37. Ellie #2
The drive to Sully’s high-rise apartment didn’t take long. He lived close to Cream & Craft, which explained how he’d gotten there so quickly that night. And now that he’d confessed to having my location—well, it all made sense.
Things were starting to feel like they made sense again.
“Wow, this is…” Stepping inside Sully’s apartment, I took in the floor-to-ceiling windows and sparkling view of downtown Minneapolis. “Really nice.”
“Thanks.” Sully rubbed the back of his neck before he became a blur of motion, throwing dishes in his sink and kicking shoes out of the way, hiding them beneath the lower shelf of his entry table.
“It’s, yeah—it’s…” He glanced around, making a face when he spotted the dirty towel draped over his boxy-looking couch.
“Well, I left in a hurry the last time I was here.”
For a split second, I found it hard to breathe. The last time he was here, he’d just come home from spending the night at Maple Street. When I’d pushed him away, even though I’d most definitely needed him.
“I know,” I acknowledged softly, wandering past him into the living room. He didn’t have much as far as decor, but he did have a shelf of things he’d created, like a LEGO model of the Shire that I imagined him taking pictures of to send to Chloe when he finished. “I don’t care about the mess.”
I stopped by the windows, appreciating the view.
The sun shone with a brilliant ferocity, like it knew that the occupants of the streets below only had a few more days of beautiful weather left before the tides turned and a long winter settled in.
People milled around—young women carrying yoga mats, couples walking home from the farmer’s market.
Once upon a time, I thought that would be me.
Sully and me. I thought that after college, if we decided to stay in Minnesota, we’d live in an apartment like this together.
We’d go out for drinks with friends in the evening, catch matinees at the Guthrie of The Christmas Carol or something Shakespearean when we were feeling a touch sophisticated.
I imagined us biking across the Stone Arch Bridge to grab a beer in Northeast.
When I turned, I caught Sully in the act of hastily snatching a stack of paper from a coffee table that was far too large for the space. Highlighters rolled off the smooth surface, banging on the hardwood flooring when they fell.
“What’s that?”
Sully tucked the papers beneath his arm, giving a tight shake of his head. “Nothing.”
But then a few of the papers fluttered out of his grasp, landing on the floor face up, and my stomach churned in ways I didn’t know how to describe.
Anticoagulant prophylaxis in pregnant women with a history of venous thromboembolism: A systematic review read the bold letters at the top, and I just sort of…
stopped breathing as I stared at it. At all the words I couldn’t make out because they were suddenly blurry and the lines that were highlighted across the paper.
Bending down, Sully swept the papers back up. He sighed, seeming to know that I’d seen them. “I’d been doing some research.”
“You were doing research,” I repeated numbly.
“Yeah.” Sully arranged the papers in his arms so I wouldn’t be able to see the words on them before nervously raking a hand through his hair.
“Borrowed Theo’s university log-in to access Canvas.
And when I say borrow, I mean stole, because he doesn’t know that I know how to hack into his accounts, and we really don’t need to tell him.
I just really needed to—I just wanted to be prepared and—” He dragged a hand down his face.
“Turns out, there’s no such thing as being fully prepared because I didn’t even think, I didn’t even think… ”
His expression crumbled, and nothing could have kept me away from him.
“Sawyer.” I took a step and then another, until I was circling my arms around his middle.
Sully hesitated only a second before hugging me back, tossing the article on the couch, forgotten.
I buried my face in his chest, holding him close.
And I understood what he meant last night—that even though I was as close as I could possibly be, it still didn’t feel close enough.
He rasped my name into my hair, and I closed my eyes, breathing him in.
I didn’t really know what to say. Other than something I wasn’t sure if I had said yet. “Thank you.”
“You don’t—God, you don’t have to say that.”
“But I want to,” I insisted. “I want to thank you. For everything. For caring.”
Sully put his hands on my shoulders and pulled back so he could look at me. “For caring?”
I frowned, confused by the tone of his voice.
“Eleanor, I don’t care for you, I—” He rubbed a hand over his mouth at the last second, cutting himself off.
He glanced at the ceiling, seeming to debate something for a very long moment before finally deciding to look back at me.
