6. Penelope
six
penelope
I cannot live with him. I cannot.
We have lived together for less than twenty-four hours, and his shit is already all over the place—and not in your typical, “move-in day” sense of the word.
After finding out that Ant and I would be sharing this place, at least for the next few months, I took myself out of the house and ran a few errands. Target not only provided me with a few essentials, but also told me I deserved a little treat for the hell I’m in. Pushing in through the garage door, I notice the trails.
There are little Anthony Ellis breadcrumbs everywhere , starting in the laundry room, and ending down the hallway that branches off the living area to the left and leads to his bedroom. Luckily, the layout of this house is absolutely perfect. The main living areas of kitchen, dining room, and living room separate it down the middle. We each essentially have a side of the house to ourselves. Save for the sunroom that I claimed as an office that resides on his side—and set up before I unpacked anything else—we can keep to our own sides for as long as we’re living together.
Unless of course you’re Anthony Ellis.
It’s funny how easily I can trace his train of thought. Starting in the laundry room, there’s an abandoned duffel bag.
Clothes that he brought over from his hamper. Leave them here, and he’ll remember to wash them.
In the kitchen, beneath an open empty cabinet, there’s a taped up box next to an empty protein bar wrapper.
Got hungry. Had snack. Forgot his objective .
On the kitchen table are three different boxes, stuffed with randomly assorted objects. When I see a milk jug full of change on top of one, I don’t even want to dig further.
What grinds my gears the most is that, upon walking into the house, I find him already occupied. On the couch. Computer in his lap. I sigh, lightly stomping over to him.
“What are you doing?”
“Training videos,” he says without even looking up from…the TV? Not his computer? Because he isn’t even watching the videos?
I glance down to see him working through our mandated teacher training portal. We go through the same workplace module videos every year. Apparently, they take precedence over getting all of his shit out of our shared space .
“Are you even watching them?”
He scoffs, his focus wholly on the baseball game.
“No. Do you? ”
“Yes,” I lie. No one watches those videos. Blood borne pathogens: If someone pukes in my classroom, I’m calling the office. I don’t need a thirty-minute training video to tell me that.
Ant scoffs, a Yeah, okay, proceeding to click through the entire next section in flash frame, pushing him right through to the common sense quiz at the end—which he aces without even trying.
“Did you need something?” he asks, routing his mouse to start the next training video. I cross my arms.
“Your stuff is all over the place. If we’re going to live together, we’re going to need to come up with some sort of plan. I cannot handle this level of disorganization.”
“Sorry,” he says without looking up from his computer. “I promise, it’s all on my checklist. I just have to get this done first.”
“Really? Those videos aren’t due until, like, the end of October.”
“I know,” he says, still clicking. “But when I texted Gerald about the school shutting down for the year, he said it was one less thing he’d have to worry about in retirement, and then he mentioned the training videos, and there was also an email about them in my inbox that I cannot delete until I finish said training videos, annnnnd now I cannot focus on anything else until they are done.”
He says this all while clicking through a video on Title IX.
“But you, like, put half of it down instead of just putting it away. Couldn’t you just take five minutes to put it away?”
“Pen. I promise , I know that , but the damn bees in my brain want to do the videos right now , so could you please just let me finish .”
Bees in my brain .
And now I feel horrible.
Ant told me about his ADHD in Florida—and his subsequent embarrassment of it that I can see climbing his neck in shades of red and vibrating in the way that his eyes won’t quite meet mine. He told me all about it on that beach.
“This vacation—spending time with you, really—has been the first time I’ve been able to slow down.”
“Got a lot going on at home?”
He sighed. Tilted his head back toward the sky as he leaned back on his palms.
“Yes and no. I’m uh… I’ve had ADHD since I was a kid. My brain never shuts off—kind of like there’s a hive of bees inside and I never know what’s going to set them off. But here, with you… I don’t know. I can sit still for a little while. The bees don’t seem so noisy.”
I blushed the same color as he did in the moonlight as he continued.
“I’ve always felt like part of that label meant I would never measure up—would never be able to achieve what others could. Like they all had a ladder and I’d always be at the bottom jumping. You make me feel like I can keep my feet flat on the ground and still reach the mountaintop.”
He had shrugged through his vulnerabilities, and that was the first moment when I’d reached my hand over to his. The first intentional touch. The first time my skin had ever felt like an inferno.
I shake that memory from my head, and let my heart ache for him for just a second.
“Umm… Sorry. It’s just an adjustment, you know?”
“What, living with another person?”
No. Living with you, and trying to convince my heart that it isn’t permanent.
