Tilly
TWENTY-FOUR
The Estimate: A contractor's number is good for thirty days. After that the same work on the same house costs something different, because the house has gone on without you in the meantime.
My eyes open like someone flipped a switch to pitch-black darkness. Rhodes breathes heavily beside me.
I'm suddenly wide awake. There's no slow climb out of sleep.
My body has decided it is midmorning in Italy, and there is a boat somewhere I am late for.
Then the streetlight comes through the shutters in thin bands across a floor that isn't mine, with his clothes and mine tangled up on it where we dropped them.
He's on his stomach beside me, one arm thrown across my ribs, his face turned toward me on the pillow.
In every version of Rhodes I know, he is doing something. Talking, moving, opening the fridge, tinkering with an engine, changing the subject when I get too close to a real answer. He fills whatever room he's in.
He isn't doing anything now. His mouth has gone soft.
I've never noticed how thick and long his eyelashes are until I see them against his cheek.
He looks younger, somehow, like how I remember him when we were playing flashlight tag at Oak Moss when we were younger, when things were less complicated.
My chest does this stupid little squeeze, so I lie there and let it.
His arm is dead weight across me. I slide out from under it an inch at a time, lifting his wrist with two fingers and setting it down on the warm spot I'm leaving behind. He doesn't stir. I move to the edge of the mattress, then off it, catching the frame so it doesn't creak.
My feet find the floor, gathering my clothes as I go, leaving behind the shirt that I took from him in Italy. I open his door without a sound and pull it shut behind me. I'm halfway across the dark hall before I have time to reconsider.
I'm sneaking, and I stop dead in the middle of the hall when it lands on me, because there is nobody in this house to sneak past. Libba is not asleep below me in the villa. Dad and Grandbank aren't across the terrace. Coop is in Spain, living his best life.
It's just me, standing in the hallway holding my leggings like a thief, running a play I ran every morning for a week because it became the only way to move.
I go into my room. The bed is cold and unmade, the sheets exactly how I left them a week ago. It feels unused, like a room in someone else's house. I climb in and pull the blanket up.
I lie there and stare at a ceiling I can barely make out in the gray, ambient light. When I turn to one side, hoping to find sleep, it never comes. So I turn to the other. On approximately the seventh turn, I give up.
Fine, if my body thinks it's morning, it can help me save Oak Moss.
By the time Rhodes finally starts making noise down the hallway, I've unpacked both of my suitcases, run a load of laundry that's already thumping in the dryer, made a full pot of coffee and finished most of it, and sorted the week of mail into a bill pile, a junk pile, and one envelope from Tulane I know is about a lab fee. That doesn’t include the five rereads I’ve done on my notes for Oak Moss.
The kitchen smells like coffee and the lemon spray I used on the counters at seven. It reminds me of Italy.
He comes down the hall shirtless, creased down one cheek from the pillow, dragging a hand over his face. He stops in the doorway and squints at the daylight coming through the window, then he squints at me, and at the folded mail piled high on the corner of the island.
"What time is it?"
"Almost eleven."
"You've been up how long?"
"Since three." I fold a dish towel I had already folded. My eyes go down before I can stop them, focusing on the flat of his stomach to where his waistband sits. I get a full flash of what that stomach felt like under my hands in Italy before I make myself come back to the mail.
"Couldn't fall back asleep. I left so I wouldn't wake you flopping around."
He crosses to the fridge, pulls out eggs, sets a pan on the burner without asking whether I've eaten, and takes down the bread and two plates.
"You wouldn't have bothered me," he says. "Should've woken me up."
"It was three in the morning."
“You mentioned that." He cracks an egg one-handed. "Could've worn you out enough to put you back down and solved your problem for you."
Heat crawls up my neck, which is ridiculous considering we're supposed to be going back to normal. "Real generous of you. A full public service."
"I'm a giver, Tallulah."
"You're something."
He flips the eggs without looking up. "Next time say something before you go, though. Seriously.”
“Mmm kay, Rhodes.”
He hands me a fork like he's been handing me forks his whole life.
My phone lights up on the counter with the reef-crew thread. Trey confirms the Friday tide window, then starts a whole back-and-forth about who's hauling shell and who's got the trailer.
