“Me too,” Mitch said.
“Who’s gonna do the Thrive work?” Dex acted insulted, but Ellie could tell by his smile that he was only teasing.
“Your forty-seven other employees,” Mitch said. “We’re offering to help, not take over. Besides, look at all our free time. What else are we gonna do? Sleep?”
“You guys work harder than anyone I know,” Ellie admitted.
“You should have seen Dex before he opened Thrive. He literally worked for eighteen hours each day. He worked from the moment he woke up without a break.” Mitch nodded at Dex. “When I met him, which wasn’t long before he opened Thrive, he was surviving on fast food and coffee.”
“Remember how we all used to crash in Dex’s living room?” Regina laughed. “Trust me on this, Ellie. Waking up in the same room as these two guys after two days of not showering is not pleasant. I don’t know what it is with men. They eat, sleep, work, and showering doesn’t even come into play.”
“Dex showers,” she said, remembering earlier that morning when they’d shared a shower and he’d washed her body. Then loved it until she could barely remember her name.
“Maybe now, but when he was in design mode?” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Whew.”
“Okay, enough.” Dex flagged the waitress down and ordered their drinks. “Did you eat today?” he asked Ellie.
“A little.” She looked at Regina. “Do you guys want to share something? I probably shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.”
They ordered appetizers, and Dex’s phone vibrated. He checked the text.
“Hell yeah. We just broke preorder records.” He let out a whoop. “Time to celebrate.”
“We are on fire. You were right to release on time, Dex. Ballsy move, but a good one. No need to kowtow to KI.” Mitch held his fist up above the table, and Dex bumped it with his own.
“Isn’t it crazy, Ellie, that the guy you knew in high school is now one of the most successful game developers in the United States?” Regina leaned back and stretched an arm across the back of the booth.
Mitch looked at her. “Don’t make a move on me, tattoo girl.”
She pushed him.
In the days they’d been together, Ellie had been so wrapped up in finding a job, getting over Bruce, and trying to figure out how to be a normal person in a relationship that Dex’s career success hadn’t even crossed her mind. Just another thing that made her weirder than the next girl.
“When I think of Dex, I see the spindly, sweet-eyed teenager who made me feel safe for the first time in my life. He could be a garbage man or the president, and I probably wouldn’t notice. And I definitely wouldn’t care.” She felt her cheeks flush and realized that she’d just revealed her heart to Dex’s closest friends and admitted something that she had yet to admit to herself.
Dex kissed the side of her forehead.
“Jesus, Dex. Where were you hiding her all this time? And please, Ellie, can I clone you?” Mitch asked.
“Believe me, you don’t want to. I’m like a walking earthquake. You know if I’m around things will turn to chaos, but you never really know when.”
“Hey, that’s not true,” Dex said firmly.
“Oh, yes, it is.” Ellie nodded.
“Why?” Regina asked.
The waitress brought their drinks and appetizers, and Ellie sucked down a mouthful of her rum and Coke to ease the sting of the conversation.
“Why do you feel like you’re an earthquake?” Regina ignored the harsh stare Dex was giving her—the one he made no move to hide from Ellie. “You’re smart, you’re really nice, and you’re obviously really into Dex. Why do you feel like that?”
Ellie sighed. No one had ever taken the time to discuss why she felt like she did; they’d just accepted it. The same way she did. Or they flat out denied it, like Dex did. “Wherever I go and whatever I do, something always falls apart. Look at when I came to New York. I’m here less than a day and my friend abandons me, I wake up looking at some strange man’s junk, and then my purse gets stolen. That stuff doesn’t happen to anyone else that I know. I’m like black-cloud Ellie.”
“Stop. You’re not anything like that.” Dex squeezed her hand.
Flat-out denial.
“But those aren’t things that you did. Your girlfriend was a flake. The guy was…what? Drunk? Stupid? And your purse? Well, you are in New York.” Regina nibbled on a mozzarella stick.
“When’s the last time all that stuff happened to anyone you know?” Ellie asked.
