Chapter 44 Larissa
LARISSA
I pulled down the visor and wiped my cheeks. I was puffy, splotchy, and I had dark circles under my eyes. Chris had seen me worse. I closed the mirror and drove back to his house.
He was waiting just inside the door when I got there.
He helped me out of my jacket and hung it on the hook while Woofarine bounced at my feet. I got my snow boots off, turned around, took one look at Chris’s gentle expression, and burst into tears.
He held me right there in the entry while I sobbed into his shoulder.
I couldn’t catch my breath.
I still wasn’t feeling good from the epinephrine and allergic reaction yesterday, and I hadn’t slept well. I was swinging from one crisis to the next with no end in sight. I was tired down to my core.
I never got a break.
I started every day forced to reassemble the shattered pieces of the day before.
I never got to feel truly safe and secure and stable because the bad things never stopped happening.
And the scariest thing of all was that for the first time in my life, I felt like giving up.
Like the inner drive that propelled me forward, the only thing that kept me alive, and housed and fed, was finally exhausted.
“Hey, shhhhhh…” He smoothed my hair.
“What am I going to do?” I hiccupped.
“You’re not going to do anything. You just be still for a few days.”
“I can’t. I can’t ever stay still, I can’t ever stop moving.”
“Hey, look at me.” He pulled away and tipped my chin up. “You’re going to be okay,” he said softly. “We’re going to rest. Read, watch TV. That’s it. That’s all we’re doing for the next twenty-four hours.”
“And then what?” I sniffed.
“And then we’ll talk about it. Figure it out. Maybe we can make soup. I’ll chop whatever horrible painful vegetable you want.”
He got a laugh-cry out of me.
“I’m making you lunch,” he said. “Go get into something warm.”
I gazed at him. His steady expression, those warm brown eyes. The look he was giving me felt closer than a hug. Like some boundary that had been firmly in place since the day I met him had disintegrated overnight.
My brain was glitching. I was sad and reeling and panicked. But Chris was right: I didn’t need to figure it out today. So I nodded reluctantly and he let me go.
When I came out ten minutes later, I sat on the sofa and he gave me a blanket and handed me a coffee. He made it the way I liked it. It had my creamer in it. Chris drank black coffee. He must have gotten it while I was gone.
I wondered how many considerate little things over the last ten months had really been Chris’s doing when I thought it was Mike. Things I maybe didn’t even notice at all but that left me more comfortable, or safer, or less upset because of them.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The memories bubbled up now that I knew what to look for.
Him turning on the radio when driving to the hospital with Mom.
A new sponge at the lake house.
A plate of nut-free food materializing at a party.
How he’d whisked me away that same night because Mike was drinking—how bad had it actually been? Lying on pee-soaked carpet bad?
Something told me it had been.
And it was more than just the tangible things. I knew it was. More than the EpiPen and the hydroplanter and the jewelry box. It was probably advice and guidance too. He probably made Mike a better human in ways I’d never know.
And I wanted to know.
I wanted to watch the last ten months in the third person.
Assign credit where it was due to the man who deserved it so I could decide how to feel about it.
But right now I couldn’t even begin to process.
So I pet my dog, made an active attempt to de-escalate myself.
Drank my coffee, let the sound of Chris moving around the kitchen calm me, and the doom loop in my head started to quiet down.
I was already feeling a little better by the time Chris sat next to me with two bowls of mac and cheese. “Thank you.” I stared at the food for a moment. “I cannot believe this is my life,” I whispered.
“You hate mac and cheese that much?” he said, taking a bite and smiling at me.
“Ha. You know what I mean.”
“You still have the graze boards,” he said. “Do it full-time, use the kitchen.”
I sniffled. “I can’t. You don’t have the room. Not for the amount of orders I’d need to do to make a living off it.”
“How much room does it take?” he asked.
I poked at the noodles. “I need table space to do the boxes in an assembly line. I need racks for dry storage, refrigerators—”
“How many refrigerators?”
I shrugged. “I filled Donna’s side-by-side every week, and I’d need to do twice the volume to replace all my other jobs. Your whole living room and kitchen would have to be converted to production space to make it work.”
“Okay. What about opening a storefront?”
I laughed dryly. “Well, first of all, I have no credit. Not yet. But even if I did, I couldn’t afford the build-out.”