I brace for it. Some old part of me waits for Rhodes to glance over, make a crack, go still the way he used to at the mention of Trey. But he doesn't ask me one thing about it, continuing his morning chore. He slides the eggs onto a plate and pushes it across the counter to me.
Whatever used to go tight in him at Trey's name has gone out of him, and this morning is easier for it. For whatever reason, the sight of the eggs turns my stomach. I have no appetite.
"You booked today?" He asks.
"Meeting Jo in an hour. Then probably the library because I put off a bunch of homework that I need to get done before I go back to school tomorrow."
He nods and takes a bite of toast, asking what time I think I'll be done.
I check the time and swear.
"Shit. I gotta get dressed."
I head down the hall without answering or touching the eggs.
Jo's already got a table by the window when I get there, laptop open, two coffees in front of her.
"Friday's tide," she says before I've even sat down. "Low's at 6:42. If we launch by six, we get the whole window before it turns on us."
I pull the coffee toward me. "That's another brutal wake-up."
"You said you wanted the whole flat exposed. That's the price." She scrolls. "Bagging shed's back up, by the way. The fan Marco rigged actually works, so we won't sweat through our clothes like we did in the fall once the sun starts coming down.”
“Small mercies.”
"Here's the not-small one." She turns the laptop so I can see the spreadsheet, then decides I don't actually need to and closes it halfway. "Bob sent this to me last night. The spring grant came in short. We're going to be light on cured shell for the next placement."
I make a face into my coffee without reviewing it. "How light?"
"Enough that we can't do the full footprint we planned.
Bob said we'll figure it out, maybe beg some off the state stockpile, or split the placement into two rounds.
" She shrugs. "It's a reef-crew headache.
Just wanted you to know before Friday so you're not surprised when he says we're rationing bags. "
"Noted." It's a reef-crew problem, and it lives out on the water, a long way from anything else I'm carrying.
Jo closes the laptop the rest of the way and folds her hands on top of it.
"Okay. Reef's handled. Now, tell me about Italy."
"It was awesome."
"You're going to have to give me more detail than that. You've been gone for a week, so fill me in." She leans in. "How was being with the fam? Any drama about your stuff?"
So I tell her the surface stuff. Everybody got along, nobody fought, and Italy was beautiful. I think about how I almost told Libba about Rhodes more than once, but Libba is too close to all of it. Jo isn't. I can tell Jo without having to turn it into something first.
"I slept with Rhodes, Jo. And we kept hooking up basically the whole week."
Her eyebrows climb. "You had sex with Rhodes?!"
"Keep your voice down!" I look around to make sure no one turned around.
"Sorry," she whispers. "I just didn't have that on my bingo card. Are y'all like a thing now? I can't believe it. I mean, I can. He is delicious. But I just—"
"It was the best week I've had in I can't tell you how long, Jo. It was easy and fun." I turn my cup a slow half-circle on the table. "But no, we aren't a thing. We were just having fun in Italy. We're home now, and real life is back. Sex is done."
I think about last night, when the sex clearly wasn't done. But I leave that part out.
She studies me for a second, and I wait for the pivot, the careful voice, the are-you-sure. It doesn't come.
"I'm trying to understand why you're telling me this like you're reporting a successful exchange program. You freaking had a love affair in Italy. That's a Lifetime romance movie in the making."
I kick her under the table. She laughs and catches my shoe between hers. "It wasn't a love affair. It was sex. And it was fun, but it had an expiration date."
"Fine. You had a fun week. You had great sex, and nobody is making it anything more than that. Now you're home, so why does the fun have to end?"
"Are you seriously asking me that?"
I think about his shirt on my bedroom floor, and eggs sliding across the kitchen counter. Next time, say something before you go. None of that answers the question.
"We're back to normal, that’s it. I'm sure we will still have fun together, just like always, just not in the biblical way."
"That's so boring."
"It's real life. I can’t date Rhodes Stone. That’s ridiculous.”
Jo sits back and raises her hands as if in surrender. “Okay. But for the record, I wasn’t saying date him.”
I narrow my eyes at her. "You're being annoying."
"I'm sitting here."
"Annoyingly."
She grins and reaches for her coffee. "All I'm saying is, you already crossed the giant forbidden line.
You live together, Cooper's in Spain, and you're moving out in a few months.
If you both know this isn't going anywhere, I don't see why you have to stop having fun just because your passport got stamped. "