Chapter 17 | Cecilia

Chapter 17

Cecilia

E vie and I need to spend more time in hotels. The pressure I feel building in our relationship releases in this small room. We’re us but more. Away from my apartment, I am able to bask in everything that we are and give in to Evie’s need to take care of me. Which is why I’m curled up on the couch with a book in my hand, and she’s puttering around the kitchenette. I watch her futz with the takeout containers before my eyes glaze over as a replay of last night and what we did on this very couch runs through my mind. Evie pulling the book out of my hand. Evie crawling into my lap. Evie’s hands at my waist, hips, lower and lower. Goose bumps rise on my arms.

“You all right over there?”

I blink away the erotica and focus on the real version of my girlfriend. She stares down at me with a grin that says she knows exactly where my mind is, and if I’m good, there will be more tonight. That grin holds dirty promises.

“Fine.” I straighten and take the plate of food from the hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the street.

“I would’ve ordered you something,” Evie says, sitting down next to me with a plate of her own. “But I figured you’d still be with Liz.”

I shake my head, even though I assumed that until three this afternoon. “She’s having dinner with Zoey.”

“And you didn’t want to join?” Her voice is innocent enough, but she’s obviously fishing. Ever since the night I found out about Liz and Julian and spilled the whole story—my dad, Zoey, Liz, Julian—Evie has been asking needling questions and psychoanalyzing every response. Once, her interest in my life would’ve been irritating, but now, I’m grateful to have someone to share it with. And the more I tell her, the more I want her to know. Letting her in is terrifying, but it’s also fulfilling. It’s been so long since someone really saw me, since I let someone see the full picture. But Evie does, and she’s not running, which makes me want to stay too.

“Not really. For starters, they’re both in the broken hearts club, and no one wants to be around that.”

“Zoey too?”

I nod. “Right before the end of the semester, Zoey caught her boyfriend and her best friend in bed together.”

Evie gasps and then glares at me. But truthfully, I didn’t think to include that in my story about Zoey at the time. I knew it happened, but in the way I know anything happens in Zoey’s life—because Liz tells me. But hearing Liz talk about it stirred an inkling of sympathy in my stomach. No one deserves that pain, and yet no one seems to be able to escape it.

“Yeah,” I say, resisting the urge to shrug. Something tells me Evie would read way too much into it. “I was not dealing with that on top of the awkwardness of the whole situation.”

“The whole situation?”

It’s a psychologist follow-up if there ever was one, down to the deliberate innocence in her voice. She might as well have asked how I feel about that. I almost give her a snarky answer, but the truth rolls out of me instead.

“Liz said something to me the other day, that I should be over our parents’ divorce because it’s been almost two decades and that the divorce was mostly civil, considering.”

Evie sips her wine, and I can see her mind running through everything that falls under “considering.” I’m not going to get the girlfriend answer, not tonight. Not when she’s staring at me as if I’m the best project that’s ever fallen at her feet. “That seems like a valid assumption.”

I think of all the weekends my mother came to see me that year after the divorce, after the Zoey bomb. I was a junior in college, living the quintessential college life despite being a professor’s daughter. I lived off campus in an apartment with my two best friends. My father was on sabbatical that semester, which seemed weird timing. I wondered—still wonder—if he knew. Had he heard whispers of his former TA being pregnant and then signing up for the Peace Corps? Had he worried endlessly at night that his world could come crashing down? Does it matter? Whether he knew or not, I can’t get past the endless tears my mother cried on those weekends she visited. The only place she could grieve without Liz as a witness. Liz, who hadn’t complained about spending weekends with our father or babysitting her new sister, was falling in love with Zoey and Julian at the same time. She had fallen seamlessly into her new life.

“My parents’ divorce might have been civil, but it wasn’t as easy as Liz remembers. Our mom went to such great lengths to make sure Liz didn’t see her upset. And my sister, god love her, believed my mom and loved my father and Zoey, as if it didn’t hurt my mom every time one of their names came out of Liz’s mouth.”

Evie narrows her eyes and puts her wineglass down on the table. “Liz was... seventeen? I highly doubt she was that oblivious to your mother’s feelings.”

I open my mouth to protest, but Evie silences me with a look.

“Did you ever think that, maybe, as hard as that time was for all of you, Liz was making the best of it to survive? Just like your mom was hiding from Liz, maybe Liz was hiding from your mom.”

The weight of that possibility hits me like a bar across the chest. Julian makes too much sense in that light. Liz couldn’t be sad when our mother was devastated. She couldn’t be angry since I had that covered. Liz had to be brave, and Julian held her up through it all. Ugh. This is why I don’t tell Evie things. It’s impossible to be righteously angry when your anger might be misplaced.

“I’d prefer the girlfriend answer. Please.”

Evie rolls her eyes. “That bitch.”

I laugh so hard tears sneak out. Evie almost never curses, a holdover from working with young kids all day. I kiss her lightly. “Thank you.”

With that conversation effectively dead, we turn to other topics. Evie tells me about her day wandering around Princeton and meeting up with some old friends. I add in stories about the latest requests from a young client who wants a fixer-upper. Spoiler alert—they will not fix it up. Twilight falls, and we’re still on the couch talking and laughing and touching. It’s a perfect night, on top of a series of perfect nights. Two weeks of perfect nights. Not that I’m counting.

“So...” Evie starts after depositing our plates in the dishwasher.

I do not like the sound of that. “Yes?”

“I got you something.” She perches on the edge of the couch. “But don’t make it a thing, okay?”

I cross my racing heart. We’re not gift givers, and I have an uncomfortable feeling about Evie’s hesitation. She stares at me for a moment longer, gauging my mood, before finally pressing something small, pointy, and cold into my hand.

“I want you to have this for when we’re back home.” She says it assuredly, clearly, unrushed. She’s been thinking about this for a while.

A key. Wow. It sits on my palm almost accusingly. Set. Point. Match. I close my fingers around it. It’s not the first time Evie offered me a key, but it is the first time I think I might want to keep it. What is it about this woman? I literally can’t quit her. I’ve tried, and somehow here we are. I don’t allow myself to get into situations like this. It’s rule number one. But I have no intention of returning to my own cold bed when we get home unless Evie wills me away. And I know she won’t. Not when she’s handed me a key to her apartment.

This is a gross overreaction to Liz’s marital woes. I’m aware of that. But the news shook me. That and the fact that Liz ran to her other family. To Zoey. How many days was she in Ardena before she called me? Those were probably the hardest moments of my sister’s life, and she didn’t let me in until I flew across the country and demanded answers.

I tear my gaze away from the key clasped in my hand. Evie’s eyes are full of love and hope. My stomach flutters.

“Thank you,” I say, taking her hand.

Maybe this is the answer. Maybe letting Evie in is as simple and complicated as it has to be. Because sitting on this couch, Evie’s hand in mine, I can almost pretend I don’t care about anything else.