Chapter 13 Never Go to the Back Room with a Dog Adoption Coordinator
Never Go to the Back Room with a Dog Adoption Coordinator
Elliot and Lainey should not have kissed.
Technically it had been an accident—at least at first—but based on her inability to make eye contact with her “friend,” her libido was not concerned with technicalities.
She’d done her best to avoid him, and it helped that Elliot was exceedingly militant when it came to his morning running schedule.
Each day at seven, without fail, he was out the door in his running shoes and tiny shorts for exactly forty-seven minutes.
(She’d timed it.) As far as she was concerned, they’d tacitly agreed that these forty-seven minutes were her time to shower and laze about the house in privacy, the way she had before her days as a “married” woman.
At seven fifty-seven, once he was showered and she was ready to face the day, they would carry on with being friends as though the kiss had never happened.
He’d make them both coffee, and she’d help him with cabin renovations for a few hours while doing her level best to stare at his hands in an instructional way and not a leering way.
It wasn’t helping matters that Elliot had a way of listening to her that she was finding hard to resist.
It was the intensity in his eyes as he watched her, like every word she said carried weight. She’d never really felt heard before. It cracked her open when he looked at her like that.
At around ten, he would settle into his remote job at her dining table—architecting, she assumed—and she would leave to carry on as she normally would, doing whatever provided her enough money to stop working just before sunset, in time to stare at the incomplete art pieces that were metaphorically cackling at her like mean-spirited tree witches while Elliot worked on the cabins again.
Once or twice, they’d spent the evening in lawn chairs with Vincent Groff’s journals—Elliot with a glass of wine, Lainey with a water—mulling over the many possibilities of the still-imaginary Forest’s Bridge.
This new routine was made possible by her medication.
She’d had a few rough mornings that required a breakthrough pain medication, but she’d otherwise enjoyed her mostly migraine-free existence.
She hadn’t realized how much of her life she’d handed over to her pain—fretting about it, managing it, enduring it—until it no longer required so much of her.
And it was all thanks to Elliot. Her husband. Her friend. Her…whatever he was.
Her daily routine also relied on her indifference to how large Elliot’s hands were and her exceedingly detailed memories of how they felt on her body.
···
On Sunday—the one that happened to follow Easter, which had come and gone without a peep from Camille—she disrupted their new normal to make some much-needed cash at the Groff Retreat.
Bree’s parents—the owners of the resort and the final word on most things on its premises, including Bree’s personal life—did not approve of hiring unlicensed handypersons for on-site repairs, and Lainey was certainly not an exception.
But on Sundays, when legitimate tradespeople were difficult to come by, they pretended not to notice her fixing an occasional sink in exchange for cash.
“So he kissed you, and now he’s just not talking to you at all?” Bree asked. She was perched on the edge of the tub in an oxblood red sweat suit, supporting her weight with one hand and cradling her belly with the other.
“No.” Lainey swung her head out from under the sink to set the record straight. “We still work together and bicker—like we always do—but now all of our arguments have this ever-present undercurrent of sexual tension.”
“Sexual tension. I remember that,” Bree commented absently.
Lainey wasn’t sure whether to linger on her friend’s comment, so she forged ahead.
“When we fight, it’s no longer the bitter back-and-forth of an elderly couple resigned to marital-bed death.
Now when I look at him, I’m picturing myself Wolverine-ing into his clothes with my fingernails and then I remember that we can’t do that—which only makes it hotter. ”
“I hate to break it to you, but you two have always been that way,” Bree replied.
Lainey grimaced, back under the sink. “But it wasn’t out there in the open like a third roommate. And now that I’ve felt his abs, and I can’t unfeel them.”
“Elliot has abs?” Bree asked curiously.
“Yes, and they’re not the bulky, gross kind. They’re subtle and understated. Elegant.”
“His abs are elegant?”
“I’m just as surprised as you are.” Lainey nodded as her hand threaded a slip nut back into place. “So now I have to live the rest of my life possessing this knowledge, knowing I’ll never have the opportunity to touch them again.”
She’d seen his stomach before, but she imagined it would look different to her now that she held a deeper appreciation for its context. Art was so often that way for her. It stood to reason that six-packs followed a similar principle.
