Chapter 15
“That was extremely awkward,” I say, trying to fix her with my most stern stare even as she ignores me and sets an omelet on the table.
“Being up on your roof all night with a dude you can’t decide if you want to murder or bone? Yeah, that must’ve been hard.”
She grabs a fork, pours a glass of water, and then sticks them both next to my plate, eyeing me and then the chair. She sits down and watches me until I give in and sit across from her.
If she is trying to use melted cheese as a distraction tactic, it’s working. At some point the hunger had started to feel normal, but shoving that first bite of hot pillowy eggs and velvety molten bliss into my mouth makes me even more ravenous. Dane watches as I inhale the entire omelet without saying a word and then wash it down with the full water glass.
“Hungry?” she jokes.
“I didn’t quite realize how hungry,” I admit in between bites. “I didn’t have dinner before I got locked upstairs last night.”
Dane leans in to look at me closer, like she’s inspecting me for something. “So you didn’t bone him?”
“Stop saying ‘bone,’” I retort, the seriousness a little diminished by my mouth being full of toast.
“Yeah, I guess the roof, with no cushioning or like ... wipes ... would be a subpar experience,” she snorts.
I fix her with another look, and she just chuckles.
“This wasn’t like a choice I had,” I emphasize. “It was a shitty situation, and we made the best of it.”
“Well, not the best ,” Dane counters, still laughing under her breath.
I rub my hand down my face, not sure if I can take her mockery. It would be funnier if I wasn’t feeling the remnants of being so inconveniently attracted to him. But perhaps it’s a little bit like Stockholm syndrome, and none of that will seem real in the light of a normal day.
“Look, maybe he’s not as bad as I originally thought,” I admit, and I hate how smug Dane now looks. “But no, I am not interested in him. He’s still not the kind of person I would hang out with on purpose. And he’s sort of a former patient, so even the thought is on the border of ethical. Please just drop it,” I sigh.
Dane holds up both hands in surrender. It’s one thing I love about her—she calls things like she sees them but never belabors a point, especially when it’s clearly bothering me. She gets up and sticks two more pieces of bread in the toaster and starts busying herself with making a cup of tea. She’s mothering me, but I sort of like it after the night I’ve had.
I hear my phone chirp and remember it’s been sitting there abandoned all night. I stand up to go retrieve it. There are a lot of messages on it—Dane’s increasingly bewildered reaction to my nonresponse; my mother reminding me I’m supposed to take her to the farmers’ market before work today because “I’m not sure how to pick the right tomato. How do you know if it’s good or if it’s mealy?”; a previous Tinder date who I’m probably going to ghost. And there, the newest message, is from J.
J: Are you a gym person?
I have no idea where this is going, but I’m mostly glad he didn’t text me last night when I couldn’t respond. ??Sorry to say I’m not,?? I write back.
I stare at the screen, watching the little dots that indicate he’s writing something back, anticipating with a slight giddiness I can’t pinpoint.
J: Oh don’t be sorry. I just wanted to make sure, because I’m definitively Not a gym person but I didn’t want to do that awkward thing where I berate gym people and then you tell me you run a 10k every morning or bench press before breakfast.
Nora: I’m not only not running a 10k before breakfast, but I don’t even have a concept for how far that is.
J: To be fair, it was the bench pressing that was before breakfast.
Nora: Ah, okay. Well in that case, definitely that person. Does it count if I’m only bench pressing a small irritated dog?
J: Absolutely. That’s one dog more than I’m doing every day.
J: ... I realise it sounds really bad to say I’m doing a dog every day.
J: This is what I get for trying to be clever and for typing before I think—implying that I’m attracted to canines. Well done, me.
I cackle, and Dane shoots me a look. I wave her off and go back to my phone, unable to stop grinning.
Nora: I would point out that we’ve gotten off track of the original question, but that seems obvious at this point.
J: Yes, I’d say so.
J: Right. Gyms. Before I was so mortifyingly embarrassed by my own words, I was going to ask if you thought I could still mock gym people even if my back has started to feel fifty years older whenever I sleep even mildly funny?
Nora: I think a key tenet of mocking people is being a little self-loathing, so I say mock away?
