18. Chapter 18
eighteen
Noel
“ D o you think rosé or white goes better with Doritos?” Kate asks, holding up a bottle in each hand.
It’s Friday night, and we’re sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, eating junk food and wearing the onesie pajamas that we bought each other for Christmas last year. As one does when your fate takes a hard left.
I point listlessly to the pink bottle, and she unscrews it, pouring me a cup. “So, you do know sleepover rules apply at any age, right? If something happened with Mr. Destiny, you’re required to tell me the whole truth.”
My eyes slip closed, and Jamie’s mouth at my neck flashes behind my eyelids. A memory this time, the past instead of the future, but it brings the same unsteady feeling.
“You’re not actually sleeping over.” I gulp my wine and top it off.
She shrugs. “I’m too old to sleep on the floor.”
“You don’t want to sleep without Colin.
“Whatever. The sleeping part doesn’t matter. We have the rest.” She hands me an elastic and brush so I can get to work putting a fishtail braid in her hair. She already did mine. Space buns. I hate her.
“Turn around,” I tell her, gathering her hair.
She shuffles to the side, and I settle behind her, working out my words while Pixie climbs my back, trying to eat the bunny ears on the hood of my pajamas.
I scoop her up and redeposit her on the couch.
The truth is, I didn’t need to be reminded that I’m bound by code to spill my guts.
Extreme circumstances call for extreme opinions, and that’s Kate’s specialty.
“I don’t think we should call him that anymore,” I say, running the brush through the ponytail I’m making.
“What?”
“Mr. Destiny.”
“You never thought we should call him that, and you called the guy I was dating freshman year Trench Coat, so you don’t get a say.”
“He wore a trench coat!”
“Exactly, these nicknames don’t come out of nowhere. This one stays.”
I heave a sigh. “I have to tell you something.”
Kate’s head whips around, ruining the braid. “What?”
I know what she’s expecting, and I can’t bear to look at her face when I disappoint her, so I turn her shoulders away and start again on her hair.
“Do you remember I told you that night about the tattoo on Jamie’s back?
” A crack threatens my voice, and I pause to repeat what I’ve been telling myself for the last three days: I shouldn’t feel this way.
I shouldn’t be so … devastated. I barely know him .
Kate nods. “The quote you couldn’t read.”
“Yes, that one.” The words bunch like cotton inside my mouth. I don’t want to speak it, give it more credence. But I also can’t keep it trapped inside my brain, rattling around with the memories, turning them sour. “Well, I saw it again, in person, and it’s… different.”
“What do you mean it’s different?” she asks around her cup of wine.
“I mean it’s not the same. Like at all. Not even close. The words I saw are just gone and instead it’s a drawing of a wave.”
She looks at me over her shoulder, her forehead creased. “Maybe he had the other one removed.”
“Doubtful, but even if he did, why wouldn’t I have seen the new one?
Wherever the vision took place, I haven’t been there yet.
” I picture the fireplace, the snowy mountains I saw.
“It wasn’t here at the cottage and it wasn’t at his place.
If it hasn’t happened yet, I should have seen the one he has now.
And there’s another thing—a scar on his right hand.
” Faced with this new development, I realize I didn’t give that little clue due diligence.
“It wasn’t there when I…” I wave a hand near my head.
“He said he got it after we met but also after he opened the brewery that he claims he only has because of me. Day of, actually. How can that be? If it all worked out like I said, then I should have seen it.”
Kate shrugs like I haven’t just debunked this whole thing. “I mean, it can’t be an exact science.”
“Can it not?” Kate knows even less about this than I do, and I only know that Nana believed in it, and everyone thought she’d lost her mental faculties well before she actually had.
“What’s the point if it can be wrong? Why not just use your horoscope or a fortune cookie to see the future?
You’ll have an equal chance of being correct and it won’t come with a heaping side of terror. ”
“Okay, well maybe it was right back then but it changed. Maybe you changed it by running away that night. Like the Butterfly Effect or whatever.”
“I didn’t run away. I went home because I had to.”
“And you didn’t come back for two years.
