5. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
Ten Years Ago
The studio apartment is four hundred square feet and the mattress is on the floor and I have never been happier in my entire life.
Gordon comes through the door smelling like the restaurant kitchen where he works closing shifts, all grease and sweat and exhaustion, his shirt untucked and his hair a mess.
I’m still wired from the double I just finished at the hotel front desk, running on coffee and adrenaline and a bone-deep tiredness that makes everything feel slightly unreal.
Neither of us should have the energy for this.
We find it anyway.
He kicks the door shut behind him and I’m already moving toward him, and he catches me around the waist and pulls me in, and then we’re kissing against the door like we haven’t seen each other in weeks instead of twelve hours.
“We should sleep,” I say against his mouth.
“We should,” he agrees, and his hands slide under my shirt anyway.
“I’m serious. You have class in the morning.”
“I know.” He walks me backward toward the mattress, still kissing me. “I’ll sleep after.”
“You always say that.”
“And I always mean it.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and his eyes are tired but warm, so warm. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I missed you.”
“You saw me this morning.”
“Still missed you.” He kisses me again, softer this time. “Every time I’m not with you, I miss you.”
The mattress hits the back of my knees and we tumble onto it together, laughing because his elbow clips the wall and the springs creak so loud the neighbor bangs on the wall almost immediately.
“Sorry!” Gordon yells, and then he’s laughing too hard to say anything else.
We lie there for a moment, tangled together, giggling like idiots while the neighbor keeps banging. Then his hand slides up my thigh, and I stop laughing.
“Gordon.”
“Hmm?”
“The neighbor.”
“He can wait.”
He pulls my shirt over my head and tosses it somewhere, and then his mouth is on my collarbone, my shoulder, the curve of my breast, and I arch into him with my fingers in his hair, and the springs announce it to the entire building.
We both freeze.
“Okay,” he whispers. “New plan. We’re going to be very, very quiet.”
“You’ve never been quiet in your life.”
“Watch me.”
We make it about forty seconds. He eases me back against the pillow one inch at a time, moving like the mattress is wired to an alarm, and gets my bra off with a concentration that makes me bite my lip to keep from laughing, and then he lowers his mouth to my breast and I make a sound and the springs make a louder one and the neighbor’s broom handle hits the wall twice.
“Your fault,” he whispers against my skin.
“My fault? You’re the one with the mouth.”
“You’re the one who married the mouth.”
I have to press my face into his shoulder to keep the laugh in.
He uses the opportunity to get my underwear down my legs, and then his hand is between my thighs, slow and sure, and the laughing stops being a problem because I can’t get enough air to laugh with.
I pull at his boxers and get my hand around him and he exhales through his teeth, long and shaky, and whispers that I’m going to kill him, and I whisper good, and we work each other like that in the dark, unhurried, listening to each other breathe, two broke kids on a secondhand mattress with the whole world outside the door and none of it invited in.
“Come here,” I whisper finally, and pull him over me.
He settles between my legs and when he finally pushes inside me I gasp against his neck and hold on, and the springs give us up completely, and neither of us cares anymore.
“I love you,” he says, his forehead pressed to mine, his breath ragged.
“I love you too.” I arch into him, meeting his rhythm. “Don’t stop.”
“Never.”
The springs creak and the neighbor bangs, and Gordon reaches back without breaking rhythm and knocks on the wall twice himself, cheerful, like a reply, and I lose it, both of us shaking with laughter in the middle of it, at the absurdity of it, at the joy of it, at the fact that we’re broke and exhausted and living in a shoebox and none of it matters because we have each other.
Then we’re not laughing anymore.
The rhythm changes, deepens, his hands finding mine and pinning nothing, just holding, fingers laced on either side of my head, and the room goes serious around us, just breath and springs and my name in pieces against my ear.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and the pressure builds and builds until it breaks over me, and I bury the sound in his shoulder.
He says my name when he comes, broken and reverent, and I follow him over the edge again with my nails in his back and his name on my lips.
After, we lie tangled together in sheets that desperately need washing, and he traces patterns on my shoulder.
“I pawned my sewing machine today,” I say quietly.
His hand stills. “What?”