J: I knew you were the right conspirator on this.
“Are you ... giggling?” I hear Dane ask from the other room.
I wander back in as she sets down my perfectly buttered toast along with a steaming cup of tea. I nestle back into my chair and take a bite, slower now that I’m not completely famished.
“I’m texting with J,” I explain, as though that should cover everything. I look up and see she’s watching me with a soft smile. “What?” I ask.
She shrugs and sits back across from me, leaning over the table as though she’s trying to detail the lines of my expression. “It’s cute. You like him.”
“Yes ...,” I say, feeling my face heat up a bit at the observation. “I think we’ve covered that, though.”
“Yeah, but ... it’s real now. It’s not just like you projecting on someone’s writing.”
I understand why she feels that way. I’m too embarrassed to try and verbalize that it’s always felt real. And I’m not sure how I even would explain it—texting seems more immediate, more real, as she pointed out. But the substance and weight of our conversations haven’t deepened. They’re just more instantaneous. Texting has been easy because talking to J has always been easy. This is simply a new, faster medium.
“So now what?” she continues.
I take another large bite of toast to give myself a moment to answer. “Well, we agreed we’d meet up when I’m in London.”
“And when’s that going to be?” she asks.
I frown. “Oh, well, we haven’t like set a particular time yet or anything. He’ll be going to the event for the new boss, too, but we’ve just generally said we’d have coffee or something as well when I’m in town.”
“Don’t you want a more concrete plan?” she asks.
I squirm in my seat. In all our texting, I haven’t actually brought up the original point of getting his number again since we started. “It’s still like a month away.” I shrug.
“So you’re just going to keep texting this dude every day but then wing it when it comes to actually seeing him in person?”
“I’m seeing him in person either way at the event,” I remind her.
“But you don’t even know what he looks like, so you could see him but not see him unless you actually make a plan,” she lobs back.
I know she sees that small piece of me that’s still hesitant. Meeting J in person is going to have an effect on me, even if it doesn’t on him. And that potential for unwanted friction is making me tentative. After all, I’ve been fine—my life is good. Is it worth potentially blowing up my serenity for a man? A man who may not even want me?
But the possibility of it being worth it—that little piece in the back of my brain that says it doesn’t hurt to hope your life could dial up from a nine to a full-on ten—makes me know I’m not actually backing out now.
“I’ll make a plan,” I say firmly, as much to myself as to her.
My phone rings, and I look down. My mother is video calling me. Wonderful. But unavoidable.
I swipe to answer, and she immediately starts talking when her face pops up on the screen. “What time do you want to go to the market? I don’t want to leave it to too late, or you’ll be with patients and all the good tomatoes will already be gone.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t text earlier; I was—”
“Don’t worry about it, just want to make my schedule for the day!” she says breezily.
I want to believe she’s being nice, but I can’t help the prickle of annoyance that she doesn’t even consider asking How are you? before launching into her own queries. If someone who is usually prompt didn’t text me back for a whole night, I’d at least have a cursory wonder if everything was okay.
But my mom has never had that mother’s intuition that allows her to consider her children’s well-being outside of her own. If I said to her, Mom, I was stuck on the roof all night, she would absolutely overreact and make a big fuss, but it wouldn’t occur to her to even ask after me. She assumes I’m always fine; it’s a comfort to her to believe I’m always fine.
“I should be ready in half an hour or so, if you want to start making your way over here. Nothing opens until eight a.m. anyway,” I finally say. “I’m going to hop in the shower quickly, but otherwise I’m good to go. And George needs to go out too.” He looks up at me, grateful for the acknowledgment.
“Great, great, great,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “I’ll text you when I’m close. Bring some treats for Waldo.”
At that she hangs up.
“Your mother is a piece of work,” Dane mumbles, grabbing my plate and walking it over to the dishwasher.
George is now standing, a little silent entreaty to get moving. And since I don’t want to dwell on whatever kind of piece of work my mother is, I take that as my sign to follow George’s implicit instructions and start getting ready.
Somehow, even after a strange night, I’m able to pull my day back in order. I jump into the shower and let the scalding-hot water rinse off whatever remnants of the evening are pervading my skin. It’s a reset.
