Her side of the room, the side farthest from the door, seemed untouched. Her satin robe still laid across the back of her big reading chair by her favorite bay window. There was still a glass on her bedside table with a stack of paperbacks next to it, as if she were going to lay down that night, pick one up, and start reading it. Everything seemed to be waiting for her return.
My heart started beating faster and I knew if I didn’t leave the room, soon the tears would come. Being in that room was too much for me to handle. The room still had so much Liv in it, I could only think of how much Liv I didn’t have.
I moved quickly to Devon’s dresser and pulled open drawers frantically, sighing in relief when I found a drawer with jogging shorts and t-shirts. I pulled one of each out quickly, nearly ran to the bedroom door, and then slammed it behind me as I left. I leaned against the closed door, sucking in deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. After a few moments, I felt the control of my emotions come back to me, and moved to the kids’ bathroom to get out of my soaked and frigid clothing.
I went back downstairs wearing Devon’s clothes. It was impossible not to smell him on them, but I tried my hardest not to hold the collar of his shirt purposefully to my nose and inhale. I’d smelled him plenty of times in my life and, as sad as I knew it was, I could pick out his particular scent over any other. It was clean and spicy. All male.
I found Ruby and Jax standing in front of a pile of towels that were all soaked and doing nothing to help the standing water problem.
“Thanks for getting the towels guys.” They smiled at me, but then just continued to look at me as if I knew what was supposed to happen next. “I’ve got no idea how to deal with this.”
I pulled up a browser on my phone and Googled, “How to deal with standing water.” None of the pages that popped up looked as though they’d be of any immediate help, and the only thing I could think of was to get the water out any way I could. So I grabbed a big mixing bowl from a cupboard, and started bailing water out the French doors. The kids grabbed cups and helped, but I told them to stay out of the water, as it was still intensely cold.
We’d been working for a while, not making much progress, when I heard Devon’s voice.
“Oh, my God,” he said, and I looked up to see him placing his briefcase on the island, eyes wide, taking in all the chaos.
“What are you doing here? Did you miss your work thing?” I immediately felt terrible, as if I was causing so many problems. My feet were freezing, I was wearing clothes that smelled fabulous and were too big for me. My hair was a disaster from the earlier incident with the storm inside the laundry room, and all I really wanted to do was take a warm bath. “I’m sorry,” I cried, dropping my hands to my side, making the giant mixing bowl I held onto slap against the side of my leg. “I didn’t know what to do. Google wasn’t any help. The thing in the laundry room was spewing water when we got home and I was just trying to get the water out.” I was rambling and on the verge of tears, no longer able to keep my composure together when Devon walked straight to me, through the freezing cold water, dress shoes and slacks still on, and wrapped his arms around me.
I was startled at first because, well, we never really touched except when it was accidental and detrimental. So, to have him wrap his arms around me, knowing it was me, in an effort to comfort me, well, I lost it. I cried into his suit jacket, dropped the bowl, and moved my arms around his waist, pressing my face further into his chest.
I was crying out the stress of the last few months, crying for every time I’d held it in since Olivia passed, crying for all the times I wasn’t enough for her children or her husband. But I was holding on to him for entirely different reasons. I was pulling his body closer to mine because I could, when I never could have in the past. I was feeling all the muscles in his back as my hands ran up to his shoulder blades because I just couldn’t stop myself. I was reveling in the knowledge that his hands were on me and paying excruciatingly close attention to the fact that I liked his hands on my body. I loved everything about being in his arms, but hated myself for loving it so damn much.
“Ruby, Jax, why don’t you guys go upstairs and put on some pajamas,” he whispered softly to his children, and I couldn’t imagine the scene I was making in their kitchen.
After a moment, he pulled away slightly, his hands coming to frame my face, feeling very warm against my exceedingly cold skin.
“Are you okay?” he asked, the sincerity in his voice breaking me open just a little bit more.
“I’m c-cold.”
“Yeah, your lips are a little blue.” His eyes kept darting between my lips and my eyes. He hadn’t moved his hands and I wasn’t about to pull away from his touch. “Let’s get you to the living room and warm you up a bit, all right?”
“Ok-kay.”
He turned from me, but reached for my hand at the same time, and pulled me into the living room. My feet started to tingle as soon as they were out of the water, and I made my way to the couch. When I sat, he knelt in front of me, just between my parted knees, one of his hands on each of my thighs. His finger hit the mesh of his basketball shorts and realization came over his face.
“Are you wearing my clothes?”
“Yes-s,” I stammered, teeth still chattering. He leaned forward until his face was exactly a hair’s breadth from mine and my lungs seized up with his proximity. A blush crept over my face when I realized he was only reaching for the throw blanket draped over the back of the couch. He pulled it around my shoulders, wrapping it around the top half of my body. “I got s-soaked while I t-turned off the valve. I w-went upstairs but c-couldn’t bring myself to p-put on Liv’s clothes.”
“Shhhh,” he said as he rubbed his hands up and down my arms, trying to build some heat between his hands and my skin. It seemed like I’d been waiting years for him to use his heat on me, but thinking about it in that moment made me feel shameful.
