Chapter Twenty-Four Love and Hand Dryers
Chapter Twenty-Four
Love and Hand Dryers
I wait for Regan to leave before I make the call.
Well, that plus about another hour spent wearing down the hardwood floors in my apartment, trying to decide what the perfect
thing to say to Nikki would be. Which isn’t to suggest that I figured it out—it’s more like that was how long it took me to
realize there really wasn’t going to be a perfect thing to say.
There is no magic word to undo the hurt we’ve put on each other, and sweeping things under the rug won’t help either. We need
to have an honest talk about what we both want and what we both need—and if that includes each other, which, god, I hope it
does, then about how we would make that work too.
There’s a chance I’ve blown it. There’s a chance she has too. But we won’t know until we try, until we sit down and finally
have that brutally honest conversation I’ve been running from. No more spinning out inside my head, no more predicting the
future or trying to guess if she’s being sincere. It’s time to woman up and be real with each other, as terrifying as that
sounds.
I punch in her number and hold the phone to my ear with shaking hands, each ring making my heart beat faster and faster, until I feel like I’m on the verge of a heart attack. I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t pick up.
“Andy?” she says.
Oh my god, she picked up.
“Nikki?” I say over the din in my ear. It’s loud where she is. It’s so loud. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says. She sounds relieved to hear from me, and the voices behind her become more garbled, replaced by the sound
of hand dryers and flushing toilets.
Did she duck into a bathroom?
“Where are you?” I ask, even though that’s not the point. I’m scrambling for words, the relief of our connection, even across
cell towers and countless miles, turning my thoughts into slick, slippery things that keep falling from my hands as I try
to grab onto them.
“Sorry, what? You keep breaking up. I’m at the airport right now. I have to fly to Florida to shoot a commercial. Everybody
and their mother is in the Centurion Club tonight for some reason. I can barely hear you. I’m so sorry. Is everything okay?”
“If you’re busy, I can—”
“No!” she says quickly. “No! I’m not! I’m so glad you called. I take it you got my email?”
“Yeah, and not just the one, Nikki,” I say, and the words sound a little watery, a little more on edge than I mean to sound.
Be cool. Be chill. You’ve got this.
“Did you read any of the book?” she presses, when I don’t say anything else.
“A little,” I say. “I really didn’t want to keep going, if I’m being honest with you.”
“Of course. Yeah, you don’t have to,” she rushes to say. “I just thought you might want to after I got your text. I’m sorry
for bothering you.” Nikki sounds disappointed, and my heart splinters.
I’m screwing this up already.
“No, it’s not that. I want to know how it ends, I do . . . but I realized as I was reading it that I’d rather you tell me,
when you feel ready. I don’t want to read—” Another hand dryer clicks on, making it impossible to hear anything.
“Huh?” she says into the phone. “I’m sorry, I can’t really hear you.”
“I said I want to hear it from you!” I shout.
“Sorry, hang on,” she says, and then her voice goes a little muffled, like she has her hand covering her cell. “Can you guys
stop with the hand dryers for five seconds? Please! No. No! I’m not signing anything for you, you can see that I’m on the
phone. I don’t care if you post that I’m an asshole. I think you’re an asshole. Great. Don’t watch it, then. Plenty of other people will! Look, I’m trying to talk to my girlfriend here, can you just—”
The words “my girlfriend” punch the air right out of me.
Is that how she sees me. Now? Still? After all this time? After everything?
“Sorry,” she says, the room going suspiciously quiet around her. “What were you saying?”
“Your girlfriend?” I stammer out.
“No, I didn’t . . . I don’t know why I said that. It slipped out. I don’t think that’s what we . . . you’ve been very clear
with me.”
“It’s okay,” I say softly, hoping that she can still hear me, but more than that, hoping she can feel me. “I don’t mind.”
“Oh,” she says, seeming surprised. “You don’t?”
“No,” I say, backpedaling a little in case she still tries to take it back. “I mean, it slipped out, right? So . . .”
“Right, yeah,” she says, that deflated tone seeping back into her voice, and this is stupid, this is so stupid.
I’m dancing around things again, losing my nerve, doing the exact opposite of what I said I would. Maybe this is the pattern I really need to break—not Nikki, but my inability to speak up. To say what I need to say, for myself.
