Now
“Can I take a shower, or do I need to use the hose again?” I ask, giving the house a quick once-over now that she’s invited me inside. Not much has changed since I was here last weekend. Ella started projects, but she didn’t complete anything. There are a hammer and nails on the floor, buckets of paint in the corner, and the doors are removed from the cabinets.
Ella slides a mug across the kitchen counter for me, setting boundaries. Don’t come close, her dim expression says.
“I seem to remember you walked your happy ass to town and rented a room to shower, right?” Steam from her coffee drifts across her lips before she takes a sip, veering her look away from mine.
Ella’s boundaries feel like a prison, and I’m sentenced to solitary confinement. She’s given me the cold shoulder before, she’s refused to see me for weeks at a time, and she was in a committed relationship with someone else. But she’s never been this … absent.
“Should I go?” I jab my thumb over my shoulder to the door.
“I didn’t invite you here in the first place, Teller,” she reminds me, pushing the distance between us.
I grab a shirt from my bag and pull it over my head. I slept in a fucking tent in her front yard just to be next to her, to prove that we’re worth fighting for. I can’t make this work on my own, and she’s not giving me anything to hold on to. All because I didn’t mention that her dead boyfriend was cheating with my dead girlfriend?
“What are you so afraid of?” I can handle humiliation, but her indifference kills me. She acts like we haven’t craved each other for years, as if we haven’t battled to be together, as if we never happened at all. “You keep calling me a liar, Gabriella, but you’re the only one in this fucking house who’s lying.”
Ella turns away to look out the window, throwing the early morning sun across her blank look. I want to kiss and kill her at the same time, but I settle for picking up my backpack to leave.
I haven’t decided if it’s for good or for now when she calls my name.
“How can I trust you?” she asks.
“How can you not?” I reply, letting the strap of my bag fall from my shoulder to my hand. “You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted, Smella. I’m far from perfect, but I love—”
She holds her hand up to keep the word from coming too close. “Don’t do that, okay? Don’t leave, but don’t do that either. I can’t hear it right now.”
Pressing my lips together, I trap the confessions and pleas in my lungs and nod.
“I don’t know why I came here,” she confesses, drinking another sip of caffeine. “I hoped that by selling this place I’d find closure or the answers to why I’m not loveable. But I’m terrified to let it go. That’s why I can’t get a single thing done. Self-sabotage.”
“You’re good at that,” I say.
Brown eyes swimming with tears move my way, and she says, “Don’t go, Teller.”
You dumb girl, I want to roar. Are you fucking blind? You must be, because I’m right here.
I chew on the confession between gritted teeth.
Ella waves her hand around the room. “There’s no going back now.”
“Don’t sell it if you don’t want to,” I offer carefully.
She pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. “My realtor’s hosting an open house next weekend, so I can use some help cleaning up. I need you, Tell, but I don’t need the other shit, you know?”
I nod.
“We can talk about it—us—later, but right now, I’d appreciate it if you can fix that stupid sprinkler head before I flood the entire neighborhood.”
There are plenty of places I’d rather be than trapped in my head. Doubts plague me. Questions poke my skull until it splits. Confusion rides my back like a fucking child, holding too tight around my throat. I catch glimpses of Ella roaming from room to room, dressed in cut-off shorts and a shirt that shows her navel, and it helps ease the conflict. But her silence whispers nonsense in my ear.
She doesn’t love you.
She’s laughing behind your back.
Why did you ever think she was different from everyone else in your life?
I consider gouging the anchors from the tent into my feet to keep from kicking the motherfucking door down and rage until she gives me a straight answer about us—about anything. It would be counterproductive because I’d have to fix the door. So, I clean the gutters once the irrigation system is up and running, keeping the anchors in sight just in case.
People walk, run, stumble by all morning long, unashamed as they stare at the tent and the hooligan perched on a ladder, pulling leaves from the roof. They judge me like everyone else does, unaware of my life-saving abilities. I smoke a cigarette and light another one once it’s gone, puffing and clearing decayed vegetation from the roof. When the sun rises to the top of the sky, I take my shirt off, exposing the neighborhood Ella grew up in to the full force of their arrogance.
