Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
I LIVE HERE
LOUISA
We hear the front door open and I check my phone for the time, he’s home early. Not early early. But earlier than I expected him to be.
“What do we do?” Chandler asks in a frenzy and Toby makes a confused face.
“What do you mean, I live here, you’re allowed to be here,” I say.
(They can totally be here, right?) I pull Chandler with me.
“Come on, you should get used to spending time with him, outside of handing him a coffee.” She cuts her eyes back to me now, knowing full well she hasn’t seen him in days, and now, it seems, doubts she will outside of being with me.
When we emerge from the bedroom, he’s still standing in the entry way, his finger looped into the knot of his tie as he loosens it from his neck. In his other hand, a large brown bag of takeout.
“You’re home,” I say, walking up to him quickly, knowing I have spectators who already seem to be collecting data and compiling a case (maybe just one of them.) I rise up on my toes and kiss his cheek. The corner of his mouth twitches in reply.
“I live here.” He clears his throat, surprised by the guests, the performance, and well, maybe even the questionable judgment that got us here.
“And you brought dinner?”
“Indian,” he specifies. “There’s more than enough, stay.” He looks over my shoulder towards my friends making the offer, speaking louder so they know the invite is for them.
“Absolutely,” they reply at the same time.
Chandler is not interested in the butter chicken, but maybe buttering him up to see what else she can piece together.
And Toby will be more than happy to run it through some mental model of his to tell me that the likelihood of these nuptials being successful is nil. (I already know, trust me.)
“I can take this,” I say as I grab the bag of food and bring it to the kitchen.
He just follows my steps, taking off his suit jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeves.
We leave them in the living room, and I lower my voice to a whisper so the sound doesn't carry through the open space. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
“I live here,” he repeats, as he grabs a can of sparkling water from the fridge.
“Right, duh, obviously, I just mean, I was moving in all day, and they came by to help.” I start unpacking the bag of takeout, container by container. “Although, now that I think about it, they didn’t really help at all,” I say much louder with the intention of Toby and Chandler both hearing it.
She just blows me a kiss. “I’m helpful in other ways,” she says.
Hudson leans against the island so his back is to them when he says, “It’s no problem, Louisa, you live here also.” He grabs a samosa from the bag on the counter, and reaches for dishes to actually set the table, not just the staged placemats that are already there waiting their turn.
“This smells great, I love Indian food,” I say.
“I know,” he says under his breath.
I don't know when I became a person who eats takeout out of anything other than the container it came in, but here I am, legally bound to it.
Chandler put herself well within questioning distance, and I know this was not an accident.
Toby on the other hand, he will just quietly observe, eventually telling us his findings, but for now is just here to enjoy some vindaloo. (My favorite.)
“So, Hudson,” Chandler kicks it off, with the pleasant tone that screams of a not-so-hidden agenda. “How did you two actually get together?”
Hudson passes the vindaloo without looking up. “I thought Louisa might have covered that.” As he takes another bite of food, perhaps in the hope it will spare him the questions.
“Lou has been a little vague,” Chandler says. “But I'm a details person.”
“She's really not,” I say.
“I am for this.” She cuts me a look that tells me she won’t let up.
“I’m also a details person,” Hudson says cooly as he settles back in his chair. He’s argued cases in front of actual judges, he shouldn’t find a twenty-nine-year-old with a gel manicure and a hidden agenda remotely intimidating, but I sure do.
“We were—” I begin, as he is watching me with easy composure, waiting for me to toss him the ball, to tag him in coach, or whatever other sports reference I’m not equipped enough to make.
“The answer about how we got together,” Hudson says, knowing that my reply fizzled out on the line.
“It isn’t interesting.” It’s delivered flatly, but somehow he manages to sound earnest. “We spent a lot of nights at each other's throats, there’s always been tension there. We just didn’t immediately call it what it was.
” He’s able to lie so smoothly, though to him, he wouldn’t consider this a lie at all.
“We were both just coming out of relationships.” Chandler rolls her eyes in response, knowing exactly who he’s referring to, and wanting to make it known that now, even months later, she still has a disdain for him.
But Hudson just continues, “Everyone assumed we hated each other, Louisa is such a relationship girl, and I have never been a relationship guy,” he says, looking over at me, delivering the final blow that lands this as authentic.
“So neither of us was entirely sure how to announce it.”
“Right,” I start.
He hangs on the breath, giving me space to answer, but I don’t. “Given the circumstances,” he continues, “of how we met. Which were, by most measures, a disaster. And the months following, which were—”
“Also a disaster,” I offer.
“Characterful,” he says. “I was going to say characterful.”
“He wants to say disaster,” I correct.
“Well, you did earn me one of my worst days of my professional career.” His tone corrects from the flat narrative one he’s been using, to the sharp one he uses for me.
“So you decided to return the favor that night?” I retort. We have clearly diverted topics, this one far more honest than the previous.
