Chapter Six
Crashing on Ruby’s couch for three nights straight had permanently altered the construction of my spinal cord, but that still hadn’t stopped me from sleeping harder than I’d slept in months. I’d only gone outside to walk Marlon.
My eyes still crusty with sleep, I checked my phone for the time.
It was twelve thirty-four in the afternoon.
When I worked for Brody, I left my house every morning at six thirty.
I was not a late riser. And yet, over the course of the last few days, I’d discovered that the more I slept, the less time there was in a day to be awake.
The fewer hours I spent awake, the less time I had to live with the reality of whatever my life had turned into.
At the metallic sound of the key entering the front doorknob, I dropped my phone and closed my eyes again.
By this time, Ruby would have had a breakfast with friends, gone to a water ballet class, and maybe even hit up a resale boutique.
When she saw me lying here, she would definitely have opinions and I didn’t want to be awake for them.
The door opened and the key hit the counter with a clatter. Heavy footsteps dropped closer and closer and I instinctively squeezed my eyes shut before realizing I probably looked constipated and then forced my face to relax, even letting my mouth fall open into a snore for good measure.
Ruby cleared her throat.
Nope. I wasn’t falling for that trap. If she was going to lecture me, I would at least be showered and wearing a bra. So until she disappeared into her room, I’d play dead.
“Vera?” asked a deep, baffled voice. A voice much too deep to belong to Ruby or even Hollis.
I opened one single eye as I squinted up at the tall, broad figure hovering above me.
This was a dream. A depression-induced stress dream.
Against my will, I opened my other eye.
Because no way in hell was Elias Buckley standing in Ruby’s living room, holding a stack of light bulbs.
I closed my eyes again and begged myself to wake up from this dream within a dream.
“You’re not real,” I said to the dream version of Eli.
A hypnagogic hallucination or a waking dream.
Maybe with a side of sleep paralysis. Or something like that.
I’d read about this before, but never experienced it myself.
Stress could do weird things to a body, though.
“I assure you,” the Eli-shaped hallucination said, “I am real.”
I opened one eye again and then, to prove his point, he tapped his index finger to my nose.
Okay. I felt that.
“Uhhh . . .” As I sat up, my blanket fell away, and I was suddenly aware of my braless forty-year-old boobs, nipples pointing to the ground like a pair of You Are Here arrows on a shopping center map.
“Not to be a bad hostess,” I said as he leaned on the arm of the chaise longue, “but what the fuck are you doing in my grandmother’s apartment? Are you even real?”
He held up the boxes of light bulbs, and then, like I was the one out of place here, said, “Changing light bulbs. And yes, I hope that I am real.”
“Are you a maintenance man?” My head felt like one of those shape-matching kids’ toys and not a damn thing about this scene fit in the shapes of my brain.
He shook his head. “I just play one on TV.”
I blinked at him. Did Eli Buckley make a . . . joke? I recalled many things about Eli, but his humor was not among them.
In fact, the last time we saw each other was deeply unfunny.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said.
He set the boxes down and proceeded to unbutton the cuffs of his sleeves and roll them up, thick blond hair coursing over his forearms. A single vein wound along the back of one of his arms and disappeared into his shirt.
He had always been so hairy. I’d been so oddly mesmerized by that.
Hair poking out the collar of his T-shirts.
Trailing down the front of his belly. There were no men in my house growing up and something about being surrounded by so much testosterone in college left me fascinated in an anthropological sort of way.
Or maybe I was just super horny.
So much about him was the same as it was eighteen—no, nineteen—years ago, but the manicured beard on his face was a departure from the clean-shaven treasurer of Sigma Chi I remembered.
He was softer now too and had a few creases at the corners of his green eyes.
Yet he was still just as barrel-chested and capable of filling up a room without ever saying a word.
And his clothing . . . it was less frat boy with his parents’ credit card and more tailored and sleeker with a nod to Palm Springs in the 1950s.
He was . . . stylish. And thoughtfully so.
“The maintenance guy ran off with a resident’s grandson to Venezuela a few weeks ago, and we haven’t found a replacement. Ruby needed help changing out some lights. Obviously, we prefer the residents not get on ladders.”
“So you work here, then?” I asked, fidgeting with the ring on my right hand that once belonged to my mother.
He nodded, his green eyes briefly glancing down at my hands. “You could say that. I’m the head geriatric physician on staff.”