Carol spies on me from her window and makes four trips to the mailbox. Trever rides by with a friend, flipping me the bird. When they come back around twenty minutes later, I soak them with the hose. I laugh, but the man across the street comes out of his front door with his hands jammed in his Dockers, shaking his head.
I’m about to send a shot of water over to his side of the road when Ella approaches with a cold bottle of water.
“Don’t even think about it,” she says, passing me the Aquafina.
“Did you grow up around these people?” I ask. “They’re assholes.”
“Trever’s a new addition,” she replies jokingly, leaning her forearms on the porch railing. “But most of them have been around since I was a kid. Carol used to be in love with my dad.”
“She’s in love with me, too.” Cool water touches my lips then fills my mouth, and I wink over the plastic bottle.
Ella’s softer than she was when she left L.A., wider in the hips and thicker in the thighs. A touch of stomach hangs over the waistband of her shorts, and there’s a roundness in her face that wasn’t there before. She isn’t wearing a bra under her shirt, and her toes are unpainted.
I’ve never been more attracted to her than I am right now.
“Carol baked him cookies and made him the most disgusting casseroles. She was shameless.” Ella smiles at the memory. “My mom was so mad, but there was nothing she could do after she left her family.”
The smile disappears.
Lowering the plastic bottle from my mouth, I ask, “Have you seen your mother since you’ve been back?”
Ella stands straight and walks past me. “No, and I don’t want to.”
She goes back to wandering from one room to another with no real focus, and I walk a mile into town and buy a six-pack of beer and a couple of sandwiches. She doesn’t acknowledge my absence when I return, but she gladly accepts my offering of alcohol and nutrition.
We sit against the wall in the dining room under the light streaming through the sliding glass door. The mixture of sun and turkey on wheat brings soul to Ella’s features, warming her cheeks and broadcasting the gold in her eyes. There are a million things left unsaid, but it doesn’t bother me, and she isn’t kicking me out. We drink one, two, three beers each, and we’re as full and as happy as two people can be at a time like this.
“What can I do for you?” I ask, collecting our empties for the trash. The girl weighs one fifty at the most, and while she’s high-minded, I don’t think she’s worked on her muscle mass in our time apart. I can demolish walls and lift heavy things for her since she hasn’t had a man around.
She better not have.
Ella stays on the floor while I throw out our garbage. The grin on her lips is laid-back, and the color in her cheeks glows. I stay still and quiet, and for one second, it’s like nothing has changed. Tension disappears with sobriety, and possibility beams like the light covering her body.
We’re happy, tipsy, and just okay.
Compassion’s gone as fast as it arrived. I look away first, or she does, and friction slams down between us like a cement wall.
“I’m going to paint the kitchen cabinets.” She stands to her feet and claps breadcrumbs from her hands. “Do you want to help?”
“Sure,” I answer. It would be easier to replace them, but that’s another thing that goes left unsaid.
By the end of the night, our fingers are raw from sandpaper, sawdust covers us, and we haven’t painted anything. But we worked together without spilling blood or tears, and she hasn’t cut my throat with the sharpness in her eyes. Progress.
“Why didn’t I just order new cabinets?” Ella breaks the silence, dropping her face into the palms of her hands. “This is a disaster.”
“Nostalgia makes you do crazy things.” I wash my hands at the sink, watching debris flow down the drain so I don’t have to look at her.
“Because these cabinets played such a huge part in my childhood,” she states sarcastically. Ella leaves footprints on the floors as she crosses the kitchen for the broom. She collects a small pile of dust and gives up. “I shouldn’t have left you the way I did.”
Sucker punched by her admission, I fall into the corner between countertops and wait for her to say more.
“You didn’t deserve that, Tell.” She presses her lips together and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “We didn’t deserve that. But I thought things were going to be different, and then you lied—”
“It was different,” I say. I keep my tone even so she doesn’t put her guard back up. “We are different, Gabriella. We were engaged. We were living together. It had never been that way.”
The small shake of her head rocks me to the core. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Mentally, we were the same idiots who terrorized everyone we love because we couldn’t get it together. The only difference is our families stopped refereeing our bullshit.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose until my eyes water, determined not to lose my temper and prove her right. Outrage shoves restraint out of the way, swamping my veins with sludgy resentment. The muscles in my jaw constrict, and I clench my teeth until they feel like they’ll break. I close my eyes and breathe through my nose, trying but failing to ease the pressure behind my eyes.