“I was still trying to get the tentacle porn out of my head and the smell of cloves off my chest,” he says, eyebrows pinching together, exposing the wrinkle that lives between them. Chandler makes a sound that is definitely a laugh but she converts, at speed, into a cough to hide it.
“We both know I tried to apologize for that,” I say quickly.
“Right, because muffins left outside someone’s door like a baby at a fire station is an acceptable apology.”
“Survey says?” I look to my friends at the table hoping for the support, where Toby is shoveling food in his mouth and Chandler is wide-eyed.
“Calm down, Steve Harvey,” Hudson says, as Chandler’s hands just go up in a ‘don't look at me’ motion.
“The point,” he says, taking control of this before it goes somewhere he can't navigate, “is that telling people felt—” I see him searching for the word.
“Complicated. Because how do you explain falling for someone when the falling looked, from the outside, like hatred, before we could even admit it to ourselves?”
“There was always tension,” I jump in. “I just didn’t know what that tension meant at first.” As I say it, I worry that it sounds true, even to me.
“And because of the timing, I didn’t want it to be colored by the idea of it being a rebound.
” It’s hilarious, actually, knowing that Chandler would have hooted and hollered if I told her I had a rebound. (Roma, too, honestly.)
“So the letter came,” Hudson says, bringing it back, which is something I didn't expect him to do. “And when it did, I couldn’t lose the person I’d spent months being an idiot about.”
I choke on my rice. (Not metaphorically.) A genuine, undignified, wrong-pipe inhalation of basmati rice that requires me to press a napkin to my face and spend three seconds coughing into it while Hudson passes me a glass of water.
I am performing being his wife while he is performing being my husband while my friends sit across the table and watch, one of them already emotionally invested in it being real. This is, objectively, a very manageable situation that I have completely under control. (Not one bit.)
But even knowing this is him putting on a show, the words take me aback by the sheer impossibility of them.
And I wonder if this is obvious to everyone.
Because if we can’t even get past the ‘how did you get together’ part of the story, we have absolutely no hope to prove to Immigration (to anyone) that we are happily married.
Under the table, I find his foot with mine and press down with what I intend to be a warning but what he takes (apparently) as an invitation, because his other leg shifts and traps mine beneath it.
Calm and strong, and he doesn’t look at me as he does it, just reaches for the naan.
I drop my hand under the table to try and free my ankle from its cage, and he just swats it away, a smirk pulling on the corner of his lips.
(And that makes me want to punch him right in the balls, or, well, I can't think about the other thing it makes me want to do.)
Chandler is watching us wordlessly, but for the first time in nearly ten minutes, Toby speaks.
“Statistically, relationships that originate in conflict have—”
“Toby,” Chandler snaps.
“—have a lower success rate than those beginning in—”
“Toby!” I’m the one who snaps this time.
“I’m just noting the data doesn’t indicate success beyond the two-year mark when you factor in normal divorce rates, family dynamics, the nature of the beginning of the relationship,” he continues, unfazed as always.
Never really understanding why people don’t seem to feel as drawn to the numbers of things as he is.
“The data,” Hudson says mildly, taking his glass of water back from me, “can take the night off.”
Chandler continues with her round of questioning as she pushes food around her plate.
He answers, charmingly, eventually releasing my leg from where he held it long and tight enough I was beginning to feel pins and needles.
Hudson answers like he’s being deposed, or maybe like someone who is used to doing the deposing and knows exactly how much rope to give.
Finally, she asks how he knew. He doesn’t ask what.
He says ‘the immigration letter changed everything practically.’ There it is, the rope.
Not too much to hang ourselves, but just enough that someone might think we could.
“But the rest, my feelings, changed earlier than that.” She asks what he means by the rest and he looks at me, briefly, and says, “Ask Louisa.”
“Do not ask Louisa,” I (Louisa) say emphatically.
“Magic-wanded those problems away.” Chandler grins, finally satisfied. Taking a sip of the wine Hudson opened when the conversation took a turn into an interrogation.
“What about work,” Toby asks, shifting gears. “What happens with work?”
“Well, I won’t be able to work at The Double Shot until this is all sorted, but I can keep recording, and that’s going well,” I say.
“Better than well,” Hudson corrects. “She has three books releasing this month.” I do, he’s right. Even amidst the ‘find your passion’ and my auditioning for non-fiction in the event I never do, I have three books coming out, and already am booked out for the next months with new recordings.
“How would you—” I start, low enough that only he can hear it.
He moves closer, the corner of his mouth looks like it could be reaching for mine, but I won’t let myself believe it.
Instead it’s the almost-smile that gets settled back.
(Even though it still exists in his eyes.) Chandler and Toby are having a sidebar conversation about something far less interesting than whatever is on the tip of his tongue, and with his eyes on me, mine drops to his mouth as it forms the words.
“If you think,” he says, as his voice drops a step lower, “that I don’t know exactly what my wife is doing, you’re underestimating how closely I pay attention to you.”