Page 59 of Wrapped with a Beau

“Hell, Elisha, I’ll take a dozen Santas over that.”

As she flounces away, she hears him mumble, “Gonna make a law one day about the evils of your smart mouth during the holiday season, Elisha Rowe.”

She grins all the way out of the movie theater. “Mm-hmm. Good luck, baby.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Elisha

In bed later that night, Elisha lies on her side, cheek pressed into her silk pillowcase. She inhales the lavender oil she daubs to aid a good night’s sleep and watches Ves’s shadow move behind the curtain of his second-story bedroom across the street. He’s just an unexciting blurred shape. She’s watched him a few times before, not on purpose or anything. She likes to leave her curtains open to sleep in the moonlight streaking across her bed, and in the morning, dawn wakes her better than any alarm could.

Tonight, her nighttime routine is just as methodical as all the others, but then something changes.

Decrepit old butterflies start to flap their ragged, time-worn wings. Slowly, at first, like they don’t remember their strength, then more fiercely, until all the dust and cobwebs are shaken off. And then they take flight, fluttering away while she’s in her pug-patterned lilac pajamas and Ves is too far away to do anything about it.

She inhales sharply. Her earlier fullness from the cauliflower steak and potato-leek soup at the vegetarian restaurant she took Ves to is replaced by something insistent and hungry.

Her right hand drifts to the waistband of her flannel bottoms, fingers slipping underneath. Cool fingers on warm skin. She bites her lip and lets her hand move lower. She wishes Ves had kissed her after he’d walked her home. She thought that had been his intention when he’d accompanied her across the street, all the way to her front door, which was disarmingly sweet and entirely unexpected. He could have just parted ways when they reached the cul-de-sac, he to his house and she to hers.

So the fact that he didn’t means something. Then again, the lack of kiss also means something. She sighs and pulls her hand free, unsatisfied with this line of thinking and everything else, too. Maybe the revelations of the evening had just been too heavy.

Across the street, his bedroom light turns off. But a second later, her room glows.

She snatches the phone under her pillow. One new text message.

Ves: You still up?

Elisha hesitates over the keys only long enough not to talk herself out it.

Elisha: Yes.

Ves: Thanks for dinner tonight. I had fun.

Elisha: Me too. Sorry they seated us right in the center of the restaurant. Swear I didn’t plan it!

Ves: Not sorry that Ben got a good view of us, I’ll bet. He was fuming.

That makes her smile.

Elisha: To be fair, that could be because he was seated near the restrooms, though...

Bentley had already been in the restaurant, sitting with some of the guys Elisha had graduated with, mostly ones she’d turned down at the Old Stoat or one of the many holiday parties over the years. Whatever. They’d fake-smiled their way through it when Elisha and Ves had to pass them on the way in and out.

A new message from Ves bubbles up.

Ves: Wouldn’t it be funny if all your exes were teaming up to make a new trivia team?

Elisha: HAHAHA NO WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT They’d probably call it Elisha’s Exes and think it was clever.

Ves: You weren’t kidding about spurning all of them?

Elisha: What can I say, everyone wants me

An ellipsis bubble pops up. Disappears. Then it’s back again. In the time it takes her to reread her last message, analyzing it for any clues as to why he’s waffling with his reply, he stops typing.

She wishes she had gone with a different emoji in her last message, one that isn’t so cocky. The laugh-crying emoji, maybe. That one shows she’s clearly joking around. She squirms, trying to get comfortable. Wait, what if he’s fallen asleep?

For a second, she’s miffed. But then she imagines him nodding off, phone falling to his chest when his hand goes limp, Elisha the last thing on his mind. That’s not so bad.

---