“Yeah.”
“I promise you, getting to the doom boxes is the next item on my checklist.”
“Doom boxes?” I chuckle. He hitches his thumb over his shoulder without taking his eyes off of the frantic click-throughs of the training videos. I follow his thumb over to the kitchen table, where his boxes of chaos sit.
Doom boxes. Funny .
I leave him to finish his videos—well, to skip through his videos—in peace, while I worry about myself. I unpack the bathroom essentials I picked up at Target, take a quick shower, and change into sweats for the night. When I meet Ant on the couch, I notice that he’s wrapped up in a Red Sox tie blanket, only taking up half the couch. The memories of our FaceTime calls—of Ant wrapped in that same tie blanket, snuggled in bed, his face filling up my phone screen in the middle of the night—sneak in all of a sudden, making my body ablaze. I snag my Kindle and settle into the other side, tucked beneath my own blanket, and try to focus on reading.
Except, my mind can’t read more than three consecutive words in a row. Now, I feel like I’ve got bees in my brain. Only, it’s just one. And its stinger is needling at the incessant question that I crave the answer to.
“So, why do you have to live here? What happened to what’s-her-face?”
I know her name, but only because I Facebook stalked her once upon a time. He doesn’t need to know that.
Ant’s face turns to stone, his focus not wavering from the training videos.
“We were never going to work. I want a family and she doesn’t.” He swallows thickly. I pull my knees up to my chest. Family was something we talked about a lot on that trip. How we both want a houseful of kids—him, because he grew up with brothers; me, because I grew up with too much love and no one to give it to. It was one of the reasons I thought we were made for each other. But then I found out that he had taken his girlfriend back, and that illusion shattered like stones through stained glass.
Anthony moves his laptop to the coffee table and turns to face me, giving me and this confession his undivided attention.
“We were broken up before Florida. She didn’t want kids, and was never going to come around to the idea. But when I got back, she begged me to give us another shot. I felt terrible, because we had plans together once upon a time, and I gave in, because I’m a coward. I went along with it for a few weeks before I couldn’t pretend anymore. I was wrong—for leading you on, and for lying to her and to myself that we could keep trying to fix what was beyond repair. For what it’s worth, I am more sorry than you’ll ever know, Pen.”
I can’t handle the look in his eyes and the honesty in his voice. It is cuttingly candid, transparent as a freshly cleaned window. I hug my knees to my chest to keep myself from going to him, because I know what happened the last time I was a sucker for his words. He reeled me in, hook line and sinker, and then dropped me to the bottom of the river.
But those eyes—they’re an oceanic color I’ve never been able to describe, never been able to get out of my head. And they drip with remorse. He swallows again, like there’s a bag of marbles trying to slide down his esophagus, blinking with the pain of it.
I can’t speak. The words that want to come out are from my heart and not my head. My head knows he’s bad news. My heart wants to crawl right back into the bear trap of his arms. It seems to have forgotten the way we were ripped to shreds the last time. Instead, I nod. Acknowledging his apology isn’t going to kill me. It very well might weigh me to this spot though.
As soon as it’s clear that he is done talking to me, I lift myself from the couch and head to my office. Suddenly, my brain is buzzing with his words once again, as if I finally detoxed from the last hit of him, only to become freshly addicted to this new strain of Anthony Ellis.
Luckily for me, I don’t have to succumb to overthinking before bed. I’m not tired. I’m wired . With inspiration.
Something I haven’t had in far too long has busted through the walls of my writer’s block. And I have Ant to thank for it.
The little bit of backstory he gave about his history with his ex has my fingers itching to get on the keyboard. And fly they do. It’s past two in the morning by the time I stop writing. Between character arcs, plot, and the first four chapters, I haven’t felt this good since before .
Before a road block the size of the interstate halted progress of my latest story, because even trying to conceive someone else’s happy ending while mine was drowning in concrete hurt too much.
That thought is the one that halts my fingers in the dead of night when the rest of the house is quiet. Ant was the one to stop my creative flow. It may as well be his stories that rekindle the fire. I blink a few times, yawning as I notice the hour on the clock. I triple save all of my documents, send them to the Cloud, and pack it in for the night. Passing the living room, I am shocked to see the TV still on. Ant must have fallen asleep on the couch.
Despite my anger, my frustration, my stupid longing feelings for him, I use every ounce of willpower that I have to stop myself from peeking in. From turning off the TV and covering him with that tattered Red Sox blanket that clashes with the décor. Instead, I turn off the hallway light, tuck myself in, and pray that when my alarm goes off in the morning, I can still hold onto the momentum of this story.