” She waves a hand in front of her like a game show host revealing a prize.
“So it’s a little different. It could be that making a conscious decision to ignore a huge gift from the universe had an effect on when and how the vision came true.
I mean, what if you hadn’t left that night and you two had been in love this whole time?
Maybe if you had been here, he would have picked the other tattoo.
” Her eyes go wide, and she breathes out a little, “Woah. This shit is seriously wild.”
I deflate with a gust of air. The way she’s casually explaining the possible rules of this with a straight face is another layer on the crazy cake.
If we can change the future, then how can someone see the future in a vision?
And how are we ever supposed to make a decision again knowing the outcome could affect literally everything else?
I have a hard enough time making myself click the alternate route on my GPS because I’m terrified there’s a Mac truck barreling my way if I choose to veer off course.
Then of course there’s the opposite scenario, where I was supposed to take the shortcut and doom myself because I stay.
“Orrr,” I say. “It could be a very big warning that none of this is real.” When I say it out loud, my stomach sinks like a stone. I absently drop Kate’s half done braid.
This is why I never let myself believe in Nana’s readings. Getting my heart set on something that could blow up in my face was something I’d already learned not to do. I didn’t need to seek out more opportunities to get my hopes up.
Kate reaches back to tie the braid I’ve left dangling, then shifts so we’re shoulder to shoulder. “Do you honestly believe that? After everything?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if it matters at this point. You just said I could have changed the whole thing by leaving that night. What if I changed something else?” Something I already had my heart set on .
My body sags. That’s the thing of it, right? The thing that had me running away from him on the beach, my hands clutched over my heart as if I could keep it safe from the reckless path I started down. If one thing has changed, then it’s possible that whatever I saw between Jamie and me has too.
I’ve had three glimpses of what I took to be the future, and so far only a couple of minor details have been right. I started to tell myself that, despite the dwindling evidence, it wasn’t reckless to believe in it because I wanted it to be true.
And I should have known better. That’s the trouble with letting yourself want things.
It has the dangerous side effect of making you forget all the reasons it won’t work.
You pack your kid up and take her on a road trip to chase a man you had one night with.
Or you hop in a van you bought on Facebook Marketplace for three-hundred-dollars and probably some weed, drive to California, and end up with completely foreseeable engine trouble because you never thought past the wanting part.
I mean, what if I did let myself fall for Jamie’s adventures and carefree smile and careless hair? Then what? This is a short stay, a sabbatical to find what I need to fix my life back in Connecticut. What am I even doing?
It’s not that it didn’t occur to me that I was exploring this connection with Jamie here, a place I’m only staying temporarily.
I just truly didn’t have much faith in it at first. And then I was caught up in it.
Believing that the little things I like so much about him were messages from the universe.
But there were never any directions past this feeling in my belly.
Never any safety net like Colin suggested.
In the real world, where magic doesn’t exist, it was never going to work. I was never going to have him.
“I tried to listen to the universe, Kate, but I’m not going to drive myself to the bottom of a lake because the signs say there’s something there.
This tattoo thing is a warning that I need to do what I came here to do and go home.
” My voice cracks on the last word, and something sharp spears my chest.
Shit.
Kate grabs my hand and squeezes. “You wanna know what I think, Noel?”
I sigh. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, too bad. I think you’ve been so busy looking for cosmic signs, that you’re missing the ones right in front of you. You’re disappointed, babe. When you came here, even that was hard to muster. That has to tell you something.”
I consider that, that maybe the way I miss him is the sign and I’m ignoring it.
But it’s also entirely possible that you can find a sign for anything you want to be true if you’re gullible enough.
The fact is, whether magic is real or not, I have no proof I can count on it to be on my side.
“I am disappointed,” I tell Kate. “I’m disappointed in myself. This has been too much from the start. I’m still me, just three hours north.”
She stares at me for a longer than a comfortable amount of time, then nods. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yup. Whatever you say, Noel.” Kate gets to her feet and heads down the hall. “It’s your life.”
“Where are you going?” I call from my spot on the floor. “Since when has it ever been ‘Whatever you say, Noel?’”