Love and Other Words

by Christina Lauren

  “No?” I ask, biting back a relieved smile and tugging at his shoulders so he hovers over me.

  “No.” He grins, settling between my legs, his eyes going a little unfocused.

  “What is it going to be like this time?” I slide his glasses off, setting them on one of the empty shelves.

  Elliot kisses a slow path up my neck. “It’s going to be what we wanted before.”

  “Thanksgiving on the floor in our underwear?”

  He growls out a little laugh, pressing his hips forward when I reach down, lowering his zipper. “And you in my bed, every night.”

  “Maybe you’ll be in my bed.”

  When he pulls back, his eyes narrow. “Then you have to actually go to your damn house, woman.”

  I laugh, and he laughs, too, but the truth of this sits between us, making him go still. He watches me, and I can tell it’s turned into a question during our silence; he’s not letting me off the hook.

  “Will you go with me? To clean it out?” I wince, admitting, “I haven’t been back in a really long time.”

  Elliot kisses me once, and then ducks, kissing my chest over my heart. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home for eleven years. I’ll go anywhere you go.”

  now

  wednesday, january 10

  I

  ’m hit with a powerful blast of nostalgia as soon as we open the door. Inside, the Berkeley house smells just as it always has – like home – but I don’t think I realized before how home smells like Mom’s cedar trunk we used as a coffee table, and Dad’s Danish cigarettes – apparently he snuck them more than I knew. A sunbeam bursting in through the living room window captures a few tiny stars of dust, spinning. I have a woman come and clean the house once a month, but even though things look tidy, the place still feels abandoned.

  It sends a guilty ache spearing through my middle.

  Elliot comes up behind me, peeking over my shoulder and into the living room. “Do you think we’ll make it inside today?”

  He softens his joke with a kiss to my shoulder, and I can’t exactly blame him for the gentle jab: we’ve driven by the house twice now, late at night after my shifts at the hospital. I’ve been too mentally drained to feel up to rejoining my childhood home. But I don’t work until tonight, and today I woke up feeling… ready.

  Our plan for now is to sell the Healdsburg house and clean out the Berkeley place to make it ready for visiting Cal faculty who want a furnished rental. But cleaning it out for this means taking all the important memories with me – photo albums, artwork, letters, tiny mementos sprinkled everywhere.

  I take a step in, and then another. The wood floor creaks where it always did. Elliot follows me in, looking around. “This house smells like Duncan.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  He hums, passing me to walk over to the mantel, where there are photos of the three of us, of Kennet and Britt, of Mom’s parents, who died when she was young.

  “You know, I’ve only ever seen one photo of her. The one Duncan had next to his bed.”

  Her. My mother. Laís, to everyone else. Mãe, to me.

  Elliot trails his fingers over a few frames and then picks one up, studying it, before looking over at me.

  I know which one he’s holding. It’s a picture Dad took of me and Mom at the beach. The wind is blowing her long black hair across her neck, and I’m leaning against her, sitting between her legs, with her arms wrapped around my chest. Her smile was so wide and bright; in it, you can see without having to be told that she was an absolute force of nature.

  He blinks down to it again. “You look so much like her, it’s uncanny.”

  “I know.” I am so grateful for the passing of time, that I can see her face and be glad that I inherited it from her, rather than terrified that looking in the mirror would be a greater torture every day as I aged and began to look more like how I remembered her.

  I kneel down by the cedar trunk, where all our photos, letters, and keepsakes live.

  “This one should go in our apartment.”

  The lid to the trunk is halfway up when Elliot says this, and I lower it back down without looking. Warmth spreads so quickly through my limbs that I grow light-headed. “‘Our apartment’?”

  He looks up from the picture. “I was thinking we should move in somewhere together. In the city.”

  It’s only been ten days since we got back together, but even in that time, the commute between us is a beast. Renting a room from Nancy means that having “company” stay over is awkward enough to be impossible. And Elliot is simply too far away from the hospital for me to stay with him, either. Most nights, he meets me for a late dinner in the city and then drives home, and I fall into bed.

  The one day off I had in that time – two days ago – we didn’t ever leave his apartment. We made love in his bed, on the floor, in the kitchen. For a brief pulse I imagine having access to him – to his voice and hands and laugh and weight over me every time I come home – and the desire for it becomes a second pulse in my chest.

  “You’d move to the city?” I ask.

  Elliot sets the picture down and sits beside me on the worn Persian rug. “Do you really question that?” Behind his glasses, his eyes seem nearly amber in the sunlight coming in the window. His lashes are so long.

  I want to kiss him so much right now my mouth waters. I know we have work to do, but I’m distracted by the stubble on his jaw, and how easy it would be to climb into his lap and make love to him right now.

  “Macy?” he says, grinning under the force of my attention.

