Singe (19 page)

There’s a long, breathing silence.

“Addie.” Eli shakes his head and yanks his zipper up, then sits down on the edge of the coffee table without bothering with his belt. “The part where I get bored? That what you think of me? Seriously?” Now his face is just sad. His hands hang loose and knobby between his knees, clasped together. He looks like a kid getting ready to pray before the big game.

Addie presses her palms into her eyes until everything is bursts of pink stars. “You were married a long time, you’ve got stuff to get out of your system,” she tells the inside of her eyelids. “I know about you.”

Eli sighs. “You don’t, actually,” he says. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Addie takes her palms away. The heels of her hands are damp. “What?” Eli is gray and fuzzed around the edges, black spots swirling across his face. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Eli shrugs. “What it sounds like. You literally don’t know a single thing about me, Addie.
Or
about my divorce, quite frankly. You’ve never asked. And I get it, you want this to be casual, but.” He looks away, curving his palms around his knees. “I thought the fact that I asked to meet your family made it pretty clear I didn’t.”

Addie feels like the thread of this conversation ran away from her. “But I’ve met your wife,” she says, shoving at the sheets. Suddenly she’s hot all over. “Back at last year’s barbecue. And your dog. It’s not like I’ve never—” She stops talking. “Your dog. Your dog that got hit by that car.”

“Yeah,” Eli says. “She’s doing fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

Oh
God
, that makes Addie feel like the smallest person in the world. And it’s not even like he’s wrong. Seriously, when did she become the kind of person who didn’t ask follow up questions about somebody’s hurt
dog
? What kind of jerk
is
she? That’s not how Addie was raised. It’s not. It’s like she was so busy thinking Eli was indecent or something, that she forgot to be decent herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, running her thumbnail along the fraying edge of the top sheet. “Of course I want to hear about your dog. You’re right, that was shitty. You’re right.”

“S’fine.” Eli shakes his head. “It’s not about my dog.”

“It kind of is though.” Addie shrugs, feeling caught out and helpless. She thought the best defense was a good offense, like in basketball or firefighting. Now she just feels dumb. “You don’t have to go, I’m sorry. I woke up and freaked out, I don’t know.”

“’Cause of last night?” Eli lifts his head to look at her, his face all worried. “I mean, did you not want to—?”

“No, I
did
,” Addie insists—and it’s true, she was crazy for him, his mouth and his fingers and the vibration of it buzzing through her body. She would have let him do whatever he’d liked. “It’s just, like—” Ugh, this is embarrassing, this is worse than ninth-grade abstinence-only health class with Sister Beata. “What I told you, it’s like—” she breaks off, screwing her face up in disgust. “Forget it.”

“
Addie
.” Eli leans off the coffee table and cups her shoulders, her face. “I know, okay? I get it. But it’s not like—I want to
date
you, princess. That’s what I’m saying. I want you to feel like you can tell me that kind of stuff. Just you, nobody else.”

“Even though I’m—” Addie stops herself. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I never should have told you. This is stupid. I’m being stupid.” She concentrates hard on tracing the edge of the sheet. “Okay. I freaked out, and you want to date me, is that what we’re saying here?”

There’s a silence. When she looks up, Eli’s eyebrows are inching toward his hairline. “Addie,” he says, eyes dead on hers. “You get that that’s one of the hottest things anyone’s ever told me, right?”

Well. Addie feels herself blush. “Yeah, I can see how that might be nice for you to hear.” She rubs at the back of her neck, ducking her head. Chances a glance under her eyelashes. Eli’s face is schoolboy-sincere, like any secret Addie told him would scrawl across it like the pages in a book. “It’s true, you know,” she tells him in an undertone.

“Yeah?” Suddenly the both of them are whispering. “Just me?”

The pit of Addie’s stomach is very, very warm. “Uh-huh,” she says. “Just you, nobody else.”

So. That’s the end of that argument, pretty much.

