Chapter Forty-Six
The next morning, the only acknowledgment I received from Ruby was a barely audible hello.
Right before we boarded, Hollis patted my shoulder and said, “Give her time. She’s got a short fuse, but that means she burns out just as fast as she catches.”
Eli and I weren’t as forthright with our affections in front of Ruby and Hollis, but it was hard not to chalk that up to the thick tension between me and my grandmother.
When we landed, Ruby and Hollis took a cab back to Starlight Palms while Eli and I drove home in his car, which he’d parked at the airport. The moment the doors sealed us shut inside, I flung myself against the passenger seat and sighed.
Eli squeezed my thigh before reversing out of the parking space. “You survived being in a flying can in the sky with Ruby. Congratulations.”
“I deserve a reward,” I said with a pout.
“How about a slumber party?” he asked.
“Can we do face masks?”
“Only if we can get into a sexy pillow fight first.”
“Deal,” I said.
As we drove home, Eli kept his hand on my upper thigh, straying only when he needed two hands on the wheel.
The higher his fingers inched, the more restless I became. The moment he parked the car in front of our apartment, I nearly threw my body over the console at him until he said, “Is someone at our door?”
I leaned forward, squinting at the tall, slim figure with a blunt shoulder-length bob. “Oh my god . . .”
Eli was saying something, but I was already out of the car and running for the door. “Tess! What are you doing here?”
My best friend spun around, her eyes puffy and her cheeks red. The moment she saw me, she started sobbing for what was definitely not the first time today.
Before I asked a single question, including Who the fuck made you cry? I enveloped her in a hug. The one and only time I’d ever seen Tess cry was when we saw The Notebook in theaters after chugging a bottle of Yellow Tail in the parking lot, so this felt monumental.
Speaking of intoxication . . . “Tess, you smell like a bottle of scotch. Did you drive all the way out here before or after the scotch?”
She sniffled and shook her head. “I took an Uber. It was four hundred dollars.” She half hiccupped, half sobbed. “Before tip. He let me drink in the back seat and he stopped at In-N-Out.”
“I hope you gave him a great rating.”
She nodded. “He even let me listen to”—she sniffed—“the Fleetwood Mac ‘Silver Springs’ live recording from nineteen ninety-seveeeeeeeeen on repeat.”
I cupped her face in my hands. “Okay, okay, you’re all right. Let’s get you inside.”
Behind me, Eli cleared his throat. “Hey, Tess.”
She frowned at him. “Ugh. You’re even hotter than you used to be.” And then she turned to me, stabbing a finger at Eli. “That’s not fair.”
Eli blushed a little, running a hand up the back of his neck.
“I know,” I said, and then gave him a meaningful look that I hoped he understood to mean: Please don’t get handsy in front of my distraught best friend before I have the chance to tell her that we sort of hooked up . . . several times in the last forty-eight hours.
Eli nodded once and then stepped around us to unlock the door.
Tess stumbled inside and announced, “I need to pee.”
I pointed her to the bathroom and then took my bag from Eli.
“I guess our slumber party is going to be postponed,” he said, his hand ghosting down my backside.
“Consider it a rain delay.”
Once Tess returned from the bathroom, I sat her on the couch with a huge glass of water while Eli got to work on making her an egg and cheese sandwich, which was about the current sum of the refrigerator’s contents.
“Okay, now tell me what happened.”
Tess laid her head in my lap and guided my hand to play with her hair. “The shower fixtures I picked out are on back order.”
Eli either coughed or quietly snorted but had the good sense not to say anything.
“Okay . . . maybe I could help you pick out new fixtures?”
She shook her head and then turned on her side, so her body was curled into the back of the couch and she could properly cry into my shirt.
“No, it’s not the fixtures. That was just the tipping point.
It’s working seventy hours a week and eating a cup of microwaveable mac and cheese even though Max always leaves me a plate of homemade food in the refrigerator. ”
“But Max is a great cook.”
“I just . . . got married when I was twenty-four and I woke up one day and realized that I am living the life that twenty-four-year-old me chose and is that fair to me now? And I hate that when I get home at night, I have to eat dinner alone. It makes me sad when I see the artwork the kids bring home but they aren’t awake to tell me about it and then .
. .” She paused for a moment. “Oh god, does that make me sentimental?”
I shook my head as I gathered part of her hair in a loose braid. “No, just human, I think.”
