13. Elara
Elara
The fitted sheet goes on first because that’s apparently how these beds work.
I learned this from my mother, over the phone, the first time Ashley stayed over, standing in the dark holding a corner of elastic like it had personally wronged me.
The fitted sheet is the foundational document.
Everything else is built on the fitted sheet.
Erik is in the bathroom. I have, I estimate, four minutes. Maybe five if he’s the kind of man who looks at his own face for a while, which I doubt, because men like that don’t, they just walk out already certain.
Four minutes. That’s plenty. I’m just making up the pull-out. It’s a small job. A normal, small, hosting job that any normal host does for any normal guest, and I am going to do it calmly and proportionally and then go to sleep in my own bed like a person.
The blue blanket.
Obviously the blue one.
It’s the softest thing I own, it’s the one I’d want, so it’s the one he should — actually. No. Wait.
It’s thin.
The blue one is the softest but it’s also the thinnest. Summer-weight, barely there, and if he gets cold in the night he’s not going to come knock on my door and ask for another one.
Men don’t do that kind of thing. He’ll just lie there freezing and polite about it until morning, and I can’t have that, that’s a failure of the whole operation.
Hosting.
This is hosting.
I throw the blue one on anyway, because soft matters, and reach for the gray.
The gray one is the warm one. Heavier, thicker, the one you actually want when you get cold.
But it’s only warm — what if Erik runs hot.
Some people run hot. Some people are furnaces, they kick everything off in the night, they sleep on top of the covers like a starfish radiating heat into the void.
I have never once thought about Erik’s personal temperature and I am absolutely not thinking about it now.
Not about what he’d be like to sleep next to, or whether you’d wake up warm…
No. I should not be having that thought. He’s my neighbor.
I grab the gray one too.
Both. Both is the answer. Both is just giving him options, and options are the cornerstone of good hosting.
Everyone knows that. You don’t decide for a guest whether he’s hot or cold, you put out both and let him sort it out himself.
I put the gray one over the blue one and smooth them both down, and I step back, and the gray one is sitting slightly off-center, so I fix it, and fixing it knocks the blue one crooked, so I fix that too.
And somehow this puts the gray one off-center again, which shouldn’t be geometrically possible but here we are.
Fine.
Blankets are handled.
Blankets, done.
Now, on to the pillows.
I look at the couch — the pull-out, I mean, the bed — at the two flat cushions currently lying there doing the absolute bare minimum a pillow can do while still legally being a pillow.
Two.
Two sad pillows.
For a grown man.
No. Absolutely not.
I tug down the corner of the blankets to smooth a wrinkle on the way to my room to get appropriate pillows.
I come back with three.
I stand there holding three pillows and looking at the two already there and the math isn’t working, because five is a weird number.
Five is lopsided, so I go back and get two more, and now I’ve got the good ones, the real ones.
The ones that actually do something for your neck instead of just being present.
Everyone deserves neck support. That’s not even a hospitality thing, that’s a spine thing.
That’s basic skeletal care, and I’m not going to be the host whose guest wakes up with his neck wrecked because I rationed pillows.
I arrange them against the arm of the pull-out, building it up, and then there are too many at that end so I redistribute. I move some to the other end, build that up too, and step back and realize I’ve now lost the reason I was doing any of this.
Doesn’t matter. Keep going.
One from the first side falls down, I fix it while I stare at the throw pillows.
The little decorative ones, on the chair, the ones that exist purely to be moved off the chair before anyone sits down.
Absolutely not. Not while there’s a job to do.
I bring them over. They’re firm but they’re soft on top, and honestly they’ve been freeloading on that chair for two years, it’s time they earned their keep. I tuck them in along the back edge, filling the gaps, packing it out so there’s no cold open space against the wall.
There, now it’s all soft, all the way around, no hard edges anywhere a person could —
I step back.
Okay.
I tilt my head at it.
It is… a lot of pillows.
Objectively.
If I’m being a scientist about it, that is a quantity of pillows that has crossed over from “made bed” into something else, something with walls, something you’d climb down into rather than onto.
But it’s cozy.
Cozy is the goal.
Cozy is good.
