Chapter 6
Denny
I want a person to come into my life by accident,
but stay on purpose.
― Adele
Denny learned three things just by helping Eris settle down in her new room: the girl didn’t deal well with changes, she was extremely particular about how her belongings should be put away (the state of Denny’s wardrobe would have given her a heart attack) and she wasn’t overly fond of big lights or big noises.
Each of these facts gave Denny a different hue of concern. There was nothing she loved more than trying new things and was known to be pathologically chaotic, not to mention she could get really loud without realising it. She’d have to learn to tone her quirks down, for Eris’ sake.
They improvised a quiche for dinner with the vegetables that Eris pulled out of the fridge to show Denny that they were about to go bad.
There was also some cheese that had expired a couple of days before.
Denny wanted to throw it away, but Eris wouldn’t let her.
It still tasted good, so she chopped it down and mixed it with the veggies instead.
Denny often forgot about the food she bought until it was too late.
If things weren’t right under her nose, they stopped existing.
Unfortunately, that also happened with people and, just like the food, her relationships, romantic and platonic, tended to deteriorate fast. The average person required constant proof that they were wanted, and she didn’t have the energy for that, not with her days in the shop being so laden with stressful human interaction.
To her, it was the quality, not the quantity, of attention you gave each other that determined the value of a sentimental bond.
The problem was that no one seemed to agree.
After piling the dirty dishes into the sink, swearing to herself she’d put them in the dishwasher in the morning, she and Eris moved to the living room, both reading on their phones in companionable silence.
“We should exchange numbers,” said Denny after a while.
Without batting an eyelid, Eris put her phone down, stole Denny’s, and punched in her number, then pressed ‘Call’. When her phone rang, she saved Denny’s number under Sunshine.
“Are you sure the room is okay?” Denny asked while saving Eris’ contact details. “I don’t want you to feel like a guest: this is as much your home as it’s mine. The other room is bigger, has an ensuite bathroom, and—”
Eris clasped a hand over Denny’s mouth, staring closely at her with a glare that betrayed a twinkle of mirth.
Denny held her breath, lost in the unbelievable brightness of those eyes. Something stirred inside her—a ripple of warmth, soft and quiet, that bubbled from her chest and spread out to her fingertips, making them twitch from a haunting longing.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, ducking her head to escape that bewildering spell.
They were sitting on the carpet with a post-dinner herbal tea and a plate of chin chin, the Nigerian cinnamon biscuits that were a favourite comfort food in Denny’s family.
Eris was more interested in them than the conversation.
“This is new for me as well. I grew up as an only child and I’ve always lived alone since moving out of my parents’...
I’ve got a lot to learn about sharing my living space with someone else.
” The bigger room was, in fact, crammed with tons of relics from her countless short-lived craft fixations: knitting, polymer clay, flower pressing, watercolours, beads... “You’ll have to be patient with me.”
Eris sighed. There was a slit slanting across her right eyebrow, which Denny had initially dismissed as an aesthetic whim. The skin, however, was dented in that spot, and paler. It lined up almost perfectly with the scar cutting across Eris’ lips.
“I’m really glad you took me up on my offer. That place didn’t feel right for you.” Denny repressed the instinct to put her hand on Eris’ knee. This was yet another catch: she was too tactile and Eris too averse to physicality. That particular side of Denny would be difficult to contain.
An indecipherable look fluttered her way. Denny couldn’t explain what it was about it that she found so adorable. Like that moment when Eris had unfolded her bed sheets, only to realise a twin set wouldn’t fit the king in front of her. Her puzzled expression had been heart-melting.
“You can use my spares,” Denny had said, laughing. “I’ve got plenty of those. Never used them.”
But Eris hadn’t laughed with her. Not even a smile.
She never smiled. Her rare laughter was shallow, a breath coughed out without sentiment.
She had stepped away from the bed and had quietly folded the sheets back, tucking them at the bottom of the wardrobe, under a pile of towels that had seen better days.
You can have my spare towels, too, Denny would’ve wanted to tell her, but the line between availability and rudeness could be thin and offending Eris was the last thing she wanted. Awkward things slipped out of her mouth all the time. Her tongue was faster than her judgement.
Eris wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the tea.
She was sipping it halfheartedly, making funny faces as it went down.
Her hair was tied up in a ponytail, exposing an undercut that could’ve used a retouch.
The hair was a lighter shade there, a hint of copper in the undertone.
The chocolate brown of the lengths suited her creamy complexion better.
“Don’t drink it if you don’t like it,” Denny told her, but it fell on deaf ears: Eris kept sipping and making those cute faces.
Denny was still thinking about it two hours later, sitting in bed with a book in her lap and another cup of tea on the nightstand.
Despite the captivating prologue and the even more captivating introduction of a new character who was just her type, her thoughts kept straying to Eris’ lovely face scrunching up so adorably.
She had to go back to the beginning of the chapter for the second time. Her eyes were reading but her brain wasn’t.
The TV was droning on the wall, mere white noise that she required to do just about anything.
She’d annoyed all her university peers with her studying habits: TV or music on, curled up in her seat in the most unthinkable positions, a leg always bouncing.
No one could concentrate in her close proximity—oftentimes not even herself.
If she wasn’t one-hundred percent invested in an activity, performing it was agony.
She could make herself do it, of course, because she was skilled at posing as a responsible adult, but forcing herself through a task burnt her out so severely that she needed hours, if not days, to recover—a luxury that running a business didn’t allow her.
A shuffling from the door alerted her. Eris was on the threshold in a tattered oversized t-shirt, ready for bed. Half of her makeup was still smudged around her eyes, making her look like a bedtime version of the Winter Soldier. With her physique, she would’ve made a sick gender-bent Bucky Barnes.
“Hiya. Wanna watch a movie?”
Eris glanced at the screen, where Imagine Me among them Denny spotted a few mugs she knew had been lying around the house for quite a while.
The whole kitchen, in fact, was spick and span.
The stack of empty food boxes that served as a visual shopping list had been shoved into a corner of the sideboard between the windows to make room for the fresh laundry that Denny had been neglecting for about a week.
It was neatly folded, stacked in the most unrealistically even pile she’d ever seen, not a wrinkle in sight.
Apparently the ordinary housework that was such hard graft for Denny was no big deal for Eris.
Denny pushed the food boxes back to a more apparent spot. She needed them in plain sight to remember to buy them. Shopping lists didn’t work for her: she could never keep them updated and always forgot to pick them up on her way out.
Once she had stumbled across an educational TikTok about attention deficit disorders in women and had seen a lot of herself in it. It was comforting to know she wasn’t the only one struggling with such basic tasks.
“This could be me,” she had told Blake, aiming for a laugh, but all she’d got had been an unimpressed stare.
“Sounds like enabling laziness to me.”
“I don’t think I’m lazy.”
“And yet it takes you four to six business days to fold a basket of laundry.”
Denny had had nothing to say to defend herself. She had felt so ashamed that she had never dared to bring the subject up with anyone else, not even when her therapist, months later, had suggested that she see a neuropsychiatrist.
Eris put one last cup in the dishwasher and frowned at the display. She had a pair of shabby headphones on, loud music blaring out. She hadn’t noticed Denny’s arrival.
To avoid startling her, Denny turned the light off and back on. Eris turned around, pulling the headphones down.
“Morning.” Denny’s smile got smothered by a yawn. “You didn’t have to do any of this.”
Cocking one shoulder, Eris pointed at the dishwasher. Denny didn’t understand, so Eris impatiently tapped the display.
“Oh, yeah, let me show you!”