Chapter Forty
We walked a little farther down until we stumbled upon a bright building with a canopy that read Hotel Monteleone.
The lobby was brimming with people in various stages of their night. Wedding rehearsal parties saying good night before the big day. Freshly minted twenty-one-year-olds who went too hard too soon. Hip travelers on their way out of the Quarter to find more authentic local experiences.
We turned the corner into the bar, and then I stopped. The view was absolute brain candy, but the most surprising thing of all was— “Is that bar moving?”
Eli doubled back, realizing he’d left me a few steps behind. “Welcome to the Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar. It rotates every fifteen minutes or so.”
In a cheeky nod, the back of each bar seat was embroidered with an exotic animal you might find on a carousel ride.
Long fingers threaded through my own. “Come on. That couple over there is about to get up.”
While I always felt like I had to yield the right of way in a busy place because I was a bigger person, Eli used his broad shoulders and height to part the crowd.
He gave a nod to the man who was helping the woman beside him up from her seat. “They’re all yours,” the man said.
Eli stepped up and took a card out of his wallet for the bartender.
“I can get—”
“No protesting,” Eli said. “You don’t cry on my shoulder and then buy your own drink. It’s a universal law.”
The bartender, an older man who looked like he could play a very convincing Santa Claus at a rich-people mall, took Eli’s card. “What can I get you two?”
“I’ll have a Sazerac,” Eli told him.
“A mint julep, please,” I said.
The bartender nodded and then held up Eli’s card. “Leave it open or closed?”
“Leave it open for now.” Eli rested his elbows on the bar top, his hands clasped.
I stared at the vein traveling up his forearm for a moment too long before I realized he was talking to me.
“I’m sorry. What was that?”
“I was just saying that I can take Ruby around to all her events tomorrow. You should stay back and enjoy the hotel.”
“We’ll see. This isn’t really new territory for us.” I hadn’t even considered tomorrow. Or even the next few hours. I’d have to go back to the room eventually and see her, but that was a Future Vera problem. “This place is . . . great . . . ” I said over the swelling music.
“Except?”
“Please don’t judge me.”
“Judgment-free zone,” he said, although I could barely hear him.
“I hate live music. And I don’t get people who like it.”
He snorted. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re in the wrong city.”
“I don’t know what to tell you! If I want to hear music, I’ll go to a concert. But I don’t want to stumble upon it when I’m just trying to have a conversation with someone.”
“So unexpected live music?”
“Yes. Red flag.”
“What are your other red flags?”
I leaned in closer to him as the music started up again so he could hear me. “Um . . . grapefruits.”
He studied me with bemused confusion.
“But just actual grapefruits. Not grapefruit-flavored things.”
“That hardly seems fair to grapefruits.”
“Do you work for Big Grapefruit? I’m pretty sure grapefruits are doing fine without my support. And the aftertaste is . . . blech!” Just the thought made me gag. “What are your red flags?”
“The Rainbow Bridge.”
“The Rainbow Bridge? As in when a pet dies, they cross the Rainbow Bridge?”
“Yes!” he said with conviction. “My cat of twelve years died last year—”
“I never took you for a pet person.”
“I’m not a barbarian, Vera.”
“I guess I just thought you would have an exotic fish tank in your fancy cardiology practice and that would be enough animal companionship for you. But I’m sorry. I derailed you. Your cat . . .”
“Right. So Bear—”
“Your cat was named Bear?” That was aggressively cute.
His brows arched in mock annoyance.
“No more interruptions!” I promised.
“Okay, so when Bear died, the vet’s office made this huge deal of him crossing this supposed Rainbow Bridge and then they even had a Rainbow Bridge out front that crossed over the saddest pond I’d ever seen. When you pick up your pet’s ashes, you’re supposed to walk over the bridge with them.”
“Well, that’s cheesy, but it could be sort of comforting for some people, right?”
“It was patronizing.”
I nodded along. “I am outraged on your behalf.”
“Losing Bear wasn’t easy, okay? I’d gotten him for Brigid, but then it turned out that her mom developed a late-in-life allergy to cats, so Bear came to live with me and . . . Don’t laugh . . .”
“I will do my best.”
“My house was henceforth called the ‘catchelor pad.’”
My eyes burned at how goddamn sweet that was. “That is the single greatest thing I’ve ever heard.” I held up my drink. “To Bear!”
Eli clinked his glass against mine and took a long sip.
“So how did Bear get his name?”
“Well, would you believe me if I said it was a family name?”
I laughed and motioned for him to continue.
“My first pet was a hamster. I was four. I named her Bear. I don’t know why. But I was distraught when she ran away, and then we got a goldfish.”
I held up a hand. “Your hamster ran away?”
“She was in her little hamster ball and I guess my dad left the garage door open one day. We never saw her again.”
