Chapter 24
I wake up with sunlight in my face and a cat hoarding most of my pillow. It only takes me a moment to realize where I am, and then the whole night comes flooding back. My lips are raw and my body aches, but I stretch in contentment. My mind isn’t yet up to speed, although I’m awake enough to know that I probably should relish the not thinking yet.
I look over at Eli sleeping. It’s adorable seeing him so peaceful instead of in his normal whirl. And he’s got one arm lazily lying on me, and the other is ... oh my god, he’s actually holding hands (paws?) with one of the cats. I don’t know whether to giggle or melt. It might be the cutest, most wholesome way I’ve ever woken up with a man. How does that even happen? Adorable.
But I feel creepy staring and watching him while he sleeps, so I turn to look around the room. I saw it when he was sick, but obviously not from this vantage point. His bed is pretty low, so it’s like getting an inside view of the feet of his dresser or the bottom of his bookshelf. He has two little ships in bottles sitting on the bottom shelf.
Huh. I’ve never seen that before. Some déjà vu tingles, and I try to remember where I heard about someone making those.
And then I remember. J.
J told me he’d taken it up as a hobby.
Thinking about J propels me with nervous energy, and I don’t like it, so I carefully extricate myself from bed, find my underwear from where it was unceremoniously tossed onto the floor, and pad over to the bathroom to pee. I just need to ignore this sensation. Whatever feeling is niggling is irrational. And I need to get up anyway. I can’t leave George for this long.
But I don’t want Eli to think I ran away. Maybe I’ll leave him a note about George, and then I can always come back when I’m done. Does he want me to come back?
I wander into the kitchen to grab my shirt, crumpled like a material remnant of the previous night. I hear a phone beep twice and go to the counter to grab it.
It takes me a minute to realize, in my still-sleepy mental state, that it isn’t my phone. But by then I’ve already seen the message that popped up.
Celia: Looking forward to our Monday chat later today—do you mind if we push by an hour? Also—remind me that I have a couple notes on Ask Eleonora as well as the Sanders OpEd.
I nimbly put the phone down onto the counter, like it’s scorching and it’s burned me. I sit on the stool, pull my shirt on, and start numbly buttoning it up.
I look again just to make sure I haven’t misread.
What the hell? What would Eli have to do with Ask Eleonora? Is that Celia like ... my Celia? What does Eli ... do?
I know Eli is a writer or journalist of some kind. But since that first walk, where we agreed not to talk about work, we’ve just had so much else to discuss. It never seemed odd that we didn’t talk about our jobs with each other. It didn’t seem relevant. Obviously he knows I’m a therapist, since I was his sort-of-therapist for a brief moment.
But I never told him about my column—and why would I have? No one in my life really knows about it except for Celia, Ari, and Dane. I’m used to not talking about it.
Why haven’t I asked him more about his work? We’ve talked about the day-to-day of working from home, the unease of sitting in front of a screen alone. But I never really bothered to say, Hey, Eli, who do you actually write for?
Is it possible that Eli writes for the Sunday Tribune ? Is it possible ... is it possible he does something with Celia? Is it possible he has some oversight over Ask Eleonora? Is it possible ...
Is it possible ?
What the actual hell.
I stand up and start pacing, my dreamy state now replaced by some form of adrenaline and panic. I need to get the facts straight in my mind to try and make sense of everything: No one works on the column except Celia and J. I know Celia’s boss gives the okay to everything once it’s done, but she doesn’t edit, and I guess the layout people handle it once it’s ready to go online and in the paper. But it’s not looked over and commented on by anyone else. If Celia is asking Eli about it, what else could that mean? Maybe he’s on an editorial board of some kind? After all, his name is Eli. His name doesn’t start with a J, so he can’t be my J.
Except.
Except . . .
Eli is my middle name.
Jarvis Eli.
Holy fuck.
Moving on autopilot, I go to grab my phone from where it was tossed onto the counter last night. With shaking hands I pick it up. I open WhatsApp and type a message to J.
Nora: How was your weekend?
I hit Send and watch with horror as Eli’s phone lights up.
Eleonora: How was your weekend?
No.
This doesn’t make any sense.
J lives in London. J isn’t brash. J isn’t like Eli . He’s sensitive and open. He’s accessible; he’s the very opposite, with all the walls Eli puts up.
How can Eli be J? I know him. I know both of them . They aren’t the same.
And then ... if J is Eli ... why didn’t J tell me he’d moved to New York?
That thought causes everything to go cold.
I’d spent so much time wondering if J felt the same way as I did, as if we had some unmatched ability to speak honestly with each other. But if that were true, how could he just conveniently leave out that he’d moved to the city where I live?
I think I told you about my one friend who I can tell everything to, he said. You make me feel that way too.
Is that me? But then he didn’t tell me everything.
One open version and one closed. One standing in front of me and one obscuring where he was.
The freedom to be ourselves is a conundrum. The roles we play define how we present ourselves, and the pieces we can obfuscate either make us more or less likely to give a full picture in any particular context.
What is the full picture? Would anyone get the full picture?
I know I said to Ari a couple months ago, when I admitted my feelings for J to her, that it was ridiculous to imagine loving someone based on only correspondence, but I hadn’t actually considered how right I was—how much could be left out .
How much has been left out.
My head is pounding. It’s too much to process. I’m confused and unable to get a mental grip, and I need to get out of here.
I scribble out a note on the counter: Had to go walk George.
I pause, not knowing how to sign off. Should I say, I’ll come back ? Should I say, I’ll text you later ? Say, Hey, funny story, did you know we’ve actually been writing to each other for years and now we just had sex and I was feeling sort of guilty because I thought I was in love with this other guy but that other guy was you and so ...
Wait. No.
I’m in love with Eli?
Is that the conclusion I have to draw from this?
I’m not in love with Eli. I’m attracted to Eli, obviously. I like Eli. But Eli isn’t J.
Eli is J.
Crap.
I don’t write anything else on the note. I walk out the door and go back upstairs to the safety of my apartment.