It’s not sadness.
This is madness.
“We were grieving,” she says, challenging my self-control. “We did it the only way we know how, and that was together. The chaos we create—people like us thrive on it. We get off on the power to destroy the people we care about. It did feel different for a while, Teller. But it was a lie.”
“It wasn’t,” I whisper, but her words ring true.
“You took a bat to my car,” Ella reminds me. “You’re sleeping in a tent on my front lawn.”
“And what about you?” I snap like brittle bones, immediately dosed as adrenaline taps into my circulatory system. A flash of heat slices through my skin, peeling back what’s left of my self-control. I pick up her mug from this morning and chuck it across the room, painting the wall in cold coffee. “I didn’t force you to fuck me. I didn’t force you to move in. I didn’t force you to wear my ring on your finger.”
“But you did force me to leave by lying to me,” she shouts. Her eyes dilate, drugged with hostility just like me. “It’s the same story, Tell. We faked it for a while, but the moment I found out you didn’t trust me—trust us—enough to be honest with me about Joe and Kristi, I knew we were headed down the same gutter we stomped through for years. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to turn out like my parents. I don’t want to hate you.”
And there it is.
Born into chaos, raised on dysfunction, we are the sins of our fathers.
“I know,” I say.
When a family is wealthy like mine or rocked by a tragedy like Ella’s, it’s easy to hide trauma behind money and condolences. People like us play the part everyone wants to see: the prince to an empire and the unlikely success story. We fall through the cracks of assumed togetherness, silently swollen with damage and bitterness.
She’s the abandoned child, and I don’t fit the mold.
It’s behavior taught by good intentions. My parents forced me into a box I was too big for because they believed it was best. Ella’s mom was hooked on something she needed more than family, and her dad died of cancer before he told her it wasn’t her fault.
When two fuck-ups come together, chances are it’ll end badly.
Like a bat shattering a windshield.
My parents are nothing without their money, Maby is depressed and impulsive, and I’m sick and fucking tired of pretending like I didn’t see this coming.
“I don’t know how to be without you, Ella,” I say.
“Neither do I,” she admits.
I wasn’t going to come back.
It’s been a week since I was in St. Helena last. I left Ella after our conversation that went nowhere fast, determined to give havoc the space she asked for.
Fuck that.
Apart from the last month, Ella’s the only person on the face of the planet who’s taken me as I am. I won’t let her stop because she’s temporarily insane. Shit happens. People die. Relationships shift. We ran from our problems across California, but they caught up with us. We can be better than the people who raised us. We can prove them wrong by being different.
“Smella, I’m home,” I call through the open window.
She opens the door, letting it slam against the wall. The scent of lavender and coconut stretches from her skin to my lungs, comforting me from the inside out. Ella’s lips are red, her hair is curled, and she’s dressed in clean clothes.
“Going somewhere?” I hold the bouquet of flowers out for her.
“Teller, you can’t put the tent up in the front yard,” she says over sage and asters.
“Can I sleep inside?” I ask, smiling over them, too.
She rolls her eyes. “No, you can’t.”
“Then I have no choice…”
Ella takes the flowers, turns for the kitchen, and looks for a vase. She doesn’t have one, but she does have an empty bucket that gets the job done. “Put it up in the backyard.”
“Why?” I ask playfully. “How can I scare Trever away if I’m in the back?”
She’s managed to get the doors on the cabinets by herself. The white finish livens the place up, changing the mood to something more positive. There’s a layer of oil on the wood floors that gives off a chemical orange smell. It doesn’t hide how damaged they are, but compared to the walls, they look newly installed.
“We should remove the rest of this wallpaper.” I run my hand over the ripped flower print.
“Teller.” Ella drops my offering into the bucket and slides under the sun. “The open house is today.”
“I forgot about that,” I say, leaning against the fridge.
“I’m not surprised.” She sighs and runs her hands down the front of her shirt. “So, if you must put the tent up, put it in the back … the way back. And make yourself scarce for a while, please.”
Lowering my eyebrows, I tilt my head and ask, “Why can’t I stay?”