Erik is doing me an enormous favor by being here, by being a wall between me and Kyle and the whole stupid city, and the very least I can do — the actual least — is build him somewhere soft to land.
That’s not weird. If wanting a guest to be comfortable is weird then I don’t want to be normal.
And if comfortable happens to require every soft object I own arranged into a — into a cozy — then so be it.
That’s just thoroughness. I’m thorough. It’s my whole brand.
The bathroom door opens.
“Okay so.” I’m already moving, already smoothing the corner of the blue blanket that does not need smoothing, that I am smoothing anyway because my hands have decided this.
“It’s — it’s not as comfortable as it looks.
Probably. I actually don’t know, I’ve never slept on it, but the mattress is decent for a pull-out, which I know sounds like the lowest bar in the world, but I actually did research when I bought it because I knew I’d have people stay eventually, theoretically, and—”
I fix a pillow.
“—so there’s the blue blanket because it’s the soft one, but then the gray one’s over it in case you get cold, except it’s also kind of heavy so if you get hot you can just kick the gray one and keep the blue, that’s the whole reason there’s two, it’s a system—” I tug the sheet straight where a corner’s gone loose.
“—and there’s a throw too, if two isn’t enough, it’s on the chair, but honestly three might be excessive, I don’t know your needs, I didn’t want to assume your needs—”
I step back.
The bed looks—
“Honestly it looks really good. Like, really good.” I hear myself say it and can’t stop it. “I kind of want to sleep in it myself.”
Silence.
The good kind, I assume, the kind where a person is about to say wow, thanks, this is great. I turn around to collect my wow, thanks, this is great.
Erik is standing in the middle of my living room, and he is not looking at me.
He’s looking at the bed. And his face is doing something I have never once seen it do — not in the hallway, not in the elevator, not when he was peeling Kyle off me like adhesive.
Something has come down over him, or come up in him, I can’t tell which, and his jaw is tight and his eyes are doing too much and he is very, very still.
I do not have a reference point for this expression. I’ve been collecting Erik’s expressions for three years without meaning to and this one is new and it does not go with any of the others. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on anyone else ever before either.
“Erik?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Okay, that’s — that’s concerning.” And just like that I’m across the room, because something is clearly wrong with him, he’s gone pale and strange and statue-like and people don’t do that for no reason. “Are you okay? Do you feel sick? Did you stand up too fast? Here — come here, sit, sit down—”
I take his arm and steer him toward the bed and he comes, he just lets me move him, which scares me more than the pale face does, because Erik does not get moved. Erik is the one who moves things. I get him to the edge of the pull-out and press him gently down by the shoulder and he sits.
“Stay there. Don’t move. I’m getting you water.”
I’m back in thirty seconds with a full glass. He takes it without quite looking at me and drinks the whole thing down like a man who forgot he had a body and just remembered.
I take it from him and set it on the table.
“Better?”
He finally looks up at me.
And then he reaches out, takes my hand — his is warm, his is always so warm — and pulls me sideways down across him, easy, like I weigh nothing, until I land in the middle of the pull-out in all the blankets and all the pillows and all the soft I packed in around the edges.
I laugh, startled, and for just a second — half a second, less — there’s something on his face that looks almost like fear, raw and fast, and then shoved back down before I can be sure I saw it at all.
“Umm.” He clears his throat. His voice has gone lower. “Yeah. See? See how comfortable it is.”
I sink back into it.
Oh.
Oh, it is. The pillows take my weight and the blankets are exactly as soft as I promised and it’s warm in here, packed in on all sides, walls of soft.
And whatever has had me wound-tight that I’ve been carrying since the coffee shop or maybe before lets go all at once, every muscle in me going quiet at the same time, like the whole day was just me trying to get here and not knowing it.
“I told you,” I say, into the softness.
“You did.” His voice is rough. “You did tell me.”
He’s still got that look. Closer now, I can see he’s not sick. I don’t know what it is, but it’s aimed entirely at me, and my heart is doing the racing thing again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine,” he says. “Completely fine.”
One second he’s sitting at the edge of the pull-out, a careful foot of space between us.
The next his hand finds my ribs — the exact spot, the high curve of my side, the place that’s been warm since his apartment, the place his finger already knows — and presses in.
I shriek.