Eventually Eli gets back on the futon and convinces Addie to lie back down too. They hang out there while the sun rises out the east-facing windows of her artificially chilly apartment, gray and then pink and then finally the bright orange ball of it climbing over the rooftops of the squat apartment buildings across the street. Eli keeps his hands in her hair. He likes it, he realizes, the idea of having a girlfriend. Or, not the idea of having a girlfriend—the idea of it being
her
.

“Jim O’Neill’s gonna be jealous,” Addie observes, tracing patterns on Eli’s stomach and up over the thicker scar tissue on his chest, where the skin is raised and shiny. He wonders if she’s going to press him on where they came from, now that they’re sharing personal information. He wonders if he wants her to. “If I’m your only girl.”

Eli snorts, turning his head and pressing a kiss against her jawline. “Shut up.”

Over coffee he tells her about Hester and some about Chelsea, the highlights. She can be a good listener, when she wants. “Your parents still in New Hampshire?” she asks him, bare feet propped in his lap at her tiny kitchen table. The robe is slipping off one olive shoulder. Addie doesn’t bother to adjust.

“Nah,” Eli says, rubbing at a rough patch on her heel. The turnout boots give her blisters in the same places as him. “My mom moved to Tucson after I left for college, wanted somewhere warm. My dad died when I was a kid.”

Addie’s eyebrows only jump for a second. “Oof,” she says, smoothing out her face behind her coffee cup. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

People don’t ever ask the obvious question, Eli’s noticed. He used to worry like all hell about that when he was younger, but it turns out everyone just fills in the blank with cancer or a heart attack and moves on. “Was a long time ago,” he promises Addie, pinching a toe. “But yeah, I’ve got no family there anymore.” Unless you count graves. Eli always feels bad about that, how there’s no one left to lay flowers. In a week, it’ll be the anniversary of the fire. Eli always counts from that night, not the blue, surreal morning weeks later, when a nurse called them all into the hospital room to say goodbye to his brother’s body on a ventilator. Eli remembers that morning in brief flashes, the dotted hospital curtains, the beeping machines, his spaceman pajamas. The bottoms were soaked with piss because he’d wet the bed and there hadn’t been time to change them. What he remembers most is refusing to say goodbye. Will was already gone.

“And you haven’t been back?” Addie asks, burrowing her feet farther into his lap. Her eyebrows are drawn together in a dark line, sweetly serious. “Not since you moved?”

Eli knows she’s making a point to herself, but that doesn’t stop the attention from being flattering. “Nope,” he says, grabbing her ankle before she can do any serious damage to the family jewels. “Not since.”

He
almost
wants to tell her. Not the whole story, of course, just the bare bones facts, the fire and Will and his dad in the ground less than a month apart, the Grant family cut in half. But Addie’s squished bright kitchen doesn’t really feel like the place. Not even for the sanitized version.

He steers the conversation back toward her family instead, the split with Jenn and her sister-in-law’s pregnancy (
they’re going with Quentin, Eli, which is like, the single worst saint name after Basil
), how many cousins she actually has (twenty-six). Eli sips his coffee and listens. He wants to know about it, all the dumb intricacies of her family. He’s been doing the where-you-from, what’s-your-job, how’s-your-family first date shtick for so often these past few months, he thought he was sick of it. Turns out he was just sick of hearing it from people who weren’t Addie.

Chelsea calls on the way home with a Hester update, something she’s been doing more and more the closer it gets to the anniversary of the fire. Eli knows he’s being checked up on, the same overactive guilty conscience that drove her to get him a Christmas present after she filed for divorce, but he doesn’t call her on it. For the past nine years, Chelsea was the one sitting up with him on the anniversary of Will’s death, dragging him out of bars and once, in college, out of a bar fight. He gives her the update on Parker’s twins, tells her about the company barbecue coming up this Saturday evening. He doesn’t mention the arsons, how everybody at the house is on edge.

He doesn’t mention Addie either.

“You wanna come by and see her?” Chelsea asks him as they’re saying goodbye at the end of the conversation, the slight upward curve in her voice that she gets when she broaches something she’s been thinking about for a while and wants to make it sound casual. “Take her for a walk or something? The vet says she should be up and around by the end of the week.” A beat. “Dave’s got a conference in Boston, so he wouldn’t be in your face or anything.”

