CHAPTER TWELVE
LIZ
Ilet Jovi struggle with both cushions, one stuffed under each armpit, until he's halfway up the stairs before I reach out and take one from him.
He tries to argue for a second, insisting he's got it, but I use the cushion to nudge him in the ass and get him moving again. He waits for me when he reaches the landing, offering me the lead. Which I suppose makes sense since it's technically my room we're headed to.
Under any other circumstances, I'd be happy to take the spot, would insist on it even, but not tonight. "Go ahead. You know the way as well as I do."
His eyes lock on mine as though he's trying to study my thoughts. "You go," he maintains, taking another step aside to widen the path for me. "I'll follow you."
But I don't move so much as an inch. "Why does it matter who goes first?"
"It matters because I can either be your buffer or I can have your back," he says, voice dropping lower to keep from waking the kids.
"So be my freaking buffer," I hiss.
"No."
I fight the urge to stomp my foot. I refuse to succumb to a two-year-old’s coping mechanisms no matter how tempting it is. "If you're not going to help me, why are you still here?"
He leans in, until his nose is mere inches from mine. "I will help you. As soon as you let me."
I glare at him in response and he sighs.
"Liz," he says my name like a plea. "I would gladly be your buffer if I knew that I could be your buffer every night after this one.
But I can't. Which means, tomorrow night, you'll have to come up here alone.
And I can't accept that. Can't accept knowing you faced this on your own, when I should have had your back. So let me have your back, Liz."
My ire dies a quiet death.
"This side of you is making me very uncomfortable," I grumble as I walk around him, careful not to let our oversized cushions collide. "I know we agreed not to be assholes for the sake of the kids, but we never said we were going to care."
"You started it," he huffs behind me, "when you offered me the couch."
"My mistake," I say, reaching for the handle when I get to the door. "Won't happen again." Distracted by our conversation, I walk in before I can register what I'm doing. I make it two steps in, before it hits me.
"Shit," the word expels on a breath, the sight before me like a punch to the gut. I stumble back a step. Right into Jovi.
Two large hands come to rest at my waist as my back lands flush against his chest. In all the years I've known him, he and I have never embraced.
Never stood this close. Never touched this much.
Despite my brain insisting I should jerk away, that I should bolt out of his reach, my body's instinct is to stay. To be held. Just for a moment.
So I do. I let Jovi provide the support he promised, for a few seconds, until I catch my breath.
As if in tune with the wave of my emotions, Jovi's hands ease from my waist as the surge of grief begins to ebb, one palm coming to the small of my back as I take a deep breath and step forward.
His touch follows me as I move, fingertips pressing gently as I take the next two steps into the center of the room.
"Trent always said she held a ball of chaos in her calm," Jovi says, as we take in the disaster before us.
A trail of clothes winds from the closet to the bed to the en suite bath, marks every step my sister took in this room the night she died. The hair dryer, still plugged in, hangs over the back of a chair she dragged over from her desk to sit in front of the full-length mirror in the corner.
The contents of her make up bag have been dumped onto the bed and sit among the dips and valleys of their down comforter. Which has not been neatly spread across the king-sized bed but lies misshapen in a strange twist down the middle.
One of the pillows is placed on the floor in front of the mirror, where Lena sat to do her makeup. Using the chair she dragged there not for sitting in, but as a side table holding a comb, a collection of pins and two bottles of hair tinctures. And, of course, as a hanging rack for the hair dryer.
Two pairs of shoes sit in haphazard piles near the door, indicating the last of her decisions before she left the room. Black stilettos and strappy silver sandals lost. Which means she chose the teal peep toes. She always did.
The only sign Trent also got dressed in this room is the rumpled towel left behind on the bench at the foot of the bed.
And the only reason I know it was his contribution to the disaster here, is because wet towels were Lena's one pet peeve.
Not because of the added clutter, but because of the smell.
But the musty funk isn't the only scent still lingering in here. There are faint citrus traces of Lena's perfume which she applied religiously. Because the scent delighted her. And, of course, the underlying notes of horse and hay are present, hinting of a hamper in need of emptying.
"It's like they were just here," Jovi whispers, his raspy voice breaking on the last word.
I force down the lump in my throat, warring with the same thoughts and the unwanted emotions they churn up.
"I knew it would be hard coming in here," I almost choke on the words trying to get them out. "But I didn't expect it to be like this."
I was worried about facing the pictures.
The family portraits I took of them last summer, custom-framed and hanging on the wall above their bed in a perfect row of four large squares.
The bride and groom shot from their wedding day that Lena kept on her night stand.
The photo of her pregnant with Remmi Trent kept on his.
The countless casual candids she pinned into the frame of her large mirror.
All those happy moments, reminders of the life they were building—the life they should still be living—those I braced myself for.
This snapshot of their life kept frozen in time by the power of a closed door, I wasn't prepared for. Not at all.
"Is it too late to sleep in the living room?" I ask, fingers gripping the couch cushion like it's the last of my sanity.
"Yes." Jovi clears his throat, the hand at my back giving a light squeeze before guiding me forward. "Come on. We can do this."
I nod, forcing myself to go through the motions ahead.
Another step forward and we rest the cushions against the bed before we split apart, both of us bending to pick up a piece of clothing left strewn across the floor.
Neither of us speaks as we move on autopilot, picking up and clearing the space enough for us to sleep here.
But I hear Jovi sniff and clear his throat more than once, echoing my own attempts to keep my grief contained.
When we finish, Jovi's eyes are as red as mine, and his thick lashes are matted with tears. "Where's that air mattress of yours?"
I twist to look toward the door. "I left it down in the hall outside the den." After walking around the house with it for ten solid minutes, it was the only place I finally felt I could set it down.
