12. Elara
Elara
Erik’s apartment is the same shape as mine and nothing like it.
Same bones — same galley kitchen, same window in the same place throwing the same flat afternoon light.
But where my apartment is a controlled landslide of books and mugs and a plant I talk to, his is just…
calm. Lived in, but calm. Like a person who knows where his things are and doesn’t apologize for any of them.
I stand a few feet inside the door doing the thing where you don’t know what to do with your hands, so I do everything with them — clasp them, unclasp them, push my hair back, fold my arms, unfold them, decide arms are too much commitment, let them hang.
“Make yourself at home,” he says, not looking up, already moving toward the back. “This’ll take five minutes.”
Make myself at home. Sure. I’ll just do that. I’ll just casually exist in the apartment of the man who watched me ask his jaw if it had a membership and then later peeled my ex off me like a sticker. Totally relaxed. The picture of a woman at ease.
I do not sit down. Sitting down feels like a decision I haven’t earned. So I hover, and I let my eyes go where they want because looking at his stuff is at least a thing to do that isn’t looking at him.
That’s when I see the notepad.
It’s on the little table by the door, next to a bowl where he keeps his keys, and my whole body does a small stupid thing before my brain catches up to why. Cream. Heavier than normal paper. The kind with a little tooth to it, the kind that holds ink so it presses through to the back.
The kind my notes are written on.
My stomach drops about an inch and then catches itself, because — okay.
No. Let’s all calm down. Paper is paper.
They make that paper by the truckload. It’s in every store that sells stationery in America.
It’s probably in a drawer in my own apartment, it means exactly nothing that a grown man owns a notepad. Men own notepads, that’s allowed.
And anyway it would never be Erik.
I mean. Look at him.
He’s crouched at a low drawer across the room, sleeves shoved up, the muscle in his forearm shifting as he digs for whatever he’s after, jaw doing the thing it does — and the thought I was having, whatever responsible thought I was building about notepads and evidence, just sort of wanders off mid-sentence and doesn’t come back.
A man who looks like that does not spend his evenings handwriting affirmations and sliding them under a woman’s door and running off at speeds that violate physics.
He has better things to do. He has, presumably, an entire calendar of better things, full of people-shaped —
No. We’re not doing the calendar thing again.
But the paper does something to me anyway, some side door it opens, because thinking about the notes makes me think about last night, and thinking about last night makes me think about —
Blue.
Not blue like a color you pick. Blue like something looking back.
Pale, almost silver where the dark should be, fixed on me and not letting go, and the rest of the face won’t hold still but the eyes do, the eyes stay, and there’s a body pressed against my back and a mouth at my ear saying a word I can’t quite —
Starlight.
He called me Starlight.
Nobody calls me Starlight. Nobody has ever called me Starlight, it’s not a me thing, it’s not a thing anyone has said to my face in twenty-nine years.
I’d remember, you don’t get called Starlight and forget it.
But there it is, sitting in my head in a voice I’ve never heard, attached to a face I can’t hold and a pair of hands that — okay.
The hands I remember. The hands were thorough.
It was, in fairness, an extremely good dream.
It just wasn’t my dream. That’s the part. I didn’t build him. I build all of them, the men from my books, that’s the whole point of them, and I did not build a silver-eyed stranger who —
“Ella.”
I am underwater and someone says my name from the surface.
“Hey.” Closer now. “You okay?”
I blink, and the room comes back — Erik’s apartment, Erik standing right in front of me with whatever he was grabbing forgotten in one hand, watching me with a small line between his brows.
I have no idea how long I was gone. Long enough.
Long enough that he crossed the whole apartment and I didn’t notice a single step of it.
My face goes hot. Instantly. Catastrophically.
Because I know what my face was doing. I could feel it doing it. I was standing in this man’s home with my whole expression somewhere very far away and very specific, and he watched it happen, and there is no version of the last thirty seconds where I looked like a woman thinking about taxes.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m fine. I was — thinking. About the article. The oolong. Riveting stuff, the oolong, you really get lost in it.”
He does not believe me. I can see him not believing me. But it’s worse than that, because he’s not just catching me in a lie — he’s looking at me like he knows exactly what I was actually thinking. Like he can read the heat on my face, and the corner of his mouth has gone up, just slightly.
Oh. My…
He is enjoying this.
“The oolong,” he says.
“It’s a very rich topic.”
“You looked pretty lost in it.”
“It’s complex. There are antioxidants. There are — notes.
Tasting notes.” I am making it worse. I can hear myself making it worse and I cannot stop.
This is just who I am now, a woman who says tasting notes to a man who watched her have an entire private moment in his living room. “It’s a whole world. The tea world.”
“Mm.” He’s still got that look. He looks at me just a little longer than I can survive and then takes pity on me, or pretends to. “I’ve got a couple more things in the back.”
“Great. Yes. Go. I’ll be here, being normal.”
“I can see that.”
He goes. I’m going to expire.