“I don’t see why you can’t hook up again. He doesn’t seem uninterested.”
She lifted herself up on her elbows to look at Bree eye to eye.
“He’s already made it clear he’s not looking for a married-with-benefits situation with his temporary wife.
” Lainey forced lightness into her voice.
That particular rejection had touched a raw nerve that’d been stinging for days.
“And even if he could handle something like that, it would never work with Elliot. He eats the same thing every third day. It’s always salmon, tuna, cod.
Salmon, tuna, cod. Over and over again.” Lainey gave the nut a snug turn with the wrench.
“You eat all the same foods, too,” Bree argued.
“Because I’m poor and bad at cooking. Not because the exact sequence of my meals is the one thing holding together the paper-thin fabric of my existence. I could never be compatible with someone like that. He has the coffee maker set to brew coffee at the exact same time every single day.”
And to brew her coffee. But for some reason, she left that part off his morning routine when she relayed it to Bree.
Lainey pictured the way he looked that morning when she left, measuring and remeasuring two-by-fours for the deck on Forest’s Bridge with his tongue captured between his teeth.
He came alive when he worked on that project.
His passion was infectious. A desire to create itched through her limbs more than ever, and she knew the only difference was him.
It had to be. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Oh my god, you’re obsessed with him!”
Lainey swung her head out of the cabinet to find Bree crouched on the ground directly in front of her like a baby sparrow.
“Jesus! When did you creep up here?” Lainey squawked.
“You are! You’re, like, swooning,” she insisted, duckwalking another two steps until Lainey’s back was up against the cabinet door. “You can’t lie to me. I’m pregnant.”
Lainey was fairly certain those two things weren’t connected, but not enough to argue the point. “Fine, I like him. Is it so bad to like your husband?”
“It is if you’re only married for insurance.” Bree fluttered her lips. “What do his friends think about this whole marriage thing? Does he have a friend? Not all men do.”
“I don’t think he’s told his friends,” she said, trying to appear unfazed by Elliot’s apparent shame surrounding all things Lainey Davis.
Lainey’d overheard Elliot on FaceTime with Sebastian, Annie, and Grayson countless times.
She guessed Annie was the one initiating the calls.
Of the two of them, she seemed the most concerned that Elliot’s abrupt move was a sign of a prolonged psychological break, and as such, her voice always carried an air of parental relief when Elliot answered her calls appearing more or less intact.
On those calls, they discussed his renovations, the weather, and the general frustrations of remote government work, but Elliot never mentioned Lainey. Not once.
“Do you think you’re grateful for the medication and your brain is confusing that for attraction?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, even though she was certain gratitude wasn’t the source of her attraction. She’d felt that from the very start. What was beginning to grow between them now was something else. Something big.
“The meds are working, right?” she asked.
“They are,” Lainey assured her. “They’re not magic, but my migraines are more controlled. I finally have the energy to feel…inspired again.”
For her, the worst part of chronic pain wasn’t the physical toll, but the mental one.
For so long, she’d wake up with hands itching to create and thoughts consumed by inspiration, but her mind hurt and her body was worn out before the day had even begun.
Sometimes it made her want to cry, not the pain—well, a little the pain—but the feeling of being trapped inside her body.
She never knew when she’d wake up a bird chained to the floor of a cage.
Now she was starting to take waking up feeling well for granted, which two months ago she never could have allowed herself to hope for.
Bree stood, belly in hand. “Well, personally, I love this. And you know, with the baby coming, I’ve been thinking…
” Lainey’s heart beat impatiently. Bree was ramping up to something.
“About kids and the retreat and the future, and it occurred to me…but I wanted to talk to you first because…and I really hope you’ll be honest with me.
You’re always honest with me, right? Actually, let me back up—”
“Dear god, woman. Spit it out,” Lainey demanded. Bree’s sentence was turning into the slow climb of a roller coaster Lainey hadn’t agreed to ride.
“I want to bring back ‘Little Groff,’ ” she announced, bracing for Lainey’s reaction. Lainey’s time at the Groff Retreat was Lainey’s third-least-favorite topic (after Hayden and large spiders, respectively).
Lainey’s face screwed up. “What if instead you bring back waterbeds in all of the cabins?”