When I’m dry and dressed, I come out to a patient George. I worry that he thinks I left him on purpose, and this is his way of showing me he can be more of a team player. Even though most people would be happy with a dog that waits nicely, I don’t like this unsure version of him. But I’m hoping after a day or two of normalcy, he’ll go back to believing he’s king of the home.
Dane has cleaned up everything, and I give her a wordless hug. She reciprocates with a kiss on the cheek, and I know that’s all we’ll ever have to say about this. I’ll never have to mention my inadvertent locking out if I don’t want to. And for that, and many other reasons, I’m forever grateful to have Dane in my life.
I head out at eight, once I can see my mother’s location approaching mine. Her phone is dead half the time, so it’s not always an accurate way to time her, but whenever she’s remembered to charge it, it’s easier than trying to get ahold of her. It took some coaxing to get her to turn on her location sharing—she claimed she wanted to be “off the grid”—but I eventually got her to accept the basic fact that if she’s going to have a smartphone, the phone is tracking her whereabouts whether or not she’s allowing me to see it, and eventually she relented.
Our trip to the market is easier than I feared it might be. It’s still early enough that the large Wednesday market isn’t overrun, my mom brought the more low-key Waldo, and she doesn’t debate me about which tomatoes to get. We wander over to my favorite stand, Eckerton Hill, and she proceeds to ask the twentysomething college-student employee more questions about soil than I think he was prepared to answer. You’d think she was a country dweller or an agricultural biologist and not a neurotic New Yorker who gets freaked out when she sees a moth.
And thankfully, out in the light of day, George is trotting along, head held high in his normal state. He’s ignoring every dog, including Waldo, and barking at leaves he finds offensive. It might not seem normal for most dogs, but it’s blissfully normal for George. I let myself worry slightly less that I’ve given him irreparable trust issues.
Armed with three different types of tomatoes and new knowledge to spout about cucamelons ( Did you know about these, Nora? Surely you couldn’t if you hadn’t brought them over to me ), my mom waves goodbye half an hour later. I have enough time to drop George off and give him an extra cuddle before heading off to work.
My clients today are mercifully straightforward. It’s as though the universe has recognized I had enough nonsense last night and need to not have anything too dramatic to deal with.
I get home and spend the night cooking and baking. There’s something essential for my nerves about the manual step by step of a recipe. I make shepherd’s pie, because I’ve been thinking of it ever since J mentioned it, despite it being totally unseasonable. And it’s definitely the right move because a warm, creamy, meaty, stew-like concoction is essential to setting me back in a centered place. And as I scoop out the dough for black-and-white cookies, I imagine handing them to neighbors and clients tomorrow and seeing the small smiles that cookies inevitably bring out in anyone.
It’s calm. After a night of the unexpected—unexpected scenarios, unexpected people, unexpected revelations—I need a night where nothing happens and everything is easy. It’s as though I started with my scalding shower and ended with cooking to fully put the strangeness of last night behind me.
But when I get into bed later that night and pull out the new book I purchased yesterday, my hand hovers. I want to skip to the last few pages like I always do, just to be safe in the knowledge that I know it’ll all end okay. But I hate that Eli’s voice is now in my head. That’s life, Nora. No one gets to know what’s ahead.
It’s certainly true of Eli. My judgments of him were all ... off base.
Or maybe that’s not fair to me. They were based on a context. And that context is often our reality when we meet someone—we’re not free when we’re introduced to a new person. We’re slotting them into some role—employee, friend, first date, man in therapy who doesn’t want to be there. We see someone a certain way based on how they’re projecting themselves onto that role. It’s so rare when we just get to be wholly ourselves .
And maybe that’s why the texting with J feels so uninhibited. It feels freer than any other relationship in my life right now.
I don’t know what’s ahead. It’s frightening. But I’m proud of myself. I’m taking the leap without knowing the ending. I’m putting myself out there with J, and it feels worth it. I’m doing it my own way—slowly. Carefully. But I’m not avoiding it anymore. I’m not hiding behind a document.
It’s so annoying that I once again hear Eli’s voice from earlier.
That’s the fun of it.