“Because you’ll distract me, and I need this house to sell.” Ella crosses her arms defensively, and I hold my hands up in surrender. “Maby’s getting married next weekend. I don’t have plane a ticket. I don’t have a dress. There’s still paint in my hair. This open house means a lot to me, Tell. I want to sell before the wedding, so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
She’s coming home.
Not to me right away.
But she’s finally coming back.
“When is it over?” I ask.
She inhales a deep breath through her nose and drops her arms. “At four.”
My eyes widen. “What am I supposed to do for five hours? Can I watch TV in your room? I won’t make any noise.”
“No!” A smile bends her lips.
I realize we have an ordinary conversation for the first time since her great escape. No one’s crying. No one’s bleeding. No one’s defensive. We’re easygoing and improving, and the curve of her red-painted mouth triples the size of my ill-fated heart.
Patting my pockets for my cigarettes, I smirk, hoping she can’t see the love-struck tremble in my hands. I wink and say, “I’ll leave, but what do I get in return?”
“Well,” she exhales dramatically, “I won’t burn your tent down with you inside of it.”
I shake my head. “Not good enough.”
Ella glances at me from under her eyelashes, turning her face before I see how pink the flush in her cheeks gets. My triple-sized heart does motherfucking flips inside my chest.
“What do you want from me, Teller?” she asks, occupying herself with the flowers. Ella picks at the tiny leaves and closes her eyes to smell the asters.
“I want my ring on your finger, but I’ll settle for a kiss goodbye.” Shrugging my shoulders, I raise my eyebrows and laugh.
Ella’s neck snaps in my direction, and she narrows her eyes. “Get the hell out of here.”
“Fine,” I say, sticking a smoke between my teeth as I walk away. “But if Trever swings by with his bicycle squad, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
A sedan with the real estate company’s name advertised on the back window is parked in front of the house when I return a half hour after the open house was scheduled to end. Being charred alive isn’t how I want to end the day I’ve had. So, instead of inviting myself in to demand the kiss she owes me, I sneak around to the backyard and set up my tent.
I’m shaking it free from the bag when the kitchen light turns on. A blonde woman steps into view, giving me a double take when she notices my tent building skills. Ella’s realtor squints, nearly pressing her nose to the window to get a better look at the trespasser in the backyard of the house she’s trying to sell.
The woman doesn’t know who I am, but with some luck, she soon will.
House-hawker beckons my girl over as she lifts her cell to alert the proper authorities. Ella appears, dismissing me and the bright orange tent before she disappears again without so much as a glimpse in my direction. Her agent lingers for a second longer with a single raised eyebrow before she locks the window and closes the blinds.
Trusting my gut feeling, or heart feeling, or guilt feeling, I give Ella space, even after I hear the real estate agent leave. A full moon douses everything in white light, reducing the stars to dust. Someone’s built a fire, casing the neighborhood with the scent of hickory and relief. And crickets go a cappella, playing a tune louder than the cars driving by or the sprinklers watering the grass next door.
I’m balancing on the edge of consciousness when I hear footsteps sloshing through the damp grass. Pushing up on my elbows, oxygen seizes in my lungs as Ella’s silhouette stops in front of my tent. She doesn’t ask permission to come in, and I don’t want her to.
“You okay?” I ask when I finally see her face. My heartbeat barrels so fucking hard, it shakes the dust from my bones.
Ella kneels on the grass, wetting the knees of the gray sweats hanging from her hips. Moonlight reflects from her glassy eyes, and she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth as her chin quivers.
“My mom showed up, Tell,” the saddest girl in the world whispers.
I straighten and ask, “What did you say?”
Grief rakes a trembling hand through her hair, pushing it away from the tears sticking to her cheeks. The consequence of heartache knocks Ella back on her heels, and her shoulders fall as she lets burden crush her. It darkens the brown in her eyes and wrecks what’s left of her tenacity, leaving Ella gasping for air and crumbling.
“Apparently, she saw the listing for the house online.” She cries, unable to stop the downpour of emotion from sinking her mood. “She drove by and saw me on the porch and stopped. I didn’t recognize her at first, but then she said my name…”
Pulling Ella into the tent, I wrap my arms around her hard enough to feel her lungs expand against my chest as she sobs. She hammers and claws at my back, crying into my neck in long, painful wails that sever me into pieces.