“And then we’re still down to one shower and there’s only one working outlet in our bedroom right now, so I’m always showing up to work with a dead phone.
And I forgot Violet’s science fair last week and when I said I was sorry, she said, ‘I’m not mad.
I’m just disappointed.’ Vera! I’m the mom. That’s my line!”
Eli set the plate with the sandwich down on the coffee table with a quiet “Oof.”
Tess rolled over onto her other side, her pants twisting around her ankles. “But I’ll tell you what! Twenty-four-year-old Tess didn’t know she was signing up to be a bad mom.” She gestured to Eli. “Even he thinks I’m a bad parent.”
Eli shook his head. “Not judging. Just relating, I swear. When Brigid was in preschool, I was doing a rainy day pickup where they load your kid in the car for you. It took me two blocks before I realized they’d accidentally given me Javier, one of Brigid’s classmates.”
Tess sniffed. “Okay, that is pretty awful.”
“Thank you?” Eli questioned.
I mouthed a silent thanks before resuming my best friend duties. “Last year, I left Marlon at the dog park,” I admitted in a rush of shame. “I took his leash and just walked right out. I made it all the way home and poured his dry food in his bowl before it dawned on me.”
Tess flopped back over and looked up at me. “Was he traumatized forever?”
I shook my head. “When I showed up, he was rolling in the grass, nipping at another dog’s back paws. But I did buy him those little doggy ice-cream cones to assuage my guilt.”
“Where is that little shit?” she asked.
“At the boarders’. We just got back into town.”
My best friend narrowed her eyes at me. “We?”
“Ruby was receiving a lifetime achievement award at a horror convention in New Orleans.”
“Well, that explains why you were there, but what’s his deal?” She hiked a thumb over at Eli, who was leaning up against the TV cabinet now with his arms and ankles crossed.
“I went as Ruby’s physician,” Eli said evenly.
Tess looked from me to Eli and then back again before sitting up and reaching for her sandwich suspiciously.
She pulled the plate to her chest and sat in the corner of the couch as she continued to eye us, looking more like Gollum and his precious than a ferocious entertainment lawyer who was more trusted by her clients than their favorite plastic surgeons.
“Right,” Eli said. “I’ll be in my room if either of you need me.”
His door wasn’t even shut before Tess pointed at me, her mouth stuffed with the egg and cheese sandwich. “You’re fucking the good doctor!”
I waved her off but couldn’t hide the searing blush on my cheeks. I supposed if there was anyone who I could tell the messy, complicated truth to, it was Tess. “I guess you wouldn’t believe me if I told you Ruby has Eli on call like she’s Elvis or something.”
“How was it?” she asked dreamily. “Our walls are too thin to have the kind of sex I need to have right now. I just want someone to pull my hair. Did he pull your hair?”
I frowned at her and then stuffed a pillow in my face. “It was . . . really hot,” I said into the fabric. “But it’s so new too. Casual. No hair pulling yet, but he is very adept at locating the clitoris.”
“He is a doctor. Please do explain how hooking up with your ex-husband is casual.”
“He was my husband for less than twenty-four hours.”
Her empty plate clattered as she placed it on the coffee table and then slumped down into the sofa with her eyes closed and her arms flung in the air. “Time doesn’t matter in the eyes of God, Vera!”
“You’re a reformed Catholic who doesn’t believe in God,” I reminded her.
She waved me off. “Old habits and et cetera.”
After divulging a few more tipping points from the last few weeks, Tess dozed for the rest of the afternoon.
I knew things at home were tense for her, but her life had always seemed so .
. . full to me. Success, a solid marriage, good kids.
On paper, she had it all. And yet, she still felt trapped by decisions made when we were barely adults.
I let Tess epic cry and sleep off the scotch while I unpacked and did laundry. Eli did the same, leaving kisses on my shoulders or brushing fingers along my hips every time he walked past me. It was decidedly . . . domestic.
When he left to see Brigid and pick up some groceries, Tess woke up groaning and in need of a shower.
She dug into the giant Birkin her boss bought her for Christmas a few years ago and sighed with relief when she came up with a tan stitch of fabric.
“Spare underwear. I have never regretted having spare underwear,” she said. “Purse underwear will never let you down.”
I got her set up in the shower and then I settled onto the couch with the notes and pages I’d compiled on the project that might someday be a screenplay, and gave them a thorough read. Maybe it was the high of my trip to New Orleans, but what I had here on the page didn’t feel so . . . bleak.