To recover, I do what I always do, which is find something to look at that isn’t the source of the problem. There’s a bookshelf along the far wall, and I drift toward it.
Good books. Old ones, some of them, cloth-bound, worn at the edges like he’s actually read them.
A few rocks — not crystals, just rocks, smooth ones, like he picks them up places.
A coil of cord. A folding knife. And down on the second shelf, between a book about birds and a book with no title on the spine, a little figurine.
A dragon.
It’s small, no bigger than my thumb, carved out of something black and polished so deep it’s almost wet-looking.
Onyx, maybe. Wings spread wide, tail curled around its own feet, head turned a little to the side like it heard something.
The detail is insane for how small it is — you can see individual scales, the ridge of the spine, the line of the jaw.
I’ve seen this before.
Not this this. But something like it. The pose. The turned head and the folded wings and the tail wrapped around — I have this. It’s on my body. The exact dragon sitting on Erik’s shelf.
“This looks just like my tattoo.”
Behind me, the sounds of Erik stop.
When I turn and look at him, his eyes are wide like now I’ve finally said something ridiculous.
“You have a tattoo.” He swallows. “Of a dragon?”
“Mmhmm.” I look back at the figurine, running my thumb along the shelf above it. “Since I was eighteen. It’s small. It’s on my—” I gesture vaguely at my own ribs without turning around. “It’s whatever. Impulse decision. The most rebellious thing I’ve ever done and it’s the size of a credit card.”
“Can I see it?”
And that turns me around.
He’s closer than he was the last time I looked — not crowding, just closer, the bag of his stuff set down somewhere, both hands empty now, and he’s looking at me with an intensity that does not match the size of what I just said.
I told him I have a small tattoo. People have tattoos.
This is not some newfangled idea. But he’s looking at me like I said something that matters.
My face is already going hot for the second time in five minutes.
“Oh — it’s. Um.” Eloquent. “It’s kind of in an awkward spot, it’s on my side, like my ribs, it’s not really a — it’s not a show people situation, normally, it’s—”
“Please.”
Just that. Quiet. Not pushy. He’s not going to make me. I can feel that he’s not going to make me, that if I say no he’ll nod and let it go and never bring it up again. Which is somehow exactly the thing that makes me want to say yes, because nobody’s making me, so it gets to just be mine to give.
I sigh, like this is a great imposition, like my heart isn’t doing the racing thing again.
I drop my bag.
I turn to the side, and I get a hand under the hem of my shirt, and I pull it up — past my waist, past the soft part, up to where the band of my bra cuts across my ribs.
The little dragon sits just under it, high on the curve of my side, black ink on pale skin: wings spread, tail curled, head turned like it heard something.
Erik doesn’t say anything, just looks.
He moves. I feel him close the last of the space — and he doesn’t say can I, doesn’t ask, and I don’t say anything either, and one finger, warm, finds the top of it where it sits below the band and traces down.
Slow. The wing, the ridge of the spine, the tail curled around its own feet. Like he’s reading it.
It should tickle. It doesn’t. It goes through me, low and humming, every nerve along that side of me waking up at once, and I forget, for a second, the entire concept of breathing.
“It suits you,” he says.
Low. Certain. Not the way you say it about a tattoo.
The way you say it about a thing that was always going to be true.
I don’t move. He doesn’t move. His finger is still resting against my ribs and my shirt is still up.
And I absolutely do not feel his finger continue to move slowly, carefully.
And I can’t help but think that in some version of today I am a normal woman writing about tea, and I have never been further from her than I am right now. I don’t know what to feel about that.
“Erik,” I whisper. I don’t know what I mean by it. It’s just his name, and it comes out wrong.
His finger goes still against my skin.
And then, from the hallway behind us, a door bangs and he steps back.
I let my shirt fall.
We do not look at each other.
“I’ll get my bag,” I say, to the bookshelf.
“Yeah,” he says, to somewhere else.
I pick up my bag. I make sure my phone is in my pocket, that I’ve got my keys. I am, by every visible measure, a woman gathering her belongings to walk twelve feet across a hall.
But my hand keeps drifting back to my side.
Not on purpose. I’ll be doing something else — settling the strap on my shoulder, checking I’ve got everything — and the heel of my hand finds the spot through my shirt, the stretch of ribs where the ink is, where his finger was, and presses, light, like it’s checking something’s still there.
I catch it the third time and make myself stop.
It’s just warm there. That’s all. Skin holds warmth, that’s a known property of skin. It doesn’t mean anything that my hand keeps going back to check.
The little dragon sits on the shelf with its head turned, listening, like it has been this whole time.
“Ready?” Erik says from the door, his bag over his shoulder, his face put back together into something easy and ordinary, like the last few minutes happened to two other people.
“Ready,” I say.
My hand is on my side again. I take it off.
I follow him out, across the hall, into the apartment that’s mine, and the whole way over there is a small warm place on my ribs insisting, quietly and against all evidence, that something happened that I’m going to need to deal with later.