“Psh. She’ll get six hundred words in and give up,” Dorothea says.
“Elsa never fails at anything.”
Dogzilla hops onto my lap, then tries to climb my chest, which is awkward in all the ways it can possibly be awkward, not the least of which is that she’s dressed in her alien costume today and her tentacles are going up my nose.
Katharine pops back onto the screen, wiping her arms with a cloth napkin. “What did you say to the twat when she told you what she was about?”
Usually I love her soothing accent as she lets out a solid twat, but today, the question itself makes me sob harder. “She asked—hic!—me for a—aad—advice.”
Jen leans right into the camera. “Tell me you didn’t give it to her.”
Katharine’s leaning in too. “Tell me you did, but you gave her awful advice.”
I reach for my hot chocolate. “I can’t doooooo thaaaaaat,” I sob.
The front door slams.
Dogzilla jerks while she has her claws in my chest, yowls in terror, and leaps onto my laptop, but she misses and hits my arm, which sends my hot chocolate flying everywhere.
Everywhere.
“No!” I leap to my feet.
Towels.
I need towels.
I can’t lose my laptop. I can’t lose my laptop.
“Henri?” All three of my friends blink and stare, and then everything goes black.
“Nooooo!”
“Henri?” Luca calls. “What’s—oh, shit.”
Dogzilla yowls again, looks up, sees Luca, and then collapses on the floor like she’s realized we’re not being invaded by Nonna, or Luca’s mom, or Elsa and her family, or something not quite as terrifying like an angry hoard of bees on steroids or a pack of saber-toothed tigers that have traveled through time to eat us, and my cat has officially checked out of duty.
Luca’s leaping all over the kitchen. He throws me a towel, then skids on the hot chocolate on the floor as he grabs another towel.
I lunge to wipe off my laptop.
He stops next to me and tries to pat down my arms while I’m trying to use them to clean up my laptop.
And I can’t stop sobbing.
“Henri. God. Are you okay?”
I nod. “I’m fiiiiiiiiine.”
“Jesus. No, you’re not. Did someone die?”
“No—hic! I—I’m okay.”
“This is not okay.”
Well.
When he puts it like that, the only thing I can do is sob harder.
“Don’t cry, Henri. Don’t cry. I’ll buy you a new laptop. Do you use a cloud back-up? Tell me you use a cloud back-up. Never mind. Not important. I’ll pay for your hard drive to get recovered. Oh, shit. Shit. You named it, didn’t you? You named your laptop and now you’ve lost a friend and shit. I can’t fix this.”
Ohmygosh.
I didn’t name my laptop.
I didn’t name it, and I should’ve, and now it’s gone to the great laptop heaven in the sky, and it was my friend and I didn’t even give it a name.
I’m a complete and total laptop mama failure, and my sister’s going to be a bestselling author in like two weeks, probably without naming her laptop either, except she’s Elsa, so of course she’ll remember to name it, and it’ll be something beautiful like Violet Sparkle von Gorgeous, and I can’t even have a proper pity party.
Also, Luca’s hair dye is fading, and it should look like a light brown rainbow of poop, but instead, it’s utterly adorable, like a chestnut wave kissed by a unicorn that would look spectacular on one of the billboards on the interstate where his current billboard holding Kangapoo resides, whereas my hair is once again at that perfect length where I caught myself having devil horns when I glanced in the mirror three hours ago.
“It’s something else, isn’t it?” He pulls back, his green eyes going wide and worried. “Did someone die? Fuck, Henri. Tell me how to fix this.”
I shake my head and grip his forearm, and holy crap, his forearm is solid.
Also, I’m not sure we’ve been this physically close since the hotel room in Boston—at least, not when someone else wasn’t watching—and I like it.
Especially when he throws his towel on the table, mutters, “Screw it,” and grabs me in a giant Luca hug.
It’s not a normal hug, because it’s bigger and stronger and like being cradled by a giant teddy bear that acts like a tyrannosaurus rex but only because he’s been taught for so long that it’s the only way to keep his heart safe.
He squeezes me tight and buries his nose in my crazy hair and all of my panic and insecurities and sobs slow until I’m a giant blob of worn-out muscles and jelly bones.
Check that.
I’m an embarrassed giant blob.
“Elsa’s writing a romance novel,” I whisper.
His body goes so tense that the hug shifts from a teddy bear cuddle to trying to rub myself against a steel refrigerator door. “Your sister Elsa?”
I nod into his chest.
“The Elsa with the twenty-three kids and ten pets and forty-three volunteer organizations and her own YouTube channel? That Elsa?”
Once more, I nod.
“Why the fuck is she doing that?”
I swallow hard and don’t answer.
“Because you write romance novels?”
There’s a deadly calm in his voice that should probably make me worry, but it’s hard to worry when I’m snuggling a steel door with a heartbeat getting stronger and faster under my ear, and when I suspect he gets it, and I like that he would instantly understand why I’m upset about this, when I shouldn’t. It’s a free world, and if Elsa wants to write a romance novel, I shouldn’t stop her. I know how it feels to have people try to keep you from your dream, and even if I’m horribly jealous and broken and neurotic, that’s no reason to make her the same way.
“Henri?” Luca’s voice rumbles through the kitchen and makes me shiver in the good way. “Tell me she’s not doing it because you do it too.”
“She has everything else. Why does she need this too?” I shudder and try to grab the words back. “If this will make her happy, of course she should do it. There’s plenty of room in the world for her stories too. And I always say every story has a reader.”
“Christ on a tortellini,” he mutters. He pulls back again, grips my arms, gets right in my face, and growls, “Stay.”
And then he turns and marches out of the kitchen, pulling his phone out of his pocket and giving me a view of his rear end that I’ve been trying very, very hard not to appreciate every time I watch a baseball game, because that ass ain’t mine.
To quote…someone.
Probably.
As soon as he disappears from view, I remember my friends, and I drop my own phone trying to pull it out to open the video chat app and get back to them.
Katharine, Dorothea, and Jen are still there, Jen bouncing the baby now, and they’re all staring intently at me while my phone takes sixty-five years to fully engage the app.
“Are you okay?”
“What happened?”
“Tell me that rugged baseball player you’re shacking up with came home and threw you on that table and had his way with you until you can’t feel your legs.”