The California Dashwoods Page 11

  “You too,” Greta said.

  Colonel Brandon shifted her weight awkwardly. “Well, um, I’ll stop in tomorrow and see if she’s here.”

  “Okay,” Elliott said.

  Colonel Brandon scooped up the broken pieces of the DVD, dropped them back into the case, and squeezed it shut. She slipped it into her jacket pocket and walked awkwardly back toward the door. The bells jingled and danced as she pulled the door open.

  It closed slowly behind her.

  “Wow,” Greta said in the silence that followed her departure. “She’s a weird one.”

  “Says you,” Elliott said. “Who isn’t weird at all.”

  Greta rolled her eyes. “It just means I’m an expert.”

  They went back to playing snap.

  “Elliott?” Greta asked after a few more rounds.

  “Mmm?”

  “Are you looking forward to Ned coming to visit?”

  “He’s not coming to visit.” Elliott turned a card over. The Empress stared at him haughtily. “He’s coming to look at some property Paula wants to sell.”

  “And you being here has nothing to do with that at all?” Greta pressed.

  “Why would it?”

  The next card was the Moon. She was a woman too. Elliott liked her more than the Empress. She had been drawn with a gentler cast to her features.

  Abby had a deck of tarot cards somewhere. She’d gone through a few periods in her life where she’d liked to read them at least once a day. She’d tried to explain to Elliott once that she didn’t believe the tarot told her fortune, as such, but that the cards offered guidance to someone receptive to it. It was the same as palmistry, or reading tea leaves, or checking her horoscope every morning. Elliott had never been particularly interested, but Marianne had gotten into it for a while. She’d done spreads for all her friends from school. Marianne could probably tell him exactly what it meant to draw the Moon after the Empress.

  “He’s nice,” Greta said at last. “Ned is.”

  “Yeah, he is. Doesn’t mean he’s coming to see me though.”

  “Doesn’t mean he isn’t,” Greta countered. “Have you asked him?”

  “No.”

  Greta snorted.

  Elliott idly shuffled the deck of tarot cards. “What?”

  “I was just thinking that if we put you and Marianne together, you’d make a perfectly well-balanced human being.”

  “Again with the stone throwing.” Elliott pulled a card out of the deck and almost laughed. The Lovers. Of course. “What’s the view like from inside that glass house of yours?”

  “My threats to stab people are exaggerated at best,” Greta said with an evil smirk.

  “You be sure to let your future defense team know that.”

  “I’ll also tell them not to call you as a character witness.”

  “That is a very good idea.” Elliott cut the deck and turned over the top card.

  Death stared back at him.

  Marianne would probably have something to say about that as well. The Lovers, followed by Death. Well, everything was followed by Death, Elliott supposed. And some things were preceded by it, like uprooting their lives and somehow ending up right here, in this dinky little shop in a tiny town in northern California, surrounded by incense smoke and crystals.

  They closed the shop at four and headed down Main Street to see if the coffee place was still open. Elliott bought Greta a hot chocolate and a slice of coconut sponge, and ordered himself a coffee. A boy waiting at the counter for his order shuffled his feet.

  “H-hey,” he said at last. “Greta, right? You’re the new girl.”

  “That’s me,” Greta said, not even cracking a smile. “Shiny and new.”

  “You’re in honors history,” the boy said. “I sit behind you. It’s Mitchell. That’s my name. Mitchell.”

  Greta blinked at him.

  “Um,” Mitchell said, and Elliott could almost see him desperately clutching at any straws he could. “Did you do your homework yet?”

  “You can’t copy off me.”

  Mitchell turned red. “Oh, no, I . . . I wasn’t going to?”

  “Good,” Greta said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m glad we got that settled.”

  Five minutes later as they walked back toward the apartment, Elliott said, “You know that kid was trying to ask you out, right?”

  Greta wrinkled her nose and gave him a sideways look. “What? No he wasn’t. He wanted to copy my homework!”

