16. Elara
Elara
The doorframe catches me and I let it.
One second. I get one second of holding on like the building might tip, and then I’m around the corner, out of their sight line, and my legs carry me to the counter before they resign.
Okay.
Okay okay okay.
Coffee. I said coffee. Coffee is a sequence of small, achievable steps, and I am a woman who can achieve steps.
I open the cabinet. I close it. I don’t remember what I was looking for in there, which is fine, because I open it again and it’s mugs. It was mugs. Obviously it was mugs.
My hands are shaking hard enough to hear.
I turn the faucet on. For the coffee. Coffee needs water. The fact that running water also covers sound is a coincidence I am simply benefiting from.
“I know those eyes.”
There. Said. As a whisper, but that doesn’t matter. I said it out loud, technically, in the legal sense — at a volume that doesn’t make things true. That’s how volume works. Everyone knows that.
Because I do know them. I got half a second at the door, half a second before I made myself stop, and half a second was plenty, because I looked at a complete stranger and I already knew him. I didn’t decide. It was waiting for me.
“No,” I whisper aggressively. “Absolutely not.”
Here’s what actually happened. A door exploded. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream like a fire hose. The brain, under stress, grabs the nearest familiar-shaped thing and staples it to whatever’s in front of it. That’s science. I have written articles adjacent to science.
“Stress,” I tell the faucet. “That’s all this is.”
Except the dream was last night and the stress was tonight, and staples don’t work backward.
“Then it’s the wine.”
There was wine last night. A lot of wine. And wine dreams don’t count — everyone knows wine dreams don’t count. Inadmissible.
Except the dream isn’t the problem. Dream whatever you want, that’s free. The problem is the dream showing up in your apartment and taking the door off its hinges to get there.
Wine doesn’t do previews.
Wine also has no issue with regret.
“I read too much.” Okay. Yes. Here’s a real one. I read too much, my brain is fully furnished with impossible men, and it needed somewhere to put a face. That’s all a dream is — the brain doing its laundry. Everything in the machine went in the machine at some point.
Except I know my machine. I build them. Every man I’ve ever dreamed, I built him out of a book and I could tell you which book. And I did not build that man. He came pre-assembled with his eyes already—
“Blue eyes are common,” I whisper, and I’m pointing at the sink now, prosecuting a faucet. “Millions of people have blue eyes. Statistically it would be weirder if none of them broke my door.”
Good. Great point. Case closed.
Except they’re not blue.
They’re pale. Almost silver, where the dark should be. Nobody has—
The mug leaves my hand.
I don’t drop it. That would imply a decision was involved. It’s just in my hand and then it’s everywhere, all over the tile, a hundred pieces of a mug that survived three apartments and two boyfriends and could not survive this sentence.
“Shit.”
Full volume. The one word tonight gets through at full volume.
I get the broom. Sweeping is good. Sweeping is a task I can do because you can tell when sweeping is done, which puts it ahead of everything else in my life right now.
And somewhere in the middle of the little pile of pieces, bent over a dustpan in my own kitchen, I stop pretending.
“I dreamed him,” I whisper.
The broom doesn’t argue. Gerald would’ve at least had the decency to be a plant about it, but Gerald’s in the living room with them, being brave, and I’m in here whispering confessions to cleaning supplies.
“I dreamed him, and now he’s standing in my living room.”
And in the dream he called me—
Nope.
Not finishing that one.
That one goes in the box. I have a literal box for things I’m not dealing with. Metaphorically. Also literally, which is not a thought I have time for either.
Mugs. Count the mugs.
Six this morning. One in the sink from deadline week, and I am not washing dishes in front of strangers, that’s how they get you. One deceased, may she rest. That’s four. The blue one has a chip — I check the chip. Clean. Fine. It’s not damaged, it’s got character.
Four mugs. Five people.
The measuring cup looks at me from the drying rack.
“Don’t make it weird,” I tell it. “You have a handle. You’re basically a mug with a math degree.”
Drafted. Welcome to the roster.
I load them onto my fingers by the handles the way I do, because some skills stay with you, and the mugs rattle once against each other and go quiet.
Good. One of us should.
And that’s when I notice what my body is doing, because my body has been doing it this whole time and waiting for me to catch up.
I’m angled toward the far wall. Not the doorway — the wall.
