Chapter 20 Elise #2
Sienna stepped inside and looked around.
The morning light fell through the windows and caught the fruit bowl on the table and the framed Valkyries jersey on the wall and the throw blanket draped over the sofa, the same blanket she'd wrapped around Sienna's shoulders on the night they first made love.
"You cleaned," Sienna said.
"I clean."
Sienna ran her finger along the windowsill and inspected it. "You don't clean. Not like this. You shoved everything into the spare room, didn't you."
Elise pressed her hand against her chest in mock offence. "Absolutely not." She had absolutely shoved everything into the spare room.
Sienna's eyes were soft. She reached for Elise's hand and squeezed it. "Thank you."
"Are you hungry? I was going to make lunch. You should sit down and rest while I cook."
Sienna raised an eyebrow. "You are going to cook?"
Elise was already walking toward the kitchen. "I'm going to cook. For you. Right now. Sit down."
"Elise, you can’t cook!”
“I absolutely can.” She pulled ingredients from the fridge with her jaw set in the determined way she approached everything.
Sienna leaned against the sofa's armrest, watching her with open amusement. “I’ll keep the fire department on speed dial.”
"Sit. Down."
Sienna rolled her eyes with a theatrical exasperation that was undermined completely by the smile spreading across her face.
She was smiling and she sat on the sofa and tucked her feet up and watched as Elise moved to the kitchen.
The open-plan layout kept them in sight of each other from anywhere, Sienna on the sofa and Elise at the counter, and the domesticity of it, the simple, ordinary act of being in the same room while one person rested and the other cooked, was so achingly normal and so impossibly precious that Elise had to pause and press her hands flat on the counter and breathe.
She was home. She was here. She was alive.
"What are you making?" Sienna asked from the sofa.
Elise opened the pantry and pulled out a box of penne. "Pasta."
"Can you make pasta?"
She filled a pot at the tap, water splashing against the stainless steel. "How hard can it be?"
The answer, it turned out, was quite hard.
The water took forever to boil. She over-salted it, then tried to fix it by adding more water, which meant it took even longer to boil again.
The pasta went in and she forgot to set a timer and by the time she remembered, the penne had passed al dente and entered a territory she could only describe as compliant.
The sauce was from a jar because she was not a fool, but she'd attempted to add garlic and burned it, and the kitchen filled with the acrid smell of charred garlic and Sienna was watching from the sofa with an expression of increasing concern.
"Should I be worried?" Sienna called.
"It's under control."
"It smells like it's under fire."
She plated the overcooked pasta and the too-salty sauce and the burned garlic and scraped the black bits off the bottom of the pan and added a sprig of basil from the pot on the windowsill that Sienna had given her two months ago and that was, miraculously, still alive.
She carried both bowls to the sofa with as much dignity as she could manage.
They sat together, the bowls on their laps, and Sienna took a bite and her expression went through a rapid sequence: hope, confusion, mild alarm, and then a carefully neutral neutrality that was so transparent Elise burst out laughing.
"It's terrible, isn't it," Elise said.
"It has character."
Elise poked at a blackened piece with her fork. "It has burned garlic."
Sienna chewed and swallowed with visible effort. "The garlic gives it a smoky depth."
Elise snorted. "Liar."
Sienna grinned. The grin became a laugh, quiet at first, then bigger, and then they were both laughing, sitting on the sofa with their terrible pasta and the morning light coming through the windows and three weeks of fear and hospital corridors dissolving into the sound of shared, helpless laughter.
Elise laughed until her stomach ached and Sienna laughed until her ribs protested and she pressed her good hand against her side and gasped and said "Stop, stop making me laugh, it hurts" and Elise couldn't stop and neither could Sienna.
They ate what they could. Sienna managed about half her bowl, which Elise counted as a victory given the quality.
They set the bowls on the coffee table and Sienna leaned into Elise's side, her head on Elise's shoulder, her good hand finding Elise's hand, and the laughter faded into a comfortable silence.
"I've been thinking," Sienna said.
Elise kissed the top of her head. "Dangerous."
"I've been thinking about what happens next. About us."
Elise turned her head and pressed her lips to Sienna's hair.
It was soft against her mouth and Sienna's shampoo, the hospital-issued kind that wasn't her usual one, smelled faintly of coconut and nothing like the woman Elise knew.
