Chapter 9 A Very Legitimate Business Arrangement #2
Lainey let him be. She filled her days working on sculpture pieces or building hideous commissioned furniture or doing literally any job in town that paid in Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or, in a dark moment, an IOU for farm-fresh eggs.
One twenty-three-year-old with seven computers and no furniture to speak of paid her in crypto to replace his sump pump, so now she had one-third of a Liminal Coin she couldn’t figure out how to deposit.
Or how to determine whether it was actually a prank.
With all this on her mind, she’d probably be able to forget Elliot entirely if he didn’t text her incessantly throughout the day.
Elliot: Where are the garbage bags?
Elliot: Where do we keep the toilet paper rolls?
Elliot: Never mind. I found the cabinet where you keep them and there’s only two rolls left, so I’m going to the store. Do you want me to get anything else?
Elliot: Do you have a coffee bean preference or are you more of a “whatever is on sale” kind of woman?
Elliot: I went to EZ Gas again. I know, I know, but at this point, switching to Bauer’s would be succumbing to intimidation. And I can’t live like that. Is this feud actually serious? Or can we exist as a house divided?
Elliot: Where should I eat lunch? I’m becoming increasingly curious about Jorg’s/Justin’s Bavarian/Swedish meatballs.
Lainey sighed. She’d have to make Brad Bauer’s wife that creepy antler chandelier she’d sent Lainey from Pinterest. Hopefully that would buy her enough goodwill with them to get her through July, as her husband insisted on purchasing gasoline and Cheetos from the enemy.
She typed out a response.
Lainey: You are too comfortable texting me.
Lainey: Garbage bags are under the sink. You’ve seen how much milk is in my coffee, so you know it literally makes no difference to me what kind of beans are in there. I’ll handle the Bauers. Don’t go to Jorg’s/Justin’s unless you’re looking for a dramatic shakeup in the functioning of your bowels.
She sat on the porch of the five-bedroom “cottage” with a railing in need of repair, waiting for his response.
Elliot: Aw, look at you looking out for me!
Elliot: I wish you’d sent that twenty minutes ago.
Elliot: I got you more pasta for dinner tonight. You’re out of bowties.
At dinner, there was no avoiding each other. Separate meals had made sense in theory, but in practice, the two shared a narrow galley kitchen that barely accommodated one human, let alone two people cooking independently and trying not to knock elbows over the sink.
“Ope” and “Sorry” were their cooking soundtrack as Lainey usually made some kind of bean and veggie pasta—not because she was a vegetarian but because meat was expensive—and Elliot made a lot of fish.
A notable amount of fish. Like, alarming quantities of fish.
One night, he tripped on the bathroom rug, and Lainey privately googled if dizziness was a symptom of mercury poisoning (inconclusive).
They’d go to sleep and repeat the pattern again.
Until one morning, when they didn’t.
The morning had begun otherwise unremarkably. She’d snuck into the shower during his workout, gotten dressed, and put on her “no-makeup” makeup, but when she walked into the kitchen, the mug of coffee she’d begun to take for granted was missing.
That was when she peered out the window to find a post–morning run Elliot buzzing around her carport workshop like an agitated bumblebee.
“Elliot.” She stepped cautiously outside to greet him. He was wearing those damn running shorts again. He was always displaying his thighs like a lewd KFC three-piece combo. “You good?”
She was hoping he wouldn’t answer honestly. He was so palpably “not good,” and she wasn’t equipped to help him with that. She didn’t know the guy. Deep conversations were bound to be a minefield.
“Dave Lindley asked about you while I was buying rodent traps at EZ Gas.” He said it like a riddle, as though the sentence had a second, more critical meaning.
“Okay…” She kept her eyes up, careful not to wander over his sweat-darkened shirt that mapped the lines of his chest, an image of which she now had printed on her prefrontal cortex. “Why are you still going to EZ Gas? Dave is going to rope you into his downline for his ‘primal snack food’ MLM.”
