Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
GRAMS WANTS A GROWL
LOUISA
The morning after, I woke up in the guest room and shuffled out to find both a tea and a coffee already poured and waiting on the island as he stood in the corner of the kitchen the way he always does, drinking his own. (Out of Kermit the Mug.)
I drank both.
We didn’t talk any more about what happened. Not us sleeping together, or sleeping together. Knowing that, like he said, it can’t happen again. The surprise immigration visit reinforced every fear I’ve had, confirming exactly why we can’t let ourselves get blinded.
He just stood there, reading something on his phone, and I sat at the counter in my pajamas and we existed in the kitchen together the way we had for months, ordinary in a way that should have felt strange after everything, and somehow didn’t.
That’s the part that gets me. Not the fight, not the going to sleep in separate rooms in the same apartment after his hands roamed my body and I felt every breath of his in my ear as he came.
The part that gets me is how easily we found our way back to ordinary.
Like we’ve had so much practice at pretending that it’s second nature. (And isn’t pretending at all.)
My feelings haven't changed. I know that. Which is how I ended up here on a Wednesday, in the sitting room of his grandmother, listening to her critique audiobook narrators on the basis of growling ability.
There are worse places to put yourself when you're trying not to be in love with your fake husband. (Don’t tell him.)
We’re sitting here as she’s in the wingback chair by the window.
I’ve made her a cup of tea (properly), and on the small table between us her tablet is propped against a stack of library books because we’ve been on an audiobook journey.
I showed her how to search for the genres she likes (which are a lot higher on the smut scale than I expected) and we listen to them together each week.
It’s got nothing to do with any marital arrangement, it just evolved.
I started spending most Friday mornings with him and Grams, but Wednesdays, today, I slip in alone.
In the beginning it was incidental, I was in the neighborhood so I’d stop in here and there.
Then I started making myself be in the neighborhood and now, well, Grams is expecting me.
So I’ve become the most reliable person possible for Grams. (Which is something I’ve never once been for anyone who isn’t paying me.)
She is, in every way that matters, the keeper of him, and being near her is a fix of something sweet and secret. She knows the parts of him that existed before the armor was fitted and the walls went up and he decided that being undeniably brilliant was safer than being known.
“The narrator on this one,” she says, tapping the cover of a gothic romance we started last week. “He is very good, but he doesn’t growl.” I laugh, out loud, because like I said, Grams likes smut.
“Show me the new one,” she says, gesturing her hand to my phone.
“You don't want to hear me,” I say. I always say this, it's not false modesty, it's just the discomfort of being listened to by someone who knows you. But with Grams it’s very much a losing battle. I love strangers in earbuds. (They are my bread and butter.) But if there’s one person in a room who can see my face while my voice plays through a speaker, that's a different exposure that I would prefer only against being flayed. (Or maybe some version of performing live.) I don’t mind sitting here reading to her, but there’s a difference when it’s recorded. (Don’t ask me.)
I’m saved, temporarily, by the sound of the door.
There’s a knock, but it’s more to announce himself than be invited in, but he stops in his tracks when he sees me.
And I sit up straight from where I am leaning over Grams, fiddling with her audiobook settings.
Hudson and I look at each other across Grams’s sitting room with an identical expression, like we’ve both been caught doing something far more scandalous than anything that involves a grandmother. (And I can think of a few things.)
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
“Me? What are you doing here,” he says.
“I thought Fridays are your day?”
“This isn’t shared custody, I come on other days also.” I can see his face trying to sort through how long this has been going on, and I think he’s about to ask me, but instead he turns to Grams. “And you didn’t tell me you were having secret meetings with my wife?”
“You never asked.” She takes a sip of her tea.
He crosses to Grams and kisses the top of her head, and pulls the footstool from the corner without asking if it's needed, because he knows Grams’s feet are better elevated by this time of day.
(I should have thought of that.) He takes a seat on the small settee at the room's edge, but as they do in every room we’re in, his eyes find mine.
“Were you showing her something?” Hudson asks me, but Grams responds before I can.
“She was avoiding it,” Grams says. “She won’t play me one of her books.”
“Shame,” he says, to Grams and also to me. “She’s good.”
“I don’t think hearing muffled clips through drywall makes you an expert,” I say. “And you definitely can’t hear anything from the new studio.”
The corner of his mouth moves, pulls into a smirk. “I know how to download an audiobook, Louisa.”
Well, fuck me. (Seriously.)
