Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Go," Eliot said. "Relax. Shower. Whatever you need. I'll make dinner."
Dalene stood in the middle of her kitchen and watched him open her fridge like a man who had a plan. "You cook?"
"It's payback." He glanced at her over his shoulder. "For the croissants, the cinnamon roll, the scone."
"You hated the scone."
"It wasn't to my taste. Now you know me better. I know you better. We'll do better."
Dalene liked that; liked that this man had gotten to know her in a few days and was going to take that knowledge and make something just for her.
She didn't care if it was a peanut butter and jelly or a bowl of cereal.
Both of which she liked. What she liked most was that Eliot was right now thinking about what he knew about her and what within that knowledge would make her happy.
She looked at him for a moment. At the set of his shoulders, the way he was already moving through her kitchen with ease.
"Okay," she said. She went.
The shower was extraordinary. She stood under the hot water for eleven minutes without thinking about vendor contracts or weather reports or Tristan's Instagram or the festival timeline.
She didn't think about anything at all because she had not a care in the world.
That seemed to keep happening the more she spent time with Eliot.
She changed into soft clothes. She dried her hair. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror — really looked, the way she didn't usually, the way that required more time than she normally had.
She looked tired. She looked, underneath the tired, like someone who was starting to put some things down. She could see the weight lifting off her shoulders in real time. She could see the dark smudges under her eyes getting brighter in the light of the bathroom mirror.
She went back to the kitchen to see that he had made pasta. The kitchen smelled like garlic and olive oil and something herby — oregano? Her small table was set with the plates she never used because they were the good ones, the ones Vivienne had left her, the ones she saved for special occasions.
"Sit down."
She sat down.
The pasta was, genuinely and without any need for exaggeration, delicious. They ate and talked.
"Tell me about Vivienne."
"She was a science teacher."
"Is that why you went into the profession?"
Dalene nodded. "I wanted to be just like her, which disappointed my mother who wanted me to be in fashion; a model or a clothing designer or makeup artist. I had no interest in any side of that career."
"I can definitely see you as a model."
The compliment made her cheeks warm, which made her think of her freckles. Today, some designers and photographers might find those exotic enough to snap pictures of or send her on a runway, but when she was young, she looked nothing like the homogenized girls on the cover of magazines.
"My grandmother used to say that beauty was just pattern recognition. Your brain identifying something that follows the right rules. She said falling in love was the same thing. Your nervous system recognizing a pattern it's been waiting for."
"That's a very scientific way to describe love," he said.
"She was a very scientific woman." Dalene picked up her fork again. "She was also the most romantic person I've ever known. She didn't think those things were contradictory."
They moved to the couch. It simply happened the way things happened in an evening that had gotten comfortable — dinner plates cleared, television found, the natural migration from table to couch that occurred when neither person wanted the meal to be over.
Eliot sat at one end. Dalene sat at the other, her feet tucked under her, a blanket pulled from the back of the couch that she'd had since university.
She was aware, at some point, that she had shifted.
The distance between one end of the couch and the other had changed, in the gradual, unconscious way that distances changed when two people wanted to get closer without admitting to it.
She was very comfortable sitting shoulder to shoulder with Eliot. She was extremely, dangerously comfortable. So much so that she slumped down into the cushions until her head rested near his shoulder cap.
She thought: I should sit up.
She thought: in a minute.
His shoulder was warm and solid and the television was saying something and the evening was very quiet and she was so tired. She was so much more tired than she'd known until right now. The tiredness was the kind that only arrived when something safe was nearby—
The next thing she remembered was waking up. The television was on. A peppy woman in an infomercial talking about pots. A countdown clock blinking on the lower part of the screen. The clock on the wall said half-past one.
She was horizontal. This took a moment to resolve. She was on the couch, yes, but horizontal, and warm, and the warmth had a source; Eliot.
His arm was around her. His chest under her cheek; the slow steady rise and fall of a man deeply asleep.
At some point in the last several hours the couch had reorganized itself entirely.
Or they had. The result was this: her head on his chest, his arm around her shoulders, the blanket across both of them like it had made a decision all its own and acted on it.
Dalene lay very still. She looked at him.
Asleep, he looked different. The vigilance was gone — the constant, low-level alertness that she'd come to recognize as his baseline, the way he held himself like a man who had learned early to monitor his own perimeter.
Gone. In its place was just a face. A tired, unguarded, quietly handsome face that was doing nothing except existing in her living room at one-thirty in the morning.
She should wake him. That was the correct and sensible response to this situation. He should go back to his own apartment and sleep in his own bed. She should sleep in hers. Everything should be appropriate and boundaried and exactly as agreed upon when they set up this fake dating scheme.
Except it wasn't feeling so fake right now. It felt all too real. Dalene wouldn't mind if this was her new normal and not a temporary thing.
She decided not to wake him. Like her, he had sleep problems. He was resting so peacefully right now. She would not take that away from him. She'd deal with it in the morning.
With that thought, she rested her head back against his chest. The warmth closed back around her. She was asleep again before she finished deciding to be.