Chapter 7
ELI
TRACK: Adele, “Someone Like You”
By the time our server takes our dessert orders, I’m a fuck of a lot more relaxed than I was when we first walked in here, and it’s all thanks to Reese.
Sexy-ass Reese in that snug dress that made my throat go dry—and my pants swell at the sight of the sweater material clinging to every dip and curve of her body when Neil took her coat off her.
I’ve never known Reese to tell a lie—in fact, she seems to get off on telling me exactly what she thinks—but right now, she’s playing the part of my girlfriend seamlessly.
So seamlessly, it feels natural for me to sling my arm around the back of her chair, running my thumb over her shoulder as she tells a story about her nieces.
Which of course she quickly pulls away from as soon as the dessert arrives.
I’m reminded, each time that happens, how this isn’t real. How I need to cool my fuckin’ jets with the warmth I get each time Reese looks at me or her knee brushes against me.
And each time I do that, I’m reminded we could get found out at any time. We survived this long without any questions sharp enough to poke holes in our story. But I know it could happen at any moment.
Luckily, Neil seems particularly interested in the work I’m doing in one of the buildings I bought a couple of years ago—an office building right next door to this restaurant called the Waterfront Block.
It was falling apart, and my plan had always been to tidy it up and flip it on the commercial market.
“So why haven’t you sold it yet?” Neil asks, sipping his coffee.
I tap my fingers on my knees as if I’ve had a cup myself, which I could never at night. I have to restrict myself to two small cups in the morning or else the only thing to settle my heart rate is a five-mile run.
Reese puts her hand over my fingers, giving me a squeeze. It’s when she does stuff like this that I do an about-face about wanting to go. I want to stay like this, her hand on mine, like we’re here together by choice and not necessity.
“Eli?” Neil asks, frowning. I try to remember what he was saying. Selling the Waterfront Block, right. It’s a good question—I fixed it up and should have flipped it last year. But I haven’t been able to let it go yet.
I shrug. “There are a few tenants in there. Guess I’m having a hard time letting go.”
“It’s not empty?” Kelly asks. “It looks awfully shabby.”
A prickle of irritation goes over me. “The cladding needs work, but I’ve fixed up the inside. The upper floors are vacant. I rented out the lower few to a couple of artists when I was first trying to keep the place liquid. They use it for studio space.”
Reese is studying me. “You don’t want to evict them,” she says softly.
“They don’t have anywhere to go that’s as cheap as the rent I’m asking for.”
“Eli always did have a bleeding heart,” Kelly says. “Cassandra says you’re even coaching kids at basketball.”
“Baseball,” I grit out. She’d rubbed an old wound between us, and she knows it. She used to hate how much I cared about baseball, when frankly it wasn’t even as much as I could have. It wasn’t like I watched every game and had pennants on my wall. Not since I was a kid, anyway.
She also hated how much I wanted kids. She’d always clam up when I tried to broach the subject. It feels kind of pathetic that teaching other kids how to play baseball is the closest I got.
I take a swig of wine—too much to be considered a sip—and glance at Reese, needing the anchor of her.
Reese is looking at me with her brows furrowed—not in concern, but like she’s surprised, though I can’t tell what about and I can’t exactly ask her when she’s supposed to know all about it.
“Well, I think it’s admirable,” Neil says, lacing his hands on his belly. “The artist thing I mean. The baseball too. Well done, Eli.”
He doesn’t mean to sound condescending, I know, but it still has that effect. Like the kids and artists are urchins or something and I’m granting them porridge. I want another sip of wine, badly, but I also want a clear head. And I need to drive us home.
“I don’t know about admirable,” I say. “I just don’t have any need to put them out just so I can make a couple extra bucks.”
“What about making the whole thing artist studios?” Reese asks before sticking a bite of the chocolate mousse cake we’re sharing in her mouth.
“The ground floor could be a gallery.” For a moment I’m distracted by the way her tongue flicks out to lick the bit of chocolate stuck on her lip, making my flame of irritation turn to something else.
I turn away, forcing myself to look back at the others.
“It barely breaks even as it is,” I say, even though I kind of love the idea. But I’d still need to fill it. Plus, I never set out to be a landlord. Buy, fix, sell. That was all. “I don’t know that there are enough artists in Quince Valley to fill up six giant floors of office space,” I say.
Reese looks away and I feel like an ass for torpedoing her idea.
“Too bad it’s not New York,” Neil says. “People’d pay a mint for TV productions space. Hell, I would.”