“What are we going to do about the water?” I whispered, unable or unwilling to use my full voice to ruin the moment.
“Um, well, I’m not sure.”
“Google isn’t much help.”
His mouth quirked up in an adorable grin and I couldn’t help it when mine did the exact same thing. “Really? Well, I guess we’ll have to use some good old fashioned ingenuity then.” He thought for a moment, his hands still torturously kneading into my arms. I had to admit though, I wasn’t feeling the cold anymore. I was only feeling the slow burn building deep inside me. “You stay here, warm up. I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t have time to answer before he disappeared down the flooded hallway. But I did hear the splashing and figured he must have gone right into the lake that used to be the laundry room. I cringed, thinking about his shoes again. There was a lot of noise coming from down the hall and I couldn’t help but stare at the entrance, waiting for him to come back.
When he finally reappeared, he was carrying a large round machine that had a hose like a vacuum. “What is that?”
“It’s a shop-vac. It can suck up almost anything. We’ll have this place cleaned up in no time.”
“Auntie Evie, we’re hungry.” Ruby appeared at the bottom of the stairs with new, dry pajamas, looking exhausted. I immediately felt terrible. Amidst the flooding crisis and my emotional breakdown, I’d forgotten to feed the children.
“Okay, Ruby, go upstairs and put on a movie for you and your brother. I’ll bring up a picnic for you to eat in the TV room on a blanket.”
“Really?” Some of her exhaustion left and was replaced with excitement. They were never allowed to eat anywhere except the table.
“Really. But you have to promise to keep an eye on your brother for me while I help your daddy clean this up.”
“Okay,” she yelled happily, as she skipped back up the stairs.
Three hours passed, in which I’d made sandwiches for the kids and brought them up with grapes, crackers, and juice boxes, calling it a ‘picnic’. They’d eaten and watched their movie whi
le Devon and I worked together to suck up the standing water. Once most of the water was gone, all we could do was use towels to try to dry the floor and the walls. After inspection, Devon concluded that the hose that hooked up to the back of the washer had broken, causing all the water to flow out onto his beautiful hardwood floors.
“We’ve got a few fans in the attic, I’ll go get them.”
I heard his footsteps go up the stairs and I focused all my mental energy on his use of the word ‘we.’ He’d meant him and Liv. The we he thought he’d be using for fifty or sixty more years. He wasn’t a we anymore, but, to me, he always would be. Liv and Devon. My best friend’s husband, regardless of whether or not she was alive. For a reason I only assumed was for my personal torture, I’d been totally fine with Devon and Liv as a we when she’d been alive, but now that she was gone, the fact that he still attached himself to her in that way made me feel sad and heavy.
When I heard him clear his throat a minute later, I turned to see him looking at me with soft eyes. “There were so many times when we were younger, before life really happened, when I’d imagined you in my clothes. I’d have these fantasies of coming home from my big important job to find you in one of my button up shirts, or just in one of my ties.” I could feel my cheeks burning at his words, but couldn’t move my gaze from him, didn’t want to shatter whatever was happening between us, because I knew it was fragile, like spun sugar.
“Then things got serious with Liv and me and the fantasies sort of turned into forbidden thoughts. Thoughts I knew I shouldn’t have, and managed to turn off all together for the most part, aside from the few moments when you were absolutely too beautiful to push to the back of my mind. Just little snapshots of heaven I tucked away and only thought about when I was really happy, because thinking of you when things weren’t going well with Liv was too close to infidelity. I couldn’t think about you when, perhaps, I wanted to most because I was afraid of what that would do to my marriage. So, I tried not to. And it worked, for the most part. I still got to see you often. Still had you in my life, our lives. Still got to tell you that you looked nice, or that I liked your new hair style, still got to know you were safe and close by.”
I could remember practically every compliment he’d given me in the last nine years. I’d tucked them away too. Tried not to read too much into them, because it felt too much like I was betraying my best friend.
“And then I come home one night and there you are, in my kitchen, wearing my basketball shorts, and Liv is nowhere to be found.”
The air in the room crackled with his words, filled with the regret of the enormity of the thought. Olivia was nowhere to be found, but she was still everywhere.
“And the mind boggling part is you’re even more unavailable to me now than you were before. Olivia’s absence took you so much farther away from me. Even though you’re here, in my house, every day. You’re here, but you’ve never been more out of reach.”
“Devon,” I managed to whisper, not really even knowing what I wanted to say, just needing to stop his words.
“Unless-ˮ
“Devon, no.”
“Unless it’s you who’s keeping yourself away for her sake.”
“I’m here, Devon, but we can’t-″
“There’s no reason we can’t-″
“Yes, there is. Olivia-″
“Is dead.”
His words hurt for so many reasons I couldn’t even begin to count them. Olivia was dead; there was no reason to deny him that fact. I stood up, finally finding some feeling in my body besides the pounding of my heart. I walked to him, stopping just far enough away so that he didn’t get any ideas about reaching out and touching me. Surely, that would break me.
