Chapter 3 #3
“I know.” Lara set down the pencil. “I just thought this might actually take something off your plate.”
“It does.”
“But?”
Ella looked up.
Lara’s face was open. Careful, but not defensive. She seemed genuinely ready to stop if Ella asked her to. The problem was, Ella did not know whether she wanted her to stop.
“I think Carolina got in my head,” Ella admitted.
Lara stilled. “About me?”
Ella regretted it as soon as she said it. “Not in a bad way.”
Lara’s smile was small and unsurprised. “It’s okay. I’m aware not everyone finds another woman doing admin in their dining room charming.”
“She’s protective.”
“She should be. You’re worth protecting.”
The sentence landed more softly than Ella expected.
Lara leaned her hip against the table, arms folding loosely over her stomach. “Ella, I know this is strange. I know I’m here longer than I meant to be. I know your house is your house, and your wedding is your wedding, and I’m…around.”
“You’re not a problem.”
“I’m a little bit a problem.”
“No.”
“I am.” Lara said it calmly. “Not because I’m trying to be. Because grief is inconvenient and housing is humiliating and I am currently both grieving and under-housed.”
Ella’s mouth twitched despite herself.
“I promise I’m not trying to take over,” Lara said. “I’m trying to stay useful enough that I don’t become unbearable.”
Something in Ella eased.
There it was. The thing she had sensed but not articulated: Lara’s usefulness was not arrogance. It was fear. She was trying to earn her keep in a house where nobody had named a debt.
Ella knew that feeling in other forms. The instinct to become easy when you were afraid someone might regret loving you.
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to earn being here,” Ella said.
“I know. But I do anyway.”
“Okay.” Ella pulled out a chair. “Then maybe ask before taking on wedding stuff. Not because I don’t appreciate it. Because if Carolina asks me whether my houseguest has become my wedding planner, I need to sound less guilty.”
Lara smiled. “Fair.”
“And please don’t answer my phone again.”
“Absolutely. I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
“Would it help if I told you Bethany sounded terrified of you?”
Ella burst out laughing. “Did she?”
“A little. In a respectful way.”
“Good.”
Lara’s smile warmed. “Very bridezilla of you.”
“Thank you.”
Together, they finished the invitation stacks. Ella let Lara help because help, when asked for, was allowed.
At six, Noah called to say he was stuck at the office and would be late.
Ella put him on speaker while she and Lara were sorting stamps.
“Define late,” Ella said.
“Eight? Maybe nine. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We’ll survive without you.”
“I know. That’s the trouble.”
Lara reached across the table and stuck a stamp slightly crooked on Noah’s cousin’s envelope.
Ella nudged it straight. “Your cousin Andrea gets a plus-one, right?”
“She broke up with Matt.”
“She’s bringing someone else.”
“Already?”
“Apparently.”
Noah groaned. “Fine.”
Lara leaned toward the phone. “Tell Peterson if he makes you stay past nine, I’ll tell everyone about the Christmas party karaoke.”
There was a pause.
“Lara?” Noah said.
“Who else would weaponize karaoke so efficiently?”
“How do you remember that?”
“He sang Nickelback with his whole chest, Greenwood. Some wounds scar.”
Ella laughed.
Noah said, “I’m hanging up now to preserve what remains of my authority.”
“Good luck,” Ella said.
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
He hung up.
Lara went very still for a fraction of a second, her hand hovering over the stamp sheet.
Ella noticed because she was looking at her.
Then Lara peeled off another stamp and pressed it onto an envelope. “He sounds stressed.”
“He hates this client.”
“Peterson or the client?”
“Both, I think.”
“Peterson always makes him grind his teeth.”
Ella looked up. “He does?”
Lara nodded. “Noah won’t admit it. But if Peterson’s involved, he comes home with that headache at the base of his skull.
You can tell because he rubs here.” She touched the spot on her own neck.
“And then he pretends he doesn’t need Advil because apparently masculine pride is stored in the cervical spine. ”
Ella smiled, but more slowly this time.
She knew that headache. She knew the place Noah rubbed. But she had learned it over the past year, through shared evenings and dark bedrooms and the careful intimacy of loving someone adult enough to hide pain badly.
Lara knew it from before.
Of course she did.
“That’s exactly what he does,” Ella said.
The evening was fine after that.
Fine, and pleasant, and faintly off in ways Ella kept refusing to collect.
Lara made grilled cheese and tomato soup from the previous night’s leftovers, the way Ella usually did when Noah worked late and came home brittle.
She claimed it was because they had bread that needed using, which was true.
She cleaned the kitchen as she cooked, which Ella appreciated.
