Chapter 23
Patrick
I wake up at six.
This is not unusual. My body does this regardless of what happened the night before, regardless of what I'd prefer, regardless of the fact that it is a Sunday and Erick is not here and there is no reason, logistically speaking, for anyone to be awake at this hour.
It has always done this, trained over years of early runs and early mornings and the specific discipline of a man who decided, at some point, that sleep was not something to be indulged.
But this time Elena is in my bed.
I lie there for a moment, look at the ceiling, and take stock of this fact.
Her hair is spread across the pillow next to mine.
Her back is to me, her breathing slow and even, and she has at some point stolen approximately seventy percent of the duvet with the serene unconscious confidence of someone who has been doing this her whole life.
One arm is curled under the pillow. She is completely asleep.
I have not woken up next to anyone in three years.
I thought it would feel wrong. I was prepared for it to feel wrong.
For the guilt to arrive on schedule, the way it always has, the familiar weight of it sitting on my chest at every moment of happiness since Sarah.
I lie there and I wait for it and it doesn’t come.
What comes instead is something quieter and stranger, something that takes me a moment to name.
It feels right.
Not in a way that erases anything, not in a way that forgets. But in the way a room feels right when the furniture is finally where it’s supposed to be. The way a morning feels right when it starts like this.
I reach over and push a strand of hair back from her face, very carefully, so I don’t wake her.
She turns.
Not toward me, exactly, but toward me. Her whole body settles closer. She makes a small sound that is not a word. Her hand finds my arm in the dark and stays there. I stay there with her. Just this. Her warmth. Her breathing. The quiet before the world starts again.
She wakes up just before seven. The hand on my arm tightens slightly, testing.
“You’re awake,” she says, without opening her eyes.
“I’m always awake at six.”
“It’s not six.”
“It was when I woke up.”
She opens one eye, looks at the window, closes it again. “Why do you do that to yourself.”
“Discipline.”
“Discipline,” she repeats, with the specific contempt of someone speaking a foreign language they find philosophically objectionable.
I pull her closer and she lets me, which is not nothing, Elena letting something happen without immediately assessing whether she should allow it. She tucks her head against my shoulder and I feel her breathe out, a long slow exhalation, her whole body releasing something it had been holding.
I kiss the top of her head.
She tilts her face up.
What happens next is slower than last night.
Quieter. Last night was something I won’t forget for as long as I live, the way she finally let go, the way her whole body changed when she stopped fighting it, the sounds she made that had nothing performed about them, nothing managed.
But this, the morning version, is its own thing.
Her hands in my back. The unhurried weight of her against me.
Her mouth on my jaw before it finds mine, and I roll her onto her back while her legs wrap around me.
She sighs my name against my neck like it’s something she’s been meaning to say and only just remembered.
Afterward she lies on my chest and traces her fingers along my collarbone, back and forth, the way someone does when they’re thinking about something other than what their hand is doing.
“What time does Erick come back?” she asks.
“This evening. Six, maybe seven.”
A pause. “I should probably not be here.”
I keep my voice even. “You don’t have to go anywhere.”
Another pause, longer. I can feel her working it out, the Elena-specific process of checking every angle of a thing before she’ll let herself want it. I’ve watched her do this across a desk for months. I know better than to hurry it.
“Okay,” she says, finally. “I’m staying for breakfast.”
That is how Elena Brown says yes. I note it and I say nothing.
She finds one of my shirts.
One moment she was in my bed and the next she is standing in my kitchen in a white shirt, one of the ones I wear to the office, which on me ends at the hip and on her ends at mid-thigh, and she is opening and closing cabinet doors with the specific chaotic energy of someone performing a search without a plan.
“Top right,” I say. “Mugs.”
“I found the mugs. I’m looking for the coffee.”
“Counter. Left of the machine.”
“You have six different kinds.”
“I drink a lot of coffee.”
“Why do you have a honey lavender blend? You don’t seem like a honey lavender blend person.”
“Someone sent it.”
“Who sends a CEO honey lavender coffee?”
“A vendor with poor instincts.”
