Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [72]
“When are you coming back?”
“When I find a new apartment.”
I rolled my eyes.
She stood in her closet and threw clothes into an open suitcase on the floor. Michael, who had come with her, watched from the living room. He’d left his coat on. He seemed both uncomfortably hot and embarrassed, regarding Zoë’s temper with the amused forbearance of a married man who had learned it was better to side with his wife despite the eccentricities of her so-called logic. I wondered if he knew he was one of the things we’d fought over. No doubt it would give him pleasure.
She was in and out in half an hour. She slammed the door behind her.
Eli was taken off guard by the entire spectacle.
I actually found myself defending her behavior: “She gets irrational when her mother’s sick.”
Worriedly, he stood at the living room window and watched as she walked resolutely away from us.
13
After a month of stomping around, one part human and one part Clydesdale, I was finally given permission to shed the cumbersome air cast. Eli drove me to the doctor’s office and sat in the waiting room reading Highlights while I had my last examination.
“You’ll have some residual pain,” the physician said. He was the third I had seen throughout this ordeal. I couldn’t even remember his name. “But for all intents and purposes, you’re back on two feet.” He smiled. He couldn’t resist the pun.
On the way home we bought a sleeve of Toll House easy-bake cookie dough to celebrate. I had the very best intentions of baking the cookies. Instead, I put a dozen in the oven and ate the rest of the dough raw while watching Sense and Sensibility—a fitting film, I explained to Eli, because the spraining of an ankle served as major plot point in the romance between the beautiful Marianne and the dashing rogue Willoughby.
Eli sat on the floor, his back to the couch on which I was rather unceremoniously camped with the cookie dough to my left and my liberated ankle enjoying its perch on the armrest. As Edward Ferrars began to fall, in an ever so endearing and awkward way, for Elinor Dashwood, it occurred to me that I’d seen this movie at least eight times and wasn’t tired of it. But then I’d always had talent for repetition. As a little girl I played Amy Grant’s “Thy Word” until Mom threatened to donate my Fisher-Price tape player to the church poor box. I read favorite books until I could recite them from memory. In one year I watched Return of the Jedi one hundred and twentythree times. Writing turned my childhood love of repetition into a professional skill. When working on a story I could envision the same scene and the same characters a dozen times, perfecting or changing a minor detail with each replay.
My fantasies of men were similarly nuanced and rerun. In my mind’s library of catalogued romances lived men famous, men ordinary, boys I knew, and boys I watched from a distance. The conversations I had with these men, the kisses and otherwise we shared in dark rooms, comprised a collection of ideas taken from cinema, from magazines, and from the novels I’d read burrowed beneath my bedroom blankets, cheeks flushed with vicarious excitement.
I knew better than to expect much from love, from romance. But to expect and to fantasize are not the same thing.
I watched Eli trying to watch the movie, studied the line of his profile, the concentration furrowing his brow. We hadn’t been acting any differently than we had when Zoë was around; he only ever treated me with the friendly detachment of a roommate. When he moved to the couch to sit beside me, I knew better than to expect him to take me in the crook of his arm or to even notice that I was wearing perfume. I never wear perfume.
He fought sleep. His head bowed lower and lower as his eyes grew heavier, until, gently, his cheek came to rest against my shoulder. My breath caught. I closed my eyes, wondered if his lips would taste as spiced as the scent of his skin.
The credits rolled. I turned the volume up to startle him awake. He was only a little bewildered