He ate while he thought about it. “What about doing big events?”
“Like what?”
“Like the table at the pool party.”
I’d love to. One large order to deliver instead of fifty small ones for the same price. Three or four of those tables a week and I’d be making really good money.
I’d thought of doing full graze tables before, but I just never had the time to pull it all together.
It was harder to sell than the boxes. I’d have to advertise.
A lot. Update the website, figure out a pricing scale.
It would take me a few weeks to get that all up.
And I’d need pictures. That was the thing that really held me back.
It was like the chicken and the egg. Most people wouldn’t spend two thousand dollars on a graze table unless they could see pictures of the caterer’s previous setups, so I’d never gotten any orders for any.
And I couldn’t afford to make a fake setup just to get photos.
A graze table was made up of hundreds of dollars’ worth of food, the mock-up alone was more than I could afford.
“It would work,” I said. “But I don’t have the startup money for that either.
And if I did manage to pull it off, it could be months before I get any orders and start making anything.
” I let out a deep breath. “I think I just need to give it up. Maybe I should just find another waitressing job. A place with a bar.” I grimaced.
He shook his head. “No, you’re not giving it up. I’ll help you. How much do you need?”
I gave him a look. “No.”
“How much?”
“Chris, no—I can figure it out myself.”
He peered at me with those gentle eyes. “I know you can. But let me help you anyway.”
I studied him while he waited for me to answer.
“I’d need wooden boards and some nice plates,” I said.
“Everything for the boxes are disposable, but for a graze table I’d need permanent fixtures to display the food.
That’s going to be most of the cost. For the mock-up I’d need flowers, the meat and cheese, fruit—enough to serve at least twenty-five to look impressive enough… A thousand dollars?”
“I can give you that.”
I shook my head. “No. I am not taking money from you.”
We had a little stare-down. He took a careful bite of mac and cheese and chewed it while I watched his brain working.
He swallowed. “What if…”
“What if what?”
“What if you pay me back?”
He wouldn’t let me pay him back. I knew this without even thinking about it, it was a trick.
“Look,” he said. “There’s never going to be a better time to try this. The universe made the decision for you—rewrite the script. Don’t go back to waitressing. Pick a different door.”
My eyes roamed his face. His earnest expression. He really wanted to do this. He genuinely wanted to help me—but then he always had, even when I didn’t know it.
Every man I’d ever trusted had let me down. All of them except for one.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it. But I won’t borrow money from you. I’ll let you co-sign on a loan. If you’re willing.”
“Is it because I won’t let you pay me back?”
“Yes, it one hundred percent is.”
He coughed out a laugh. “Okay. We’ll go to the bank tomorrow.”
He went back to eating and I sat there and watched him, my bowl in my lap. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels as an ache bloomed in my chest. It crept through my body like a slow-moving flood, the words he said last night floating on the top.
Do you understand…
I did.
In fact, it was the only thing in a really long time that actually made sense.
This man loved me.
Many men had claimed to, but this is what love looks like. And I was almost glad that I’d been shown what love isn’t my whole life so I’d know what it was when I finally saw it.
I set my bowl on the table and climbed into his arms. He didn’t even pause.
He folded around me, and I held on to him with my eyes squeezed shut and he drew me in closer and anchored me.
He’d just gotten out of the shower. I could smell the soap he used, and he was wearing the hoodie I’d worn that one time.
I knew how it felt to wear it and now I knew how it felt to be held by him when he had it on, and all I could think sitting on this couch in his arms was that I loved him too.
This feeling wasn’t fragile. It wasn’t the wisp of a thing I’d felt for Mike. It was roots and trunk and branches reaching to the sky. It was under and over and in the middle and it had been growing longer than I’d even realized.
I was too spent to unravel it, to decide what it meant, or what I should do about it. I just knew that I felt it. I was reduced to the barest bones of myself, broken and on the verge of giving up. Everything was bad, everything ruined.
Maybe that’s how you learn truths about yourself, when you’re withered down to nothing so it’s easy to see what’s left.
And Chris was it. He was the sliver of light coming through a crack in the door in a dark room.
The scent of home, a soft landing, a port in the storm.
The only person in the world I trusted to catch me when I’m falling.
And how can you not love someone who’s that? You can’t help it even if you want to.