Chapter 46
LARISSA
This looks badass,” Lexi said, scrolling through the pictures of the graze tables on my phone. We were at a boba place in Brooklyn Park. It was the first time I’d seen my best friend in over a month. I’d been busy and she got two new jobs on the other side of town.
Lexi walked out of Donna’s about three minutes after I did and the cook she was dating went with her. Donna and Janessa had to start waiting tables again since they were down half their staff. It made me feel vindicated every time I thought about it.
“Thanks. So do you like the new restaurants?” I asked, sipping my boba.
She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “My morning job is Pancake Disco. Closer to my house at least. And the night one has a bar. Tips are better. To be honest, I only stayed at Donna’s as long as I did because you worked there.”
I gave her a soft smile.
“Chris did this with you?” she asked, zooming in on a graze board photo.
“He did.”
Chris poured every moment he had into helping me with this right up until his vacation was over and he had to go back to work. Then he helped me when he got home and on his days off.
I got business cards made to leave on the tables for any event I might get to do. And I came up with a name: Board & Sweet, nut-free grazing by Larissa.
We made six graze tables. We reused the same meat and cheese on all of them to save money. It was almost rancid by the time we got all the pictures we needed, as the whole photo staging took a week to pull off.
We did the tables in different locations.
One on Chris’s neighbor’s marble kitchen countertop, another one in an event room in a hotel that one of my old customers worked at.
We had to set it up at 9:00 p.m. after their last event had cleared out, which sucked because Chris and I didn’t get home that night until after midnight, but it was worth it.
The chairs in the background still had the fancy covers on them from the wedding, which made it look like I’d catered a real event.
The last three we did in the living room and took tight shots so you couldn’t tell where we were.
I styled them all differently. Used different flowers, different colored cupcakes.
And I paper quilled something for each of them.
The quilling was an extra step. It took me hours to do each one, but it made my tables special and different from anything else that was out there.
I’d charge extra for it, but it could be personalized to the event and they got to keep the decoration.
I priced out each table for twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five people, with a contact option to message me for a quote for larger parties.
This morning I’d emailed all my previous graze board and snackle box customers a link to the new website. All the people who’d bought things from me over the years who would hopefully consider me for their next special event.
Now I waited.
And the waiting was terrible.
The cost of everything came in at twice what I thought it would. Almost two thousand dollars—and Chris co-signed for all of it.
The dessert and sandwich tables were not in my original plans, but when I told Chris my ideas and showed him the tiered sandwich setups from my vision board, he wanted me to have it.
He said if we were going to do it, we should do it right and that more options meant more orders.
Then, like he wasn’t already doing enough, I came home from doing deliveries a few weeks ago to find a wall of wire racks off the kitchen.
He’d filled the living room with folding tables for graze table production and bought two extra fridges for the garage.
I didn’t even want to think about how much he’d spent and of course he wouldn’t tell me. But it changed everything.
Now that I had what I needed, I was able to do graze boards full-time out of the house—and I could barely keep up with the demand. Since I didn’t have to pay rent, I was finally paying off my bills. My dad’s bills, but still.
Chris believed in me in a way that I could never believe in myself. And it actually did make me believe in myself. Like maybe he saw something I didn’t.
For the first time, I felt stable, because Chris was there to catch me if I fell off the tightrope I was walking.
He wasn’t shaking the line like everyone else always did.
He drove me to do deliveries when he wasn’t at work and when he was, he made me trade him and take his car because it was safer.
He replaced my tires and didn’t even tell me—probably because he knew I wouldn’t let him.
There was never a time that I got into either vehicle and it didn’t have a full tank of gas.
He treated the idea of me stopping at a gas station like it would be an assault on his very character.
He thought ahead for me. Always. He knew what I needed before I needed it. And I loved it.
I loved it all.
Coming home to him. Him coming home to me. Staying up late talking, sharing space, sharing our lives.
And the ache lived inside of me now.
I never got a break from it. I felt it when I looked at him while he sat on his side of the sofa reading or when he was driving me to do deliveries.
I felt it when I held one of his hoodies to my nose when he wasn’t home to see.
I felt it when he woke up in the morning and he was a little scruffy, standing in the kitchen in his plaid pajamas making me breakfast and again after he got ready for work and I watched him leave.
Sometimes when he went to work, I missed him so much I drove there to take him lunch, just to have an excuse to see him. And when his eyes would light up when he saw me, that ached too.
This was what I never felt for Mike.
This was the thing that I kept trying to manufacture. Only with Chris it was real.
And there was nothing we could do about it. I wouldn’t hurt him by pursuing him and subjecting him to the loss of everyone he cared about, and he wouldn’t hurt Mike by pursuing me because that’s who Chris was. So it would be nothing, no matter what we wanted.
Lexi sipped her drink while she scrolled through my graze table photos. “You know Mike’s not talking to his mom, right?”
