Singe (21 page)

“’Cause of Jenn, you mean?” Eli asks, nudging the top of his head at her hand so she’ll keep scratching. His brain aches, just a little—he had three beers while they were watching TV last night, or maybe it was four. He’s been to the liquor store twice this week already to restock. “Are none of them coming to the wedding?”

Addie huffs, fingers traveling down to press against the base of his skull. “Not a one. It’s effing embarrassing.” She’s petting him the way she would Chicken Cat, firm, deep scritches. Eli tries not to hum. “Maybe my brother would if I asked him, I don’t know. No one talks about it.”

“What about your dad?” Eli traces the tuck of skin where her thigh becomes her ass, turning his head to get a better look at her. “Would he come?”

Addie shrugs, her chest rising and falling. Everything about her body is relaxed right now, delightfully wobbly. It makes Eli want to bite. “Who knows?” she says. “When Jenn first got kicked out he didn’t say a word. Dunno why he would make a gesture now.”

Eli thinks of everything he knows about David Manzella, all the speeches and press conferences he’d watched the man give over the years, the cool, pristine peak of his Class A cap behind the podium. Thinks of his firm handshake at the fairground. Eli’s own father was a quiet, round man who worked in engineering and was always home in time for dinner. “You could ask him,” Eli suggests, rubbing Addie’s thigh. “Your dad.”

“You think?” Addie peers down at him, like maybe the thought actually hadn’t occurred to her before now. She’s funny, this girl, the things she’s ballsy about and the things she isn’t. He cares about her way, way more than he ever thought he would. “Just like, flat out ask him why he’s not coming and tell him I need him to?”

“I mean, you know him better than I do,” Eli says, the fingers on her thigh creeping higher, just barely touching the line of hair. Addie shifts her hips to give him room. “But yeah, if it’s important to you, if you really want something, you gotta ask for it. Even if you feel like you shouldn’t have to, you gotta ask.”

“You gotta, huh?” That makes her smile, tugging at his shoulders until he crawls up the bed so they’re face to face, one of his legs slung over the hourglass curve of her hips. “You got something you wanna ask for right now?”

“Maybe.” Eli grins down at her, slow and easy. Ducks his head to suck the vellum-soft skin of the pulse point on her neck. “Thinking about it.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” she murmurs afterwards, breathless and flushed. Eli loves getting her off like he likes to breathe.

“I have my moments,” he says.

He bums around his apartment for a while after she leaves, cleaning up empties and making a half-assed grocery list. It’s been a while since he went shopping for something that wasn’t booze. The whole place smells like sex, thick and heavy, so Eli opens the safety windows as far as they’ll go and lets the sun bake down on the carpet. It doesn’t help much.

At noon, he unloads three bags of randomly selected produce and deli meats from the Outback and makes himself a sandwich. The tap water runs warm as blood for a full minute so he grabs a beer out of the fridge instead, the bottle cool and beetle-shiny. After that one, he grabs another. He owes his mother a call but it feels too close after the anniversary of the fire, too pointed. It’s that fuzzy, liminal period between the anniversary of Will’s death and the anniversary of his father’s, the part of July that drags out slow and horrible each year. Eli usually drinks to make the time go faster, throws himself into work. Chelsea would always tell him when he needed to cut it out.

Now, though—

Around five he gets a text from Addie,
getting ready for dinner, gonna do it
. Eli smiles at his phone. Then he opens the fridge to get stuff for a sandwich, grabs another beer while he’s in there. Flicks on the TV.

Addie means to corner her dad outside on the patio first thing, before she loses her nerve, but she gets sidetracked first by her mom, who wants to show off the haul she got this afternoon at Joann’s Fabrics to make a triangle quilt for the baby, bright swaths of cotton printed with monkeys and friendly alligators and ducks, and then by Danielle and Kristine, who need an argument settled about the sexy vs. sluttiness of tongue rings. “Irrelevant,” Addie concedes, “since the second your mother noticed, neither one of you would
have
a tongue anymore.” Jenn’s sisters scowl at her humorlessly, two identical teenage frowns.