  “Pretty sure he didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s dumb.” Greta scowled. “Boys are dumb.”

  But she wore a thoughtful expression all the way back to the apartment.

  ***

  Marianne and Jack’s whirlwind romance was fast and intense, and it ripped the air from her lungs. When Elliott got home from the restaurant on Sunday night, Marianne was sitting on the top step waiting for him, wrapped in a comforter and smoking a joint.

  “He’s gone,” she said. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “He’s gone back to New York.”

  Elliott sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I mean, he’ll be back,” Marianne said with a shaky laugh. “Of course he will! But I already miss him.”

  He’ll be back.

  She said it a few times over the next few days. She lived and died by the pinging text message notifications on her phone, each one buoying her up again and rebuilding her shaken happiness.

  He’ll be back.

  He’s busy.

  He loves me.

  Abby was in total agreement. “Oh, Mar. The way Jack looks at you, of course he’s in love with you. A blind man could see it.”

  Greta looked worriedly at Elliott whenever Marianne or Abby talked about it, as though she was waiting for him to say something to contradict them. Elliott didn’t. Whatever was going on with Jack, it hadn’t been an act with Marianne. Elliott hoped he was a good enough judge of character to be sure of that.

  But love wasn’t all-encompassing, was it? There was love, but there was also work, or school, or day-to-day life. The bubble had to burst sooner or later. Didn’t it? Henry and Abby and their great romance were the exception to the rule, Elliott had always thought. And, even then behind all the grand gestures, they’d had something smaller, quieter, but also stronger. And that small, quiet thing, that certain bond between them, that was what Elliott thought of when he thought of love. Not sailboats or serenades, not poems or presents. Just two people who looked at one another and thought, Yes.

  He hoped, now that Marianne and Jack’s bubble had burst, that the yes still somehow remained.

  Elliott arrived home from an afternoon shift at the restaurant to find Ned Ferrars sitting at the small kitchen table. Elliott had been half expecting it, but he still froze for a moment in surprise before he remembered how to breathe again. Ned looked out of place in the poky little apartment, sitting there uncomfortably as though he was trying to take up less room than his body usually required. He was dressed more casually than Elliott had seen him before, in jeans and a well-fitted henley, and yet he still managed to look overdressed in comparison to his surroundings.

  An expression Elliott couldn’t read flashed across Ned’s face when their gazes met, and then Ned smiled slightly. “Elliott. Hi.”

  “Hi.” Elliott wished he were wearing something that didn’t smell quite so strongly of garlic sauce.

  So did Abby, apparently.

  She fluttered toward him, her patchwork skirt swirling as she moved. “Go and have a shower and get changed, and then we’re taking Ned on a tour of Barton Lake before we go to the Boathouse for dinner.”

  Elliott nodded dumbly. He grabbed some clean clothes from the stack he kept beside the television and headed for the shower.

  He thought about drowning himself to save the awkwardness that was sure to come. It was stupid. The time for shyness had passed, surely. He’d had the guy’s dick in his hand, for fuck’s sake.

  A burs
t of laughter—Abby’s—carried above the noise of the shower. It was weirdly embarrassing to realize that the walls were so thin here, and the rooms so small, that if he could hear his mom laughing, then Ned could hear the spray of the shower. Could hear the way it changed pitch when Elliott angled his body into it or cupped his hands to splash his face.

  Elliott grimaced.

  He was thinking about Ned thinking about him showering.

  Yeah, too weird.

  Elliott tried to concentrate on scrubbing the smell of garlic out of his skin, and not think about Ned sitting in the tiny apartment.

  Except what was Ned doing here? Had he really flown all the way across the continent just to look at some lakeside land? Maybe. Elliott had no idea what Ned actually did. Something to do with construction or property development, whatever the hell that entailed. Maybe this was standard practice for property developers? Maybe he wasn’t here to see Elliott at all.

  Until he thought that, Elliott hadn’t realized how much hope he’d somehow stacked onto the idea.

  Stupid.

