21. Elara
Elara
There is a version of me that wakes up graceful. I’ve read about her. She stretches in golden light, pads to the kitchen with her hair falling in soft waves, and everyone loves her.
I wake up in stages, and none of the stages are flattering.
I’m in leggings and the sleep shirt with the hole in it, my hair is doing whatever it voted on overnight, and I’m halfway down the hall before my eyes fully commit to being open. Which is fine. My feet know the way, and my mouth is already going.
“Gerald. Gerald, wake up. You will not believe the dream I had.”
He’ll be exactly where I left him, which I appreciate about Gerald. Consistency.
“And before you judge me — it wasn’t Xaviar.” I round the corner. “I know. I was shocked too. Three weeks of that book and my subconscious picked the last couple of nights to get creative. There were stars, Gerald. Hundreds of them, everywhere, and the one with the silver eyes—”
The words die in my throat.
There are two men in my pull-out.
There are men everywhere, actually. Yesterday comes back all at once — the door, the coffee, the ominous number no one was willing to talk about. Yesterday happened. And then it stayed over.
The fantasy men have taken over my apartment.
No Leif.
Again.
I’m starting to think they invented him to mess with me.
And here’s the thing about pre-coffee brain. It has no filter, no shame, and no supervision.
Also, sleeping men can’t catch you looking. Asleep, they’re basically fictional. And I’m allowed to look at fictional men. Those are the rules. I don’t make them.
So I look.
The problem takes up most of my floor. To be fair, it’s a small floor.
To be fairer, he’d make a ballroom look cramped.
He’s blond, which I hadn’t fully registered last night with the door and the screaming, and he’s built like the word broad was invented to describe him and then gave up.
Flat on his back, one arm behind his head, and the arm alone is a situation — ink starting at his wrist and climbing, over forearm, around bicep, under his sleeve and back out at his collar, so his whole upper body reads like one continuous story I am absolutely not going to stand here and read.
His shirt’s ridden up. There’s a strip of stomach that authors would describe as carved, and they’d be right, and I hate that they’d be right.
I have read entire chapters about less.
The trap is folded into my reading chair, built along completely different lines — lean where the problem is massive, dark curls smashed flat on one side, head tipped back, throat bare.
One hand hangs loose off the armrest. Long fingers.
I notice the fingers. I stand in my own living room and notice a sleeping man’s fingers, which is a completely normal thing that normal women do.
And Erik. Three years across the hall and I have never once let myself look at Erik, because he’s Erik, and neighbors have rules.
Except for the jaw incident the other day which was most definitely wine and not me.
That doesn’t count. Asleep doesn’t count either.
Asleep, his face has gone soft, his hair is wrecked in a way that suggests it took all night to get there, and his t-shirt is doing absolutely nothing about the chest under—
Where was I going. Kitchen. Coffee. In a minute.
It’s warm in here. The radiator. Definitely the radiator.
Then my lap of the room arrives at the top layer of the pull-out.
It shouldn’t have.
Gunnar. Half on Erik, sitting up, grinning at me like the sun came up specifically for him.
Awake, I get all of him at once — the shaved head, the ink climbing right up his neck like it ran out of arm and kept going, hazel-green eyes already on me.
He grins wider and the tongue ring catches the light, because of course it does.
Awake. Extremely awake. Awake the whole time, is my professional estimate.
He watched me do the entire lap. Every stop on the tour. I know because the grin says so. The grin has receipts.
Okay. Being caught looking is survivable even if my face is very hot right now.
Looking is a normal human activity, like breathing, or crying at commercials.
The talking is the problem. How long has he been awake?
What did I say out loud? I said stars. Did I say silver?
I don’t think I said silver. I was mid-silver.
Mid-silver doesn’t count. And I definitely did not say eyes.
New policy, effective immediately. Dream recaps happen behind a closed door with the shower running, like a normal paranoid person.
His mouth opens and I brace for the end of my life because I am not having this conversation right now.
“Who the hell is Gerald?”
Oh thank god.
Then he looks at me. Looks at the plant and back at me. I get to watch it happen in real time, the math, the terrible math.
“No,” he says.
“It’s not—”
“You cannot be serious.”
“He’s—”
“You talk to your plant?” He’s up now, over Erik and off the pull-out, delighted in a way nobody has a right to be before nine a.m.
“I don’t— I just—”
“She does.” Erik. Eyes still closed. He hasn’t moved an inch.
Fucker.
For the record, talking to your plants is extremely normal. There are studies. I haven’t read them, but they exist, and they’re on my side.
These men are not.
Gunnar crosses to the window and leans down until he’s eye level with Gerald. Then he picks up one of his leaves between two fingers and turns it over, slow, like he’s checking it for wires.
“What’s so special about him?”
“He’s a pothos.”
“Is he magical or something?”
“Magical?” I look at Gerald. Gerald looks like a plant. “Why would he— what?”
He asked it like a real question. Like there was a box to check.
Gunnar keeps squinting at Gerald like Gerald knows what he did.
“He makes her feel safe.”
Rayner. From the floor. Eyes open, on me, and I get the feeling they’ve been open for a while.
“He doesn’t— I mean— that’s not—”
“He does.” Calm. Certain. Like he’s telling me what day it is.
He’s known me for twelve hours. He should not have opinions about my emotional support flora, and he definitely should not be right about them.
I hate him.
My face goes warm again, which is ridiculous, because it’s a statement about a plant.
And the dream picks that exact moment to knock. Stars. Silver.
No. Nope. We are not doing that.
It’s a well-established fact that dreams are just the brain doing its laundry, and I am not going to stand here in front of witnesses and sort the laundry.
