15. Sully
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
sully
THIS HOUSE WAS STUCK in time, a capsule of sorts.
My room at Maple Street hadn’t changed much since I was a teen.
A red plaid comforter covered my bed, same as usual, and the shelves above it still held books with frayed pages and trophies that didn’t mean anything now.
This room remained a snapshot of a Midwestern middle-class teenager, frozen for nearly a decade.
When I’d packed for college, I brought only the essentials and left everything else behind. There hadn’t been a reason to bring more than I needed, not when campus had been less than an hour from home. And I’d never really come back for it.
Sighing, I eyed the empty box sitting atop my bed, knowing I needed to fill it.
After carrying Ellie’s luggage to the top of the stairs, I gave her some space to unpack, first going into the basement to check on the status of the utilities.
Last night, I’d woken in the midst of a restless sleep, thinking about Eleanor living in this old house all by herself, and how a million things could go wrong.
Those thoughts festered inside me until I gave in, dragged myself out to my kitchen table, and opened my laptop to spend the rest of the early morning hours doing extensive research via YouTube videos, learning how to check every questionable utility in Maple Street’s century-old basement.
It probably wasn’t necessary. Everything appeared to be fine. But at least I’d be able to sleep tonight.
Now, unfortunately, I had to tackle my room.
Resigned, I sat on the ground and began pulling shit out from under my bed. It was one of the things my mom had asked of me—to clear all this out. And fuck, there was a lot of it. I yanked on the first thing I saw—an orange shoebox—and froze when it popped out from under the mattress.
It was overflowing with pictures.
Pictures of Ellie and me.
And the notes we used to pass back and forth in Culinary, when we gave up on learning how to fold a napkin into a swan.
There were ticket stubs of movies I’d taken her to, including The Hobbit.
And letters she sent me during her freshman year of college, when I’d still been in high school.
My throat tightened while something stomped on my chest. If I didn’t know better, I might have called Blake, asked my cardiologist brother what the number one heart attack symptom was and if maybe it was the sensation of the Hulk smashing your most vital organ.
I started to shove the entire box back under the bed when a knock sounded at the door.
Ellie opened it before I could figure out how to get my throat to work, and I turned, hoping my body blocked the box from view.
“Hey, I have snacks,” Ellie said, her voice oddly tentative. “Baby and I were hungry, so I made some popcorn and cut up some apples with peanut butter.”
Baby and I were hungry.
Those words immobilized me, filled me with emotions I didn’t think I’d ever recover from.
“Are you okay?” Ellie asked, and I figured it was because I’d forgotten how to function as a human, but then she added, “You have the big light on.”
That shook me out of it. “Yeah, I was—” I waved my hand toward the switch because now that she mentioned it, I hated how bright it was.
Ellie immediately flicked the overhead light off, reaching instead for the lamp on my dresser right inside the door.
“Thanks. I was testing all the bulbs in the house. Making sure I didn’t need to replace any for you. ”
“Oh. Thank you.” Ellie set a small bowl of popcorn on the dresser, right next to the lamp and a stack of some kind of collector cards. “But I do know how to change light bulbs.”
“You’re pregnant,” I muttered, slightly shocked that I didn’t freeze up again from the thought. “I don’t want you climbing on chairs or ladders. Thank you for the snack, though.”
She nodded and munched on an apple slice, still holding a fruit-covered plate in one hand. As she chewed, she took her time looking around the room, a sheen filling her gaze.
“Wow, things look…the same.”
I cleared my throat, trying to be as unaffected as possible by this entire thing. “Yeah, things don’t really change around here.”
Her eyes found me, and their impact was undeniable. Especially as she said, “You have.”
“I have,” I agreed. “You left, and it changed me. There’s really no denying that.”
She blinked—once, twice, almost as though stunned. Had she not expected me to agree? Did she not realize what it had done to me when she left?
“I wanted to come back,” she admitted, and now it was my turn to be stunned. Floored. I felt flattened to this worn carpet beneath me. “It was never supposed to be forever.”
When I tried to swallow and clear the seemingly perpetual dryness from my throat, it felt like razor blades were lodged in it.
“Eleanor,” I started, but then her body language changed, stilling as her gaze stopped on something just behind me. Her dark brows pulled together as she zeroed in on whatever it was.