I cocked my head. “He’s not?”
“Nope. Because of how she did you. Janessa too. And word on the street is that he’s moving out of the guesthouse too. He’s been working for Tony full-time, quit the gym thing. I think you changed that dude’s brain chemistry.”
“Well, good.”
“Have you talked to him?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m not ready.”
I was glad he was doing something with himself though. And I did appreciate that he’d stood up for me to his mom. That meant a lot.
“Chris just texted you,” she said, handing me back my phone.
I read the message.
Chris: Three guesses for why our dog is soaking wet?
There was a picture of Woofarine sitting next to an open toilet looking like a drowned rat.
I laughed at my screen.
Me: Nooooooo
He sent an upside-down emoji and I cracked up.
“So what’s up with Chris?” she asked, watching me grin at my phone.
“Not much,” I said, putting my screen face down.
“I literally don’t know how you’re not having sex with that dude. I find acts of service so fucking attractive.”
I huffed. “Same. It’s not like that though,” I said, stirring my drink.
She gave me a look. “Girl, be so for real. That guy’s so into you.”
“I don’t want to be the reason Chris loses all his friends after he just lost his mom, Lexi.”
“Is he even talking to Mike?”
“No. But that’s not the point. He doesn’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him either. He wasn’t doing well mentally before we broke up, he’d probably go off the rails if Chris and I ever…” I trailed off. “I just can’t.”
“Do you want to though?”
I let out a long breath. “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
I had to try not to think about it.
The truth was, I thought about it constantly anyway.
I kissed him on the cheek on New Year’s and I swear I could still feel his skin against my mouth a full month later.
I fantasized about him. I imagined crossing the hall and climbing between his sheets in the middle of the night just to see what would happen.
He looked so cute in his white lab coat at the pharmacy. It was ridiculous how much I liked it. I got jealous every time he kissed the dog. I was a mess.
“Hey, did I tell you about the loyal husband video thing I saw?” she said.
“No…”
“This therapist listed the three careers that are least likely to cheat. Accountant, farmer, and pharmacist.” She pursed her lips at the last one.
“Doesn’t even surprise me.” I took a sip of my boba. “Why farmers, you think?”
“’Cause they don’t want anyone getting half their farm?”
I cracked up.
“He is loyal,” I said. “I could never imagine him cheating.”
“Is he a good roommate?” she asked.
“So good. You know what happened the other day?” I said.
She poked at her ice. “What?”
“I fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke up, Chris had put my phone on the charger and covered me with a blanket.”
“Aww, cute.”
“Yeah. The weird thing is, I don’t take naps. Ever. I can’t. I feel like I can’t stop moving when there’s work I could be doing, and now suddenly I can stop and it’s so weird. It’s not even like I have less to do because I’m so busy with the business.”
“You’re out of survival mode,” she said, talking around her straw.
I blinked at her. “What?”
“You’re out of survival mode, babe. The cortisol has stopped pumping. The caveman lizard brain has turned off. Your body has marked you safe from round-the-clock consciousness.”
I sat back in my seat. “Oh my God…” I breathed. “I think you’re right.”
“That dude’s got you relaxed. Imagine how relaxed you’d be with a good old-fashioned dicking down.”
I choked.
“He’s gotta be thinking about it too,” she said.
“Don’t even tell me that,” I mumbled. “If I think about him thinking about me, I’m going to catch fire.”
She laughed.
“I don’t know how much longer I can live with him,” I said, almost to myself. “It’s not healthy.”
“Do you like living with him?”
“Yeah. I really do. There isn’t anything about him that I don’t like.”
“Could you?” she said. “Move out if you wanted to?”
I looked at her over the table. “You know what? Yes. I could.”
I’d officially recovered my credit. It wasn’t great yet—I still had to build it up—but my dad’s debt had finally fallen off and it was enough to get me in the door for a lease. I was making enough money doing graze boards that I could afford my own apartment if I wanted one. And comfortably.
For the first time in my life, I was not pigeonholed by poverty into living with someone I didn’t want to live with. I had the choice. It’s the thing I’d tried explaining once to Mike, the thing that Chris seemed to innately understand.
This is what love looks like.
It’s lifting someone up even if you know it means they can get out.
“There is literally nowhere else I want to be and nobody else I want to be with,” I said.
“So it’s finally smash,” she said, smiling around her straw.
I played with the paper label on my cup. “It’s like we both know and acknowledge that there’s something there, but we can’t do anything about it.”
“Have you guys talked about it?”
“Not really,” I said. “Not after that first night. Maybe one day, when all of this with Mike is behind us and he’s moved on… I don’t know. I just can’t ever picture everyone being okay with it.”
My phone vibrated on the table. I picked it up thinking it was going to be Chris again with another Woofarine update. It wasn’t. I sat up straight.
“What?” Lexi asked.
I shook my head, grinning. “Nothing.”
Chris deserved to hear it first.