Eli and I are going to be alone for seven and a half minutes.
I was so busy obsessing over his can we talk that I didn’t think about what came after the airport. Instead, I spent the car ride making small talk with Adam’s grandparents while internally I screamed, can we talk about what?!
One possible option tightened my stomach with dread: Nick and Miriam’s wedding. It’s the subject du jour, but if he wants to talk about that, I’m running. He barely looked at me that night, but there’s still a chance he saw the cracks in my cheerful laughter and wide smile.
Adam’s parents call me and Eli their free-range kids, and when we get there, they sweep us into their adopted parental web. Eli disappears with David, probably so they can bond over the latest puzzle David’s in the middle of. I let Laurie’s hug recharge my Absent Mom battery, pressing my face into her cloud of blond curls, then raid my designated snack shelf in the pantry while we chat. Eli’s old shelf is stuffed with canned goods, save for a fresh bag of Doritos.
It’s not until we finally peel ourselves away that I remember we’re leaving Adam’s grandparents here.
Which means Eli and I are going to be alone for the drive to Adam’s house.
I follow him down the driveway with my feet dragging, that can we talk squeezing my throat, his yes, she is like fingers pinching my chin, demanding my attention for a landslide of memories.
Look.
“You’re beautiful,” he says when I show up at Adam’s house for prom junior year, where we’re meeting up with a group of friends—
When his parents get divorced senior year after constant fights about money and jobs, and he cries, so I do, too, apologizing afterward for the makeup that’s smeared on my face and his shirt—
When he kisses me for the first time on my twenty-first birthday, just after I blow out the candle on the cupcake he bought me, seconds after I wish for him—
Right before he tells me he loves me a week later—
When I ask him if the dress I’m wearing for his coworker’s engagement dinner is okay as he types out a text to Luce, his stress-tight eyes flitting from his phone to me.
I’m so focused on the memories flying out of their usually padlocked box that I don’t realize I’ve followed Eli to the passenger door until I crash into his back.
He turns, hand hovering over the door handle. His eyes are stress-tight again—still, maybe—but recognition sparks in them.
“Oh. You want me to drive?”
The question is absurdly personal coming out of his mouth. I hate driving and he never minded getting behind the wheel for me. He wouldn’t know that if we were strangers.
“No!” I grip my keys like a lifeline, repeating less intensely, “No, I’m good. I love to drive, actually.”
It’s a stupid thing to say, but I don’t expect him to call me on it. So when one corner of his mouth lifts, my stomach clenches. And when he leans back against the car, forearms honest-to-god flexing as he crosses them over his chest, it falls out of my body entirely.
“You do, huh?” he says. “That’s new.”
As of five seconds ago, his raised eyebrows add, very unnecessarily.
“It’s not that new,” I reply. Now it’s been ten seconds. “And I can handle a seven-minute drive regardless.”
I’m proud of myself for hacking off thirty seconds. It’s not like anything can happen in that timeframe anyway.
Eli clearly takes that as a challenge. Everything about him straightens— his body pushing away from the car, those shoulders, his mouth.
“Listen—”
“We should go. Adam’s probably shot off four iterations of a ‘where are you?’ text,” I interrupt, my heart leaping. I start to back up, but he hooks a
finger through the belt loop of my jeans, stopping me in my tracks.
I stare down at his finger just as he releases his hold. He’s not even really touching me—not the way he used to, with greedy hands—and yet it’s impossibly intimate.
My eyes dart up to his throat, where his Adam’s apple presses against goose-bumped skin. I imagine I can feel the vibration of his voice there with my mouth when he states, “I’ll drive.”
Our gazes clash. “I can do it.”
“Of course you can,” he says, an old mix of wry and weary. “But it’s only seven minutes. Right?”
Right. Just fourteen thirty-second intervals where anything could happen, if this weird, determined Eli has his way. “Knock yourself out.”
He circles the front of the car and I fumble to get the passenger door open, cursing under my breath.
Thankfully, he forgot to take the key, so I slide into my seat before he’s in the car, jamming it into the ignition. The stereo comes to life and I spin the volume dial to an ear-splitting level, where listens and can we talks go to die.