She finds the right bag, loads the machine, then leans against the counter looking at me. The shirt is slightly too large at the shoulder and she hasn’t bothered to button it past the third button. Her hair is not arranged.
She looks extraordinary.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she says, looking down at the shirt.
“Do what.”
“This. Wear your shirt. Like, the ones from work.” She looks at me. “I know that’s probably weird.”
“It’s not weird.”
“I used to watch you at the office and I wanted—” She stops. Shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“What.”
“I wanted to know what it felt like to wear something of yours. To be wrapped up in something that smells like you.” She meets my eyes. “So I did it. I hope that’s okay.”
It is more than okay. It is the best thing that has happened all morning, and that is saying something given how this morning has gone. I cross the room and I kiss her because I don’t know what else to do with the feeling of her telling me this, of her wanting this small thing and just taking it.
“Did you grow up here?” she asks.
I look at her.
“New York. In the city?” She pours two mugs and brings mine over, sits on the counter. “Or are you one of those guys who escaped from suburbia and never looked back?”
“Upper East Side.”
“Of course you did.” She grins. “Let me guess. Parents who knew people who knew people.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“I like not being wrong.” She takes a sip of her coffee.
“Remember that time your mother came to the office,” Elena says quietly. “She was very… clear about her standards.”
I don’t respond immediately. I know what she’s capable of.
“She was very clear that Sarah was—” Elena stops. Shakes her head. “You know. The right kind of person for you.”
“Elena—”
“I’m not trying to—” She looks at me. “I just know the landscape. I’m not an idiot. Your mother has money and lineage and I have foster care and a career built on auditions and almosts. I get it.”
I set my mug down and cross the room. I back her against the counter. She doesn’t move away. Her eyes stay on mine.
“You want to know what I think?” I ask.
“Not really.”
“My mother married my father because it made sense on paper. They had a very cordial relationship. They were very good at managing a life together.” I pause. “I’ve never heard her laugh at something he said.”
Elena’s expression shifts.
“I listened to you laugh.” I reach up and touch her face. “I would pick that over the right kind of lineage every single time.”
She reaches up and touches my jaw. “You’re going to make me cry before ten in the morning.”
She leans forward and kisses me. “Good answer.”
“Oh,” she says, suddenly. “The thing.”
“What thing.”
She hops off the counter and goes to the jacket I left on the armchair last night and retrieves, from the pocket, the small paper bag from yesterday. She holds it up. Tilts her head.
“I still think this is a bad idea,” I say.
“You bought it.”
“I bought it for the bit.”
“And now we have it.” She looks at the bag. “And we have nothing to do for six hours.”
“We have things to do.”
“Name one.”
I can’t, immediately, name one. She looks at me with the expression she uses when she’s won an argument and doesn’t want to make it worse by saying so out loud.
“We’re not going anywhere today,” she says. “We’re not operating heavy machinery. It’s a Sunday.”
“Those are your criteria.”
“Those are the criteria they use.” She means Jada. “It’s a microdose. For people who want to relax without losing control.” She does the voice, the exact intonation Jada used, and it’s accurate enough that I almost smile. “I want to see what happens.”
“Elena.”
“You are the one who told me I had to lose control. Now you have to lose control.”
She is already opening the bag. “Come and sit down.”
I sit down.
We follow the instructions, which are minimal, and then we sit on my couch and we wait. Fifteen minutes, the card says. Elena sits with her knees pulled up and her mug in both hands and looks at the living room with the expression of someone conducting a scientific observation.
“I don’t feel anything,” she says.
“It’s been four minutes.”
“How do you know it’s been four minutes? We have to have more of that.”
“I’m watching the clock.”
She looks at me. “Why are you watching the clock.”
“Because I want to know how long it takes.”
“You really can’t turn it off, can you.”
“Turn what off.”
“The.” She waves a hand. “The management of things.”
“I’m not managing anything, I’m observing.”
“That’s management with better PR. Take a little more, this is not working.”
We have more, considerably more. I look at her. She looks at me. We are both entirely sober and also I am finding this funnier than I normally would, which might be the beginning of something or might just be a Sunday morning with a woman I have spent months wanting to spend a Sunday morning with.