I folded my arms over my chest, tucking my hands away. Geriatric? From what I recalled, Eli had big plans of following his father’s footsteps into cardiovascular medicine. He once said that it was the type of medicine that attracted adrenaline-fueled fuckboys.
Eli had never really seemed like a fuckboy, but he was, however, annoyingly good at everything. Not only did he never seem to try, but he hardly seemed to care and I found that most frustrating of all.
And now he worked here. I knew I needed to get out of Ruby’s hair immediately, but this was definitely a reason to expedite the process.
“I guess I should ask what you’re doing here.” He cocked his head to the side, scratching his chin. “You know, residents have to get special permission for long-term guests, so if you’re crashing on Ruby’s—”
The front door swung open and Ruby stepped inside followed by Hollis.
“Dr. Buckley,” Ruby said, trying to mask her shock immediately followed by dismay at the sight of me still in the clothes I fell asleep in. “What a nice surprise!”
“I said I could change those bulbs for you,” Hollis told Ruby.
“I don’t need any of my residents needlessly climbing ladders,” Eli said. “Even you, Hollis.”
Hollis rolled her eyes.
“Well, I see you’ve met my granddaughter,” Ruby said as she dropped a few shopping bags on the kitchen table. “I see she didn’t go out of her way to dress for the occasion.”
Low blow there, Rubes.
“We are previously acquainted,” Eli said. “Isn’t that right, honey?”
My nostrils flared at the pet name. Could I at least put a bra on before shit hit the fan?
“Is that so?” Ruby said, patiently waiting for the story there.
“Honey,” Eli said again, his tone dry. “Should I tell them or would you rather?”
Well, shit. This was going to be a doozy. Might as well get it over with. Bra be damned. “Uh, Rubes. Meet Elias Buckley. My ex-husband.”
Ruby froze. She was so still that had we been on a video call, I would have told her we should hang up and try again. For the first time in my life, I had left Ruby Stein speechless. Sadly, it was due to one of the worst mistakes I’d ever made, but it was satisfying, nevertheless.
And then the silence was gone, and her eyes lit up. “A doctor!” she exclaimed. “You secretly married a doctor and I am just now finding out?”
“He wasn’t a doctor at the time,” I muttered.
Hollis grinned as she leaned against the counter. “Well, I’m glad I decided to help bring the bags inside.”
“It was . . . very brief,” I told them.
Eli backed me up with a nod.
Ruby smirked, but before she could ask another question, there was a knock at the door, which was then immediately swung open without waiting for an answer.
“There you are!” said a young girl. No, not a girl. A woman in her twenties, who felt extremely girl-ish and yet quietly intimidating, like she was cataloging every cringey thing about me. “Doc B, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
He held up the light bulbs, like they were an obvious explanation.
The girl looked to me, confused by my presence.
“This is my granddaughter,” Ruby said. “She stopped over last night on her way through to . . . Where is it you were going?”
“Yeah,” Eli chimed in unhelpfully. “Where is it that you said you were heading, Vera?”
I saw what was happening here. Ruby wanted me out, and Eli was a little too entertained by the thought of me getting caught breaking a rule.
I stood and let my blanket drop from my lap. “Hi, I’m Vera. I was visiting, but I stayed for a little longer than expected and Eli here was just telling me about the visitor policy, so—”
The woman held her hand up. “Morgan,” she said curtly. “Residential director.” She turned to Eli. “Josephine quit.”
“What?” he asked. “How could she quit? She hadn’t even started.”
Morgan shook her head. “She quit. She called and said she couldn’t leave behind her job on the high seas, so now I’m down a maintenance tech and an activities coordinator.”
“We’ve been down an activities coordinator for a while,” Eli reminded her.
Behind Morgan, Ruby rolled her eyes, which I took to mean she had thoughts on the activities calendar here at Starlight Palms.
“The people are revolting, Eli—I mean, Dr. Buckley.”
“Morgan, I’ve told you several times. You can call me Eli.”
She shook her head. “It’s too weird. You’re old. Basically old enough to be my dad.”
“Maybe if I had been a teenage father,” he said.
But Morgan had already moved on. “Someone pinned an activities calendar to my door with the words do better written across it.”
“It is all rather boring,” Ruby muttered.
“My numbers for knitting circle this morning were negative three residents,” Morgan said.
“Negative three?” I asked. It wasn’t really my place, but I had to know how that was mathematically sound. “How is that even possible?”
“Three people showed, but when they found out I didn’t have a pattern for beer coozies they left,” she explained.