She'd fix that tomorrow. She'd buy Sienna's real shampoo and her oat milk and her brand of tea and this apartment would smell like Sienna instead of hospital. "Tell me."
"I don't want to go back to my apartment.
I know that's fast. I know we've been together for less than three months.
But I nearly died on a road I was driving because I was going somewhere that wasn't near you, and lying in that hospital bed I had a lot of time to think about what matters, and what matters is being where you are.
" She paused. Her voice was careful, the way it got when every word cost her.
"I'd like to live here. With you. If you'll have me. "
Elise's chest went tight. Not with sadness, not with fear.
With a joy so enormous and warm it pressed against her ribs and filled her throat and made her eyes sting.
She'd imagined this conversation. Lying awake in the hospital corridor during the surgery, she'd bargained with whatever force controlled these things: give her back to me and I'll tell her every day.
Give her back to me and I'll never waste another minute pretending I don't want everything.
"If I'll have you," she repeated. Her voice cracked on the words and she didn't care. "Sienna. I've been trying to figure out how to ask you that since the second night you stayed here."
"Really?"
"Your toothbrush is already in the bathroom. I will buy you oat milk. There's a shelf in the wardrobe that I cleared three weeks ago."
Sienna lifted her head and looked at her and the expression on her face was luminous. Open and surprised and so full of love that Elise's chest went tight.
"We should probably talk about the future properly," Sienna said. "Long-term. What we both want."
Elise shifted so she could see Sienna's face. "Okay. What do you want?"
Sienna was quiet for a moment. The light moved across her face and her eyes were thoughtful and certain.
"I want this apartment with you, or a house eventually, something with a garden, maybe, where we can have morning tea and watch the ocean.
I want to keep working with the Valkyries.
I've already arranged to transfer your care to Dr. Gupta, formally, so the ethics question is settled.
I want to swim in the morning and come home to you in the evening. I want a cat."
"A cat." Elise's face lit up.
"You don't like cats?"
Elise sat up straighter, tucking one leg beneath her. "I love cats. I grew up wanting one but our apartment was too small and my dad said he was allergic, which I'm pretty sure was a lie because he's not allergic to anything. We should totally get a rescue cat from the shelter.”
Sienna's smile was wide and unguarded, the kind that showed her teeth and crinkled the corners of her eyes. "I was going to say rescue."
"Of course you were. You're a physician. You fix things. You'd want to fix a cat too."
Sienna laced her fingers through Elise's. "I want to give something a home that doesn't have one. Yes." She paused. "Something small and scrappy that doesn't trust anyone yet. We'll earn its trust. The way you earned mine."
Sienna meant the parallel and her eyes were serious when she said it and Elise pressed closer, her lips against Sienna's temple.
"We'll name it something ridiculous," Elise said. "Something you'd put on a nametag."
Sienna's smile widened. It was the most relaxed Elise had seen her face in weeks, the hospital pallor overtaken by ease and the light from the window and the prospect of a future that had, until three weeks ago, been uncertain.
Sienna pressed closer. Her good hand tightened on Elise's.
"We're doing this," Sienna said. It wasn't a question. It was a declaration, quiet and certain, from a woman who had spent forty-one years avoiding declarations.
"We're doing this." Elise's voice was certain and she meant it with every fibre of her body.
She cupped Sienna's face in her hand and turned her gently and kissed her.
The kiss was soft and tasted of burned garlic and love, and Sienna made a small sound against her mouth that was half-laugh, half-sigh, and Elise held her face and kissed her again.
"I love you," Elise said. "I love you, Sienna Park.
I loved you when you taped my shoulder and I loved you when you made me scrambled eggs and I loved you when you cried on my sofa and I loved you every day in that hospital and I am going to love you tomorrow and the day after and every day after that for as long as you'll let me. "
Sienna's eyes were bright with tears. She didn't wipe them. She let them fall, two slow tracks down her cheeks, and she smiled through them.
"Forever," Sienna said. Her voice was quiet and absolutely certain. "That's how long I'll let you."
"Deal."
They sat together on the sofa in the morning light, in the apartment that was now theirs, with the terrible pasta cooling on the coffee table and the ocean visible through the window and the future stretching out ahead of them, uncertain and ordinary and full of possibility.
Sienna's head was on Elise's shoulder and Elise's arm was around her and neither of them moved.
Outside, the midday sun warmed the iron balconies and the cream stucco walls and the ordinary, precious world that was waiting for them.
They were home.