“Baby,” I say, pressing my lips to the top of her head. “You need to breathe. Take a breath.”
She inhales directly from my lungs.
Her lips taste like salt, and her mouth tastes like tequila. Piercing fingertips turn to soothing, stripping ones. Ella lifts my shirt over my head, and I’m too delirious to stop and ask if this is what she wants. Because this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.
Ella shoves me back and straddles my legs. Liquor has left her swollen eyes hooded and her cheeks bright red. The ends of her hair are wet from an emotional outburst that’s left her drunk and dwindled most beautifully.
“How much did you drink?” I grip her hips as my last and only attempt at doing the right thing.
“Not enough.” She chuckles, circling against me.
My cock strains against my leg and a rush so rich with craving scalds me from the inside out. This isn’t how it should be—violent, senseless, typical—but it’s exactly how we fucking want it. This is how we’ve always done it.
“Fuck me.” Ella unties the drawstring keeping my shorts up. “Come on, prick. Fuck me. That’s why you came here, right? That’s why you keep coming here. Because you want to fuck me like everyone else does.”
Flipping her over, I spread her legs and grip the front of her shirt, yanking the thin cotton until it stretches and rips. “Fucking bitch,” I growl. “You torture me. You wreck me, Gabriella. You make me fucking miserable.”
She laughs with tears running from her eyes down to her temples. The feel of her skin against mine smudges the lines between true and false. The heat coming from between her legs erases everything but the way our bodies react to each other. My mouth waters, my vision blurs, and the only thing I hear is her voice chanting, “Fuck me,” over and over.
“You asked for this,” I say, forcing her sweats down. “Remember that tomorrow.”
“Do it already.” Ella smacks me across the face, and then she pulls my hair so I can’t look away as I enter her. “Is that all you got? Is this all you can give me?”
I push her knees apart and fill her to the brim, thrusting as hard and as far as our bodies allow. Cool calm runs through me with the connection, blessing me with clarity and an anti-anxiety I can’t get from anywhere but inside of her. It’s like being touched by a higher power, golden and righteous and supreme … and unconditional.
Her fingers loosen in my hair and fall to my shoulders, sliding around my neck. Ella melts with me, coming undone one muscle, one limb, one stroke at a time. Our reunion softens the edges of resentment and dulls the pain of rejection. We move together and breathe together, gone in the reminder of how good we are like this.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, pressing her lips to my heated skin between apologies. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Tell.”
Dropping my forehead to hers, I lace my fingers with Ella’s and rest our joined hands beside her head. I slow my tempo, wanting to draw it out until the sun comes up. There’s no need to rush; we own the night.
“I love you,” I say.
Ella’s nipples harden against my chest, and she cries against my lips. She’s gentle, sweeping her fingers along my spine, meeting me stroke for agonizing stroke, submitting to me completely.
The stars don’t need to hear her tender moans. The moon doesn’t deserve them. The universe didn’t fight as hard as I did. I cover her mouth with my hand because those sounds belong to me, and the sky won’t rob me of them.
We come together in a greedy knot of limbs and tongues and things better left unsaid. Ella’s pussy contracts around my dick and I can’t get close enough, emptying inside of her. I drill into her until the blankets wreck, and I’m drained.
“I love you, too,” she says after I’ve collapsed on top of her. “I love you the most, Teller Reddy.”
My eyes open the next day, offended by the harsh sunlight coming through the tent door that’s been left wide open. I sit up and look at my phone for the time, surprised to see it’s almost noon. Ella’s not with me, even though I remember we fell asleep beside each other during the night.
Barefoot and bare-chested, I make my way to the house to find it locked up and shut down. I knock on the door, ring the bell, and try to peek through the windows, but no sight or sound returns.
The ring of my cell phone jump-starts my heart, and I answer it without looking at the name.
“Yeah.” I pat my pockets for a pack of cigarettes I left in the tent and stand at the end of the porch, wondering how far Ella got this time.
“Mr. Reddy, this is Diana Murry from St. Helena Realty,” a voice too bright to be genuine greets me. “I’m sorry for the late response, but I got the message about your cash offer for the Mason house.”