  Thinking around in circles wasn’t going to solve anything. It wasn’t going to cause a seismic shift anywhere in Elliott’s consciousness that would let him suddenly see the truth. He didn’t have enough information to decide exactly what was going on here and what it meant.

  He could . . . He could ask?

  Elliott snorted.

  No. No, because asking was an act of vulnerability. It was showing his belly, baring his throat. It was opening himself to the prospect of being hurt, and Elliott wasn’t courageous like that. He wasn’t reckless. He wasn’t Marianne.

  Standing in the shower with the spray hitting his shoulders, Elliott had never been more starkly aware of his own deficiencies. He could just ask, but at the same time, asking was the most unthinkable thing in the world.

  And for what? He didn’t know Ned Ferrars. Not really.

  Elliott sighed and twisted the shower off. He dried himself and dressed, dragged his fingers through his damp hair to at least give it some vague style, and then stared at himself in the mirror until he worked up the courage to leave the bathroom. It took longer than he wanted to admit.

  ***

  Abby drove on their impromptu tour of Barton Lake.

  “The girls are meeting us at the Boathouse,” she announced. “It’s just us! Do you want to sit up front with me, Ned, or back there with Elliott?”

  Ned sat in the front. Elliott was half-glad. Not just because it would have felt weird to have Abby driving them around like a chauffeur, but because this way he was spared at least a little awkwardness. There was a slight sting of disappointment attached to Ned’s decision, though. Did Ned not want to sit next to him?

  The day was bright: perfect weather for showing Barton Lake’s postcard-perfect beauty.

  Elliott sat back and looked out the window, trying to pretend Ned wasn’t right there, and listened to his mother’s commentary on the things they passed. He had lived here for weeks now, but he still hadn’t seen a lot of the town. Abby had picked a route that did a circuit of the lake, going past those huge summer homes Elliott had only ever seen from the verandah of the Boathouse.

  Colonel Brandon lived over here somewhere, behind one of those sets of ornate gates. So did Sophia Smith, Jack’s aunt. And so, once upon a time, had Henry Dashwood, if only for a summer or two. Elliott wondered which house his father had lived in with his first wife and with John. He wondered what a breath of fresh air Abby must have been in John’s life, but how his parents’ divorce must have soured those memories for him.

  In the driver’s seat, Abby effused about the wildflowers that grew along the lakeshore: the delicate purple ground irises, the bright yellow monkey flowers, and the burnt-orange wind poppies. Ned nodded along, craning his head occasionally at things that caught his attention as they passed.

  Their route around the lake brought them back onto Pier Lane at last, and Abby pulled into the driveway at the Boathouse. The afternoon was softening into dusk, and since Elliott had last visited, someone had strung up fairy lights in the shrubs that lined the driveway. It was pretty. Elliott glanced at Ned as they walked toward the entrance, and wondered if that was the sort of detail he noticed. Would he be impressed by the small, quiet charms of the Boathouse and of Barton Lake, or was he the sort of person who wouldn’t notice them at all?

  There was something of a crowd at the Boathouse this evening. John and Paula and the girls, Marianne and Greta, the other members of the Barton Lake Tourist Board, and whichever Barton Lake residents Paula had considered necessary to impress an East Coast property developer.

  Elliott found a spot by the railing and watched as Paula, in a pair of stilettos as sharp as her suit, escorted Ned from group to group. Ned’s smile seemed polite but reserved. He glanced at Elliott more than once, his expression unreadable in those moments, and Elliott hated the way each glance caused a burst of nervous energy to thrum through him.

  Marianne sought him out, her eyes bright. “Ned looks good,” she said, pressing a glass of wine into Elliott’s hand. “Did you guys talk?”

  “Not really.” Elliott sipped the wine.

  Not at all.

  Because what were they supposed to talk about?

