Chapter 14 You Don’t Think I Could Take Him?
You Don’t Think I Could Take Him?
One film of paranoia and deceit later, Waffle was showing no signs of leaving the truck.
Instead, the dog circled between them until he reset himself into the perfect spot and promptly fell asleep.
His soft breaths sucked the sound out of the air, bringing the truck cab to a hush as Elliot and Lainey rested their heads on the back of their seats.
“I was counting on you to have some convoluted scheme up your sleeve to coax Waffle inside.” Elliot’s voice was pitched low, like he didn’t want Waffle to overhear.
“You always think I’m up to something, don’t you, Hodges?”
“Not like that.” He rolled his head in her direction. “You have this…way about you. You always seem to know how to salvage a situation. I’m jealous of it.”
“That is not the way I see myself.”
“Well, it should be,” he said, his voice close. “I don’t think anything’s ever turned out the way I hoped it would. Though, to be fair, I don’t really hope, on principle.”
“You mentioned that,” she said, trying to grab on to the memory. “When you were proposing. That you’re, like, a nihilist or something.”
“I’m not a nihilist. I’m a realist. I focus on how things are and anticipate the way things might go wrong and prepare accordingly. If everything goes right, great. If everything goes wrong, I’m not the least bit disappointed.”
“That is…truly depressing.”
His laugh was low and infectious. The kind that rumbled in your chest and pulled out one to match. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of optimist, Miss What’s Your Angle?”
“Unfortunately for me, I think I’m hopelessly optimistic. I’d guess most messy people are. Certainly artists are.”
He looked at her curiously. “Why do you say that?”
She pressed her lips into a line, considering.
“I think…creativity is lonely and generally disastrous. There’s no reason to do any of it unless you have hope that the thing you might make in the end will be worthwhile.
What’s the point of living in general if you don’t have any hope that the mess you’re making could turn out in the end? ”
“Why does it have to turn out? What’s wrong with being content with the present?”
She lifted an eyebrow like a dare. “Don’t try to repackage your pessimism and I-don’t-hope-for-things shtick as some sort of living-in-the-moment mindfulness bullshit.”
“That voice! When you imitate me you make me sound like a Disney henchman.” He shook his head woefully. “It’s a good thing I’m not a romantic, or I’d already be married and you’d be stuck extorting the local pharmacist.”
“Yeah, why aren’t you married?” She dug her elbow into the window ledge and leaned her face into her palm.
Something about the turn of their conversation made her feel off-kilter, like she needed all the points of contact with the car she could get.
“No offense, but you have the energy of someone who marries their college girlfriend to consolidate expenses.”
“Offense taken,” he answered, but his smile was unbothered. And a little wicked. “But I see where you’re coming from. I actually was engaged up until about a year ago.”
Caroline, she thought. Her mind scrolled the history of his Venmo transactions. The shared rent and utility payments. She couldn’t even imagine being in a relationship like that.
“God, it feels like ages ago,” he continued. “We were together for two years or so?”
Something like jealousy slithered along her shoulder blades. “Was she also in need of insurance?”
“No. You’re special.”
She knew he was only joking, but the thought had already stuck itself to her bones.
“I just…loved her, I guess.”
The slithering was back. It coiled tight around her neck. “Who ended it?” she asked, her fingers spinning in Waffle’s fur.
He swallowed. “Me. I thought she might have cheated.”
She nodded. It made a sad sort of sense. Of course he had trouble believing in people if his most recent relationship ended with…
She replayed his words in her head.
“Wait. Did you say she might have?”
“I didn’t, like…collect evidence, but I had a feeling about it.
She was growing distant—becoming secretive, hiding notifications—and then, one day, we were grilling pizzas on her balcony, and she ran inside to grab the basil and her phone was just pinging and pinging, and I heard this voice in my head telling me to search her text messages. ”
Her stomach clenched. “What did you find?”
His hand drifted cautiously onto Waffle’s back. “I didn’t look. I’d never do that. I broke up with her on the spot.”
She reared her head back. “I’ve never heard a more anticlimactic breakup story. Did you at least confront her with your suspicions?”
“I told her what happened, or almost happened. She promised she’d never cheated—even offered to show me her phone and everything—but at that point it didn’t matter.”
