Chapter 12
Denny
Come, love,
make me better than I was.
Come teach me a kinder way
to say my own name.
― Andrea Gibson, Good Light
Seeing their reflection in the shopwindows they were passing, Denny realised how easy it would have been to mistake them for a couple all along.
They hardly uttered a sound walking home. Denny didn’t mind. She was happy to catch Eris glancing down at their joint hands and then share a fleeting smile with her before growing serious again, back to her usual self.
They discarded the damp clothes in the laundry room, changed into something comfy, and padded to the kitchen to put on some tea.
Denny was a goner for this kind of domesticity: the pouring rain beyond the windows, the distant sound of thunder, Eris shuffling around to gather mugs, spoons, and biscuits.
She was staring at the kettle to keep herself busy.
It was Eris she wanted to stare at, but Eris would notice—she always did.
Denny longed to commit every bit of this scene to memory in fear that she might never have anything so perfect again.
She kept telling herself that she shouldn’t get carried away, to keep her expectations low and under control, but Eris’ presence filled the whole room, calling to her irresistibly.
She was hungry for physical reassurance that it wasn’t all just a very vivid dream but at the same time didn’t want Eris to feel smothered by her.
It’d have been a shame to ruin everything before it had a chance to begin.
She was so absorbed by her ruminations that she didn’t notice Eris sidling up to her until she felt a nudge in her hip.
“You’re about to explode.”
Denny’s heart leaped. It was going to take a while to get used to that voice.
Just hearing it awoke a pleasant tightness in her lungs, a sensation similar to the fulfilment she’d felt when she’d opened the door of Tansy’s Garden as the official owner for the first time and had proudly thought: ‘You’re mine to take care of now. ’
“What gives?”
Denny almost blurted: I want to be all over you and I know you’d hate it. By some miracle she managed to trim it down to a simple: “I need some guidelines about displays of affection.”
“Guidelines?” Eris blinked. Her porcelain doll face was made to be admired, caressed, kissed, but Denny couldn’t take this liberty just yet.
“Like… what you’re comfortable with.” The perfectly drawn upper lip, the plump bottom lip… Denny had to pry her eyes off Eris’ mouth so as not to lose track of the discourse. “When and if you’re comfortable, if I can be affectionate in public…”
“Stop, stop! Jesus.” Eris turned the boiling kettle off. “If you overthink everything, this is going to be really awkward for the both of us.”
“I’m a professional overthinker.”
Eris squeezed Denny’s arms, an amused ‘No shit’ spelled out in her expression.
“If I tell you that I don’t want you to hold yourself back, will you believe me?”
“Yes, but—”
A hand clasped over Denny’s mouth. “Just be you, and I’ll be me. Can we do that? Be open with each other about what we want and what we need?” Eris’ eyebrows knit up in a silent plea and every bone in Denny’s body turned to mush.
“What if our wants and needs don’t align?”
“Guess we’ll know we aren’t meant for each other.”
So smooth, so unflinching. It had Denny reeling.
The wording strung: it sounded like Eris didn’t care whether they stayed together or not.
Her brutal frankness was seldom ill-intentioned, though.
With hindsight, forced compatibility was the very root of the failure of Denny’s previous relationships.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she reiterated one more time, a broken record stuck on the same fears.
Eris squeezed her arms again. “I don’t want you to erase yourself to keep me.”
At that, Denny was lost. They were going off-script and she didn’t know where to go from here. ‘Make an effort!’ was the right line. ‘Couples must find compromises!’ was an acceptable alternative. She didn’t know what to do with ‘Be yourself, come what may’.
“I’m an awful partner if I’m… me.”
“Says who?”
“All my exes.”
“Based on what?”
Eris’ anger was so passionate that Denny’s self-consciousness almost crumbled. There was a chance, and quite high, that they didn’t work out. Denny had been dumped before, so many times that she was starting to think that an honest disaster may be better than her collection of beautiful lies.
“I flake, forget important things, zone out during conversations, lose interest too fast…” It was a drill she’d heard so often that, statistically, the chances that she wasn’t the problem bordered on zero.
Eris scoffed. “If you flake, it means you don’t really want to do it. Fine by me. The rest is bullshit. I’d lose interest in someone, too, if they valued my affection based on how well I remember shit.”
“It’s not shit. It’s niceties that make people feel important.”
“You know what makes me feel important? Someone who’ll go any length just to make my life a smidge easier.
Someone granting me their blind trust despite nothing about me looking trustworthy.