“Olivia being dead isn’t the reason we can’t be together. But, it can never be the reason we are.”
Chapter Nine
Summer between Sophomore and
Junior Year of College
“So, when you decided to get an apartment on the third floor, was it always your master plan to make me do all the heavy lifting?” Elliot’s voice rang out through the semi-empty apartment, and I smiled automatically as I always did around him.
“Well, first of all, it wasn’t my plan to get an apartment on the third floor, that’s just what was available. But, yeah,” I said, turning and leaning my backside up against the kitchen counter, “I kinda knew you wouldn’t let me haul my stuff up two flights of stairs.” I watched, a little breathless, as he dropped a box full of textbooks on the floor of my soon-to-be living room, then turned toward me. His t-shirt was beginning to stick to his body, just slightly damp from working up a sweat carrying boxes upstairs. I knew from personal experience what the landscape of his chest looked like, but something about it being covered in cloth but still visible had my heart rate pounding.
I’d found over the last year of dating Elliot that you could grow to love someone, grow to trust them, build something with them. We’d started out a little rocky, mostly my insecurity and wariness to start a relationship at all, but Elliot had been a steady and constant presence in my life, and made being with him easy, made loving him easy. He was one of the best people I’d ever known.
He was also terribly handsome and sexy, as demonstrated in that moment as he strode toward me with determination and heat in his eyes.
“Every time I have to haul your belongings up those stairs, I’m going to take a kiss from you,” he said, trying to sound threatening, but the idea was anything but unpleasant.
“That will surely add time to the move,” I said, trying to sound as if I couldn’t care less, as if giving in to him was a nuisance rather than a thrill. I turned to put a cup in the new place I’d just deemed my “cup place,” and felt the tingles shoot up my spine as he came closer.
“What if I told you,” he said, his body coming to press up against mine, deliciously warm and firm, his hand brushing my blonde hair off my shoulder, “that every time I kiss you.” His breath was warm on my neck as my breath stalled in my lungs. “I’ll kiss you in a different place?” His lips pressed against my neck, just barely, but then he added pressure and a hint of tongue, and my knees went weak. I gripped the countertop, both trying to hold myself up but also because I simply needed to hold on to something.
I swallowed thickly, and then took in a sharp breath at the feeling of his teeth nipping at me. “I’d tell you,” I rasped, not able to hide the arousal in my voice, “that there are a lot of boxes to be moved.”
“You think I can’t find enough places on your body to put my mouth?”
My hand reached behind me and found its natural place at the nape of his neck. “I think you’d do just fine.” With that, he spun me around, quickly fitting his mouth over mine, hands gripping my backside. I loved kissing Elliot. He was an expert kisser, always passionate. He didn’t kiss as a means to an end, he genuinely enjoyed kissing and therefore, so did I. When his fingers found the hem of my tank top and slid up my back toward the clasp of my bra, I knew if I didn’t stop him, we’d add a half hour to our moving time.
“Hey now, no one said anything about second base,” I said as I gently pushed him away, my hands on his chest. He gave me a smirk, but then backed away, making his way to my front door.
“We’ll see what you have to say about bases after about twenty boxes,” he said with a wink.
“Keep talking, Elliot. I don’t see any more boxes making their way up the stairs on their own.”
He clutched his chest, mimicking pain. “You wound me. I knew you only wanted me for my brute strength.” I raised his arm and kissed his, admittedly, impressive biceps.
“Get out of here,” I said through a happy laugh. He winked again, but then disappeared out through my door. I turned back to the work of unpacking my kitchen. I was still smiling a minute later when my door burst open again, only this time I didn’t hear Elliot’s beautiful voice, I heard Olivia’s melodic one.
“Look at this awesome bachelorette pad!” Her voic
e was soft and friendly. I leaned back from the counter to see her turning circles in my living room, taking in my new and mostly empty apartment. She dropped her purse on the floor against the wall, and then joined me in the kitchen.
“Hey you,” I said, smiling even harder because she was there. “I didn’t know you were coming over. I’m glad to see you.”
“Devon and I got all our stuff moved in yesterday and then this morning we were just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, and realized that living together wasn’t much different than what we were doing. So, I wanted to come see your place.”
Liv and I had lived on campus for our sophomore year. We’d gotten a dorm room which we shared with two other girls that had a private bathroom. It was sort of like an apartment, but came with a meal plan and was within walking distance of all our classes. I loved living there and building friendships with the other two girls, but as Devon and Liv grew closer, she had wanted to take their relationship to the next level.
Devon had been good for Liv, but he’d also been good to Liv. He’d been nothing but steady and reliable and, eventually, once she’d finally realized he wasn’t going to rip her heart to shreds as it had been in the past, she calmed down. She stopped drinking excessively, stopped partying often, and became the Liv I’d known all along. She was back to being the sweet, funny, caring friend I’d had for years. When she’d told me they had decided to move in together, I was happy for her, but a little disappointed. I’d imagined living with her throughout our college experience. Not to mention that since I’d been dating Elliot for the same amount of time they’d been together, I’d felt the pressure to make the same move with him.
The Absence of Olivia Page 9