Ten minutes later I am no longer watching the clock.
I am looking at the throw pillows.
“The throw pillows are hideous,” I say.
Elena, who has been quiet for the last few minutes in the concentrated way of someone whose brain has shifted gears without announcement, looks at them too. “Objectively,” she says. “They have no character.”
“I need to change them.”
“You’re going to forget.”
“I won’t forget. I’m going to put it in the calendar.”
“You’re going to put throw pillows in your work calendar.”
“It will be a reminder. A pillow reminder.”
She looks at me with an expression I have never seen on her face before, which is not one of her usual registers, not the quick wit or the careful management or the warmth she directs at everyone including me at a controlled distance.
It is just delight. Pure and uncomplicated.
Like something has switched off inside her that usually keeps a hand on the dial, and what’s underneath it is just this.
“The furniture,” she says, lowering her voice like she’s sharing a confidence.
“What about it.”
“It’s watching us.”
I look at the armchair. The armchair looks back. “The armchair has always watched people,” I say, because this is, in fact, true, and it’s positioned that way.
She folds in half laughing, mug somehow still in her hands, and the sound of it, her actual real laugh, fills my apartment, completely, without apology, taking up all the air in a room in the best possible way.
“The couch,” she manages. “The couch is judging us.”
“The couch has no opinion.”
“The couch has many opinions. It’s a very opinionated couch.” She straightens up, gestures at it with her mug. “It’s saying: Patrick. Patrick, those pillows. Please.”
I am laughing. When did I start laughing? She’s laughing. The couch is—no. The armchair is definitely watching us. I can feel it. She has this way of taking up space that shouldn’t be possible in a body that size. Seventy percent of my couch. Seventy percent of my duvet. All of my…
My shirt. She’s wearing my shirt and the way the fabric sits on her is—it’s different.
It slides differently across her shoulders.
The collar is open and I can see her collarbone and the shirt is meant to be precise and structured but on her it’s like it’s breathing.
Like it’s a different shirt. Like everything becomes different when she wears it. That’s what kills me. That’s…
I can’t remember the last time I felt this. When was I…was I ever like this? This loose. This not thinking about what’s happening while it’s happening. She’s still laughing at the furniture. The furniture. We’re talking about furniture and I’m…
I’ve been gone. For months. Years. Since before Sarah.
I’ve been somewhere else entirely, just going through the motions, and I didn’t even know it until she was here, laughing at an opinionated couch, and now I can feel it happening.
Right now. This is happening. And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to…
“Elena,” I say.
She looks at me, still bright with laughter, her eyes lit up.
“I love you.”
The laughter doesn’t stop exactly. It shifts. Goes quieter. Her expression does something complicated and real and entirely hers, not managed, not performed, just her. She puts her mug down on the table and looks at me. “I love you too. I’ve been trying not to and it hasn’t been working at all.”
I pull her toward me. She comes without hesitation. Her hands find my face the way they did last night and I think: there. That’s it. That’s the thing I didn’t know how to say for months.
We stay like that, the armchair watching with whatever the furniture equivalent of approval is, and the throw pillows being terrible, and the city outside being the city, and none of it matters.
Then the doorbell rings.
Elena, who is closest to the door and operating at a processing speed that is, at this particular moment, not what it usually is, says “I’ll get it” with the cheerful decisiveness of someone who has completely forgotten where they are and whose house this is.
“Elena—”
But she’s already off the couch, already crossing the room, already pulling open the front door with the specific unguarded openness of someone who has no reason to brace for anything.
I watch her face change.
The woman in the doorway is sixty-three years old, impeccably dressed even on a Sunday morning, and she is looking at the woman who just opened my door, in my shirt, with bare feet and hair that tells its own entire story, with an expression I know very well.
My mother.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she says, not looking away from Elena. “I thought I’d stop by.”
Elena turns to look at me over her shoulder. Her eyes are very wide. I am standing in the middle of my living room and the couch, I think, has reconsidered its opinion of us.
“Mom…This isn’t a good time.”