Fuck, I knew what it was.
My stomach tied itself in knots as she marched into the room, bringing a wave of cherry blossoms with her.
She placed her apple plate absently on my bed, intent clear in her gaze.
I swiveled, watching helplessly as she sank to the ground next to me, and it wasn’t until she reached for the box that I snapped out of it.
“I was just clearing out beneath my bed,” I said, grabbing the box before she could and attempting to push it back where it belonged. Unearthed beneath my mattress, safely tucked away. “I have a bunch of shit from high school I need to get rid of.”
“Wait.”
Ellie wasn’t deterred, hooking a finger in the corner of the box just as I moved it, causing a mess of pictures to spill over the side. Pictures and notes and movie tickets. A handful of them landed in Ellie’s lap.
“I don’t think you should get rid of any of this,” she said softly, picking one of the pictures up. And another, collecting them in her hand. “We could show these to our kid one day, so they know that at least at one time, we were…”
Happy.
In love.
Friends.
Ellie didn’t finish her sentence, which made me feel like I was having a heart attack again.
She fell onto her back, lying on my bedroom floor and reminding me of how we’d spend nights staring up at glow-in-the-dark stars that my dad stuck on the ceiling when I was six.
The ones I never took down because Ellie liked them.
But she wasn’t staring at the stars now. She was staring at the pictures, using them to shield her face from me.
I dug my fingers into the carpet. Once again, she was so close—her ankle almost touching mine—and I just wanted to reach out, drag her over to me so I could look at whatever she was looking at.
A soft noise, almost like a sniffle, made everything worse.
Fuck.
Ellie couldn’t cry over old pictures of us. Because if Ellie cried, there was no way I’d be able to succeed in not touching her.
“Eleanor,” I rasped, and before I knew it, I was moving, crawling over her. But she was hugging the pictures closer to her face now, still using them as a shield as her whole body shook. “El.”
When she didn’t say anything, I plucked them out of her hands, but gently. I didn’t spare them a glance because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle seeing pictures of us together when we were younger. When we were happy. In love. Friends.
I put them down next to her head and shifted my attention to the only woman I’d ever wanted. And the only woman I should really stay away from, but knew I wouldn’t. Not when she was cry—
Wait.
No.
Eleanor was laughing.
Her eyes were squeezed shut, her lips stretching in a smile, and her head shook back and forth while her entire body vibrated with giggling fits. Shifting to see her better, I planted my palms on the carpet so I could hover over her.
“Sorry,” she laughed, attempting to open her eyes, wiping at the tears streaming out of them. “It’s not—it’s just—your faces in that picture.”
Her previously silent laughter became something loud and untethered, and I cracked a smile just from the sight of her.
God, she was gorgeous. I wanted to taste that smile, wanted to capture those giggles in my mouth, wanted to kiss her until she was breathless and made joyful, wonderful sounds because of the way my lips explored her. I wanted it so fucking bad.
So bad that I nearly forgot that her laughter was obviously at my expense. Not that I really cared, though.
Glancing to the side of her head, I examined the pictures I’d slipped from her hands, and when my eyes landed on the first one, it all made sense.
“In your matching little shirts,” Ellie squealed, squeezing her eyes shut again—like she was trying to fight against her tears. “I forgot about those. You all look so pissed.”
Despite my smile, I rolled my eyes, flicking the picture of Noah, Blake, Theo, and me across my bedroom floor so Ellie wouldn’t see it and fall into another fit of laughter.
We were teens and preteens in the picture, looking particularly disgruntled because, just like every year, my mom had forced us to wear matching T-shirts to the state fair.
I wasn’t sure how Natalie had gotten off the hook, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“Well, that’s going in the trash,” I muttered. “Don’t know how that got mixed in there.”
“No. Don’t.” Ellie’s eyes flashed open as she fought to catch her breath between bouts of laughter. “Please.”
I sighed.
I didn’t know how to not do something when Eleanor begged, which was honestly a problem.
“Fine.”
My eyes drifted to the other pictures lying beside her strands of dark hair, and she turned her head, following my gaze. And that was how we both came to be staring at a picture of us from a decade ago.
Me, in the first suit I’d ever worn. Her, in a short lilac dress. I was a freshman. She was a sophomore. We stood in front of my mom’s rosebushes.