“We needed the rent money. And I wasn’t using it anyway, not really, not with work and everything.”
“Liz.” He sits up, and his face is stricken. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have picked up more shifts, I could have-”
“You’re already working yourself to death. I wasn’t going to add to that.”
“But your machine. You love that thing.”
“I love you more.” I sit up too and pull the sheet around me. “It’s just a thing, Gordon. We can get another one someday, when things are better.”
“We will.” He takes my hands and squeezes them hard.
“I promise. When I graduate, when I get a real job, we’re gonna walk back into that shop and get yours back.
That exact one. I wrote the ticket number down.
” He taps his temple. “And then the fancy kind too, with all the attachments and the computerized whatever. And you’re gonna design the most beautiful clothes in the world, and everyone’s gonna know your name. ”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe in you.” He kisses my knuckles. “More than I believe in anything.”
Somewhere in the middle of all his promising, I tell him I need a minute, and I shut myself in the bathroom with the water heater and run the tap and cry as quietly as I can into a towel. When I come back out, he doesn’t say anything about my eyes. He just lifts the blanket.
He pulls me back down against his chest, and we lie there for a moment, breathing together in the dark.
“I’m gonna give you everything,” he says. “A real bed. A real apartment. A closet you don’t have to share with the water heater.”
“I like this closet.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” He kisses my hair. “Someday you’re gonna have a whole room just for your designs. A studio. And I’m gonna sit in the corner and watch you work and tell everyone my wife is a genius.”
“Your wife the genius.” I say it into his chest, tasting it. A year married and the word still fits strange and wonderful in my mouth.
“My wife the genius.” He says it with such certainty that it makes my chest ache. “And I’m never gonna make you feel like you’re not the most important thing in my life. That’s the deal. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“That’s the deal,” he says again, and he pulls me closer.
Before I fall asleep, he reaches over the edge of the mattress and pulls my sketchbook out from under it, the cheap spiral one I keep there because we don’t own a desk, and he pages through it in the dark like he’s done a hundred times.
He stops on the dress I drew on the back of a takeout menu and taped in, the one with the low back.
“This one first,” he says. “When you’re famous. I want this one on a runway first.”
“That one’s just a doodle.”
“It’s my favorite doodle.” He closes the book and tucks it back under the mattress, careful, like it’s worth money. “Someday, Liz.”
I fall asleep listening to his heartbeat, believing every word.
***
Now
I find the pawn ticket in a box I haven’t opened in years.
I’m at Gabriella’s house. I drove here the night of the fight, showed up at dawn with mascara running down my face and nothing but the clothes I was wearing.
Gabriella opened the door in her pajamas and didn’t ask questions, just pulled me into a hug and made up the guest room and let me cry until I fell asleep.
That was two days ago.
Two days, and my phone is a record of the explosion.
Forty-some missed calls that first night, spaced minutes apart until almost dawn.
Voicemails I deleted without listening past the first word.
Texts that started at pleading, cycled through angry, and landed back at pleading.
He called Lucas until Lucas stopped picking up for him too.
And then, on the second day, nothing. No calls, no texts, just silence, which was somehow worse, which was its own kind of answer.
He knows exactly where I am. He watched me drive away, and the one mercy of this whole mess is that so far he’s been smart enough not to follow.
Gabriella wanted me to block his number that first night. I told her not yet. I don’t entirely know why. Maybe I need to watch him try this hard and understand that it still isn’t the same thing as showing up, all those years, when trying would have cost him something.
Yesterday, we went back to the house for essentials.
Gabriella drove while I sat in the passenger seat trying not to think about Gordon walking through those same rooms, wondering where I was.
We timed it for when he’d be at the office, and I grabbed half my closet, my documents, toiletries, and a few boxes from the garage that I couldn’t leave behind.
The house was exactly how I left it, which surprised me for a reason I couldn’t name at first. Then I figured it out.
The gift bag was still on the counter. The glass of whiskey beside it, full, untouched.
He hadn’t cleaned anything up, hadn’t moved anything, and I stood in my own kitchen and couldn’t make myself touch any of it.
Gabriella took one look at my face and said get your stuff, I’ll do the kitchen, and I didn’t ask what she meant and she didn’t tell me.