Chapter 19 The Bed Smells Like a Bennigan’s
The Bed Smells Like a Bennigan’s
There was a man in her bed.
“Lainey. Lainey, when was the last time you had water?”
She didn’t answer. Hours had passed, and she wasn’t processing questions at the moment. Fingertips brushed back the hair at her damp forehead.
“Lainey, I need you to drink this.”
A glass bumped against her lips. An assault. “Why would you do that to me?” Her voice was flat and garbled. She’d like to say she didn’t recognize it, but she did. This was her empty voice when she no longer saw the point in being understood. She was merely a log, hollowed out by pain and rot.
The rim of the glass lowered to her chin. “Come on. Just one sip. Please, I—Jesus. Why is your pillow wet?”
“Tots melted.” She pointed weakly at the bag of defrosted food above her head she’d used as an ice pack.
“If you don’t drink this right now, I’m picking you up and taking you to urgent care again.”
She blinked open her eyes to find a muscled thigh perched on the edge of the bed. “Please,” Elliot whispered. His hand pulled the glass back from her face as she slowly propped herself up on her elbow and took the water from his hand.
He let out a long breath, like he’d been holding it in, waiting for her to look alive.
She took a sip, wanting to ease his mind the only way she could muster. His eyes stayed glued to her as he bit the side of his thumb.
“I’ve been keeping water down all day. It’s just the pain.” She burrowed back into her tot-soaked pillow.
“Why didn’t you pick up your phone? I called you so many times.”
“Screen is cracked,” she replied. “Can’t use it. Where’s my medicine?”
“What? Oh, it’s in the glove compartment. Do you need more?”
“I need any. I didn’t have anything.”
“Oh, honey.” He smoothed her hair again and kissed her on the forehead. Warm lips against cool skin. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his leg disappearing from view.
In an instant he was back, tearing into her box of pain medication like a bear breaking into a garbage bag.
“You have to peel back the foil,” she instructed. Suddenly, a tablet was on her tongue.
“Thank you,” she said. Gratitude swam through her body in a warm rush. The medication wasn’t instantaneous, but there was relief in knowing it’d entered her system.
“Waffle, can you get down, boy?” he beckoned. The mattress shifted, a fluff of fur swiping at her neck. “Roll to the other side of the bed so I can change the sheets.”
“No. Take Waffle out first. It’s been a while, and he’s been really good to me today. He only licked me for the first two hours. Then he left me for dead, just as I wanted.”
He plucked the wet bag from the top of her head. “Fine. But we’re changing the sheets next. It’s not good for you to sleep in them wet, and the bed smells like a Bennigan’s.”
She smiled. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts my head to laugh.”
“I’ll try not to, but selfishly, it’s making me feel a little better seeing you smile. I don’t think my heart has stopped racing since the highway patrol pulled me over outside the Dells.”
“Why’d you get pulled over?”
“I was speeding.”
“You don’t speed,” she said, confused. Rule-following was one of Elliot’s core personality traits. She’d watched him slow and turn down the stereo while crossing the tracks of a decommissioned rail line because ignoring clearly marked signage—even the outdated ones—“is how society breaks down.”
“You called me a bunch of times, left me an unreadable text, and then didn’t pick up any of my calls for the next several hours. So somewhere around Madison, I started taking the speed limit as more of a suggestion.”
She peeled open an eye. “How fast?”
“Ninety in a seventy.”
“That was stupid,” she told him, but the hint of a grin sweeping up her lips was severely undercutting her argument.
Just a few minutes ago, she’d been so desolate and lonesome, trapped in the solitary confinement of her pain.
But now there was a glimpse of hope cracking through her agony.
It was in her sights. Because Elliot was here.
He’d thought about her when he was gone.
He’d come home to her. And he’d cared enough to get a speeding ticket for her.
Her loneliness had been real, but she hadn’t been alone. Not really.
She dozed off for a few minutes, or possibly hours, waking to the tug of Elliot’s hands and fresh sheets under her skin.
When she woke up again, her nose was in his chest. His breath was slow and even, and he smelled like milk and honey.
She arched into him, luxuriating in the safety of his strong arms around her.
She woke up alone the next day. The room was bright, and though she had only a slight echo of pain, her body felt worn and delicate, like fresh flowers pressed into the pages of a book.
She tiptoed out into the living room, looking for Elliot, and found him at the kitchen table, curled over his laptop.
“Architecting?” she murmured. Her brain always felt a little hungover after a particularly rough night. It would probably be hours before she possessed the confidence to step into broad daylight.
He looked up. “You’re awake.”
“Is it late?” she asked.
“It’s three in the afternoon.” She frowned at the time, as though it’d betrayed her by going on without her.
“And, no. I’m emailing our claims adjuster.
If we get going on these repairs, we won’t make the twenty-first, but maybe we could fill the house after.
Charge double maybe? I know you were hoping to make a little money the weekend the bridge connects, but this is better than nothing. ”
It came back to her in a rush. Drenched and shivering, in mind-dizzying pain. The bridge. The solstice. Larry’s band of architecture fiends and bored eclipse chasers. She’d almost forgotten what she’d done in her painful fugue state.
“Elliot.”
God, he’d never look at her the same, would he? She was no better than his dad, risking everything he’d worked for on an easy windfall and utterly failing him in the process.
“What?” he asked. His eyes studied her face. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
She wasn’t certain she could. Elliot was a man primed to expect the worst in people, and Lainey was…Lainey. The last thing he needed was fuel for that inevitable garbage fire of mistrust.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I need to borrow your truck.”
“Oh.” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I mean, of course. Shit, Davis. You scared me for a second there.” Relief radiated off him in waves.