“Because I’m terrified of the Bauers, but you’re missing the point. He was asking about you.” He raked his hand through his hair. He had a light sheen of sweat on his inner bicep that was more distracting than she would’ve liked.
“He was asking me about you,” he continued. “Because he thinks we’re actually married.”
“We are actually married.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head with an air of frenzy. “We’re in a legitimate business arrangement.”
Lainey was failing to see the issue that was causing him to pace about the driveway and turning his neck a splotchy shade of scarlet. “Okay. Tell him that.”
“And admit I’m committing health-care fraud? Brilliant. Really genius stuff.” He was too flustered to pull off sarcasm with any real bite.
“Two seconds ago, it was a ‘very legitimate business arrangement.’ ”
He retraced his steps over and over, his feet kicking up dirt. “Why doesn’t this bother you at all?”
She shrugged. “It’s a small town. People were going to find out.”
His nostrils flared on his inhale. “I hadn’t accounted for that.”
“You were the one who wanted to live together to make the lie more convincing.”
“Yeah, to a bunch of claims adjusters thousands of miles away. Not to Dave fucking Lindley.” He was cursing. Things were getting serious. “Do we need to act more ‘married’?”
Lainey tried to imagine how married people might act. The only married couple she’d spent a protracted amount of time with were Bree and Colin, and Bree recoiled at Colin’s touch, even though she tried to hide it.
“People don’t think that much about other people. We don’t have anything to worry about.”
“But if Dave asks what you’ve been up to, I should have a better answer than ‘Sleeping, I think.’ ”
He should’ve had a better answer than that already, considering he spent every day embroiled in a silent fridge standoff over the ownership of an expired package of hummus of unknown origin, but he didn’t have the posture of a man prepared to receive that feedback.
She walked down the porch steps and cautiously approached, regretting her decision when her just-showered bare feet hit the dirt driveway.
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t go back to EZ Gas now that we’re married.
I can’t afford to piss off the Bauers. There are only so many furnishings a person can construct with dead animal carcasses.
” Yasmin Bauer’s chandelier had taken a sharp turn away from hunting-cabin chic and was beginning to resemble the lighting fixture of a particularly audacious serial killer.
He pulled his damp hair by the roots. “See! This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about. These people all know you. They’re not going to buy that a guy who just moved to town is your husband when he doesn’t even know which gas station to go to.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders. His skin was still hot from his run. “Elliot. It’s okay.”
She let her fingers slip down the slope of his arms, all the way to the palms of his hands. She wasn’t sure what her eyes were doing, but his were staring back at her, unblinking.
She shouldn’t be touching him like this. Hands were so vulnerable. They were a person’s physical entry point to the outside world. A point of connection. It was as though she’d stripped him bare in the middle of her driveway. Their driveway.
She dropped his hands and cleared her throat. “There’s only that one blood feud in Timber Creek. That’s it. I think we’ll be fine. When in doubt, divert all conversation to the ‘busy season.’ People love to stress about busy season. That, and complain about tourists.”
March and April were lean months for Timber Creek. It was the time of year when locals claimed to dread the upcoming “hustle and bustle” while secretly longing for the financial boon of out-of-town guests. True contempt for tourists was a privilege the town simply couldn’t afford.
“What do we say when people ask how this happened?” He gestured between the two of them.
“Us?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Tell the real story. But say your threats of legal action were psychosexual foreplay in your pathetic, lovesick pursuit of me.”
He scoffed—which was rude. “Who’s going to believe that?”
“They’ll believe the part about you—I’m a Wisconsin nine and famously a delight. The part where I fall in love with you will be the tougher sell.”
“Right. We’ll have to start a rumor that you’re trying to steal my inheritance.” His barbs were beginning to sound like a joke she was in on.
“Yeah…I don’t think anyone’s going to believe I have any interest in stealing Gil’s turtle terrariums.” She wrinkled her nose as though the very notion carried a stench. “With all due. RIP, obviously.”
He sighed at her, as though her continued existence was a test of his fortitude. “We’ll have to iron out our story later. I have too much work to do if I want to get cabin four ready for us to move into.”