For some reason, that annoyed me.
I stood in my workshop, carefully moving a piece of wood back and forth against the sanding belt, my mind only half on the work. Eileen had been doing something with the website to get people to buy stuff, it seemed; I wasn’t exactly sure what she’d changed, but each morning I came down to my workshop to find a fresh set of orders, each printed on its own sheet of paper and carefully stacked in the middle of my workbench where I couldn’t miss them. Most of the orders were for small pieces like coasters or wine stoppers, easily handled in a couple hours. I’d stack the completed pieces on top of their respective order forms in the furthest corner of my workshop, as if trying to push them out of sight and thus out of mind.
The next day, I’d come down to find all the completed orders had vanished – and new ones sat on my workbench, irking me with their very presence.
Now, when I walked past the mostly closed door to my study, I felt irritation pricking at my brain. Couldn’t Eileen have said something about the orders, given me some warning that they’d start flowing in? Couldn’t she acknowledge me at all?
Nothing. We kept on eating together, but our conversations were fewer and shorter, with longer periods of empty space between them. In the present moment, I found myself gritting my teeth, annoyance burning behind my eyes.
It galled me all the more because this was exactly what I’d asked for, what I’d been hoping to have as the outcome. When I’d talked with Niall, he made it sound like Eileen would be clinging to me and pursuing me with renewed fervor. Instead, it seemed like our time together had been a cold bucket of water on any flames of passion.
I knew that it hadn’t been because of my performance in bed. I’d been around enough times to recognize the difference between a real orgasm and a fake one. Eileen definitely hadn’t been faking anything.
But then, after we finished, she immediately went cold. It was as if, once she stopped riding me, she put me totally out of her head, forgot that anything happened between us!
I didn’t know why this rankled me, but it did. It felt like an itch that I couldn’t scratch, a slight against my performance. I’d always been the one to leave the girl, not the other way around.
I suffered through the rest of the week, but finally couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. I caught Eileen coming back from the front door, holding the day’s mail in her hands.
“We need to talk,” I said gruffly, standing in front of her in the front hallway of my house.
She paused, looked back evenly at me. I’d forgotten about her height, how she could nearly meet my gaze eye to eye. “What is it?” she asked.
Even her voice sounded cool, all business and professionalism. What happened to the warmth and heat that I’d heard before, when I kissed her and pulled her down into bed?
I’d intended to immediately start on my grudges and irritation, but couldn’t quite bring myself to say so, now that I stood face to face with her. “Any news on your severance pay?” I asked, nodding down at the envelopes in her hands.
She shook her head. “Not in today’s mail,” she answered, although I thought I heard some restrained note in her voice, like she wasn’t sharing something. “Is that what you wanted to ask about?”
“No, it’s not that.” I took a deep breath, tried to keep my voice calm and even. We could discuss this reasonably, like civilized people. “Look, you’ve been getting all these orders in, just dropping them on my work bench each morning.”
“Great, isn’t it?” She smiled, but something behind her eyes still looked restrained. “Now that the site is live, I’ve started the advertising push, and it’s working. Orders are flowing in, and we can use this momentum to keep growing!” She gestured towards the stairs. “Pretty soon, you won’t need to worry about renting out a second bedroom to get by.”
“Right.” How did her words and tone sound happy, when something about her felt off? “But you could have asked me before doing all this, you know.”
That wiped the smile off her face, like I’d swiped it away with an eraser. “I did ask you,” she snapped. “I showed you the site, told you that I’d start pushing it – or were you too distracted to listen to anything coming out of my mouth?”
Why was she getting so upset at me? A part of me knew that I ought to walk away, defuse the situation – but I’d never been good at walking away from anything, not when I truly believed that I was the one in the right.
“Maybe sleeping with you was a mistake,” my mouth blurted out.
Whoops. That wasn’t the right thing to say.
I knew it immediately, wished that I could reach out and physically catch the words out of the air. Eileen’s mouth dropped open for a moment, and she just stared at me.
“Shit. Eileen, I-“
It was too late. She spun around, dropping the mail in her hands as she dashed for the stairs.
I watched her go, torn between chasing after her and apologizing, or sniffing and being glad that at least the tension between us had come to some resolution. She didn’t pause and look back, but stormed upstairs. I listened to the thump of her feet as she climbed. A second later, the loud slam of her bedroom door echoed down the stairway.
I bent down, grumbling wordlessly to myself as I picked up the pieces of mail that she’d dropped. I flicked through them without much interest. Bills, utility charges, the usual credit card offers… and a brown envelope that I didn’t recognize.
I turned it over to look at who’d sent it and froze. The return address on the letter marked it as coming from the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association – one of the largest organizations for woodworkers. I’d taken a couple classes sponsored by the association when I’d been starting, but I hadn’t seen much need to remain a member.
So why would they be emailing me?
I slit the letter open with one finger, pulled out the single sheet of paper contained within. “This is to inform you that we have successfully received your entry for the Design in Wood competition,” I read, before I stopped and lowered the paper, forcing myself to take a deep breath.