“I miss you,” I blurt out. “I don’t want to learn about your life from a book, Nikki. I want to hear it from you first—straight
from your lips. I want to know how it ends—”
The hand dryers start up again. “I swear to god,” Nikki groans as they again drown out any hope of us talking. I would laugh
if she didn’t sound so upset. “This is what I get for flying commercial. Hold on a sec, let me see if there’s one of those
sleep pod rental places here. I think I saw one a few gates back. I’ll have to fight through the crowds, but I’d rather not
have this conversation in the bathroom. Can you just stay on the line?”
I smile, relieved that she’s seemingly just as anxious to talk to me as I am to talk to her.
“No, I get it. Don’t leave the club,” I say, remembering what a pain that was even back when we were only marginally famous.
I can’t imagine the stir she would cause wandering around out there with the general public now.
As much as I hate delaying this for even a second, I know what we need to do. A conversation this important deserves both of our full attention . . . plus, I can still hear the person grumbling about how ungrateful Nikki is for not signing her autograph in the background.
“Why don’t you just call me when you get to Florida? We’ll talk then, when we won’t be interrupted.”
“I really would rather not wait,” she says.
“I know, me neither, but it’s okay. I’m not going anywhere,” I say, and for the first time that really feels true. The urge
to run has fully dissipated in the face of potentially losing her again, forever this time.
“But I . . .” She sighs at the sound of more toilets flushing and doors banging. “Okay, maybe you’re right. Promise me you’ll
pick up, though. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t.”
“I promise. I’ll pick up.”
“Swear on Gouda,” Nikki says, and I laugh.
“I swear on Gouda that I will pick up when you call.”
“Okay, then I believe you,” she says. “We start boarding soon and then the flight is, like, five hours or so? I don’t suppose
you want to text me what you have to say? If ever there was a case for using in-flight Wi-Fi, it would be this.”
“No, it’s a conversation we should have face-to-face—or, well, ear-to-ear, I guess.”
“This is going to be the longest five hours of my life. You know that, right? I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
“I’ll be waiting.” I smile, hoping she can hear it in my voice.
“You better be,” she says in a fake stern voice before we disconnect.
I stand there uselessly for a bit, feeling adrift in my emotions.
I wish she didn’t have to go . . . but if someone turned on that hand dryer one more time, I think we would both have lost our minds.
It’s better this way, I know that objectively.
If we’re doing this right, and god I hope we are this time, then we shouldn’t have to rush.
An hour, or five, shouldn’t make or break anything if it’s as real as it feels.
I sigh and get to work stress-cleaning my apartment. What else do you do when only three hundred minutes—plus boarding and
unboarding time, and all that other stuff I’m trying not to think about—are all that separates you from telling the person
you love that you want to give it another try? There’s a soothing element to cleaning things up and setting them right.
Maybe it’s a metaphor, or maybe it’s just how nice it feels to have a clean apartment, but either way, it helps.
Five hours come and go, as I’m elbow deep in the tub with Scrubbing Bubbles or scraping schmutz off my cooktop with a razor.
The sixth hits while I’m dusting every inch of the house. I even pull out the step stool to get the blades of the ceiling
fan. The seventh hour has me utterly exhausted, struggling to stay awake while I vacuum my one small area rug over and over—running
out of both chores and excuses. It’s after midnight and she still hasn’t called.
Her plane was delayed. She’s stuck on the tarmac. There’s an odd amount of traffic in Florida on a Tuesday night and she doesn’t
want to call me when the driver is around. Her hotel room was double-booked and she’s frantically talking to the manager.
Every nightmare travel scenario becomes less and less plausible the longer she goes without so much as a text.
My heart sinks as I watch the numbers on the clock slide over to twelve thirty, then twelve forty-five.
Maybe she’s not calling this time. Maybe this is what I get for ghosting her once and chasing her out the second time.
It doesn’t seem right, but what else could it be?
Finally resigned to the fact that she’s not calling, I fall into bed, burrowing into the blankets, and slowly, sadly, drift
off to sleep.
My alarm is going off.
That’s the first thought in my skull as I jolt awake. The second is that I definitely did not set an alarm. The third is What the hell? Why is it still dark out?
The grating sound begins again, urgent and shrill, and this time, I’m awake enough to realize that it’s the doorbell downstairs.
We had it installed to ring in my apartment in case any deliveries came at off hours. We missed a UPS delivery once, and by
the time the driver had come back the next day, the flowers were wilted from spending extra time in a too-hot truck in the