He nods. "I'll go grab it."
"I'll find us some bedding," I offer in return.
It only takes a few minutes more, and we have two make-shift mattresses laid out on the floor in the space between Trent and Lena's bed and the bathroom door. It’s not until we both lower ourselves and begin to tuck under the covers that it occurs to me we should have each chosen a side of the bed for some semblance of privacy.
Now we'll be stuck right beside each other all night.
Close enough I can do more than reach out touch him, I can scent the stupid, sweet spice of his cologne.
I blink, ignoring the thought. Then turn onto my side to keep my back toward him, bringing me face to face with Lena's dresser. And the bracelet she must have dropped, lying underneath.
"We forgot to turn out the lights," I say, closing my eyes. Every time I see something of Lena's it's like a damn chisel carving out another hole in my heart.
Jovi claps his hands twice. Darkness follows.
"I didn't know they had the clappy lights," I mumble, rubbing at my chest. Lena and I used to joke about how convenient the clapping feature was anytime we saw it on TV or in a movie. I can't believe she actually got them. More than that, I can't believe she never told me.
"Trent installed the clapper a week before the accident," Jovi says quietly. "It was a surprise for her birthday. I don't know if Lena even knew."
I press my hand to my heart hard enough to bruise, as if one pain could distract from the other. He probably planned to show her that night when they got home after dinner. Only they never came home.
"She would have loved it," I whisper.
JOVI
Liz's words come out strangled as the weight of our grief settles over us like a blanket of sand.
I'm failing at what I set out to do. Failing her. And I blurt out the first trivial thought that springs to mind.
"You have hazel eyes."
I swear I can hear the stumped look on her face. "So?"
"Lena and your dad had blue eyes. Both Remmi and Gavin do too," I ramble, unsure if this will prove to be the distraction we need or just lead us deeper into the depths of her trauma. "How did you end up with hazel ones?" Christ, don't let the answer be her mother. What the fuck is wrong with me?
"No clue," she says, expelling air in a huff that sounds a mix between amused and exasperated. "Supposedly, I have a great aunt with green eyes that might be to blame, but everyone else in my family has blue eyes."
Thank fuck.
"Weird," I muse, forcing a teasing tone. "Ever wonder if maybe you were adopted? Would explain how you ended up with such a sour disposition when both Lena and your dad were pure sunshine personified."
"Says the only blond in his family," she retorts. "Ever wonder if you were the milk man's kid?"
I shift, trying to get comfortable. All it does is create a rift between the cushions right under my ass. I ignore it. "I'm not blond."
Despite the dark, I can see her silhouette roll over to face me. "Yes. You are."
I shake my head. "I'm dirty blond."
"Yeah." I imagine her eyes bugging out at me the way they always do when she uses that tone. "Dirty. Blond."
"It's not the same thing," I argue, propping myself up and only making my bed split further apart.
"It's literally in the name, Jovi," she counters. "Dirty blond is blond."
"No one would look at me and think, oh hey, that dude's a blond." It's the most asinine argument in the history of arguments. Neither of us is unaware of this. But we need it. So we keep it going. "When I think blond, I think sun-bleached blond surfer dude."
"Yes," she concurs, "sun-bleached is another type of blond. As is strawberry, or golden, or ash. And yes, even dirty. All shades of the same thing. Blond."
I move to lift up onto my hip and face her. I know it's a mistake the second I shift my weight, because it presses the two cushions so far apart, my hip lands on the hardwood floors with a soft thud. "Shit." I mutter, abandoning the hair discussion to sit up and reassemble my bed.
"Did you just land on the floor?" she asks, sitting up on her air mattress as well.
"The cushions aren't staying together as efficiently as I'd hoped," I admit, pushing them back into place. We put a fitted sheet around them thinking it would lend some structure. Not enough, as it turns out.
"Are you going to be able to sleep like that?"
I shrug, getting back into place to lie down. Carefully. "It'll be fine." As long as I don't move. I tug the blanket back into place. That's all it takes for the cushions to shift again. I freeze as soon as I feel them slide apart, hoping she won't notice.
"They're coming apart again, aren't they." Damn it.
"Don't worry about it," I tell her, exhaling and letting my body relax as the mattress splits in two beneath me. "I've slept in worse places."
Liz doesn't lie back down. The longer she stays silent, the more I swear I can feel the heat of her glare on me. "That's not going to work for me."
"What?" I pop upright, instantly regretting it when the movement makes the lower cushion shoot sideways, bumping into her air mattress. "Why not?'
"Really?" She sounds offended. I would know.
I've offended her more than anyone in the last fourteen years.
"You think you get to be all, 'no, Liz, I can't accept your suffering'," she pauses when I snort a laugh at her terrible impression of me, "but I'm going to go ahead and roll over and go to sleep knowing you’re fucking up your back on the hard floor with your head and feet propped up on two pillows?
When I'm the whole reason you're not sleeping on a real bed to begin with? "
I drag out my exhale since it's too dark for her to see my expression. "Fine. What do you propose I do instead? Go back to the sofa?"
"No." The response is fast.
Her counteroffer takes long enough for me to gather she hadn't thought of one yet when she shot down my suggestion.
But she wants me to stay.
"We can share the air mattress."
Apparently, a whole hell of a lot.
"Are you serious?"
She starts to scoot over, the rubber mattress making squelching noises over the floor as she moves. "It's big enough for two," she mumbles. "And Lena would be pissed if I didn't share."
Right. Lena.
I swallow, suddenly nervous as I crawl over and slip under the comforter beside her. It's an air mattress, so it dips under my weight, drawing her toward me despite both of us trying not to touch.
Neither of us says anything else. We just lie here. Still and stiff until exhaustion takes pity on us and we fall asleep.