5. Eloise
ELOISE
Iwoke up before he did.
He was still asleep, one arm across the pillow where my head had been, his breathing deep and even. His jacket was draped over my desk chair. His shoes were by the door, next to mine.
I stared at the ceiling and waited for the panic to come.
It didn’t. What came instead was worse—a low, steady hum of something that felt dangerously close to happiness, and I didn’t trust it.
Happiness was a setup. Happiness was the ceremony before the cleanup, the golden hour before the lights went off and the rental company showed up and you were left standing on an empty rooftop with a trash bag and a timeline.
The alarm said 6:42. The rental company was coming at eight.
I got up, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, twisted my hair back, and left a note on the counter. Gone to start breakdown. Back soon. I didn’t wake him. I didn’t know what I’d say if I did.
The rooftop was exactly the way we’d left it.
Chairs still out, peonies wilting in the alcove, string lights still on but barely visible in the pale morning sun.
The pool was still and flat, and I couldn’t look at it without feeling the phantom press of his hands on my hips, the way the water had moved around us, the sound he’d made when?—
I grabbed a chair and started stacking.
This was what I did. The morning after was always mine.
The bride and groom were on a plane to their honeymoon.
The guests were sleeping off champagne. And I was here, folding linens, collapsing the arch, sweeping petals off concrete.
It was the part of the job nobody saw and nobody thanked you for, and I’d always been fine with that.
It was the price of admission. You got to build the most beautiful night of someone’s life, and in exchange, you cleaned it up alone the next morning.
I folded a tablecloth. Then another. Stacked them neatly on the caterer’s table. Pulled the pins from the linen runners and rolled them tight. My hands knew the rhythm. My body knew the posture—bent forward, efficient, invisible.
I heard the stairwell door open behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I knew it was him by the weight of his footsteps and the way the air on the rooftop shifted when he was in it.
He didn’t say anything for a long moment.
I kept folding. The linen was cool under my fingers, and if I focused on the crease lines, I didn’t have to think about the fact that six hours ago I’d been naked in that pool with a man I’d known for thirty-six hours, and it had been the most honest thing I’d ever done.
I had no idea what to do with that in the daylight.
“Eloise.”
“The rental company’s coming at eight,” I said without turning. “I want to get the linens separated before they get here so there’s no confusion about what’s theirs and what’s the florist’s.”
“Eloise.”
“And I need to bag the peonies before they shed everywhere, because the last time I left flowers overnight, the petals stained the concrete and the building manager?—”
“You left a note.”
I stopped. The tablecloth was half-folded in my hands, one corner dragging the ground.
“You left a note and came up here to fold linens.” His voice was calm. Not angry. Not hurt. Just the steady, even thing it always was, except now I could hear the crack underneath it. “At 6:45 in the morning.”
I turned around.
He was standing by the stairwell door in his pants from last night and nothing else.
Barefoot, bare-chested, the tattoos I’d traced with my fingers in the dark now sharp and vivid in the morning light.
The coordinates on his inner wrist. The bold, intricate work that covered his shoulder and wrapped across his chest. He was holding my note in one hand.
“I’m working,” I said.
“You’re hiding.”
The words landed clean and precise, and I felt them in my sternum. My fingers tightened on the tablecloth.
“I’m not hiding. I have a job to do.”
“Your job ended last night.” He walked toward me. “The wedding is over. The bride and groom are gone. The rental company handles the chairs. The florist handles the flowers. You know that.”
“Someone has to?—”
“No one has to.” He stopped in front of me, standing close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin. “You’re up here because this is what you know how to do. You know how to be the person who cleans up. You don’t know how to be the woman you were last night.”
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and stared at the tablecloth in my hands because looking at his face was going to break something I wasn’t ready to break.
“Last night was…” I swallowed. “That was the wedding. The champagne, the solstice, the light. People do things during weddings that don’t?—”
“I didn’t stay because of the wedding.” His voice dropped low.
“I didn’t dance with you because of the champagne.
I didn’t follow you into that pool because of the light.
” He reached over and took the tablecloth out of my hands, setting it on the table behind me.
“I’m here because you crashed into me on a staircase and my arms went around you, and for the first time in seventeen years of showing up for everyone else, someone hit me right here”—he touched his chest—“without me having to reach.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“You’re not working right now,” he said.
The morning light was cool and clean on the rooftop. Not golden, not amber, not the honey-warm midsummer light from yesterday. Just early sun, honest and quiet, falling across the concrete and the empty chairs and the man standing in front of me with my note in his hand and his heart wide open.
I set the tablecloth on the table next to the folded linen. Took a breath. Let it out.
“I know,” I said.
He pulled me in, and I let him. My face against his bare chest, his arms around me, the steady beat of his heart under my ear. The same rhythm I’d felt in the stairwell when I’d crashed into him. Patient. Like the rest of the world could wait.
The longest days don’t end in one night.