Chapter 17 A Retainer and My Sluttiest Pair of Shorts #3
Several different basketball games competed for their attention. She knew that whatever was happening to Elliot was bad, even without understanding his reaction to it.
He held his eyes shut, and after a deep breath in and out, he opened them. “It’s fine,” he said, shaking himself out of his stupor. “I’ll be fine. I just zoned out for a second.”
A couple of weeks ago, she might’ve believed him. But a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t know that his nose twitched a little when he was uncomfortable. How he fought the urge to adjust his glasses at the bridge of his nose when he was stressed. But now, it was too late. She knew him.
“I know you’ll be fine,” she assured him, because he would’ve been. She was confident he could’ve white-knuckled his way through dinner and be halfway convincing while doing it. “But I want to talk to you, and I can’t pay attention if people are cheering for the Lakers in my presence.”
He smiled and let her lead him out the door.
A quick Code red text to Bree got them bumped up the list so they could order room service in the comfort of their suite. She’d expected Elliot to nerd out over all the little details, but when they got to their room, he melted into the bed, face down.
She climbed onto the mattress, lining up their bodies—hers facing his, his facing the comforter.
Everything in the room was an expensive shade of vanilla—the painted walls, the stone hearth, the white pine accents.
Her body sank into the bed, cradled by a nest of down feathers.
It was all expensive and meaningless. Gran once told her that after a certain point, money stopped making things better and only made them different.
They were well past that threshold for her, and the only person who could give the extravagance of the room meaning was lying face down on the mattress.
“Elliot,” she whispered, her eyes drilling into the side of his skull like it was the key to unraveling its contents. “Why don’t you go to bars with TVs?”
He exhaled, then turned slowly to prop himself up on his elbow.
“It’s just sports. And it’s more the competing sounds of multiple games going.
I’m fine watching one game or even being at a game.
It’s just all of them, all at once…usually, I can handle it, but sometimes, I…
freeze up.” He laughed, hollow and forced.
He was trying so hard to make light of it.
“It’s not a part of me I want to showcase with a woman I’m trying to impress. ”
“Oh, sweetie.” She let her finger trail through his hair, smiling when he leaned into it like an animal. “I think the ship sailed on that when you proposed to me on a street corner by confessing that you were deeply in debt.”
He laughed, a real one, deep and musical. The perfect sound.
“Why sports?” she asked. She didn’t want to pry, but she needed to understand.
He sighed. “It’s not a big deal, but my dad was a gambling addict. Sports betting, mostly.” His hand drifted to the bridge of his nose, bumping his glasses up as he pinched. “The more games he had playing, the worse things were going.”
She nodded, her heart aching at the sad sort of sense it all made. How he’d been so unaffected by a TV playing Antiques Roadshow at the VFW. How stiff he’d been when they’d entered the Shell Station but somehow knew exactly how to handle a bookie.
“I made you gamble,” she remembered, her body wincing in regret.
He sat up quickly, his hand now in her hair. “It was fine. I’m fine. See, this is why I didn’t want to say anything. I don’t want you to worry about this kind of stuff when it’s not even a big deal. I’m incredibly well-adjusted, considering.”
She wasn’t sure well-adjusted people announced themselves like that. She reevaluated everywhere she’d taken him with this new information, along with every “them” and “us” spot in town. Then, something truly unfortunate happened: she laughed.
It was a short shock of a laugh, but her hand hadn’t been fast enough to trap it in her mouth. His eyes stared at her, puzzled, and she wanted nothing more than to suck the sound back into her throat like a fettuccine noodle.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t find this funny at all.” She really did try her best to contain it.
“Oh yeah?” he asked, daring her.
“It’s just…” She pulled her hand from her mouth, letting it all loose. “You really moved to the worst possible place. Every bar here has at least three TVs. It’s practically in the state constitution. How have you avoided it this long?”
He shrugged. “You don’t drink.”
“So? Other people do.”
His hand trailed down her spine and snaked around her waist. He looked her square in the eye when he said, “I haven’t cared about other people since the day I met you.”
When he said things like that to her, she could hardly stand it.
Who said things like that? Who meant them?
That and the way he looked at her, like he wanted to belong to her, in a real way.