“Do you have a background in art as well as restaurant work, Reese?” Kelly asks her.
For a moment, the table is silent, looking at Reese, who’s just stuffed a bite of mousse cake into her mouth.
Kelly laughs, and this irritates me enough that I blurt out, “Reese is a singer.”
Reese’s eyes shoot toward mine.
I never was very good at shutting up.
“No, I’m not,” she says. Then she seems to remember she needs to not appear to hate me and softens slightly. “I…I used to sing. But not anymore.”
“Oh why’s that?” Neil asks, oblivious.
I hate the way she seems to shrink at that. How she worries her hands together, rubbing her wrists the way she does when she’s upset.
“It was a long time ago. Just for fun.” Reese takes a sip of her wine, clearly uncomfortable.
But I clench my jaw. That’s bullshit. Just for fun.
The first time I heard Reese sing, she’d been in the shower at my place.
I was still in bed, already panicking that in just a few days, I’d thought the girl I was distracting myself with had turned out to be so much more than I’d expected.
Funny. Smart. Self-deprecating. Instead of wallowing over my ex, I realized my thoughts had turned to Reese.
I wanted to know everything about her. To meet her family and see awkward pictures of her as a little kid.
To eat her Mom’s lasagna. It scared the shit out of me.
It was a rebound. That’s all. I’d sat up and started pulling on my clothes, fully intending to leave her a note and disappearing like the chickenshit I was.
Then she’d started singing.
It was Adele’s “Someone Like You.” Even through the door and the shower, her voice was clear and strong.
But that wasn’t even descriptive enough.
The song starts slow and builds, but even from the beginning, each note struck something deep inside my chest. Like, I could feel it.
I got up and stood close to the door. By the time she hit the crescendo, I watched as gooseflesh popped up on my arm.
It was the same song, I realized now, that I heard her sing on stage at the Rolling Hills after we’d already broken up, the only time I ever heard her sing for an audience.
I don’t remember how her sister convinced her to get up on stage, but she did.
That song took serious range. She was glorious.
Even the memory of the way her face looked up there, how her voice sounded as it shot across the room makes something dance prickly down the back of my neck now. Nothing about her voice said hobbyist.
“What about you Neil, do you sing?” Reese asks. “Kelly?”
“Oh I can’t sing worth a damn,” Neil says. “But Kelly’s not bad, are you Kel-Kel?” He reaches an arm over the back of their chair and Kelly smiles demurely.
They’re both oblivious. “Reese has a beautiful voice,” I say, a bit too loud.
Reese’s eyes snap up.
“Is that right?” Neil says.
Reese looks at me like she wants to get up and leave, and I realize, suddenly, that she could. Easily.
It doesn’t matter. I’m not wrong. Beautiful’s not even enough.
Kelly drops her coffee cup back in her saucer with a loud clink. “Maybe we ought to hear it sometime? Is there an open mic night anywhere in town?”
Reese’s jaw tenses. Now she’s throwing a thinly veiled murderous look my way.
I know I need to backpedal, that this is risky, putting her on the spot. But some part of me—the part that doesn’t speak up now—wants to know what she’ll say, now that she’s in a corner.
“Yes! That’d be marvelous!” Neil says, stuffing the last of his torte into his mouth.
But Reese shakes her head. “I reserve my solos for the shower these days.”
“Did you always know you wanted to sing?” he pushes.
I can almost see the pulsing at her throat. Intervene, idiot.
But I don’t want to. She never told me why she doesn’t sing, when it’s clearly something she loves.
She’s stuck, and she looks at me with eyes slightly wild.
That’s when I snap out of it. I open my mouth to deflect, but Reese has already given up on me, because finally, she speaks.
“It’s just something I loved doing when I was a kid.
I…my sister Michelle and I—we used to write music together.
Or I’d write it and make her sing backup for me.
We’d put on concerts for our parents. They were elaborate.
Costume changes and lighting—mostly flashlights with colored cellophane. ”
“Brilliant!” Neil exclaims. “A born show woman.”
Then she surprises me yet again.
She actually smiles. “I’d make my dad flash the beams on and off,” she says. “He could never stick to the rhythm. Back then…I was fearless. I knew it was just for fun, I guess, so I had fun. We sang and sang and sang, Michelle and I, until our voices went froggy.”
Neil beams.
So do I.
Kelly drops her fork then, loudly on her plate.
Reese seems to snap out of her trance, her smile quickly disappearing.