This had to be Eileen’s doing.
Before I was fully aware of my actions, I’d stomped up the stairs, slammed my knuckles against her door. I reached down for the handle, but she wrenched it open before I could do so, glared back at me.
“What?”
I held up the letter. “What’s this supposed to be about?”
She looked it over without taking it from my hands. “I told you that we needed more publicity. I entered the stag that you carved for me-“
“I hate contests.” I had to force my voice to stay level, not explode with anger. “Haven’t I told you this before? I hate the idea of being judged by my art. I swore to never enter a contest.”
“Sure, but this is a big opportunity, and this could attract a ton of attention to us,” she began, but I wasn’t going to hear it.
“I don’t care.” My hands dropped to my sides, and I felt my nails biting into my palms as they tightened. The paper from the San Diego Woodworkers Association crumpled as my fingers pressed deeply in. “I don’t want this. Cancel it.”
“I don’t think that I can,” she said. “I already sent in the forms, dealt with everything.” She nodded towards the letter. “You’re entered.”
I didn’t have a response to that. My mouth worked, but I couldn’t find any words for a moment. “Out,” I finally managed.
“What?”
I stepped to the side, pointed down towards the front door. “Out. I can’t handle you right now, having you here.” I looked back up at her, glared at her, feeling my blood pressure pulsing behind my eyes.
She blinked, took a step back. “You’re throwing me out?”
“Yes!” That was exactly what I wanted to do! Why had I ever let her into my life, where she’d done nothing but turn everything upside down and add in prodigious amounts of chaos? I’d been doing just fine before she arrived! I hadn’t needed her help!
/> For a second, Eileen looked like she might cry. I saw her face twitch, those big eyes of hers blinking as if struggling to hold back tears.
She didn’t lose control, in the end. Her face grew hard again, and she slammed the door on my face. I barely managed to pull my hand back from the doorframe in time to save my fingers from being squished.
A minute later, she yanked it open again. She had a duffel bag slung over her shoulder, still partially unzipped with a shirt spilling half out of it. She stepped out, turned around to hit me with the full fury of her anger.
“I was helping you,” she snarled at me. “Just because you’re too much of a fool, bull-headed horny idiot to recognize it…”
“Horny?” I echoed in disbelief.
This time, it was her finger slamming into me along with her gaze. “Yes! You’re the one who kissed me!”
“You kissed me back!” I roared.
She paused for a moment, as if not sure how to respond to that, but then plunged onwards. “It was a stupid mistake. On my part, too. I should have realized that just staying here and helping you, with any of this, was a dumb decision on my part. I should have known better to get involved.”
Dammit, but the woman was actually, incredibly, managing to make me feel bad for coming at her so aggressively! “Look, Ellie,” I began, but didn’t know where to go from there.
She didn’t give me a chance to figure it out. “You want me out,” she hissed. “And I want out. We both win.”
She moved past me, her shoulder slamming into mine to push me aside, and clattered down the stairs. I caught a hint of her floral scent hanging in the air before dissipating, leaving my house feeling somehow emptier.
I stood there on the second floor of my house, not sure how I should feel about this outcome. I’d wanted her out, right? Every time I glanced down at the note from the Woodworking Association in my hand, I felt another little surge of anger flare up inside of me. I’d told her about how I hated competitions, and she’d gone ahead and entered me anyway, despite my express wishes to have nothing to do with it.
In the same way, she’d been pushing my buttons ever since I made the mistake of inviting her to live here. She’d insisted on interfering in my business, convinced me to let her dig through all my financial records. She went ahead and built me a website that I didn’t want, flooding me with more orders than I ever received and making my hobby start to feel almost like a job! I hadn’t asked for that.
In a hundred different ways, she’d burrowed into my life, wormed her way in and made herself a part of its foundation. I was better with her out, I told myself. I’d go through some withdrawals, but in the end, I’d made the right choice. I’d never sought out long term companionship from any of the other women I’d known over the years. I did just fine on my own.
I’d be just fine. I just needed to wait, let myself adjust. Hell, Eileen would probably come crawling back to here tonight, when she realized that she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Right now, I needed to stop thinking about her.
“I need a drink,” I announced to the empty house. I still had more orders from the website that I hadn’t yet filled, but I could deal with those later. I headed downstairs to begin emptying every can of beer in my house.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eileen
* * *
I felt tears burning at the corners of my eyes as I fled Rick’s house, but I didn’t permit a single one to break free of the cage of my lashes until I reached my car. Only once I’d slid behind the driver’s seat and closed the door did I finally permit them to trickle down my cheeks.
“Why am I even crying?” I asked aloud, in between sobs that I couldn’t fully stop. “He’s an ass, and I shouldn’t be upset!”
I thought the words were true, but they didn’t seem to change anything. If anything, they just brought on another wave of tears, clouding my vision and making me blink furiously to try and remove them.