Eli hesitates. On one hand, hanging out with his ex-wife in his old house while his replacement is out of town sounds like exactly the kind of thing the shady guy Addie thinks he is might do. On the other hand, yeah, he would really like to play fetch with his gimpy dog for half an hour. “Yeah, maybe,” he hedges, keying himself into his cool, empty apartment. It always feels extra anonymous after he’s spent the night at Addie’s place. “I’ll let you know.” This coming weekend is the anniversary of the fire. Seeing Hester would help take the edge off, he bets.

At work the next day, they free a toddler’s hand from a bathroom faucet and get four people out of a broken elevator at Fairview Hospital. They answer a call at a Chinese restaurant that turns out to be a false alarm, trek back to the house jazzed up and restless. Eli’s down on the chore wheel for laundry, so he spends the afternoon stripping then re-making the beds in the bunkroom, hospital corners on each and every one. His hands smell like Eleven’s brand of fabric softener by the end, powder fresh.

“What would you do if I jumped on this?” Addie calls. Eli looks up and finds her dripping in the doorway beside the first set of beds, boots mucking up the linoleum. “It’s raining,” she supplies unnecessarily, when Eli gives her a slow once over. “Cap said to stop screwing around with the ladders before we got electrocuted. Thought I’d come in and see what the ladies are doing.” After a second, a grin splits her face open.

She never used to seek him out at work. “Brat,” Eli tells her. He sounds stupidly pleased. He wants to put both hands on her cheeks and feel that smile, kiss her, tell everyone he sees that they’re dating. Fuck, but she’s a pretty girl.

The Fourth of July barbecue this weekend is at the captain’s house, annual tradition. Addie agrees to be Eli’s date, with a couple caveats—
separate cars, separate food dishes, and you can’t hold my hand or talk to me too much
—and he rounds out the week feeling pretty good about himself. He could almost forget about the arsons and his brother, that smoked out shed from all those years ago.

Of course, forgetting would be easier if everyone else weren’t so obsessed with the arsonist. “I hear they’re talking serial now,” Parker says over brews on Wednesday. “On account of how there’s no connection between the families. Like, the guy is just doing it for kicks.” Eli grunts noncommittally, sucking on his Bud.

Thursday morning, he texts Chelsea to ask if he can swing by Saturday and borrow Hester for the whole day. It feels safer than a visit, coffee and breakfast with his ex in their old kitchen. He has an idea about bringing Hester to the potluck if she’s strong enough, letting her bask in the attention. Hester loves people with the whole of her dumb, doggy heart.

“I like that plan,” Addie says, when he mentions it. She’s sitting on his bed in her panties and a tank top, the ribs stretched across her chest in a way that’s working for Eli just fine. He runs the edge of his nail over her nipple for the pleasure of watching it pucker up underneath the cotton. Addie swats his hand away playfully. “You met my family. Seems fair I get to know your dog.”

Eli smiles.

What he doesn’t mention: that Saturday is the anniversary of the fire, eighteen years to the day, he and Will in the old shack celebrating their own private Fourth of July. That he’s never spent the day sober since he hit puberty.

Saturday morning dawns bright and hot, something optimistic about the sky. Eli downs three cups of coffee and tells himself this year he’s going to break the streak, a day with his dog and his new girlfriend and his buddies. That this year he’ll stay calm.

When he goes by the old house on Saturday to pick Hester up though, there’s more waiting for him than just the leash and pink blanket. “So, uh,” Chelsea says, both hands on a battered old shoebox sitting atop the kitchen island, the big kind meant to hold men’s boots. Right away Eli knows what it is and doesn’t want to. “I was cleaning out the attic the other day, making room for some of—” she breaks off, shaking her head. “Well, I was cleaning out the attic, and I think this stuff is—”

“Yeah.” Eli pulls it toward him without taking the lid off. Inside he can picture the handful of family photos left over from his childhood, a Red Sox hat that belonged to his big brother. The prayer card from his father’s funeral—closed casket, quick, just him and his mom at the graveside. It’s possible Eli left the box on purpose, when he moved out. “It’s mine.”