It takes me three beats to recognize the song. I once cried to it in the bathroom of a dingy bar thinking about, to quote the lyrics, Eli’s body being with somebody else.
I’m being trolled. I’m in the seventh circle of hell. I’ll never roll my eyes at Adam’s belief in curses again.
Maybe it’s not his wedding that’s cursed. Maybe it’s me.
Eli slides into the driver’s seat and stares at the stereo, then at me, unimpressed.
“Let’s go.”
My words are buried under the sound, but his eyes drop to my mouth, reading my impatience. He drags his gaze back up to my eyes as he presses the stereo dial, plunging us into silence.
I hear it coming, whatever he wanted to say outside, at the airport, maybe since we saw each other thirteen months ago. So I keep his gaze as I press the dial again, filling the space with that terrible song.
That’s right, I think as frustration blooms over his face. I’d rather listen to a song that makes me think about you having sex with someone else than discover the cliffhanger on the other end of your can we talk?
He reaches for the stereo. I grab his thumb. We stare at each other for five seconds, indie pop serving as our standoff music, and I see his next move in the narrowing of his eyes. He must see something in mine, too, because we lunge at the same time, our fingers tangling on our way to the dial. My nerve endings sing with the contact of our skin; I get there first, slapping my palm over the button.
“Georgia,” he says, with more emotion than we’ve given each other in years. It’s half exasperation, half request, with a pinch of amusement, because Eli always gives 110 percent.
In it, I hear every way he’s ever said my name, though: affectionately, through tears, in the middle of pleasure. Not the way he has in our post- breakup world, like air, something I can walk through without resistance.
“You can’t just commandeer my stereo because you’re driving,” I yell over the music.
“You know that’s not what I’m trying to do.” He leans in to say it; I feel every word against my cheek.
“Just go.”
His hand covers mine, his palm spooning the back of my hand. And then, with his eyes fixed on our connection, he presses down. Hard.
In the sudden silence, our separate heavy breaths sound like gasps. “What are you doing?” What I really want to say is, stop forgetting how
we do this. But I have to be unruffled Georgia. Easy Georgia. “I need to talk to you.”
“Since when?” I can’t help my incredulous tone. He’s never asked to talk post-breakup. He’s never wanted to, same as me; that’s why we’ve been able to go five years like this.
“Since f—” Eli’s eyes widen and then close briefly. His next words are chosen carefully. “I want to talk before we get to Adam’s. About Adam.”
That doesn’t soothe me, considering the conversation I had with Adam last night, and the fact that I know he had it with Eli, too. “What about
him?”
Eli’s hand slides from mine, his fingers moving over every bump of my knuckles. It lingers only to ensure I’m not going to attempt to destroy our hearing again, but it still sends an unwanted thrill through me.
Not ideal.
When it’s clear I’m not going to stop him, he sinks against the seat, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been…a catastrophically bad best man the past eight months, and a not-great best friend for longer. My job wa
— is— I’ve had a lot of—”
When he’s not looking at me, I can look at him—at the bunch of his jaw as he cuts himself off, how his mouth stretches into a grimace, the slight shake of his head. He’s censoring himself. It’s strange to know his tells but no longer be privy to what they’re about.
He begins again. “He hasn’t relied on me for any wedding-related thing, for good reason. And neither have you, despite the fact that we were supposed to share the duties. I mean, Jesus,” he says, letting out a humorless laugh, “I couldn’t even make it to the bachelor party I planned five percent of.”
I lean back, startled.
Adam’s Tahoe bachelor party three months ago was a joint effort in name only—Eli and I exchanged a few absurdly formal emails. I assigned him some tasks so he wouldn’t feel shitty about it, but gave myself the brunt of the work, not trusting that the job that’s gotten in the way of everything else wouldn’t do it again.
I shouldn’t be surprised that he recognized it. It wasn’t the first time I played that game with him, nor the first time I was right to do it.
