Read Singe for Free Online Page B

mainlining caffeine. Eli puts his pants and undershirt back on, shrugs into his damp shirt reluctantly. He should have hung it over the AC unit. “All right,” he says when he can’t stall anymore, slinging his jacket over his arm. “I guess I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
    Addie opens her mouth, but Eli mimes zipping his lips before she can speak. “I know, I know, mum’s the word.” In truth, this seems dumber and dumber the further removed he gets from it, all the doubts from the bathroom coming flooding back. But when he looks at Addie’s hugely pretty face, he finds he doesn’t care at all. “Do I get a goodbye kiss?”
    That wins a smirk. “I don’t know,” Addie says, brassy. “Do you?”
    This girl. “Uh-huh,” Eli decides, backing her up against the front door of the apartment and having the pleasure of feeling her body contract as she inhales. Her eyes are wide and interested, a smidge of copper in them now that he looks more closely. “I think I do.” He palms the back of her curly head and kisses her hard and deep so she’ll remember. Her tongue is coffee-bitter and wet.
    “See you tomorrow, princess,” he says when it’s over, then winks at her as an afterthought. Her loud, incredulous laugh chases him all the way down the narrow stairs.
    His car’s still in the lot of the Pint where he left it, an Outback he and Chelsea got when they were newlyweds and Hester was still a puppy, extra room so the dog could ride in the trunk when they drove up to go camping with Eli’s in-laws. Chelsea was crazy for camping. She came from one of those families with their own tents and the sub-zero sleeping bags, all of them the same combination of book nerd and nature lover. Her dad used to read Walden aloud after dinner. In the end, Chelsea got the house and the sleeping bags and the dog. Eli got the emptied-out truck, the boot still full of Hester’s hair.
    Back at his apartment he drinks some more water and eats a sandwich standing over the sink, cold cuts on bone-dry rye. There’s mold on the edge of one of the bread slices, more on the loaf when he looks closer. Eli sighs, dumping the whole thing into the garbage. All these months alone and he still isn’t used to shopping for one person, is forever buying mesh bags of avocados at half-off and losing a third of them to the trash. Every time he comes back from a multi-night shift at the firehouse, it’s to a basket full of moldy bread and a fridge full of spoiled produce.
    “You can’t keep the dog anyway, Eli,” Chelsea said matter-of-factly, both of them picking through the massive bookshelves in the den, the last room they’d needed to divide up. Hardly any of the books were his, Eli remembers noticing. It was too late to ask if that was part of why she was leaving him. “You’re never home.”
    It was too late to ask if that was part of why she was leaving him too. Eli did though. Eli asked all that and more, begged for another chance, tried to force her to hash everything out again there in the middle of the den he never used, in the house that was so wholly Chelsea’s it made perfect sense he was the one getting kicked out. But she just turned her sharp blue eyes on him and said it wasn’t working. She looked so profoundly sad.
    So. He let her keep Hester.
    When Eli unpacked the boxes later, he found she’d sent him away with One Hundred Years of Solitude and Frankenstein , neither of which had been his originally. He still isn’t sure what she meant by it. He’s about fifty pages into One Hundred Years , but he keeps forgetting the plot and having to start over. All the characters have the same name.
    Now he decides on a banana that’s only moderately overripe and heads into the living room to watch reruns, settling himself in the center of the uncomfortable fake leather couch that came with the rental. The whole apartment was fully furnished by the management company, one of the reasons why Eli picked this complex to begin