I’d dropped most of the mail onto the floor in his house, leaving behind his bills. I’d made sure, however, to keep hold of the most precious thing to arrive in the mail that day – or ever, perhaps. I pulled it out from where I’d shoved it into my pocket, running my hand over it to smooth out the creases and taking care to keep it away from any residual tears.
The letter wasn’t from my insurance company. I doubted I’d see that money for quite a while longer, and I’d probably still need to keep pestering them before they finally gave up and surrendered what they owed me.
But it seemed that Integrated Technologies had finally gotten around to issuing me my severance check.
I tore open the side of the envelope, slid out its contents. Sure enough, a check dropped into my hands, with a very comfortable number printed on it. It wouldn’t last me forever, but it was more than enough for me to afford the first couple months’ rent on a new apartment and pay the rest of my bills besides.
I pulled my phone out from my purse, found Lisa’s number. I took a deep breath before calling, trying to steady myself.
It didn’t help. “Ellie! Wait – what’s wrong?” Lisa demanded as soon as she answered, even before I had a chance to speak.
“Nothing’s wrong-“
“Nuh uh,” she cut me off, and I could hear her shaking her head. “Now I definitely know that something’s gone bad. What is it? Spill. Do you need me to come over there?”
“No.” More sniffles and tears were on their way; I could feel them building up in my sinuses. “But maybe I can go over to your house?”
“Of course!” she said immediately. “As long as you don’t mind a bit of a mess. Shay had a playdate with some of her friends, and they still haven’t really mastered the art of clean-up.”
“That’s okay. I’ll see you soon.”
I drove slowly, trying to stay safe since my thoughts weren’t on the road. It took longer than expected, but I made it to Lisa’s house without incident and hauled my hastily packed duffel bag up the steps to her front door.
“Hi there,” she greeted me, her tone dropping mid-sentence as her eyes moved down to the duffel bag at my feet. “Oh. Oh no, honey. Come in, come in. What happened?”
“I remembered how much I hate men, that’s what happened,” I said, dragging the bag inside. Lisa beckoned me back towards the kitchen. I followed, sensing a medicinal glass of wine was about to be placed in my hands.
She didn’t disappoint, grabbing a glass from her cabinet and pouring the rest of an opened bottle into it. I took the glass from her, being careful not to spill – the wine came up nearly to the brim. “Men are idiots, yes. It is our curse that we must bear them.” She waited for me to swallow my first gulp of wine before continuing. “What did Rick do this time?”
“This time?”
She shrugged. “You’ve complained to me about him before. Never with your face all red from tears, though, so it must have been something especially bad. Come on, it will feel better to let it out.”
A part of me didn’t want to talk about it, but I knew that she was right – I’d feel better with it out. So, in between finishing off the glassful of wine, I explained how Rick blew up at me upon finding out that I’d entered him into the Design in Wood contest, how he ended up telling me that us sleeping together had been a mistake, how he practically ordered me out of his house.
Lisa stood on the other side of the center island in her kitchen, interrupting me only to reach into the fridge and dig out a second bottle of wine. “A girl has to always be prepared,” she said, pulling a corkscrew from a drawer and twisting it into the cork. “God, Rick sounds like an ass. He threw you out after all that you’ve done for his business, just because you entered him in a contest?”
“He did admit to me early on that he hated contests,” I allowed. “He had some stupid reason for it. But this could be a huge advantage for his small business and could get him the recognition that he needs!”
Lisa shook her head. I noticed that she appeared to have a bi
t of green paint caught in her hair, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything about it. Must have been from the playdate earlier with Shay and her friends.
“It’s not about the business stuff,” she declared confidently.
“What? That’s what set him off, though.”
“Nope. The arrival of that letter might have been the final straw that started the fire, but he’d been simmering about this for a long time. There’s no way that a guy would throw out a woman he’s sleeping with over something as silly as a woodworking contest.”
I winced. “Sleeping with him was definitely a mistake.”
“Sleeping with who?”
I jumped at the new, high-pitched voice. Lisa and I both turned to find Shay, Lisa’s daughter, standing in the entrance to the kitchen and looking curiously back at us.
“I sleep with my stuffed animals,” she went on, advancing towards me and holding up a plush wolf with a ludicrous smile on its face. “Is that what you did?”
I caught Lisa out of the corner of my eye, frantically shaking her head back and forth. “Kind of like that,” I said to Shay. We’d met a handful of times, enough for her to remember me, but I’d never really gotten over feeling slightly uncomfortable around her. I wasn’t too good with kids.
“What do you mean?”
I searched for a kid-appropriate way to handle this. “Are you friends with any of the boys in your class, Shay?”
She plopped her stuffed animal up on the countertop beside me, and then struggled to climb onto the other stool next to me against the center island. “No, I don’t like boys,” she informed me between grunts. “They’re stupid, and smelly, and they like to punch each other all the time.”
“And that doesn’t go away when they get older,” I added, making Lisa snort. “But imagine that you liked a boy, so you did something nice for him.”
She’d managed to get up onto the stool, and she now blinked big eyes up at me. “Like what?” she asked, squeezing her stuffed dog against her chest.
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