It wasn’t his fault he missed the party, though. He was supposed to fly directly to Reno from his work’s mandatory retreat in Miami, then drive to the cabin we rented. But he never made it, thanks to a tropical storm that blew in.
Truthfully, he hasn’t been a catastrophically bad best man, but he hasn’t been a good one. Even from thousands of miles away, I could see how
much more he wanted to be involved, and how incapable he was of doing so.
And now, I can see how desperately he wants to change that. The fact that he’s here nine days before the wedding is nearly unbelievable. Not only that, but he hasn’t pulled his phone out once, not even when I was chatting with Adam’s grandparents. He stared out the window, fingers fidgeting in his lap.
He’s doing that now, except he’s picked up the gum wrapper from my cup holder.
“You can’t blame yourself for bad weather,” I say finally.
His attention stays on the wrapper, shaping it. “I can blame myself for everything else. Not being there for him, not responding to texts in the group chat on time when shit’s hit the fan. Adam texted me about the DJ thing and you know what he said when I asked if I could help?”
I press my lips together.
One corner of his mouth picks up grimly. “ ‘We’re all good, buddy.
Georgia’s on it.’ ”
I’m an asshole for the warm streak that sends through my chest, but I’ve got my own hang-ups.
Eli’s long fingers continue to work in a familiar pattern, his thumb smoothing over the outside, turning it around his index finger. Forming a ring.
I look away. It’s a talent he honed years ago at his sisters’ request, and continued even after they stopped asking for them. I have dozens of my own in a Converse shoebox under my bed, all of them given to me first as a friend and then as a promise.
“I have so much to make up for.” The crack in Eli’s voice brings me back; the devastation on his face shocks me. Not that he’s so torn up about it, but that he’s letting me see it. “I need to make a dent this week in fixing what a shitty friend and best man I’ve been.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve been Adam’s right-hand woman in all of this. Every time I’ve talked to him, he’s mentioning something you’ve helped with,
how they’d be lost without you.”
The praise sings through me so strongly it feels like relief. God, I need to be needed. To be held on to any way I can get it.
“You’re a very good friend, Georgia,” Eli says, and there’s a tiny blade to his tone. Not enough to cut me, but enough that I know it’s cut him to hear it. “I haven’t been, and I have no one to blame but myself, but I want to change that. If anything else goes sideways, I need you to let him lean on me. Let me take care of things, run errands, whatever wedding shit he and Grace need.”
“ ‘Whatever wedding shit’ doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.”
His eyes flash, both with humor and stubbornness. “You know what I mean.”
I want to say no, that he’ll have to fight me for space, because I need it, too. If I go to Seattle, I won’t have it anymore.
But Eli’s had less for longer and we both know it. It’s not just that he’s been lost in his career; I’m the one who came back home. I’ve had the power of proximity on my side for the last five years. Letting Eli take on a few things to assuage his guilt won’t kill me. More importantly, it’ll make Adam happy.
“I promise you can rely on me,” Eli says quietly, a tiny shiver to it.
I glance at him to find his attention on the ring pinched between his fingers. He turns it like he’s appraising a diamond, his lashes sweeping across the faint purple hollows beneath his eyes.
I hear what he doesn’t say: you can rely on me this time. We both feel the specter of missed dinners and weekend trips canceled, of feelings I didn’t share and plans I made without him, of nights where I fell asleep alone in an apartment it felt like we shared in name only.
His addiction to his job is so indelibly tied to his anxiety, and I know the cause—the instability of his dad’s career has always felt like the catalyst for his previously perfect family falling apart. He’s been starving for something solid half his life. But that knowledge has never made it hurt less.
My throat is thick when I say, “I’m sure there’s enough to go around.”
“Okay.” His gaze lingers on me, something indecipherable playing under the relief. “Thank you.”
“Is that all?”
His mouth parts, his thumb moving absently over the ring he’s made. Finally, he places it in the cup holder before his eyes meet mine. “Unless there’s something on your mind.”
It’s not a challenge exactly, but I don’t like the probing curve of his voice. “Nope,” I say, sinking deeper into my seat. “I’m great.”
Just wonderful.