“What’s wrong, beautiful?” Gunnar, closer now, the grin winding up. “It’s okay to be a little—”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t be trouble.”
He grins wider somehow. There was no room left on his face and he still found more.
I groan. “I need coffee.”
I retreat to the kitchen. Filter. Grounds. Water. Normal morning. Extremely normal morning, minus the audience.
Behind me, the living room makes living room sounds that absolutely make me anxious.
“Hey, beautiful. What’s this box?”
I freeze mid-scoop.
There’s exactly one box in this apartment that matters and of course it’s the one he’s got, because that’s how it goes with him — one day in and he’s already found the exact thing I don’t want touched. Three notes are inside it and I’m moving before the scoop hits the counter.
“No— don’t—”
The lid’s already open. The first note’s already in his hand, held up where a foot of height difference means I’m not getting it back.
“Gunnar, no. That’s mine. Put it down.”
He’s reading.
“It’s private.” I try. His eyebrows go up. He keeps reading.
No no no.
He’s mouthing the words as he reads them, the ones I’ve got memorized, and I’m going to die right here in my living room in a shirt with a hole in it—
Then his face changes.
The grin’s gone. I’ve known him less than twelve hours and it’s the first time it’s been all the way off. His ears go red. He reads it again, slower. Picks up the other two, reads those, and goes still.
He’s angry. My body gets there before I can argue it down — he’s angry, and I can’t tell you at what. There’s nothing in that box but three sentences and a dragon on top.
Then the grin’s back like he never dropped it, like I made the whole thing up on four hours of sleep.
He folds the note along its crease, sets it back, closes the lid. His attention catches on the little dragon and stays there. And he sets the box down on the desk with both hands, carefully. Like it might go off.
It’s too careful. Especially for him.
I find it hard to believe quiet is something he can do, but here he is doing it. The quiet’s worse than the snooping. Worse than whatever that face was.
“Don’t touch my things.” It comes out low and level and surprises both of us. “You stayed. That was the agreement. My things aren’t part of it.”
His hands come up. Both of them.
“Understood.”
And I had him sorted. Trouble. All gas, no brakes.
Apparently there are brakes.
He thinks I’m sad. That’s what this is — a grown woman keeping unsigned notes in a wooden dragon like a shrine. Fine. I’d think I was sad too, and he’s only got half the story—
Angry, my brain says. Not sad. He was angry.
At what, though. I run the options. The notes? The box? Me? Somebody who isn’t me?—
Nope. Not doing that one.
I’ve got nowhere to put it and not enough brain cells functioning at the moment to deal with any of it.
I go back to the coffee. I finish the coffee. I drink some of the coffee out of a plastic wine glass because it’s the last thing I have. It’s fine. A wine glass is just a mug with ambition.
I’m standing at the counter with my back to all of them, because boundaries. I’m aware they don’t exist right now but it doesn’t stop me from trying.
The mugs from last night are still on the coffee table when I come out — three mugs and the measuring cup, huddled together like survivors. My hand barely picks up the first mug before Brock is just there.
“Let me.”
“It’s fine, I can—”
“Let me.” He insists, warm and apparently immovable on the topic. The mug is already out of my hand, the rest are already gathered, and he’s moving to my sink with purpose. The water is running now, like he’s washed dishes in this kitchen a hundred times.
Gunnar makes a noise.
Brock ignores it with his entire body.
The water eventually shuts off and then everyone’s moving at once.
Rayner is collecting the pieces of my door off the floor like they weigh nothing, because to him they probably don’t.
Gunnar is putting the bed back together — straightening the pillow wall, squaring the corners, restoring it to code. Erik is folding the throw.
I swear Gunnar is putting it together exactly how it was before they ever stepped foot in here, and I know how ridiculous that sounds.
They just move around each other, four very large men in my very small apartment, like they’ve done it a thousand times.
Three hundred chapters of men brooding on battlements, and not one of them ever washed a dish. The genre has failed me.
Houseguests. Extremely industrious houseguests. Somewhere in the Dopamine archive there’s a listicle about this. “Ten Signs Your Houseguests Were Raised in a Cult. Number Four Will Surprise You.”
“Come on.” Erik has his jacket on. When did he put on a jacket? “We’re going to the hardware store.”
“For what?” I ask, into my coffee.
“We need to replace a door.”
“What door?”
He looks at me and his mouth tilts up. Looks at the hole where my front door used to be. Looks at the room.
“The one you broke,” he says. To all of them.
“Technically, Rayner broke it,” Gunnar says. From inside the blanket fort, where he has relocated with his coffee like a man planning to homestead.
“I did,” Rayner says. He says it like an accomplishment.
“Up,” Erik says.
“I just got it back together.”
“Up.”
“There’s no door. What exactly would we be—”
Erik grabs his wrist and pulls, which is apparently a thing that works on Gunnar, because a very large man comes up out of my blanket fort pouting. Actually pouting. Lower lip and everything.
Then Erik is herding all of them toward the hole where my door used to be, one at a time, because it’s the only way men that size fit through a doorway, and the apartment gets bigger and quieter with each one that goes.
Brock is the last one out. He stops in the doorway and winks at me. Then he’s gone around the corner.
Heat climbs up my neck without asking permission.
Dammit.
I point at Gerald.
“See? Day one. I called it. He’s the trap.”
Agreement, obviously. Look at him.
Then it’s just us — me, Gerald, a hole where a door should be, and a dragon box on the desk that I am not looking at.
“And not a word about the rest of it.”
He doesn’t say anything. But it feels judgmental.
I drink my coffee.
Stars, my brain offers, helpfully.
We’re not doing that either.