Chapter 10
chapter ten
. . .
isak
The guest house didn't feel like mine anymore.
That was the problem, one week in. We were living in it while the main house got finished, and I'd made it ours through placement and habit.
Denil had his landing places. Miner had his reading corners.
Now every room made me feel temporary. I kept checking the light and finding it wrong, the temperature and finding it off, the rooms I'd arranged to hold three people and finding them empty in a way they hadn't been before.
The kitchen was the worst. The island was painted sage-green, built for coffee cups and elbows and conversations that ran past midnight.
Now the surface sat clean and unused, the coffee maker cold, and the only thing on it was the invitation Celia had sent us six months ago, framed in glass because Denil had insisted.
I'd propped it against the backsplash after we got home.
A reminder. A decision I made when I wasn't thinking clearly, which was most of the time now.
Nearly two weeks since the wedding, more than a week since we'd walked out of that hotel suite with Nitsa's scent in our clothes and Miner's rules in our ears. We don't chase. We don't coerce. We wait.
The drive home had been its own kind of punishment.
Three hours in Denil's Suburban with the windows cracked and nobody willing to be the first to break.
I'd sat in the back with the duffel between my feet, my hand on the zipper of the main compartment, fighting the urge to pull out that pillowcase every ten minutes.
Her scent was still on it. Faint but as strong as I could hope for, sweet and supple honeysuckle.
I could have held it to my face. I could have breathed it in until the highway blurred.
Instead I kept my hands in my lap, watched the trees go by, and wondered if wanting something that badly was its own evidence that I didn't deserve it.
When we got home, I took the pillowcase out of the duffel in our bedroom with the door closed.
Held it in both hands. The cotton was soft, worn thin in places, and smelled like her.
The ache hit so hard I had to sit on the edge of the bed.
I folded it. Unfolded it. Folded it again.
Then I got a plastic bag from the kitchen drawer where we kept them for marinades, sealed the pillowcase inside, and buried it under my winter socks in the bottom dresser drawer.
Not to get rid of it. Wanting it scared me enough that plastic and wool felt like the only restraint I could trust.
I didn't wash my wedding clothes. I hung them in the back of the closet instead, the shirt still carrying the faintest trace of heat musk layered under something sweeter.
I bought a honeysuckle-scented air freshener from the gas station on the edge of town and hung it from the rearview mirror of my car.
Neither one did what I needed. The air freshener smelled like chemicals pretending to be a flower.
The shirt just made me sad. Every substitute failed at being her, and I kept testing them anyway.
The week had been one long conversation that never quite ended.
We'd talk in the kitchen over coffee that nobody finished.
We'd talk on the deck while Denil split firewood he didn't need.
We'd talk in bed at two in the morning, Miner between us, letting Denil's jaw work and my jokes fail before he answered.
The same questions, rotating. What were we allowed to do?
What constituted chasing? If we found her, what would we say?
Miner held the line better than either of us.
Denil wanted to move. I wanted to move too.
Instead I stayed still, made bad coffee, and rearranged the couch pillows three times in one afternoon.
The bond didn't help. I'd expected it to, some animal part of me assuming that one steady heartbeat ought to settle the other two. Instead Denil's frustration sharpened my restlessness, and Miner's silence amplified both.
We'd tried the obvious cure. Of course we had.
One bad night that week I'd reached for both of them at once.
Denil reached back with all his problem-solving focus, and Miner let us because the pack needed somewhere to put the heat.
It had been good. It was always good. And when it was over we lay there in the dark, sweat cooling, three people who'd just had each other thoroughly, and the noise in my head hadn't dropped a single decibel.
That was the joke of it. You can't kiss or fuck or hold your way out of missing someone who was never yours to miss.
No amount of hands or mouths between the three of us touched the frequency she'd left ringing.
I kept reaching for the pack and finding the pack right there, exactly as much as it had always been, and somehow still short.