  I blink up to his face. “It’s a big commute for you.”

  “My hours are more flexible than yours,” he says, and then a wicked light fills his eyes. “And having you in bed every night might help inspire ideas for my dragon porn.”

  I laugh. “I knew it.”

  We move in together on March 1. It’s pouring rain, and our apartment is a tiny one-bedroom, but it has a huge bay window and is only a half block away from the bus line that takes me directly to work. Elliot and his three brothers build a wall of bookcases, and – maybe a little awkwardly – Mr. Nick and Miss Dina bring us a new bed. I would have protested, but it’s a beautiful four-poster frame, handmade by one of Mr. Nick’s longtime patients. Alex, Else, and Liz drive to Nest Bedding to buy all manner of bed dressings – because neither Elliot nor I care what our sheets look like – and Miss Dina makes dinner while we all unpack, crammed into the small space.

  By seven, the whole apartment smells like bay leaves and roasting chicken, and the rain outside turns from a downpour into a rare, violent thunderstorm, lightning cracking in bright flashes of light outside. Alex dances as she slips books onto the shelves, and we all watch her covertly, awestruck that something so profoundly graceful could have emerged from this gene pool. Out of a moment of quiet, Liz and George announce that they’re having a baby, and the room erupts into noise and motion. Else cranks the music – and the energy whips into a frenzy of laughter and dancing.

  Elliot pulls me to the side, pressing against me. I’ve never seen him make this expression before. It’s more than a smile; it’s relieved delight.

  “Hey,” he says, and rests his smile on mine.

  I stretch for another kiss when he pulls away. “Hey. You good?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.” He looks around the room as if to say, Look at this awesome place. “We just moved in together.”

  “Finally, right?” I bite my lip, feeling the urge to scream, I’m so happy.

  I’ve never felt this way before.

  Tonight we’re going to fall asleep together, in our apartment, in our bed. When everyone is gone, we’ll forget about the boxes we still have to unpack. He’ll follow me under the covers with that hungry tension in his eyes, his bare skin sliding over mine until we’re a breathless, sweaty tumble. We’ll fall asleep, entangled, without even realizing it.

  And I’ll wake up before it’s light out, and want him again.


  In the morning, he’ll be here. His clothes will be here, and his books, and his toothbrush. I’ll pour cereal while he showers. Maybe he’ll come find me in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee and I won’t know he’s there until I feel the press of his lips to the top of my head. The anticipation I feel for this everyday life of moving around him is so enormous, it fills me with a heavy, shimmering heat.

  We aren’t even really dancing; we’re just swaying in place again, like we did at the wedding. But tonight, we have no secrets remaining, and no scary conversations looming. The past decade seems like a foggy blur, like we took a long road trip from one point of the earth and back again, traveling in a wide circle, destined to end up here.

  Elliot’s hands slide lower on my back, his head bends close to mine. George cracks a joke about us needing to get a room. Andreas cracks back that George is the one with the knocked-up wife. And then Miss Dina is off on a tear in the kitchen about babies, and maybe more weddings, and I watch Elliot struggle to block it all out. He winces, shifting his glasses up his nose, and studies me the way he always did, as if he could read my mind one blink at a time.

  Maybe he could.

  “Favorite word?” he whispers.

  I don’t even hesitate: “You.”

  acknowledgments

  S

  ome of our books have little pieces of our history, some have pieces of people we know, and some have little pieces of us. And then there are books like Love and Other Words that have big pieces of all three.

  I (Lauren) was raised in Northern California and spent most of my weekends from age seven onward on the Russian River with my family, in one of three funky little cabins we owned throughout the years. They weren’t fancy, they weren’t fussy – they were small, occasionally damp, shaded by trees, and surrounded by the babbling of the Russian River, or a little creek outside. Much like Duncan did for Macy, my parents got a weekend retreat as a way to get us out of the stress of our lives for a couple days each week, and at a time when buying a modest home in a small town wasn’t prohibitively expensive for a middle-income family.

  The area – from Jenner to Guerneville to Healdsburg to Santa Rosa – has been a constant in my life. My sister and I were both married in Healdsburg. My parents spent some of their happiest times together in the Russian River valley. We go there for vacations, reunions, girls trips.

  Sometimes I think about my childhood weekends now, and how lucky we were to have a place like that. I think, too, about how it is to be a mother with small children, who – even at seven and eleven – sometimes still seem so plugged into the digital world. I wonder what it will be like for them, and whether it will be hard for me to not give them the same kind of retreat, where they can read for hours in a closet, or make a friend like Elliot, or simply unplug for two solid days.

  But mostly I’m sort of devastated, because much of this area has burned in the recent fires in and around Santa Rosa. A house I rented this summer while we were editing this book is now nothing but ash and rubble. But it makes me exponentially more grateful that we wrote this book, that the memories of those areas and spaces are still fresh in Elliot and Macy’s story.