When she finally gets out back her dad’s got steaks on the grill—grilling is the exception to the
women-do-the-cooking
rule in the Manzella house—and a can of ginger ale in one hand, his uniform of khakis and a starchy polo shirt the same as always. Addie takes a deep breath. “Hey, Dad.” He made it sound so easy, Eli.
If you want something, ask for it.
And Addie’s good at that, usually. Just not always with her father. For a second she wishes that Eli was here, bizarrely, to squeeze her ass obnoxiously and remind her to be brave. She’s in way too deep with him, she knows, but she wishes it anyway. Wishes she would have invited him along.

David nods. “Hi, Adelaide.” He’s rotating the steaks forty-five degrees one by one, methodically burning in the perfect grill marks that have graced every piece of barbecue Addie’s eaten since she was a child. He doesn’t do things by halves, her father. “How’s it looking in there?”

He means,
Are the womenfolk behaving?
As if Addie herself is separate and special. It makes her feel guilty and pleased in equal amounts. “Fine,” she says. “Mom’s in quilt mode, Paulina keeps taking her tights off and putting them on Dante’s head. Marina’s worried he’s going to suffocate. Look, Dad—” She fishes a can of fizzy lemonade out of the cooler they keep back here, fiddling nervously with the tab. “Can I talk to you about something?”

David pokes gently at one of the steaks, unperturbed. “Of course.”

Addie takes a breath. “It’s about Jenn,” she says in a rush. “Her wedding, actually. It’s in August, I know you guys got the invitation, but Grandma won’t come, so Aunt Marianne says she isn’t gonna come, and…I think that’s really shitty,” Addie finishes lamely. She takes a too-fast swig of lemonade and gets bubbles in her nose. Her hands are shaking.

“‘Really shitty’, Adelaide?” David asks mildly, sipping his ginger ale. And
that—

“Yes!” Addie explodes. “
Really
shitty. Fucking horrible. Reprehensible, terrible, dirtbag parenting.” Manzellas don’t swear. Addie’s grandmother used to make David and his sisters stand at the sink with soap in their mouths, Addie’s heard the story a million times. “It’s embarrassing,” she hisses. “For our whole family, it is embarrassing.”

Her father’s expression darkens. “First of all,” he says, “remember who you’re talking to, please. I didn’t tolerate that kind of language in my firehouse, and I’m certainly not about to tolerate it from my daughter.”

“It’s not
about
my language, Dad,” Addie protests, her voice rising dangerously before she can check herself. Histrionics have never, ever worked with her father—not when she was eleven and wanted to go to the Lee Outlets unchaperoned with her girlfriends, not when she was sixteen and wanted a later curfew. And not now. “It’s about right and wrong.”

That’s the wrong way to play it too. “I don’t need a lecture from you about right and wrong,” David tells her, forking the steaks off the grill. “Not about this family, and especially not considering you and I both know full well you’re seeing Eli Grant in flagrant disregard of professional regulations.”

Which—Jesus, how long has he been waiting to hurl that one out? Addie feels her face heat up. “That has absolutely
nothing
to do with our family,” she insists anyway, throwing caution to the wind. She and her father have been on the same team since she started candidate training. It feels both good and bad to burn that down. “It has nothing to do with Jenn. And you know it.”

David sighs, and for a second Addie thinks maybe he does know it. “Adelaide, your grandmother is eighty-seven years old, all right? And I’ll remind you what the Church says about—”

“Oh my God, please don’t talk to me about the Church right now,” Addie tells him. “It’s
Jenn
, Dad. It’s Jenn, and she’s getting married to somebody really cool and great who she loves, and just.” Addie shakes her head, wanting so badly not to cry. “
You’re
not eighty-seven, whatever that even means. And I really, really don’t want to be the only Manzella there.”

For the first time David turns to face her fully, plate of steaks in hand. He has the littlest bit of grill soot smudged on the hem of his polo.

“Please,” Addie begs. She doesn’t know how to put it into words, how it feels like Jenn was loved until abruptly she wasn’t. Like there was an off switch for something that was supposed to be unconditional. “It’s—I’m ashamed of our family.”

“Adelaide—”

Just then Dante bangs through the screen door, Paulina in tow. “We need Cokes,” he announces. Paulina’s white tights are tied around his arm like a reverse mourning band. It’s summer vacation, the time for kids to be in tank tops and sneakers, shorts and no socks. But it’s Thursday night dinner at the Manzellas, so Dante has a collar, and Paulina has a dress.