She asked before opening a bottle of wine. She did not touch Ella’s phone.
At eight thirty, while they were halfway through a second episode of a home renovation show, Noah texted.
Noah: Leaving now. Sorry sorry sorry.
Ella: Soup here. Drive safe.
Lara: Tell him not to clench his jaw.
Ella looked at the screen, then realized Lara had not sent that. She had said it aloud.
“Sorry,” Lara said, curled at the other end of the couch beneath a throw blanket. “Habit.”
Ella’s thumb hovered over the keyboard.
Then she typed: Lara says unclench your jaw.
Lara laughed. “He’s very predictable in some ways.”
“Not all.”
“No.” Lara looked toward the television, where a couple was pretending to agree about tile. “Not all.”
Noah came home at nine fifteen, shoulders tense, tie gone, hair mussed by his own hand. Ella got up from the couch, but Lara was already unfolding herself from the blanket.
“Sit,” Lara told him.
Noah stopped in the living room doorway. “Excuse me?”
“You have Peterson neck.”
Ella laughed. “Peterson neck?”
“It’s a known condition.”
“I have a regular neck,” Noah said, but he came in and dropped onto the ottoman with a groan that disproved him.
Ella went toward the kitchen. “I’ll heat up soup.”
“Already on low,” Lara said.
Ella stopped.
“Oh,” she said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Lara moved behind Noah and touched his shoulders. “May I?”
He waved a tired hand. “If you can fix what the corporate world has done to me.”
Lara dug her thumb into the muscle at the base of his neck.
Noah made a sound of immediate relief, head dropping forward.
Ella stood between the living room and kitchen, watching.
It was not intimate in a sexual way. That was the first thing she told herself.
Lara’s hands were practical, almost brisk.
Noah was exhausted. Friends could rub shoulders.
Family could. Ella had rubbed Carolina’s feet after too many weddings in bad shoes; Carolina had once helped Ella wax the back of her thighs in a hotel bathroom before a beach trip, which was far more intimate and nobody had called the authorities.
Still, Ella had been on her way to comfort him.
That was the feeling. Not jealousy. Not exactly. More like arriving at the place where she belonged and finding someone already standing there, doing the thing she had come to do.
Noah lifted his head and saw her.
“Hey,” he said softly.
There was nothing guilty in his face. Only tired affection.
“I’m going to get your soup,” Ella said.
“I can?—”
“Sit.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
In the kitchen, Ella took the soup from the stove, ladled it into a bowl, and told herself again that she was not going to turn every kindness into an injury.
When she returned, Lara had moved away. She was folding the throw blanket, giving them space.
Noah reached for Ella’s wrist as she handed him the bowl. “Thank you.”
The contact steadied her.
“You’re welcome.”
He ate like a man who had forgotten food existed. Lara went upstairs after a few minutes, saying she had an early apartment viewing. Ella and Noah sat together in the living room, his thigh warm against hers, the television still murmuring.
“Lara says you have Peterson neck,” Ella said.
“She’s mean, but correct.”
“I didn’t know she used to give you shoulder rubs.”
Noah looked at her, spoon halfway to his mouth.
The silence that followed was too brief to be meaningful and too long to be nothing.
“She doesn’t, usually,” he said.
“She seemed to know what she was doing.”
“She’s had to listen to me complain about Peterson for years.” He set the spoon down. “Was that weird?”
Ella appreciated the question. She hated that he had to ask it.
“A little,” she said.
His face changed immediately. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, if it bothered you?—”
“I didn’t say it bothered me. I said it was a little weird.”
“Okay.” He put the bowl on the coffee table and turned toward her. “I don’t need Lara to rub my shoulders.”
Ella laughed because the seriousness of his tone made the sentence absurd. “Good to know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
He searched her face. “I don’t want this to feel strange for you.”
“It’s already a little strange. There’s another person living here.”
“Temporarily.”
“Right.”
He reached for her hand. “Hey. Are you regretting it?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly.
Maybe too quickly.
She slowed herself down. “No. I’m not. She needed help, and I’m glad we can give it. It’s just an adjustment.”
“I’ll talk to her if something crosses a line.”
A line.
Ella tried to imagine explaining the line.
Please tell your oldest friend not to know your coffee order.
Please ask her not to make soup you love.
Please make sure I get to comfort you first.
It sounded ridiculous even inside her own head.
“No,” Ella said. “Don’t talk to her. I don’t want to make her feel unwelcome.”
“You matter more than her feeling welcome.”
That should have settled something. For the moment, it did.
Ella leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder. He smelled the faint cedar soap she had bought because she liked it on his skin. His arm came around her. The house was quiet upstairs.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Come to bed.”