  This is our first foray into women’s fiction, and it really was a complete joy to write. We were encouraged by our two most influential book people: our editor, Adam Wilson, and our agent, Holly Root, who waited for the right idea to come along before urging us to try a different voice. Gallery Books / Simon & Schuster is an unbelievably supportive place and we are grateful to everyone there for reading and loving and helping promote this book as much as they have: Carolyn Reidy, who heads up S&S; Jen Bergstrom, who runs Gallery Books; our marketing loves, Liz Psaltis, Diana Velasquez, Abby Zidle, and Mackenzie Hickey. Thank you, Laura Waters, for keeping us all organized, on time, and for giving Adam crap regularly since we’re not around to do it in person. Thank you to the publicity department and particularly Theresa Dooley and our own precious Kristin Dwyer who, most days, feels like the Third Musketeer. We adore the cover, John Vairo and Lisa Litwack. And to the S&S sales team: next time in NYC, your drinks are on us – pinkie promise.

  Thank you, Erin Service, for not only reading this over and over, searching for every tiny error, but also – as Lo’s sister – for living so many of those Cabin Moments. Thank you, Marcia and James Billings, for taking us there. We lost one house in a flood and kept the next for over a decade, but every inch of that world will be precious to me forever.

  Thank you, Christina, for writing this book with me, for learning and caring about this place as much as I do, for tunneling back in time to figure out who these kids were. We came up with these characters seven years ago, and I’m so glad we found the best place to put them.

  We are so lucky that we get to do this and marvel every time that when people ask us what we do in our free time, we get to say, “We think about what we’re going to write next.”

  READERS GROUP GUIDE

  This readers group guide for Love and Other Words includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  When Macy and her dad move in to their weekend house in the wine country outside of San Francisco, little do they realize how dramatically this decision will impact the rest of their lives. It is in this house that Macy first falls in love with her neighbor Elliot and comes to understand the complexity of love and heartache. The novel is told in two timelines – in the past, when Macy’s mom has just died and her father is searching for a weekend home to help heal their fractured family, and in the present, when Macy and Elliot run into each other suddenly after being estranged for almost eleven years. At once thrilling and heart-wrenching, Love and Other Words is a celebration of the fragility of love, the beauty of literature, and the strength of true friendship to overcome anything.

  Topics and Questions for Discussion

  1.

  In the prologue, Macy thinks back on watching her parents interact as a child, noticing the way they would hug each other, noticing the totality of their love: “It never occurred to me that love could be anything other than all-consuming. Even as a child, I knew I never wanted anything less” (p. 2). In what ways do you think Macy’s parents’ marriage is a sort of paradigm for Macy’s future relationships? Does this desire for an “all-consuming” love color her decision to take things slow with Elliot initially? Do you think it impacts her decision to marry Sean? How so?

  2.

  When Macy and Elliot run into each other in the coffee shop, Macy feels excitement and dread simultaneously, claiming “I’ve wanted to see him every day. But also, I never wanted to see him again” (p. 26). How does the contradiction of this statement relate to the novel’s theme of love? Do you think falling in love might also be described as both wonderful and terrible?

  3.

  Discuss the structure of the novel. How does the movement from past to present impact your understanding of Macy and Elliot? Do you feel more sympathetic to Macy’s decision in light of seeing her both as a child at the start of a relationship and as an adult in its aftermath? Why or why not?

  4.

  In an early email exchange, Macy writes to Elliot the following postscript: “No one here understands that I just want to be another girl at school not the kid whose mom died and who needs to be treated like she can break. Thanks for just saying stuff and not acting like it’s all taboo” (p. 82). Connect this notion to the title. How do words shape Elliot and Macy’s relationship? Do you agree that it is through the power of words that the two discover what it means to love?

  5.

  Despite the fact that Macy’s mother is deceased for the entirety of the novel, her presence looms large. It is her list that inspired the purchase of the Healdsburg house to begin with, the catalyst
that sets Macy and Elliot on their journey. Discuss Macy’s mother as a character. In what ways do you find her haunting the pages of the novel? Can you find other instances when she impacts the choices the characters make?

  6.

  Discuss Macy’s career choice. Do you think her decision to care for sick children is a result of losing her parents so young? Of losing the love of her life?

  7.

  When Macy first gets her period, she reads a letter from her mother, who writes, “You are my masterpiece” (p. 121). In what ways does Macy heed her mother’s advice and care for her body? In what ways does she disregard her mother’s wish that she care for herself?

  8.

  Macy muses on page 136 that her dad “made a good living… but what we could never buy was chaos and bustle.” Why do you think Macy is so attracted to the Petropoulos family? Is it that opposites attract, or is it something more?