“That’s . . . traumatic.”
“Exactly. My peanut-size brain thought that maybe I wouldn’t miss Bear the hamster so much if I named the new fish Bear as well. And then it stuck. Bear the corgi, Bear the gecko, Bear the betta fish.”
“So the child who was devastated by loss decided to go into a profession that forced him to regularly confront it? That feels masochistic.”
He waved me off. “That’s human loss. Much different. Now, if I were a veterinarian, that would be masochism.”
We finished our drinks and Eli closed out his tab to rescue me from the live music that only seemed to be growing in volume.
“So that’s it?” I asked as we stepped back outside. It had cooled down a little, but the damp humidity still clung to our skin. “Anything besides the Rainbow Bridge?”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty.” He held out his hand and began to count out his red flags on his fingers. “Finance bros, people who say Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie, and my uncle Barry. It’s a long saying but trust me. The guy is such a sketchy doctor that someone made a podcast about him.”
I nodded with conviction. “Uncle Barry can go fuck himself.”
“Never let anyone say you aren’t loyal, Vera.”
As we crossed the street to continue deeper into the Quarter, stumbling partygoers spilled out from Bourbon Street.
We walked down to St. Louis Cathedral and Eli led me to Royal Street. He walked behind me with his hands on my shoulders as he turned me to face the shadow of the Jesus statue with outstretched arms projected onto the church.
“You can’t go to New Orleans without seeing Touchdown Jesus,” he said solemnly.
After a stroll around Jackson Square, we got a bag of beignets to go and took them back to the square, where we settled onto a bench, tucked away under a giant tree covered in Spanish moss.
We dug into the beignets and were covered in powdered sugar in a matter of seconds.
A guttural moan came out of my body as I took my first bite.
Eli’s eyes briefly widened at the sound before he cleared his throat and looked away.
“Okay,” I said, trying to recover from my absolutely pornographic response to powdered sugar–covered deep-fried balls of dough. “I would sit through hours of unexpected live music for these.”
He made a pleased noise. “That good?”
“So good.”
We ate the rest in silence and watched people and snippets of their lives pass us by.
As I finished the last of my beignet, a joint bachelor-bachelorette party meandered through the square with the bride and groom taking up the rear as they engaged in a drunken shouting match loud enough for everyone in a two-block radius to hear.
It was hard to follow their inebriated argument, but it seemed that the groom didn’t think the bride was ready and she was very upset about something that had happened on a swamp tour earlier that day.
“Do you ever wonder,” Eli said softly, “what would have happened if we’d woken up in Vegas and just . . . stayed married?”
I looked at him, but it was too dark to fully read his expression and gauge how he might answer that question himself. Not that Eli was ever an easy read.
“Sometimes,” I whispered. I did think about it, especially that first year or two after he’d disappeared.
“I think about it,” he said. “A lot.”
I wanted him to give me more. To say the vulnerable things first.
“Do you still have the ring?” he asked.
I nodded. “I do.” I’d always liked the ring.
“I’d wear it for months at a time, take it off, and then see it sitting in my little jewelry dish.
I don’t wear much jewelry, ya know, but I would spin it around my finger and fidget with it.
In waiting rooms. During phone calls. God, even when I waited with my mom’s body for the paramedics to come. It was comforting.”
He paused for a moment so long that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. “I’m glad the ring was there for you even if I never was. I haven’t seen you wear it, so I wasn’t sure.”
“I didn’t want you to think I’d been holding on to it in the name of something that never really was.”
“What if I was holding on?”
My breath caught. “What if?” I asked, because I couldn’t bring myself to answer his questions before he did. I couldn’t let myself be the one who put themselves out there only to be rejected or, even worse, shoved into the dark corners of his life like I had been with Brody.
The wedding party disappeared into a souvenir shop and I groaned, holding my hand up. “I hate having sticky fingers.”
Without a word, Eli took my hand, his thumb rubbing a circle into my palm. Then he pressed each of my fingers to his lips, sucking them clean one by one. My heart practically crashed into the ladder of my ribs. His warm tongue sent tendrils of heat through my arm and up to my neck.
“That’s one way to clean them,” I said quietly, my voice trembling.
Eli leaned his head down to me, his pointer finger hooked under my chin as he tilted my head up to meet him.
And then I yawned.
I ruined the fucking moment with a tear-inducing yawn.
With a sigh that turned into a chuckle, he stood up and held a hand out for me. “Let’s get a cab before you turn into a pumpkin.”
I yawned again as he pulled me to my feet. I could kick myself. But I really was exhausted, and we had definitely been heading toward dangerous territory.
Eli wrapped an arm around my shoulder and tossed our trash in a wastebasket as we walked down to the street.
I didn’t know exactly what it was he had been planning on doing after his finger grazed my chin, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was falling asleep just as the movie was getting good.