Georgie, All Along (8)
“Georgie,” he says, giving me a light squeeze. “I’m so glad you made it safely. I’m so glad you could come.”
He rises and stands beside Bel, draping an arm across her shoulders and lightly fingering the sash that’s stretching across her belly. “Homecoming court, huh?”
“We’ve hit a gold mine,” Bel says, gesturing to the bin. “Georgie was looking at—”
“The house is beautiful,” I blurt, cutting her off, because that feeling of private desperation is persisting. I don’t want to talk about the fic, not yet. I want to look at the whole thing; I want to dissect it. I want to roll around in its fullness.
“It’s all Bel’s doing,” he says, and she presses onto her toes to kiss him on the cheek. For a second, they’re in their own private, quiet world; he touches her bump and softly asks how she feels. She rests her hand over his and murmurs a reply that I don’t catch, except for the word daddy, which I hope has to do with the baby and not the sex drive she keeps talking about. I use the time to tuck the fic more securely on my lap. I’d probably shove it down the front of these overalls if I thought Bel and Harry wouldn’t catch me doing it.
“I tried to convince her to stay here,” Bel says, her voice back to a normal volume, and Harry raises his eyes to mine.
“We’d be thrilled to have you,” he says. “You could use some rest.”
Bel nods. “Pampering,” she says. “Time to think.”
It’s nice; of course it’s nice, but it’s also nearly Mrs. Michaels/ milkshake-bankruptcy mortifying. The idea that I’m here to help somehow is dust in the wind; Bel and Harry stand across from me like a let’s-help-Georgie team. Bel’s pleas for me to come last month now strike me as a ruse I should’ve seen through—an effort to get me out of LA after such an unexpected change to my circumstances there. Suddenly it’s not the prospect of sex noises that’s putting me off the guest room, it’s the idea of being a project for these two very successful people who already have most of their new house unpacked and who probably have been talking about me occasionally as they did it, wondering what I’ll do now that I’m not working for Nadia. Time to think, I know, means time to think about what’s next, and even though it’s barely been an hour since I made myself a promise to do exactly that, I realize that doing it at someone else’s coaxing—Nadia’s, Bel’s—simply doesn’t appeal.
The fic fairly burns on my lap.
I shake my head, hoping my smile looks grateful. “It’s like I said, Bel. I told my mom and dad I’d stay at their place. They want me to watch their plants while they’re away.”
This excuse would probably sound flimsy to anyone else, but my parents are super into their plants. They’d already had one of their lengthy, wandering road trips planned when I’d let them know I’d be coming, and I’d managed to convince them not to alter their schedule by assuring them of the serendipity of my availability as a house sitter. My parents are also super into things like serendipity.
“But you’ll come over,” Bel says. “Every day?”
“Of course,” I promise, then sweep a gesture toward the boxes. “It’ll probably take us that long to get through all this.”
She nods, her eyes dropping briefly to the notebook, and when she looks at me again, I’m trying to tell her something silently; I’m trying to harness all our years of knowing each other, being close with each other, into conveying something about this unexpected find. Something about how I need to keep it private for now.
I made this promise to myself, I’m trying to say. And I think this fic has something to do with it.
There’s no way she gets all that, but she gets something. She gets that I’ll be taking this notebook with me tonight when I go, and she gets that I definitely don’t want to talk about it yet. She gets that the let’s-help-Georgie team needs to manage its expectations for now.
“Stay for dinner at least?” she offers, and I smile in relief—we still fit.
Dinner, I can handle.
“Absolutely.”
Chapter 3
Georgie
I drive away a couple of hours later with Bel and Harry in the rearview, on the porch with their arms around each other, both of them lifting a hand to wave before I turn out of view. I honk once and stick a hand out the window, trying to convey my sense of total fine-ness through the casual gesture, but in spite of the impressive dinner—Harry’s baked rockfish and roasted potatoes—I hadn’t managed much to eat, my stomach fluttery with distracted anticipation ever since I first held the fic in my hands. All through cooking, eating, and cleanup, I could only keep a quarter of my brain on the conversation—more talk of Darentville’s ongoing glow up (still needs more restaurants), discussion of the tense negotiations Harry is having with his financial planning firm about his hybrid telecommuting /in-office schedule (a nightmare!), lots of chat about the state of the birthing plan (underway, but not yet complete). At a certain point, I’d gotten the sense that Bel had managed some secret communication with Harry, warning him off any conversation that veered close to Nadia or LA in general, and while I’d been grateful, it’d only intensified my desire to be alone for a while.