” Eris’ hands curled around Denny’s neck, glacial eyes ablaze with resolve.
“Denny, c’mon! Who gives a fuck about a bloody birthday?
You can forget my name, for all I care!”
Her thumbs gently pressed into Denny’s pulse. There was a restrained anger to it. Denny saw a glimpse of the feral girl she’d picked up from the street what felt like ages ago.
“Touch me, if you need to touch me. Hug me, kiss me… You have my full permission.” The word ‘you’ was accentuated by a sharp contraction in her features that slowly ebbed away as Eris’ grip relented, leaving a phantom pressure that she stroked away with a silent apology.
“I’ll let you know if it’s a no moment. Okay?”
Denny grabbed Eris’ face and very ungraciously pulled her into an urgent kiss. It was welcomed by a chuckle that boosted Denny’s confidence. The depth of the kiss verged into desperation.
Eris’ hands took hold of Denny’s hips to trace slow circles over the jut of the bones. There was so much devotion in it—a touch of reassurance rather than possession.
“I was dying to kiss you when I came in,” she whispered, “but you looked so nervous.”
“We’re terrible at this,” Denny laughed. This was what she imagined being drunk was like: dizziness, jelly legs, euphoria…
“Not true.”
“It’s mostly my fault.”
Eris pinched her chin. “I’ll allow you to be hard on me, Sunshine, but not on yourself.”
This was nothing like what Denny was used to. She was mentally wired to fight cold wars, passive-aggressive assaults that tapped into her insecurities and wrenched her to her knees… She didn’t know how to respond to sympathy.
“If I’m not hard on myself, everything falls apart.”
“You’re not supposed to tear yourself apart to make a relationship work. It either works or doesn’t.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“You let it go.” Eris’ thumbs rubbed soothing circles over Denny’s hips. “Life is hard enough, Sunshine. The real ones will make it better for you, not worse.”
* * *
They took their tea to the bay window in the living room and curled up on the upholstered sill to watch the rain-flooded street beneath.
Eris stared into her mug for long minutes, watching the coils of steam rise and vanish.
Denny didn’t have that kind of patience: she scalded her tongue twice trying to sip the tea too soon.
“I have an interview next week.”
Denny’s mug tipped, spilling burning drops on the side of her hand. She barely noticed.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t think I’d be able to go.”
Denny had forgotten about the speech issue. Eris could undergo an interview now. There were no impediments left for her to find a new employment.
“What’s the job?”
“Sales assistant in a gift shop.”
“You can’t do that, it’d eat you up!”
It was not the right job for her. Too much chaos, too much noise, too many people coming and going… Switching from warehouse logistics to customer care would be a hard blow. What Eris needed was a low-socialisation employment. If not a warehouse, maybe a factory, or an office…
The train of Denny’s thought skidded to a stop. It made so much sense that she was appalled she hadn’t considered it sooner. She promised herself she’d look into it with her tax advisor.
Eris gazed up through her lashes. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
The sharpness of it sent a cold shiver down Denny’s spine. She heard the whisper of a sickly honeyed voice:‘You messed up again? The patience it takes with you…’
But then another voice cut in: ‘Eris can be brusque, she doesn’t do it on purpose. She doesn’t hate you. You can make this right.’
So Denny clutched the hot mug and braved up.
“Sorry. That was insensitive of me.”
The thread of ice running down her spine thawed as soon as Eris’ features shifted back to their doting softness.
“Are you angry? I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I know. I’m not angry.” Eris’ leniency carried a note of regret. She gave Denny’s ankle a reassuring rub. “Just jealous of your carefreeness.”
Thunder shook the window.
Most people would define Denny as starry-eyed or naive. Distracted. Scatter-brained. Carefree was a compliment, or so she hoped. She couldn’t put her finger on it.
“My parents are back in town,” she said, remembering the texts that still awaited a reply. “They’re eager to meet you.”
Eris’ brow furrowed. “Why?”
“You’ve lived with me for a month, guess they’ve figured out you’re special.” She glossed over the friend-in-quotation-marks running joke. She trusted that her parents would refrain from bringing it up in front of Eris. “I know it’s soon, we don’t have to tell them about… us.”
A corner of Eris’ lips twitched up. Her eyes skimmed lovingly over Denny. Denny’s heart stopped altogether, drowning in that pale blue that swallowed the pinpoint pupils into its brightness.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to do this.”
“I do,” said Eris at once. “I’d love to meet your parents.”
“Sweet! Dinner this week, then? Can we make it by eight?”