They exchanged shrugs.
“My point exactly.” Ellie’s leg began to bounce beneath the table. “I’m gonna go to the ladies’ room. I’ll be right back.” She laid her jacket on the bench and headed for the narrow stairwell. She locked herself in a bathroom stall and breathed deeply.
She heard the bathroom door open.
“Ellie?”
Regina. “I’ll be right out.” She flushed the toilet without going and came out of the stall. Regina was sitting on the sink with a Twizzler hanging from her lips like a cigarette.
“Hey,” Regina said. “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable. Dex just about ripped my head off.”
“You didn’t.” She washed her hands and concentrated on keeping her leg still.
“All I was trying to say was that maybe if you didn’t think of yourself as chaos, chaos wouldn’t find you.” Regina lifted her brows.
“Do you really believe that stuff?” Ellie dried her hands and leaned against the wall. “I mean, it’s not like I want my life to fall apart every few weeks. I want to live a normal life.”
“Well, that’s the first issue. Your expectations are off-kilter. There is no such thing as a normal life. Life is what it is. Sometimes it sucks and sometimes it’s great, but most of the time it’s just kind of there.”
“You know what I mean. I want to leave the apartment in the morning and know that my ex-boyfriend isn’t going to text me and make my skin crawl. I want to know that I can love and be loved.” Oh my God, why am I telling you this? “I want what you guys have. That peace of mind to know that you’ll always be there for each other without ever having to say it.” Ellie covered her face with her hands. “I sound like an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“But I’ve seen you with Dex, and I’ve seen the way he is with you. I think you have that. Why would you question it? Don’t you feel it?” Regina crossed her arms and studied Ellie.
“Because people like me don’t have the same luck as other people.” People like me. God, how she hated saying that, but it was true. Foster children were like every other kid on the outside, but inside, she’d always felt more defensive, less self-assured than her peers. Except when she was with Dex. When it was just the two of them, she felt no judgment and no different.
“People like you? Ellie, you seem like a regular woman with really great ideas.”
“Great ideas, maybe. Regular? No way. I’m the proverbial product of the system.”
“Wait a second. You’re a fossie?”
“A what?” Ellie took a step backward.
“A fossie. A foster kid. No one else called us that, but I had to come up with a cute name to make it bearable. I grew up in foster homes. My mom was a total whack job and my father was a thief. In and out of jail. So…” She waved her arms. “I had the pleasure of belonging to no one.”
“Really?” Being a foster child had always made her feel like the only card in a deck without a match. Regina’s admission made her feel like she’d finally found one.
“Yup. Since I was seven. Six homes in eleven years.” Regina ran her hand down her arm. “I guess we all wear our pasts in different ways. I throw it in people’s faces and you…hide from it.”
Ellie pushed herself up on the counter beside Regina. “So you do understand what that was like.”
“Sure. There are zillions of kids who went through the system. You’re far from alone. And that whole can-I-be-loved thing? That’s the most consistent issue that I’ve heard. Our parents fucked up, so we think it’s our fault. Well, I’ve gone through enough therapy to understand that it’s not our fault. Our parents made their decisions. We just tagged along for the ride, and sometimes the ride crashed and threw us into another lane.” Regina jumped down from the sink and stared into the mirror, then shifted her gaze to Ellie and patted her leg. “If there’s one thing I know, Ellie, it’s that Dex doesn’t love easily. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s protected his heart like he’s been hurt before and he needed to keep it caged up and safe. Then you waltzed into his life and the man’s cage turned to dust.” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a Twizzler and swatted Ellie’s leg with it. “Girl, that man has love written all over his face. All you have to do is let yourself be loved.”
Ellie had heard that a million times from social workers or foster parents, and never had it hit her like a ton of bricks the way it did when Regina said it. Something about hearing it from another woman who had gone through the system, coupled with the fact that Regina knew Dex well and she saw what Ellie had felt coming off of him in waves, made the truth of what Regina had said more real.