He picks up the invitation that’s been magneted to the side of the fridge since it arrived. (Which happened about two months after Alfie Sterling told me we ‘have to be there.’) Hudson sets it down in front of me. “A lot’s happened since we agreed to go.”
This is (objectively) the understatement of our marriage. (Which tells you everything.) A lot has happened since we agreed to go, in the same way that a lot happened to the Titanic after it left Southampton. Technically, it’s accurate, but missing a lot of details. (Namely, that didn’t end well.)
“If you don’t want to go,” he says, carefully, as he’s been careful with me ever since he practically dragged Immigration by the collar out of my apartment. (That’s at least how it felt.) “I can get us out of it.”
Here’s the thing about Hudson that I have learned over the better part of six months as his wife, and almost a year knowing him.
When he offers you an exit, he means it completely and wants you to take it not at all.
He will move mountains to give you a choice and quietly hope you don’t make it, because he has already made up his mind.
“You’ve kept your end of the deal,” I say. “I’ll keep mine.”
“You have, too,” he says. “More than.” He turns back to pour himself another coffee, he does that lately.
Turns himself away from me at the exact moment a conversation could become something else.
The co-op board approved the purchase for 8A over a month ago now.
Meaning, he could abandon the plan now if he really wanted.
Though I think he’s going to wait until he breaks ground on the renovation before there’s any real talk of separation.
(Who am I kidding, he’ll see this thing through.
That’s who he is. So that’s who I’ll be.)
“I want to,” I say to the back of his head, something I find myself looking at more and more lately. And it’s true. (Also not entirely about the gala.)
He turns back to look at me for a moment, then nods, handing me the cereal box to top off my bowl of milk that I overestimated.
“I'll have the car arranged.” His face is managed back into place.
And while we have found ourselves somewhere past the original terms, the terms are still there.
Holding everything in place. (By a fucking thread.)
“I do need a dress though.” I spin my spoon in the cereal.
“Chandler is getting ready for her gallery show so she is elbow deep in paint, and Paola is with Lucas, you know they’re doing their whole volunteering thing, so I’m on my own, which is a problem because I've been putting it off for pretty much the entire time I’ve known about it.
” I look up at him, the question is in my eyes, and my ramble. “Will you come with me?”
“You don’t want my help,” he says. “I know nothing about dresses.”
“Well then, I should warn you, as a courtesy, that unsupervised and under pressure with forty eight hours on the clock, my track record suggests I will come back with absolutely the wrong thing, and I'll have to end up wearing my wedding dress, except that's too short and it also has a pizza stain.” I look up at him.
“So I need a witness who isn't afraid to tell me the truth, and we both know you have never once had that problem.”
It almost looks like he winces for a moment at that. Knowing how much of a lie we live.
“The pizza stain is gone. I had it dry cleaned,” he says like this is information I should have had.
“It's hanging in my closet.” (I had wondered where it went.) He looks at me like this is a totally normal thing to have done and is prepared to defend that position.
So I don't ask. (I don't know what I would do with the answer.)
“But it is too short.”
“Seeeee, good thing I have you.” And it sounds like more than I mean it to.
Or exactly as much, I’m not sure anymore.
“I do have some frame of reference,” I say, clearly not letting sleeping dogs lie.
“I once recorded a book where the FMC, Seraphina, goes to the Ember Court with the Prince of Ashbourne, who actually isn’t a prince at all, but is a secret fire wielder, and he burns her gown off while she’s standing in the middle of the dance floor. Boobs on full display.”
“The Prince of Ashbourne,” he says cooly, like he is well-versed in romantasy audiobooks.
To be fair, this is a good one (Roma called it ‘scorching’), but something tells me this isn’t his normal listening.
He just forces a smile into his mug, and polishes off the coffee while I do the same to my second bowl of cereal.
“Go get dressed,” he finally agrees.
“Now? Don’t you have work?” I ask.
“I’ll play hooky.” With that, I eagerly hop off the stool and run to get dressed, because the last thing I’m going to do is give Hudson Ellis a chance to change his mind when he just (of his own accord) said the phrase ‘play hooky.’
By the time I reemerge he has changed out of the suit he was wearing and into the dangerously casual version of himself, which should be illegal, or at minimum require some kind of advance warning system. (Not that I’d listen to it, even if it did.)
“Let’s go find you a dress,” he says, grabbing his keys from the trinket dish by the door, like it should be that simple.
It has never, not for one second, been simple. And I know, it never will be.