Chapter 18
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I’m wrapped in Hollis’s arms when my phone alarm goes off.
Night two and my self-imposed no-cuddling rule is already shattered.
After the washing machine buzzed, I turned over the laundry, then used the bathroom and climbed back into bed.
I watched Hollis sleep just long enough to feel creepy.
Then I thought, why the hell not, and kissed him goodnight on the cheek.
He stirred enough to gather me in his strong arms and, despite not having felt all that tired a moment before, I was dead to the world in no time.
I reach over and silence my phone. I don’t remember setting it, but I’m grateful I did.
Today is the day. We are going to reunite Mrs. Nash and Elsie.
There are so many ways this could go awry.
But I refuse to think of a single one of them.
Because as blank as my brain was last night, this morning it’s buzzing like a hive of caffeinated bees.
I’m starting to understand that even though like is not love, it’s dangerously close to it on my end.
Maybe the only thing keeping it from being mutual is Hollis’s need for proof that forever is something that exists in real life and not just in fairy tales.
Didn’t he tell me in the car that he wants to be convinced he’s wrong?
So we are going to need to get moving. I have to give Mrs. Nash and Elsie their happily ever after. Because I think maybe, if I can make that happen, I might get one too.
I grind my ass into Hollis’s crotch. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” I say in a robot voice.
“You are the most annoyingly arousing alarm clock,” he mumbles, his hand sliding over my stomach toward the copper-colored hair between my legs.
“Nope. No time to waste.” I slide out from his arms and step over to my suitcase.
He groans. “I don’t see how it would be a waste of time. I’ve been hard four times since yesterday afternoon without actually getting to come. If my balls were any bluer they could take the place of Uranus and Neptune in a solar system diorama.”
Don’t laugh because he said Uranus. Don’t do it.
“Sorry,” I say. “All these false starts haven’t exactly been a walk in the park for me either.
” I open a dresser drawer and find a collection of old, balled-up socks.
“Now, get up in the next thirty seconds or I’m going to pelt you with these.
Don’t let their softness fool you. I have a great arm.
I played softball like... twice. And my team almost won one of those times.
So don’t test me, Frederick Hollis Hollenbeck. ”
He sighs and rolls his eyes like the teenager who used to live in this room, but gets out of bed anyway.
I take a quick shower in his dad’s large master bathroom while Hollis does the same in the smaller hall bath so we don’t get sidetracked.
We barely speak as we fold the laundry and gather the handful of items we bothered unpacking.
I don’t know if it’s because of what he said last night and how I didn’t acknowledge it with anything except my tongue in his mouth, or if it’s because today is effectively the end of this journey.
But an odd nervous energy has settled heavy over our interactions like a weighted blanket that’s increasing my anxiety instead of easing it.
Once we’re in the car, I open the fig bars we found in the pantry.
It’s not necessarily my ideal breakfast—figs weird me out ever since I learned how they’re pollinated—but unlike his taste in women, Hollis’s dad’s culinary preferences are decidedly of his age, and fig bars won out over a box of cereal that looked like tiny twigs.
“Fig me,” Hollis says, and holds out his palm. I lay a cookie in his hand and watch him bite into it, teeth sinking into its softness as he backs out of the driveway.
“Did you know that for figs to grow at least one wasp has to die inside of it and be absorbed into the fruit?” I say.
He stops chewing for a moment. “I did not. What a delightful fact to share with me mid-bite.”
I nibble at my cookie but find I don’t have much of an appetite.
Not because of the wasps. But because each minute, each fraction of a mile we get closer to meeting Elsie, the more nervous I become.
My knee bounces. My heartbeat thuds like a heavy object falling down several flights of stairs.
I’m a ball of terrified energy. For an absurd moment, I ponder getting out of the car and running all the way to Key West. Flying like a bird, or a rocket.
If I shook up my bottled anxiety, opened its cap, and let it explode, it would probably propel me the rest of the way to our destination.
And to think, this is only a small fraction of what Mrs. Nash would have felt had we been able to visit Elsie together—with Mrs. Nash alive and not in my backpack, I mean.
What must it be like to see the person you love after decades and decades apart?
My heart did a sort of drunk version of the “Macarena” this morning when Hollis reappeared after his shower, and he was only out of my sight for twenty minutes.
Not that what I feel for Hollis is anything like the enduring love Mrs. Nash felt for Elsie.
What we have isn’t love at all, it’s just like.
Extremely strong like. Now my knee is bouncing half because of today’s mission and half because I’m nervous Hollis will somehow see through all of my faux cool and know that I hope to change his mind about lasting love for reasons other than wanting to be right.
“Did Mrs. Nash know you found Elsie?” he asks.
“No. I didn’t find her until after Mrs. Nash died.
” I shift around in my seat, suddenly aware of everywhere I’m not comfortable.
“I was going to start looking right after she told me about her, but I agreed to do some fact-checking for a War of 1812 drama, and that wound up taking up most of my time for a while.” I fidget with the zipper on my backpack.
“I wish I’d prioritized it. Sometimes I wonder, if I’d found her earlier, maybe Mrs. Nash would have lived longer.
Like if she knew Elsie hadn’t been killed in Korea after all, the prospect of getting to see her again might’ve been enough to keep her around. ”
“It’s not your fault Mrs. Nash died, you know,” he says in a warm, low voice that caresses my guilty conscience. “I don’t think anything you did or didn’t do had any effect on the timing.”