“How could it not matter? What if the messages had been from a friend? Or push notifications from a crippling Candy Crush addiction?”
He shook his head. “I realized we didn’t trust each other.
She felt the same about me, too. That’s all marriage is, I think: trusting someone with the tiny things.
The insignificant things. Those unlovable parts of yourself.
You can’t love someone you don’t trust. So even though my hunch was wrong, she still deserved better than a guy who didn’t believe in her. ”
Lainey pressed her cheek deeper into her palm, squinting at him in the darkened cab. “Elliot Hodges,” she said. “I can’t tell if that’s the healthiest outlook I’ve ever heard or if it’s utterly deranged.”
He took a deep inhale of thick, warm air. “I tend to toe that line.”
He reached out and swept a strand of her hair off her shoulder, his eyes following the movement of his fingers with the intensity of a man disarming a bomb.
It buzzed across her chest and low into her belly.
She willed her shoulder not to twitch, despite the electric current flowing between them with the gentle movement of his finger.
She didn’t want to spook him. Though it hadn’t mattered.
His hand didn’t linger. It returned to Waffle’s fur in a slow, smooth gesture as though touching Lainey had been no different.
“You definitely wouldn’t approve of any of my past relationships.” She sighed, rolling her head onto the shoulder he’d just touched. Like they were simply the kinds of friends who touched each other. “Trust hasn’t exactly been a core tenet of mine.”
“Well, now you have to share,” he teased, pulling a tiny whine from her throat. “I gave you so much material to bully me with. You need to at least try to even the playing field.”
“Fine,” she said, an airy chuckle falling from her lips.
Her eyes followed his fingers as they wandered to the tips of Waffle’s chocolatey fur.
“So, the retreat used to allow children to stay in the summer. There was a barn where parents could drop off their kids for the day and the staff took them on hikes and led them in art projects…I worked there after I graduated high school. The money was good, and the director of the program, Hayden, was, like, this confident, older guy who made me feel…interesting. Special.”
She couldn’t bring herself to look over at Elliot when she said it. How pathetic she must’ve sounded—a twenty-year-old disaster with mommy issues who’d been beginning to second-guess whether she mattered. That maybe she was the reason people seemed to leave her behind.
All it had taken to win her over was one mediocre man to tell her she was “special.” She’d been so easy to pull into his orbit. It was honestly ridiculous to feel anything but shame and embarrassment for the relationship when the whole thing had been transparent from the start.
It was best to think about anything else until she grew tired or hungry or sleepy and forgot she ever had the impulse to feel something unpleasant at all.
This was how Lainey had always been. When Gordon Reeves in the sixth grade called her valentine “creepy,” or even when her mom had rented a U-Haul to empty their furniture storage pod into Gran’s house, only to never return, it hadn’t done Lainey any good to feel sad or angry or frustrated that she’d lost her blue butterfly papasan chair in the shuffle, because none of those emotions changed anything.
What they made her feel was powerless. And she didn’t like to feel powerless.
She’d been powerless with Hayden, but she hadn’t known enough to feel that way.
“He was completely obsessed with me.” She laughed, trying to keep it light.
“At first it felt good, to feel like someone wanted so much of me. I wasn’t used to that.
But then it got dark. Fast.” The start had been this summer storm—natural, powerful, and impossible to deny.
But it couldn’t stay that way. The winds picked up, and soon what had been so sustaining had turned isolating and dangerous.
He couldn’t stay away from her, he’d told her, like it was her fault that she’d caught the attention of her older boss.
To hear him tell it, she’d been relentless in her pursuit.
To this day, she couldn’t parse out if there was truth in that.
She’d started to view her sexuality as a quality that wasn’t to be trusted.
She hid in her clothes, in her house, behind the children at her work.
She stopped going out with Bree or interacting with the guests.
She slept most nights at his place. It was easier for him to believe she was loyal if she never left his side.
She couldn’t recall when the nitpicking started, but it grew its own life.
Suddenly, she was messy. Lazy. She lacked ambition.
When it suited him, she was too clingy, but space was also evidence that she was plotting to leave him.
She was too much. She wasn’t enough. Nothing she did was exactly right.