Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Unfortunately it turns out that it’s easier to realize you’re fucking stupid than to figure out what to do about it.
Obviously some kind of admission to Van is required, some kind of prostrating at the altar of “I’m Sorry I’ve Been Such an Ableist Asshole and in My Defense I Have Some Trauma but Also I Love You, Might You Please Ever Be Able to Forgive Me?
” but Alice isn’t quite sure how to pull that off.
It’s been a week since they had sex and Van hasn’t responded to the text Alice sent after cravenly sneaking out of her own apartment.
Marie and Babs haven’t reached out since then either, and Alice wonders what Van told them, why they erased themselves from her life in a way they’d refused to do for the previous eight weeks.
God, has it only been eight weeks? Everything before Nolan collapsed in her lobby feels like a lifetime ago.
Alice can barely remember who she was before the Altmans and Van and Isabella.
It’s like all of that was a long, dreary, mundane dream, and now that she’s awake she can’t believe she’d thought that repetitive nightmare was her real life.
The only problem is that she’s not sure how to fix any of it, how to beg Van to fall into her arms again.
She’s not sure how to confess her feelings for Van without revealing the entire lie, because she’d need to say something like, Oh yeah, LOL, don’t worry, I’m not actually into Nolan at all, which kind of leads right into I promise sleeping with Van isn’t weird because I never actually slept with Nolan.
But that pretty much requires a dip into Oh yeah, we were never dating, ha ha, and then, although she’d like to linger on the technically I never actually said we were, she’s pretty sure she’d have to jump right to Yup, I straight-up lied to you during your darkest days, please accept me into your close-knit and loving family, which seems… rough.
It’s been a few days since her epiphany, and she’s still working with a very early draft of her speech, which would be okay except for the fact that the three Altman siblings are walking into the lobby of the office building right now.
Alice can’t help but flash back to the first time a group of Altmans descended on the lobby, mere hours after Nolan collapsed.
Alice had still been in shock from what had happened—his fall to the ground, her desperate attempt at CPR, the paramedics sweeping him away without a backward glance—and a troop of agitated, excitable people had come rushing in, dressed like aliens who were approximating human clothing for the first time.
They’d been loud and chaotic and wrong about everything and Alice had loved them immediately.
Today the three of them are dressed normally even though it’s not even seven in the morning, and, more important, Nolan is there, standing and walking on his own, looking so much more like the man Alice had pined after for so long.
His black hair is combed, his sharp jaw clean-shaven, the sweater covering his chest clearly expensive.
Nolan Altman, Fourteenth Floor, is back.
Van and Fourteenth-Floor Nolan must have switched lives; she looks like the one who has been recovering.
There are bags under her eyes, her cheeks are pale, and she won’t make eye contact with Alice.
She’s standing behind her siblings, her usually long, rapid strides diminished into a shuffle, like she hopes Alice won’t notice she’s there.
It’s Alice’s first sight of Van since she left her—naked, asleep, sated—curled up in Alice’s sheets. Her first sight since her revelation at Isabella’s house, since she started drafting the speech.
Alice wants to run to her, to kiss her, to have some brilliant and thoughtful apology spill out of her mouth on cue, but instead she slides off her stool and squares her shoulders. She’s not sure what’s coming right now, but she’s going to try to be ready for it.
“Hi, Alice,” Nolan says as they reach her enormous black desk.
“Hi,” she says, wary. None of them look happy, and Marie looks particularly upset. Alice wonders why she isn’t back at school in Corvallis—surely her semester has started by now?
“Guess what?” Nolan says, and Alice realizes she still hasn’t talked to him enough to have a baseline for his tone, his speech patterns. She can’t tell if he’s pissed right now, or pleased, or simply going to ask her for a key to his office.
“What?”
“I remember this place,” Nolan says, and Alice’s heart sinks. It’s doomsday. She’s officially run out of time.
He keeps going. “I remember this building. I remember moving back to Portland. I remember Marie’s high school graduation and Van’s diagnosis.
I remember everything from the last five years.
From the last five months. But you know what’s funny?
