Chapter 8 #2
The three of us are forced to take a closer look. Indeed, Alistair’s immaculate form is shimmering in the late morning sunshine.
“This is some goddamn Twilight crap,” he grumbles, wiping a hand across his abdomen. He studies his palm for a moment, then looks over his fingertips at us, brows twitching slightly when he sees that his audience consists of more than just me. “Oh. Hi.”
“Alistair, these are my friends Heather and Mark.”
Alistair greets them with the quick chin-lift traditionally meant to convey s’up?, then resumes his study of his glittery torso. “I’m gonna use the hose.”
Mark’s coughing fit kicks off anew, a high, thin “A hose?” getting rasped in on his next breath. Heather takes on this round of back thumps.
“Why do you want a hose?” I ask.
“I’m not rinsing this off inside. You said we’d be deep-cleaning the bathrooms today.
I don’t want to give us more work than we’ll already have.
” Alistair examines his arms. “I don’t even know what it is.
It came in the other day with a bunch of skincare stuff from my cousin in Korea. I thought it was bronzer.”
“Are you going to want a towel after?”
“Nah. I’ll air dry. Thanks, though.”
“That was a suggestion, not an offer,” I clarify, reenforcing the non-housekeeper nature of our arrangement.
“Cool,” he says, attention back on his abdomen.
We look on, as helpless against the pull of his perfection as the tide is to the moon, as he traces a finger around each segment of his abdominals, creating a pale outline of his six-to-eight-pack in the shimmer.
He completes the path, then, using the same finger, pokes his belly button with a high little “Boop!”
The boop at least breaks the spell, and I shake my head. Ellie Hayes, this is your life.
Chuckling at himself, Alistair strolls to the edge of the porch, disappearing around the side of the house.
Heather slumps in her seat. “That’s just your new normal?” I nod, electing, for the sake of Mark’s esophagus, not to mention yesterday’s flash of tush. “Sure. So. How are negotiations going with Cole? When we went by, he wanted to know where you were staying.”
The reference to my ex wipes away the lingering sortilege from Alistair’s display. “He had the temerity to text that he was worried about me yesterday morning.”
“Like he hasn’t lost all claim to that, the shit,” says Mark, voice still thin from coughing.
I smile at my friend’s loyalty, and the fact that the response I’d sent Cole had said the same thing. “Thanks again for picking up those bags.”
Heather smirks. “I should have known you’d have coordinating luggage.”
To Cole’s credit—not that I’m willing to extend him much—he had been willing to pack up a good portion of my clothing at my request and had braved the wrath of Heather and Mark when they went by for it.
Granted, I’d made the packing portion pretty easy for him; my preference for compartmentalization extends beyond the arguably less-than-healthy approach to my inner life.
Drawer organizers were removed from the dresser and placed into suitcases, the underbed storage containers for my rarely used winter clothes simply put in the back of Heather’s car, ditto my toiletry and makeup organizers.
It’s fitting, really, how easy I make it to extract myself from a partner’s life.
My body made the relationship severing simple, and my organizational skills made clean lines around the bulk of my possessions.
All that’s left are the bigger items and car retrieval.
I’d be tempted to make a clean break and send him a bill, but there’s no way I’m parting with my plants, and I like my stuff: the couch I bought with my first big check from a school district in Wisconsin, the bed frame I already had when we moved in together (the masculine urge to sleep at no higher elevation than that of a mattress remains incomprehensible to me), and the dresser I refurbished last summer.
The guys have offered to help me move when the time comes, and I am not above exploiting their excitement for non-foldable seating if it means that I get to see Cole’s reaction to my perpetually shirtless roommates.
But before I can overwhelm Cole with their virility, he and I are going to have to divide our combined stuff.
Disentangling from a partnership of five years is going to take some time, no matter how well defined my margins were.
Determine who gets the food processor (me) and who gets the Vitamix (him).
Decide whether to open individual accounts for streaming services or if we can continue splitting them but maintain separate profiles (I’m going to propose the latter, but I reserve the right to secretly fuck with his algorithm; enjoy the content recommendations based on your sudden love for K-dramas, asshole).
Then there’s the emotional fallout, which I suspect will plow into me the moment I sit still long enough for it to catch up.
But for now, it’s as though there are too many potentially debilitating elements trying to get me at once, and they’re all bunched up in the doorway to my awareness.
The MS prospect, the dissolution of yet another relationship due to my traitorous body, and its offshoot, the suspicion that my ever-growing list of physical maladies and personality flaws have rendered me unlovable and doomed to die alone, are scrunched together, waiting for a careless, examining tug from me, and then it’ll be a dogpile.
The backlog of emotions presses against its confines, and I imagine myself turning away.
I have better things to do. Like getting strong.
And ignoring the occasional sexy flashback of the time I spent in the bathroom with my now boss.
I have a job to start tomorrow, a household to establish, and so many lifts and movements and skills to work on in the coming weeks, I won’t have the time to pick at that scab, anyway.
A shriek pierces the air. Alistair has turned the hose on the others, who’d collapsed onto the grass following their crushing session by the rig. He alternates aiming the water at Grant, then Diego, who protests loudly in Spanish, before returning to Grant.
“Dude!” Grant yells. “Not cool.”
Diego charges with a roar, sacking his assailant. With a whoop, Grant joins the tussle, the hose writhing beside them. In seconds, the patch they’re rolling in is a wreck of muddy males.
“Someone should probably stop them?” says Mark, craning to observe from his seat.
“My influence ends at the edge of the porch,” I say. “As long as they clean off before they go in, they’re welcome to mud wrestle.”
Diego emerges from the fray and army crawls toward the hose. He aims it over his shoulder, spraying the other two, who either laugh or shout at the water.
“Well,” Heather says with finality. “The next few months are certainly going to be interesting.”
“For all of us,” Mark mutters, his stare gone thousand-yard. “Jesus.”