“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry I just vanished.” I kiss his shoulder.
He reaches up with his free hand, wiping a palm down his face. “Honey, you lost your mom at ten, and your dad at eighteen. It sucks that you disappeared, but it’s not like I don’t get it. Holy shit, your life just . . . crumbled that day.”
I move my hand under his shirt, up over his stomach, coming to rest above his heart. “It was terrible.” I press my face to where his neck meets shoulder, trying to push away those memories and inhaling the familiar smell of him. “What were those years like for you?”
He hums, thinking. “I focused on school. If you mean romantically, I had so much guilt that I didn’t really get involved with anyone until later.”
My heart aches at this. “Alex said you didn’t bring anyone home until Rachel.”
“Can we be clear about one thing?” he says, kissing my hair. “Definitively, and without question?”
“What’s that?” I love the solid feel of him next to me. I don’t think I’ll ever get enough.
“That I love you,” he whispers, tilting my chin so I’ll look up at him. “Okay?”
“I love you, too.” Emotion fills my chest, making my words come out strangled. I will always miss my parents, but I have Elliot back. Together we were able to resurrect something.
His lips press to my forehead. “Do you think we can do this?” he asks, keeping his lips there. “Do we get our chance now to be together together?”
“We’ve certainly earned it.”
He pulls back, looking at me. “I’ve just been lying here, thinking. In some ways, I should have figured it out. I should have wondered why Duncan never came back. I just assumed you were both so angry at me.”
“Over time I let myself trust my memories more.” I reach up, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “I realized whether or not you had something casual and consistent with Emma, you did really love me.”
“Of course I did.” He stares, eyes tight. “I hate that Duncan died thinking otherwise.”
There’s not really anything I can say to this. I just squeeze him tighter, pressing my lips to the pulse point beneath his jaw.
“I still love this room,” I whisper.
Beside me, Elliot goes still. “It’s funny you say that . . . I love it, too. But I came in here to say goodbye.”
My heart peeks over the cliff, falling off. “What does that mean?”
He pushes up on an elbow, looking down at me. “It means I don’t think we belong in here anymore.”
“Well, no, we won’t be in here all the time. But why not keep the cabin, and—”
“I mean, look, obviously it’s yours, and you should do with it what you want.” He runs his fingertip below my lip and bends, kissing me once. When he pulls away, I chase his mouth, wanting more. “But I want us to move past this closet,” he says gently. “The closet isn’t why we fell in love. We made this room special, not the other way around.”
I know my expression looks devastated, and I don’t know how to reel it back in. I love being in here with him. The best years of my life were in here, and I’ve never felt safer than I do in the closet.
And that’s when I know Elliot is already two steps ahead of me.
“I bet, the way you see it, everything fell apart when we tried to live outside,” he says, and leans down, kissing me again. “But that’s just shitty luck. It isn’t going to be that way this time.”
“No?” I ask, biting back a relieved smile and tugging at his shoulders so he hovers over me.
“No.” He grins, settling between my legs, his eyes going a little unfocused.
“What is it going to be like this time?” I slide his glasses off, setting them on one of the empty shelves.
Elliot kisses a slow path up my neck. “It’s going to be what we wanted before.”
“Thanksgiving on the floor in our underwear?”
He growls out a little laugh, pressing his hips forward when I reach down, lowering his zipper. “And you in my bed, every night.”
“Maybe you’ll be in my bed.”
When he pulls back, his eyes narrow. “Then you have to actually go to your damn house, woman.”
I laugh, and he laughs, too, but the truth of this sits between us, making him go still. He watches me, and I can tell it’s turned into a question during our silence; he’s not letting me off the hook.
“Will you go with me? To clean it out?” I wince, admitting, “I haven’t been back in a really long time.”
Elliot kisses me once, and then ducks, kissing my chest over my heart. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home for eleven years. I’ll go anywhere you go.”
now
wednesday, january 10
I’m hit with a powerful blast of nostalgia as soon as we open the door. Inside, the Berkeley house smells just as it always has—like home—but I don’t think I realized before how home smells like Mom’s cedar trunk we used as a coffee table, and Dad’s Danish cigarettes—apparently he snuck them more than I knew. A sunbeam bursting in through the living room window captures a few tiny stars of dust, spinning. I have a woman come and clean the house once a month, but even though things look tidy, the place still feels abandoned.
It sends a guilty ache spearing through my middle.
Elliot comes up behind me, peeking over my shoulder and into the living room. “Do you think we’ll make it inside today?”
He softens his joke with a kiss to my shoulder, and I can’t exactly blame him for the gentle jab: we’ve driven by the house twice now, late at night after my shifts at the hospital. I’ve been too mentally drained to feel up to rejoining my childhood home. But I don’t work until tonight, and today I woke up feeling . . . ready.
Our plan for now is to sell the Healdsburg house and clean out the Berkeley place to make it ready for visiting Cal faculty who want a furnished rental. But cleaning it out for this means taking all the important memories with me—photo albums, artwork, letters, tiny mementos sprinkled everywhere.
I take a step in, and then another. The wood floor creaks where it always did. Elliot follows me in, looking around. “This house smells like Duncan.”
“Doesn’t it?”
He hums, passing me to walk over to the mantel, where there are photos of the three of us, of Kennet and Britt, of Mom’s parents, who died when she was young.
“You know, I’ve only ever seen one photo of her. The one Duncan had next to his bed.”
Her. My mother. Laís, to everyone else. Mãe, to me.
Elliot trails his fingers over a few frames and then picks one up, studying it, before looking over at me.
I know which one he’s holding. It’s a picture Dad took of me and Mom at the beach. The wind is blowing her long black hair across her neck, and I’m leaning against her, sitting between her legs, with her arms wrapped around my chest. Her smile was so wide and bright; in it, you can see without having to be told that she was an absolute force of nature.
He blinks down to it again. “You look so much like her, it’s uncanny.”