” His voice is cruel now, a little taunting, and Alice knows that she deserves it.
It feels like everything in her body is frozen, like she’s a rabbit crouching in place hoping against hope that the hawk in the sky doesn’t see her, even as it’s diving right at her, talons outstretched and a hungry look in its eye.
She can’t quite breathe, and even though she imagined this happening a million times in the last eight weeks, none of those nightmares came close to how quickly her heart is pounding now, how horribly sad she is to be breaking their hearts.
Well, Marie’s and Van’s hearts, at least. Nolan probably didn’t give a shit about her last week, and he certainly won’t now that he knows the truth, now that he can place her as the receptionist and not as his girlfriend.
She doesn’t respond, but Nolan doesn’t need her to. “I don’t remember you,” he says. “I’ve never seen you before in my goddamned life.”
Okay, that one stings. There had been those little smiles, those four his, three heys, and two how’s it goings, and those had meant so much to Alice, back when they were all she had.
She’d clung to those, developed a rich and satisfying fantasy life around them, and he’d never even really looked at her.
Never took in her face at all, despite seeing her every time he walked through the lobby at night.
“I can explain,” she says, swallowing down the way his words hurt more than she thought they would, and sounding meek even to herself.
“I’m all ears,” Nolan says, spreading out his arms in that aggressive way men sometimes do when they’re sort of daring you to talk but you know they aren’t planning on listening.
Alice looks around the lobby, taking in all the people that are starting to show up to work.
It’s six-thirty now, and the lobby isn’t the empty, echoing cavern it was even thirty minutes ago.
“Not here,” she says quickly, making up her mind.
“My shift is over in half an hour. I can meet you at Fresh Grounds, down the street? You deserve…” She can’t help but dart her eyes over to Marie, to Van.
“I owe you an uninterrupted explanation.”
Two big groups of frowning men in suits come up to the desk, obviously writing off a group that includes a teenager and a lesbian as a waste of space.
“Helloooo!” one of them says, waving a hand like he’s been waiting for twenty minutes and is the most important man in the world. “We need elevator passes over here!”
Alice nods at him like he isn’t the worst. “Right away, sir. If I could have you come over this way, I can get those for you right now.”
The Altmans seem to be huddling up to discuss like they’re on Family Feud, and then Nolan says, “Fine. We’ll see you at the house. Half an hour.”
Alice doesn’t bother to say that it’ll take a while to get to the house on the bus, which is why she originally suggested the coffee shop down the street.
They’re smart people; they’ll figure it out, and the guys in front of her are rude as hell.
She nods at him, and lets her eyes linger on Van as they walk away until the asshole in front of her impatiently clicks his tongue.
—
Alice walks out the front doors at seven, looking down at her phone to double-check that she’s right about what bus she needs to take to get to the Altman house.
“Alice.”
Her head snaps over, and she’s pretty sure her eyes must bug out of her head, because there’s Van. And Marie. And Frank, bless his wiggly little heart.
“Thought you might need a ride,” Van says, and she’s clearly trying to sound gruff but Alice knows her too well for that.
Van’s upset and confused and hanging on to the smallest possible thread of hope that maybe this was a huge misunderstanding, that somehow Alice is going to pull out an explanation that will make sense, and everyone will heartily laugh, and then she and Alice can sleep together again.
God, Alice wishes that were true.
“We got you breakfast,” Marie says, holding out what is clearly a breakfast burrito wrapped in foil. “Or, dinner? I don’t know. But Van said you’d be hungry.”
Alice is horrified to feel tears coming to her eyes. God, she hasn’t even done this yet, hasn’t revealed herself to be a monster yet, and she’s already a fucking mess.
This is going to massively suck.
“Thank you,” she says, walking closer and taking the burrito from Marie. It’s still warm. “Thank you both.”
Van leads them to her car, and even though she looks exhausted she’s walking quickly, so Alice figures she’s probably feeling okay today.
Marie gets into the passenger seat, so Alice slides into the back with Frank, which involves a lot of getting stepped on and being licked in the face, all of which she tries to savor even while it’s very unpleasant.