“May we please have a Coke,” Addie corrects, already fishing the cans out of cooler. It takes her an extra second of rummaging to find, her eyes blurred with tears. “What do you say?” she asks as she hands them over.

“Thank you,” Dante chimes over his shoulder as he and Paulina run back to the sanctuary of the AC.

Before Addie follows them, she asks her father a question that’s been on her mind since she was fourteen years old. “What if it had been me?” she says. “If I had been the one who was gay? Would you have kicked me out too?”

David’s mouth opens. Works. Closes. “
Adelaide
.”

“Yeah,” Addie says, taking the plate of steaks out of his slack hand. “That’s what I figured.” She heads inside to call dinner.

She doesn’t have the stomach to face Jenn at this point, so she texts and begs off drinks after dinner, then drives over to Eli’s. It’s still in the eighties at nine o’clock—one of the hottest summers on record, the news keeps saying, that darkly gleeful tone all weathermen always have—but Addie keeps the windows of her messy car rolled down anyhow, liking the gritty feeling of the hot breeze on her face.

God, that didn’t happen how she wanted it to at
all
.

Downstairs
, she texts Eli as she’s parking in the lot of his complex, but gets no answer. She calls his phone twice before he picks up, this mumbled “’Lo?” like he was probably passed out hard on his couch. Addie fights off a wave of disappointment—it’s not like he knew she was coming, after all.

“I’m here,” she tells him, swallowing a funny thickness at that back of her throat. “Buzz me up?”

“Sure thing, princess,” Eli replies, sounding genuinely pleased. They’ve been doing this more lately, the drop-by. Addie likes it more than she might have thought.

“No leftovers,” she apologizes, up in his apartment a minute later. He was definitely sleeping, the couch all mussed and his face a little swollen and bleary. His place smells stale and faintly boozy. Eli smells faintly boozy too. “Was too pissed for Tupperware.”

“Did you talk to him?” Eli asks, leaning down to peck her hello. He tastes like old beer and garlic. Addie wants to crawl inside his skin.

“Yeah.” She rubs at her eyes, feeling the gritty scrub of mascara under her palms and not caring. “Didn’t go well. Listen, do you have any food? I didn’t eat much.”

Eli nods, pressing a kiss against her temple and leading her into the kitchen. There are four empties in the sink that weren’t there this morning, rinsed and lined up neatly. Addie doesn’t say anything but she can hear her own voice in her head, sitcom-screechy and grating. Eli is an adult.

“Could make you a sandwich,” he muses, sticking his head inside the fridge. “Got the stuff for it.”

Addie hums skeptically. The kitchen is the saddest part of this whole rental, Regan-era white appliances and a peeling backsplash. The only fridge magnet is from the Property Management Office, for God’s sakes, company logo and a number Eli can call if his ancient gas stove stops working. Addie’s never seen so much as a tomato in the place. Then she peeks over his shoulder and spots some bell peppers and half an avocado.

“You went shopping?” she asks, pleased. That’s a sign of life she didn’t expect.

Eli smirks. “I showered today too, princess,” he informs her. He makes a sandwich on good, seedy bread with turkey and Swiss and the avocado, dumps some chips on the plate besides. He also, Addie notes, feeling herself relax a bit, switches to water.

“You wanna tell me?” he asks, when they’re settled on the couch in front of the Food Network. He watches it when he’s alone now too, he confessed recently, which made her feel oddly flattered. “About your dad?”

Addie shakes her head. It feels useless and embarrassing to talk about. “Wanna tell me about yours?” she asks instead, taking a chance.

Eli huffs a breath out, offering her this weird smile she can’t exactly read. “I see what you did there,” he tells her, stealing a chip off her plate and crunching wryly. “That was an artful segue.”

“Thanks,” Addie says, but when he doesn’t follow up with any actual information she finds she doesn’t want to push. She thinks she’ll have to eventually, if they’re going to keep doing this—and God, that’s a switch, how a month ago she was sure she knew everything about him she could possibly ever want or need—but tonight when the casual hand on her knee creeps higher Addie doesn’t stop him, even though she knows he’s just trying to end the conversation.