We'd waited for Celia. Her honeymoon had been ten days, and calling before she'd had a chance to get home and put her life back in order would have crossed a line even Denil recognized without Miner's help. So we'd waited. And in the waiting, we'd searched.
Nothing online. Nitsa yielded Instagram accounts for women in their fifties and a yoga instructor in Boise.
We tried Nitsa with a C, Nitsa with a K, Nitsa with an E on the end.
Nothing. Denil suggested it might be short for something.
Anastasia, maybe, or something with an N.
The variations led nowhere. We'd spent three days in a woman's body and still did not know her full name.
We'd considered Denil's childhood home. His parents kept all their yearbooks.
Celia and Nitsa would have been in the same ones, same graduating class, and somewhere in those pages was a surname we could use.
But going to his parents' house meant explaining why we needed it.
And explaining meant the hotel, the heat, the fact that we'd spent Celia's wedding weekend fucking her best friend in a suite while the reception danced on without us.
None of us were ready for that conversation.
So the yearbooks stayed on the shelf, and we waited for Celia.
Now it was Tuesday morning, more than a week since we'd come home.
We gathered around the kitchen island with Denil's phone on speaker at its center, falling into our difficult-call formation: Denil standing, arms crossed; Miner seated, one hand at his jaw; me perched on a stool, unable to hold still, worrying the edge of the island with my thumbnail.
Denil pressed call. The speaker hummed. We waited.
Three rings. Four. Then Celia's voice, warm and a little distracted, the background noise of city traffic and overlapping voices bleeding through.
"Hey. You're on speaker. All three of us." Denil had practiced that opening. He'd stood in the bathroom this morning with the door closed and run through what he was going to say. It didn't help. Nothing helped.
A pause. The background noise shifted, like she'd moved somewhere quieter.
"Okay." The warmth left Celia's voice in the space of one word. "I'm listening."
Celia was quiet for exactly two seconds after Denil finished explaining, and in those two seconds I learned everything I needed to know about how badly we'd fucked this up. City traffic and overlapping voices filled the line before she answered.
"Let me make sure I have this right." Her voice had gone flat, the warmth sheathed.
"You three showed up at my wedding. You found my best friend in heat.
You spent three days with her in a hotel suite.
She told you she didn't want you following her.
And now you want to override what she said, forget the disrespect to me, and get her contact information because your noses told you she's the one. "
"It's not like that," Denil said.
"It is exactly that." The line crackled.
I could picture her, wherever she was, one hand on her hip, the exact set of her jaw that Denil had described enough times I could draw it from memory.
"A scent match is biology, Denil. It is not a hall pass.
It is not permission to stalk or chase down a woman who left a hotel room without waking you up because she needed space. "
"We're not chasing," I said too quickly, the defense coming out warmer and more earnest than the moment could bear.
"We want one conversation, nothing more.
She can refuse us, and we'll listen the first time.
We've spent a week sitting on our hands because Miner told us to give her room, because he said?—"
"I don't care what Miner said." The edge in her voice was new; I'd never heard her point it at her brother before.
"I care what Nitsa said. Which was nothing.
She packed her things and left while you were asleep.
That's a sentence that ends with a period, not a comma followed by 'but we're her perfect match so actually?—'"
"You're hearing what you want to hear," Denil said. "That's not what any of us said, and you know it."
"Oh, I'm mishearing you." Celia laughed, and there was no warmth left in it. "That's the problem here. Me. Let me try again, slower. She. Said. Everything. She needed to say. You just don't like what she said, so you're standing in your kitchen deciding she left the sentence unfinished."
Denil started to answer. She rolled right over him, her temper gathering speed now that she'd stopped managing it and started spending it.
"You want to know who Nitsa is? She's a person who moved to Bridgeport with two suitcases and built something with her own name on it, alone, on purpose, because the people who were supposed to love her decided her presenting was a memo about how small she was allowed to be.
She doesn't ask anyone for anything. She hasn't in years.
And she still drove three hours to hand me a wedding I couldn't have afforded and wouldn't let me pay for one card of it, because that is the kind of?—"