Not some temporary transactional arrangement.
Something real. It made her want to be the type of person who could belong to someone, too.
“I haven’t cared about anyone else either,” she said back in a hush. “Not the way I care about you.”
He pulled her closer to him on the bed. “Yeah?” he asked. His face was so sweet and cautious, as though she was saying something too big for him to believe and not simply what he’d said to her mere seconds ago.
She nodded. “I like the way you care for people. You’re dependable and honest. Those things matter to me.”
“Those things matter to me, too,” he said, swallowing thickly.
“My dad wasn’t really either of those things.
He wanted to be ‘impressive.’ He would make all of these big promises to me and my brother.
My brother would hang on every word. Our dad was a god to him.
He believed everything that man said and was always devastated when it didn’t happen.
It was better to expect the worst. Then I’d never be sad. ”
So instead, you were always sad, she thought. But who was she to dispense life advice? “That’s why you don’t like taking risks or hoping for things. Because you think it’s easier to believe it won’t work out.”
“Disappointment is just unmet expectations,” he recited, as though reading from a picture book titled Nihilism for Children. She imagined the cover would feature Eeyore or possibly the pulped stump from The Giving Tree.
“And what is hope if not our most unreasonable expectations?” he added, his head tilting to the side as if too heavy to hold up.
“It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes he’d take us into the city to place bets, and we’d get a hot dog from a cart and do free stuff, like go to the Met or walk through a park or—my favorite—look at the architecture.
Then he’d leave us in the car to meet with…
” He trailed off, processing his own story.
“Wait. This isn’t a happy memory, is it? ”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure of what to say. “You mean, when your dad would leave you in the car to meet his bookie in the city? No, I don’t think so,” she replied, trying very hard not to giggle again at the dark absurdity of his sentence.
“I wrote my college admission paper on that.”
She inhaled a snort. “If it worked, I suspect it was for the wrong reasons.”
He burst out laughing, giving her permission to laugh, too. It was more the sad, cathartic kind than joyful, but sometimes those felt good.
A knock at the door broke up their morbid fit of giggles. “Room service,” a low voice announced.
“We forgot to order dinner,” he remembered.
“We didn’t, actually,” Lainey corrected. “I called in a favor with one of my friends from my Little Groff days who now works at Barton and Bird.” She was calling in favors left and right tonight. “Come on in, Abe,” she called out through the door.
“I was never here.” The familiar tall man with dark brown skin and an impeccably groomed beard opened the door wide and wheeled in a cart packed with plates.
“While you have this food, you are not you. You are the poet laureate for the state of Oklahoma, and you are devastated you could not make it to your scheduled reservation. Devastated. Do you hear me? If anyone knocks on this door—”
“I’ll recite a haiku. Got it. Thank you, Abe. You are an angel sent from heaven.”
He wiped the rim of a plate with a napkin out of habit, then pocketed it in his black chef’s jacket.
“You and me are more than square now. If I get caught for this, Chef is going to iron a grilled cheese sandwich against the side of my face. Dude is terrifying. He has no eyebrows. Have you ever tried to read the social cues of a man with no eyebrows? It’s like talking to an empty Mr. Potato Head. ”
She sighed, more than ready to move off the subject of her eyebrow mishap for the second time that night. “Good night, Abe. Thank you for this. Seriously.” She raised a fork in gratitude.
She closed the door behind him and opened each of the containers one by one, citrus scents slicing through the air, chased by the aroma of mushrooms and cream, and followed with a breeze of a stinky cheese she couldn’t place.
Lainey was by no means a gourmand, but as a born-and-bred Wisconsinite, she could appreciate a pungent cheese now and again.
“This looks incredible.” Elliot lifted a container of sauce to his nose and sniffed. “I can’t believe you pulled this off.”
“Believe it, baby—oh crap!” The lid of the salad container burst open in her hands, spraying her stomach with dressing.
“I’m sure we can wash that out,” Elliot said with the confidence of a man who’d never gone head-to-head with an oil spill on polyester.
“I was going to return it.” She peeled her shirt away from her stomach, feeling sticky.
He scrutinized her outfit. “How?”
“I have an honest face and a tagging gun.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You know that you’re inflating the price of clothes for everyone, because then—”