“You’re already familiar with this part.” She pointed at the carport he’d reported to the city. He reddened a bit at the reminder. “Watch the porch. It doubles as a fox den, and the mother is territorial.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, his eyes scanning the entrance as he reached out to touch the exterior stonework. His thumb drifted over the wall-mounted mailbox.
“Don’t—”
He flipped open the lid, and with a piercing screech, a cloud of black wings burst out and vanished into the sky.
He retracted his hand and jumped three feet into the air. “What the—”
“That’s where the bat lives,” she explained apologetically.
“What is this place? Am I asleep?”
Her eyes passed fretfully over the hand he was guarding. “I live in the woods. Bats are part of the deal. Did it bite you?”
“No.” He did a full-body squirm. “But I feel like it’s crawling up my sleeves. Tell me something distracting,” he begged.
“Bree had to get a rabies shot when an unvaccinated show dog bit her, and she said it wasn’t—”
“Literally, any other topic!”
“Okay, um…” Alarm rose in her chest. “Oh! Salvador Dalí had a pet anteater that he would take on walks around Paris like a dog.”
“What?” he responded, befuddled.
“And he made it a point to steal pens everywhere he went.”
“The anteater?”
“No, Salvador Dalí,” she corrected. Lainey placed her key in the door, pausing at the threshold of the front entry. This home had been designed by Elliot’s idol. Would he be disappointed to see how she lived in it, with all her secondhand stuff? Whenever she built anything nice for herself, she had the immediate impulse to sell it to pay for electricity or water or medical bills. His last home was surely impeccably styled.
He couldn’t stay here. He’d hate it here. Look at how he’d responded to her tacit acceptance of the mailbox bat. It wasn’t even about her not wanting him in her space. She wouldn’t be able to tolerate his perceptible judgment at her every choice.
“So, are you?” he asked.
“Am I what?” She hadn’t been listening. She’d been fixating on the way his lip would curl up in dissatisfaction at the sight ofthe mismatched mustard-yellow pillows that she kind of sort of loved.
“Are you going to open the door?” He sounded like he was repeating it.
“Oh. Uh, sure.” She turned the knob, a knot in her stomach. He followed close behind her. “It’s a shoes-off house, but you might want to invest in slippers because the floors are this cold—”
“Flagstone,” he interjected.
“Uh, yeah. I guess you would know all of this already. I’ll just let you…”
She watched him take in the space, admiring her house in a way no one had before—with awe and curiosity. His eyes were immediately drawn to the sandstone hearth at the center, which the rest of the house seemed to pivot around.
“This makes the bat worth it,” he whispered reverently.
The sentence shouldn’t have pleased her as much as it did. “Good.”
“Is the sofa built in?” he asked, his eyes wandering the stone walls.
“Yes. The beds are also built in. So are the dressers, the wardrobe, and all the bookshelves. And the dining room table, weirdly.”
Elliot nodded. “He was big on built-ins. It was the only way he could control what furniture people put in his houses.”
Lainey grunted. “He sounds like an asshole.”
