Page 28 of Until You

chapter

seven

Cora

Here’s the thing about living with a ghost who smells like cedar and has shoulders that block out doorways: you don’t actually have to deal with him if your schedules never overlap.

And ours don’t.

Oliver Blankenship leaves the house before the sun comes up. I know this because I’m usually awake at five, lying on my back in the dark, bargaining with the lime-sized human in my uterus to please—please—give me ten more minutes before the nausea hits. And in that fragile, predawn quiet, I hear him.

The low groan of his bedroom door. The careful weight of his boots in the hallway, deliberate and measured, like he’s trying not to wake me. The faucet in the hall bathroom running for exactly ninety seconds. The coffeepot gurgling to life because he sets it the night before, every night, like a man who has built his entire existence around routine and discipline and not needing anyone.

Then the front door opens and closes with a soft, definitive click.

And he’s gone.

He comes back after dark. Sometimes well after. I’ll be curled up on my bed with my laptop, the glow of the screen the only light in my room, and I’ll hear his truck pull in. The engine cutting. The heavy thud of his boots on the porch steps—slower now, heavier, carrying the weight of a full day’s work. The front door. The fridge opening. The microwave humming for two minutes because I’ve started leaving him a plate.

I don’t know why I started doing that.

The first night, it was an accident. I’d made too much pasta—Mimz’s recipe, the one she’d written on an index card and taped to the inside of the cabinet for me—and there was a whole extra serving just sitting there. It seemed wasteful to throw it away. So I covered it in foil and left it on the middle shelf of the fridge with a sticky note that said:

Not poison. Probably.

The next morning, the plate was washed and drying in the rack. No note. No acknowledgment.

The second night, I made chicken and roasted vegetables. Left it in the fridge. Same sticky note spot.

Still not poison. You’re welcome.

Same result. Clean plate. Drying rack. Silence.

By the third and final night, it had become a thing. Not a thing thing. Not a we’re sharing meals and building intimacy thing. Just... I cook. There’s extra. He eats it. The plates get washed. We never discuss it.

It’s the most functional relationship I’ve ever had with a man, and we haven’t spoken more than twelve words to each other in the last three days.

Those twelve words, for the record:

Him, Tuesday morning, passing me in the hallway on his way out while I was on my way to the bathroom to throw up: “You okay?”

Me, gripping the door frame, cheeks full of saliva, lying through my teeth: “Fine. Bad bagel.”

Him, with a look that said he believed exactly none of that: “Hm.”

That’s three words each if you count hm, which I do, because it carried the emotional weight of a full paragraph.

And then Wednesday evening, when I was sitting on the porch with my laptop, and he came up the steps and paused. I could feel him there, behind me, the warmth of him disrupting the cool night air.

“Smells good,” he said. Meaning the kitchen. Meaning dinner.

“Leftovers in the fridge,” I said without turning around.

“Thanks, Cora.”

Two words. My name at the end. Said low, the way he says everything, like words cost him something and he spends them carefully. I felt it at the base of my skull and absolutely refused to turn around.

“Mm-hm,” I said.