His voice was lower when he spoke, tentative.
“I just need you to know that saying I care for you is a gross understatement. Okay?”
He waited, as patient as ever, until I found my voice. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he repeated with a nod and then pulled away, continuing what he’d been doing before—walking around, picking up miscellaneous things, tidying the place.
I stood there, taking it in. Taking him in, here, in this space. This space that was his and not mine.
He had his own spaces in college, of course. But I’d known them, slept in them. In a sense, they were partly mine.
But not here.
“It’s a little weird.”
“What?” Sully’s head swiveled toward me, and I realized I’d said the words aloud.
“This,” I admitted. “Being here. Having a better picture of you, your life. It’s…” I shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s nice seeing. Knowing.” A pause. “I think I want to know more.”
He went back to rummaging in the closet, clearly looking for something. “There’s nothing else to tell or see, El.”
I pursed my lips, disagreeing. Five years had passed. Five years where he’d done things that I had no idea about.
I thought of the people strolling on the streets below, the bustle of weekend activity. Had he done all the things that I’d imagined we’d do together?
“What do you usually do on Sundays?” I asked.
Sully emerged from the closet with a fall jacket in hand. He strode closer, throwing it on the couch before shrugging. “Not much, honestly. If Noah’s playing, I watch his games with the guys at a bar around the corner.”
“Is Noah playing today?”
Slowly, he nodded.
“What time?”
“Noon.”
I checked the time on my phone and scowled. “You weren’t going to tell me that Noah had a game like right…now?”
“I don’t know.” Sully picked a pen off his counter, which jutted between the living room and the kitchen and had a row of barstools tucked beneath it. He gripped the pen in his hand, clicking the end with his thumb. “You only mildly like football and—”
“But you like football,” I reminded him. “And it’s your brother playing. Who is also my friend.”
“Yeah, but—” The clicking continued, even as he walked over to grab his TV remote off the coffee table. “I mean, we can totally watch the game if you want.”
He was completely missing my point.
I didn’t really care about the game. I mean, I did.
Because it was Noah, and I’d always care about Noah and the things he did because he was my friend.
He was the popular guy who saved me a seat on my first day of high school and promised to never throw the ball to me in Phys Ed because I was terrified of it.
All of the Londons helped me through high school, freshman year in particular—the year I didn’t have Sully.
But Noah and I were in the same grade, and he made sure I never felt like the new girl, not in classes or hallways or anywhere.
So yeah, I cared about Noah’s games. I would watch them sometimes, on lonely afternoons in my old apartment. Certain games, anyway. The ones where I thought I might catch a glimpse of someone in the stands.
But right now, I only really cared about Sully watching those games. Because I knew they were important to him.
“I thought you said you usually watched the game at a bar with the guys?” I asked.
Sully stilled with the remote midair, pointed at the TV. “I do.”
“Are Theo and Cooper there now?”
He nodded, looking at me like he didn’t know where I was going with this, which made me laugh.
“Well, do you want to go join them?”
His brows drew together. “Do you want to go join them?”
Was sitting in a presumably crowded bar with presumably rowdy football fans the way I would have picked to spend my Sunday? No, not exactly. But a bit of normalcy felt nice. Even if it wasn’t my normalcy.
Sully had disrupted his entire life and broken all his routines to stay with me at Maple Street. And it was probably time he started taking some of it back. But I wanted him to know that didn’t mean he had to leave me. I could come with.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“You do?” His disbelief was apparent. But when I continued to give him an assured look, he gave in. “Okay, I’ll let them know to save us a seat.”
“Great,” I said, faking enthusiasm. Sully gave me a side-eye like he knew what I was doing, but he didn’t say anything. “Are you going to bring your underwear to the bar, or are we going to come back for it later?”
He laughed. A genuine Sully laugh.
My pulse tripped over itself.
“We’ll come back for it, El,” he said and then led me back toward his front door, where we slipped on our shoes. “We can always come back.”
And as I walked through the streets of Minneapolis, joining all the women with their yoga mats and couples coming home from the farmer’s market, I realized there was definitely some truth to that.
We can always come back.