The specific stretch of wall with a living room on the other side of it, and a specific spot in that living room, and I could put my hand flat on the plaster right now and tell you what’s standing six feet past it.
Through a wall.
That’s not a sense. People don’t have that sense. I’m choosing a different sense.
No. We are not checking. Checking is data, and I am not collecting data tonight. Tonight I am a hostess with a beverage program. Tomorrow — tomorrow is a magical place where a more capable woman deals with silver eyes and pre-assembled men and walls I can apparently see through.
She’s got it handled.
I trust her completely.
And she is not me. Not right now.
I straighten up. I put on the face of a woman whose biggest problem is beverage distribution.
“Coffee,” I whisper, one more time, and step back toward the living room. “Right.”
They’re all exactly where I left them, which shouldn’t be a relief but it is.
“Okay, so — the blue one has a chip but it’s clean, and someone’s getting the measuring cup, I’m sorry, I had six this morning—”
I start handing them out, because motion is my friend and standing still is where the trouble lives.
Erik takes the chipped one before I can finish apologizing for it. Doesn’t look at the chip. Just takes it, like the chip was the one he wanted, which is exactly the kind of thing he does that I’ve never let myself think about for longer than four seconds.
The one with the curls says “thank you” — just that, quiet, warm, aimed directly at me — and my face goes hot for no reason at all. It’s a thank you. People say thank you. I move on before my face can commit to anything.
Which brings me to the measuring cup, and I hold it out without looking up, because not looking up is the entire plan and the plan is going great—
He takes it with both hands.
Both hands. Around a measuring cup. Careful, like I handed him something precious instead of the last clean thing in my kitchen, and I look up, because apparently my neck works for him and no one else, and he’s already looking at me.
Like he found me.
I look away so fast I nearly hurt myself.
Last one. The tattooed one. I hold out his mug and our fingers catch on the handoff and something jumps between us — static, dry air, socks on carpet, pick one, I’m not investigating — and it goes up my arm and lands somewhere it has no business landing.
His smirk is gone.
Which is somehow worse than the smirk.
“Sorry about the door,” I say, to him, to all of them, to the room. Like I broke it. I don’t know why I said it. My mouth is freelancing now.
I set my own mug down on the coffee table and my hands are still shaking, which is fine. My door is in pieces on the floor and the men responsible are standing in my living room drinking my coffee. Shaking is the correct response. Shaking is, if anything, restrained.
I fuss with my mug. Turn the handle so it faces the right way, like that matters, like anyone here is going to file a complaint about handle alignment. It’s the one thing in this room I have any control over right now and I am going to control the absolute hell out of it.
And then there’s nothing left to do with my hands, and I make the mistake of looking up.
Really looking.
And I should abort that mission, right now because…
What the actual fuck?
They look like fantasy men.
Like, they really do. They’re not regular men. I know those. I mean the just-stepped-out-of-a-romance-book kind. The ones that show up on book covers holding a sword they have no reason to own. Like they’ve got some war to be sad about or something.
I own those books. I paid real money for those books because of those covers.
I have a type.
That type is fictional.
And fictional is not supposed to be standing in my living room!
Erik was bad enough. But this? This is too much sexy just… everywhere.
And now my brain wants to know more.
I just can’t leave it alone can I?
The one by the window has bronze skin, dark curls and an easy face and looks — normal. Approachable. Like he’d be fun at a party.
Yeah… right.
There is no normal in this group. The normal one is the trap. The normal one is how they get you.
The one closest to me with the shaved head, intense eyes, is covered — neck, arms, all of it — in ink, and there’s a flash of metal when he talks.
You cannot be serious right now.
Fantasy men definitely do not have tongue rings.
Oh, but what if they did?
Wait, no. Not thinking about that.
He’s looking right at me. Amused again — the smirk recovered fast, whatever that was at the handoff isn’t there now. Now, he looks like something funny is about to happen and he already knows what.
I’m not a fan. He hasn’t done anything, technically. It’s purely the face. It’s the face of a man who is nothing but trouble.
And the blond one—
No. We covered this. The faucet and I reached a verdict and the verdict was stress, and I am not reopening the case just because he holds kitchenware like it’s sacred.
“You got any of that white stuff?” the one with the shaved head says.
I freeze.
White stuff.
My brain, which has been having a day, takes those two words and drives them directly into the gutter.
White —
No.