I do know that on some level, but it’s one of those things that’s easy to know but difficult to make myself feel. “You’re pretty good at absolution. Maybe you should’ve been a priest.”
“One, I’m not Catholic. Two, should I be offended you’d prefer me celibate?”
“Oh. Right. Not a priest then.” My mind has lost the thread of this remarkably fast, devolving into me mentally dressing Hollis in different occupational uniforms. “You’d make a really hot car mechanic,” I say.
“Do those grant absolution?”
“No, but they do wear coveralls. I think you would look really good in those.”
Hollis shakes his head, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. “Such a weirdo,” he says with the same affection I used to hear in Mrs. Nash’s voice whenever she called me a silly thing .
“You know you love me,” I counter without thinking.
An awkward silence descends. I reach to turn on the radio, hoping to find a way out of it, but the new classic rock station Hollis found us when we lost the last one is currently playing an endless queue of commercials.
“So... late-stage capitalism. Not great, huh?” I say, grabbing onto the first change of subject that pops into my head.
A small huff-laugh comes out through Hollis’s nostrils. “I bet you’re great at parties.”
“I am. I am great at parties.” If I wasn’t sitting, I would put my hands on my hips. “I’ll have you know, most people find me charming.”
“I’m sure they do. Why are you assuming I was being sarcastic?”
“Because you have two modes, Hollis: sarcastic and Cormac McCarthy.”
“I think I’m supposed to be offended,” he says. “But I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment.”
Yet another commercial—this one for a car dealership in Miami—prompts Hollis to reach over and turn the volume down.
His eyes dart over to me for the briefest moment. Oh no. He wants to talk about something; I can tell by the way he bites his cheek. I really hope it isn’t my “You love me” comment. There’s really no need to emphasize that he doesn’t.
“I’d like to ask you something personal,” he says. “You don’t have to answer.”
“Oh. Um. Okay?” I say.
“Josh Yaeger. Why?”
“You mean like why did I date him?”
“Date him, share a bed with him, move in with him. Yes. All of that. Why?”
Given what I’ve said about Josh’s and my relationship, I can see why someone would question the appeal of a sneaky, self-serving asshole who couldn’t even get me off most of the time.
And yet the question hurts. It feels like Hollis is asking how I could have been so stupid.
While I have to admit I asked myself that same thing a million times after the breakup, it has a different sting when it comes from him.
“He wasn’t always such a douchecanoe, you know,” I say, unable to keep the defensiveness from my voice.
“It’s not like I met him as he currently is and was like, wow, what a catch.
He used to be...” My lips purse and shift to the side as I try to remember the good times.
The breakfasts in bed and the surprise trip to New York City to see Dani and celebrate me finishing my master’s (or was that all just for Instagram too?).
“He was handsome. Ambitious. A little uptight, yeah, but in a charming, starchy way. It was fun to unravel him a bit. Keep him from taking himself too seriously. But then during the second semester of the MFA he won an award for a short story, and some big-deal author he met at a conference blew smoke up his ass about how he could be the next great American novelist. That’s when he changed.
His ambition stopped being attractive. He became obsessed with success and people thinking he’s brilliant and—well, you know what he’s like now.
Other people are either competition or a means to an end. ”
Hollis doesn’t say anything as he reaches for my hand. His thumb brushes back and forth over my open palm. The motion grounds me while also sending sparks of pleasure into my bloodstream.
“Josh told me once that the reason he loved me was because I could always rescue him from the dark moods he fell into while writing. That I reminded him of the importance of living in the light. I thought it was romantic. I didn’t realize until the end that he was just Garden State –ing me.”
Hollis removes his hand from mine so he can navigate around a pokey RV, and I miss the contact immediately. This is going to be such a problem if I have to quit him cold turkey.
“So you were his manic pixie dream girl?” he asks.
“Yeah. Hey, you understood that.”
“It helps that sleeping in my old bedroom apparently pushed your references into the current century.”
“Eh, don’t get used to it,” I warn.
“Right. The early aughts are much too recent for an old soul like you.”
“Blech.” I stick my tongue out.
“What?”
“The term ‘old soul.’ Almost every person who has ever called me that was a man twice my age trying to explain why it wasn’t actually creepy that he wanted to get in my pants.”
Hollis’s frown stretches. “Noted.”
“Anyway,” I say, “once it became clear that I had my own ideas and dreams and wasn’t his salvation or some fun accessory to make his shitty personality pop, I think Josh started to resent me.
He did a good job of hiding it, though. I didn’t notice until the Instagram thing.
In retrospect, there were clues, but..
. I don’t know. I thought he loved me. There wasn’t reason to question it. ”
“Yeah. I know how that is,” Hollis says.
I guess he does. Maybe his relationship with Vanessa wasn’t that different from mine with Josh—just shorter-lived and longer ago.
We were both used by the people who claimed to care about us.
Except Hollis looked at his parents’ fractured marriage, his father’s tendency to jump from coed to coed, and Vanessa’s deceit, and saw evidence that lasting love is a lie; while I put three tablespoons of my elderly best friend in my backpack and booked a flight to Florida to prove that it isn’t foolish to keep believing someone might genuinely care for someone else for a lifetime.
As the water signaling we’ve reached the Keys appears outside my window, sparkling in the morning sun, I know it’s not much longer until we discover which of us is right.