“What did you think I did?”
He reached into his front pocket and pulled out his key fob. “I thought you killed someone.” His tone was flat and matter-of-fact.
She blinked fast. “What?”
His back straightened. He’d finally caught his breath. “Accidentally, of course. But I was mentally indexing where to dump a body.”
She suppressed a laugh. “You can stop planning your cover-up,” she responded, unsure whether she deserved an Elliot, but so endlessly grateful for one all the same.
“Good.” He lifted his hands to rub the sides of her arms. “Because one of us would do terribly in prison, and that one of us is me.”
She smiled down at him and considered spilling everything. Surely he’d understand how much pain she’d been in. How she hadn’t been thinking clearly. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was true.
Golden sunshine slanted through the windows and shone onto the sharp lines of his face.
Elliot was so easy to look at. Her eyes caught on his freshly showered hair that fell onto his forehead in smooth curls.
His glasses were a tiny bit crooked from falling asleep on the couch with her one too many times.
It wasn’t very noticeable. No one else would see it but her, and something about that turned inside her chest like a key in a lock.
When she stared into his eyes, she belonged to a place—to a person—and when he stared back, she could almost believe that he’d never let her go.
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” she promised, fear closing her throat like a door.
It would all be okay. She’d find Larry and make it like it never happened. She’d erase it. It would be as though she’d never betrayed Elliot’s trust at all.
Lainey knew only one place where she could find a guy like Larry at this hour on a Saturday.
The alley behind the pharmacy was suspiciously active for a small strip of oil-stained pavement. Cars were parked strategically between open dumpsters and abandoned shopping carts, including a van with Superior Bluffs Community Living emblazoned on the side.
She banged her open palm on the metal security door over and over, the scents of ammonia and vodka-drenched garbage doing nothing to dampen her resolve. “Ernie!” she called out. “Let me in, or I swear to god I’ll be back with your wife!”
The door swung open so fast she had to jump back. Ernie appeared, blocking the doorway as a scowling vision in a white pharmacy coat. “Barb would never get in your car,” Ernie hissed.
“Oh, I can be very persuasive.” She shoved her way in through the small opening under his arm. “I’m looking for Larry.”
His head swung between her and the door to the room in which he was clearly harboring the man in question. “Why would you assume anyone’s here?”
“I don’t think my grandmother boosted a sprinter van just to hang out with you.”
The interior door crept open until behind it appeared her grandmother’s head in a green dealer visor.
“Ernie, you are much too terrible a liar to fool my girl. It’s even more painful than your poker game. Let her in. I can’t bear to listen to you flounder like this any longer.”
A rod of tension released from Lainey’s spine.
Her grandmother winked and opened the back door wide.
Lainey took stock of the room. There was Gran, Larry, Mark—still in his full arm cast—a younger woman with box-dyed black hair and a nose ring who Lainey guessed was a new hire at the retreat, and a man on the end pulling his hair at the root and wearing too fancy of a watch to be local.
“Minneapolis?” she asked the desperate-eyed man her grandmother was currently fleecing.
He shook his head. “Chicago. Winnetka, technically. My wife and I are staying at this resort called the Groff. Oh my god, my wife. How am I going to tell my wife I lost my wedding ring in a poker game in the back of a podunk pharmacy?” He swallowed thickly, a man tasting pennies.
Her grandmother tutted. “I said I’d take the watch.”
“It’s a vintage Rolex,” he coughed out in utter disbelief. “The ring’s only worth a grand, if that.”
Any desire to help him escape the clutches of her grandmother evaporated into smoke.
She turned her attention to the man in the back corner wearing a Seussical the Musical sweatshirt. “I changed my mind, Larry. We’re not doing the camping thing. Elliot doesn’t want to risk losing our permit, and I should’ve respected that.”
He snickered at her from behind his cards. “Uh, it’s a little late for that.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest. “What? How? I talked to you yesterday.”
Oh so casually, he adjusted the cuff of his sleeve. “We talked yesterday, and I posted to the relevant Facebook groups from the parking lot.”
“From the parking lot?” Gran asked, scowling.
Larry shrugged in the most punchable way imaginable. “It was already in the drafts.”
“I wasn’t in my right mind when I talked to you yesterday. Ask Ernie. He saw me.”
Ernie rejoined the conversation with notable reluctance. “She demanded I give her an early refill and threatened to pluck out my armpit hairs one by one so I could experience ‘a mere glimpse of her unceasing torment.’ ”
“See? I have no memory of saying that! I was basically a different person and…legally…”
She eyed Mark for assistance. He let out a tiny pained mewl at the mere presence of her attention but nevertheless spoke up in her defense. “She’s suggesting she lacked the mental capacity to enter into a verbal agreement with you, and she wishes to void the contract.”
“That! Exactly that! Thank you, Mark.”
“Please leave me alone.”
“You got it.” She redirected her focus to Larry. “I lacked capacity, so I’m voiding the contract.”
“You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
“Larry, take it down. Now.” Desperation clawed at her insides like a rabid animal.
The room stared blankly at her, even Larry.
Especially Larry. “If you can fire off a post from your nice, dry car while watching me bike home in the pouring rain”—her grandmother looked appropriately appalled—“then you can take down a post from a folding chair while I watch you eat stale corn chips and fail to make that straight.”
Gran hid a smile. “You heard the woman, Pometti. Chop, chop.”
Larry held Lainey’s gaze in a stranglehold. She wouldn’t be backing down. Not today. Not for this. With a long exhale, Larry pulled out his phone. “Fine,” he said in defeat.
Sweet relief sank all the way to her toes.
“Is there an ATM nearby?” the Rolex man said, finally realizing just how cooked he was.