  ***

  The lights across the lake were glittering when Elliott escaped the party and wandered to the lakeshore. He was on his second glass of wine, maybe his third. Whatever. He had a pleasant buzz going on, and that’s what counted. He followed the slope of the lawn to the edge of the water and heard the tiny waves lapping at the shore. When he turned and looked back at the Boathouse, he saw that the verandah was lit up. People were talking and laughing. Soft strains of music drifted down to him, somehow making him feel distant, excluded, although he was the one who’d left.

  He stood at the edge of the water, watching the lights reflected on the dark surface of the lake. He had no idea how long he stood there before the crunch of shoes on gravel alerted him to the fact he wasn’t alone anymore.

  Elliott turned. “Ned.” In the low light, he didn’t know if he imagined Ned’s faint smile or not. “How have you been?”

  “Good,” Ned said, his voice soft. “You?”

  “Good,” Elliott echoed, and they stood for a moment in silence.

  He remembered how Ned had sat next to him in the old greenhouse back at Norland Park. He remembered how Ned had listened and offered Elliott, a stranger, comfort. He remembered that underneath Ned’s slightly pinched exterior was someone genuinely warm. A friend in a time when Elliott had needed one. And maybe something a little more than that. Elliott still didn’t know that for sure, but that was okay. He didn’t need to pin it down and define it yet. Ned was a friend, and that was more than enough.

  Except he also remembered the kiss in the greenhouse, and in the kitchen. He remembered how it felt almost as though they’d been drawn together like magnets. He remembered the frantic heat that day in his dad’s studio. Heat and friction and the smell of paint.

  Arousal coiled low in his gut, and then lower still.

  “It’s been different,” he said at last. “This town. The apartment. Everything.”

  “Good different or bad different?” Ned asked. He wasn’t looking at Elliott. He was looking at the lake instead.

  “Not bad. John—Mom’s cousin John, not Dad’s other son John—has been really good to us. The apartment’s no Norland Park . . .” He stopped himself and paused for a moment. “It’s never going to be good, you know? Not how it happened. Not with Dad. That’s what makes it hard, I mean. Losing Dad, not losing our money.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you meant the money,” Ned said.

  He wouldn’t have. The Family would have, and half the northern shore of Lake Barton, from what Elliott knew of them. But not Ned.

  The wind whispered in the leaves. An owl gave a mournful call.

  “Okay,” Elliott said. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. “Thank you.”

 
; Was this it? Was this the moment? Were they done with the small talk? Elliott wanted to be done with it. He wanted to kiss Ned, to press against him, to stoke the heat building inside him into an inferno. He wanted to be reckless again.

  He turned toward Ned, warmth expanding in his chest.

  Ned jerked away.

  A rush of heat that had nothing to do with arousal flooded through Elliott. Had he . . . Had he misread this? God, he had. Clearly he had, given the way Ned was staring at him like he’d suddenly grown a second head.

  Elliott’s face burned.

  Ned had come to Barton Lake to look at a piece of land, not to recapture whatever they’d had between them back in Massachusetts. Had something changed since then, or . . .?

  Flashes of memory came at him hard and fast: the greenhouse, the kitchen, the studio. Vibrant leaves. Loam. Oil paints and pancake batter. Mouths and skin and the rising heat.

  Or had Elliott read too much into it from the start?

  God.

  The blood roared in his skull. His throat ached.

  Ned shifted his weight from foot to foot. He slid his hands into his pockets, and then nodded in the direction of the Boathouse. “I should go back. Talk to the locals.”

  “Yeah,” Elliott said, a sour taste rising in his throat as a fresh wave of humiliation hit. He nodded and forced a smile. “Of course, yeah.”

  He watched Ned walk back to the party.

  ***

  Elliott hadn’t known how tightly his unformed hopes had wound themselves around him until they threatened to choke him. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been looking forward to seeing Ned Ferrars again—A friend? Something more?—until Ned had come and gone and left an emptiness behind in Elliott. An absence not of the man himself, but of the expectation that Elliott had unknowingly attached to him. All this time telling himself that Ned was just a friend . . . A part of Elliott must never have truly believed it if it hurt to discover it was actually true.