Chapter 25
Dane flings her door open.
“Someone better be dying for you to be knocking so fucking—Oh. Nora?”
Dane is in a T-shirt and boxers. Her stick-straight black hair is mussed, and I have to admit I’m not used to seeing it without a Pacers hat perched on top. She peers around me, as though someone else must’ve been the one doing the loud knocking on her door, but when she doesn’t see anyone else, she looks at me, bewildered.
I guess I’m not the banging-on-the-door-at-seven-in-the-morning-on-a-Monday type usually. And because Dane works for herself and is project based, she rarely gets up this early, so I must’ve roused her.
She rubs her eyes and pulls me inside.
“Nora, what the hell? And ... George?”
I almost forgot I’d dragged George over with me. He gives Dane a curt snort and then wanders into the apartment. George has never accepted Dane, and since Dane isn’t one to beg, they’ve always remained sort of cold to each other. Unlike with most people George doesn’t like, though, he never barks at Dane. I think she’s too dominant a personality for him to even attempt it. So he stays content just eyeing her with disdain. But I don’t think I’ve ever forced George into Dane’s apartment. Clearly I’m not in my best mental state.
“He needed a walk,” I say, waving the presence of her canine frenemy away as though that sentence explains everything.
Dane’s watching me, unsure of how to react to this completely out-of-character version of Nora, but after a moment she decides to go to the cabinet to turn on the coffee maker. Caffeine is absolutely needed for this conversation.
“Did you bring anything to eat?” she asks, scrounging through to see what she has.
“I sort of just ran over here,” I point out.
Her eyebrows furrow, like she’s still waking up and trying to make sense of me bursting into her apartment unannounced and without any baked goods. Highly unusual. I guess I can wait for her to get her bearings.
Mostly because I have no idea what to say. My feet took me here on autopilot, and I still don’t have my own bearings, so I’m happy to wait until we have coffee.
And apparently ... veggie straws and peanut butter?
“What the hell is this,” I ask when she unceremoniously puts a plate down in front of me.
“Don’t knock my snacks, okay,” she says, wandering back over to the coffee maker to grab our cups. “I’m hungover from drinking with you , and it’s way too early to cohesively think about something to eat.”
“Most people are awake by this time on a Monday,” I rationalize, like my uncharacteristic appearance can be chalked up to plausible formality.
She clunks a cup of coffee in front of me on the table and sits down, indicating I should do the same. “You look like shit, too, by the way. It’s not just me. So out with it. Whatever you’ve got on your mind seems like it’s a lot.”
I take a sip of the coffee and try to think of how to put this. But there’s no way to sugarcoat anything, so instead I blurt out, “Eli is J.”
She does a spit take. Like an honest-to-god, coffee-spurting-out-of-her-mouth-right-onto-the-table spit take.
“I’m sorry . . . what?”
“Eli. Is. J,” I repeat, as though maybe the problem is she just didn’t hear me. As though maybe I need to say it again for myself so I’ll hear it and believe it.
“Back up,” she says, grabbing a towel to wipe off the table and herself. “When you left the pool hall last night, you were going back to your apartment. What could have possibly transpired in the last”—she looks at her phone to see the time and grimaces—“seven hours to have allowed you to come to that theory.”
“It’s not a theory,” I say quietly.
She stares at me for a minute.
“Oh my god, you slept with Eli , last night,” she says, her mouth now curving into a grin, like a kid who’s just discovered a secret candy store.
“That’s not what—”
“You don’t look like shit—you look like you had sex! You’re wearing the same clothes. Your lips look like you had filler, which maybe is a good look for you, who’s to say. Your hair is the definition of ‘bed head.’”
“I could’ve just woken up,” I point out.
“Okay, none of that actually matters, because you have a hickey on your neck,” she chuckles, and my hand flies up, as though covering it will make it go away.
“Wrong side,” she says, indicating I should move my hand, and I dutifully move it from left to right, because that’s clearly going to do something.
“Okay, yes, I slept with Eli,” I sigh, putting my head in my hands.
“I knew the lady was protesting too much,” she laughs. “You literally had a conversation with us about knowing what you wanted and how nothing was happening with Eli, and then you went straight home and jumped him?”
“That is not what happened,” I say sternly, sitting up and trying to ignore her amusement.
“Obviously that’s not what happened, because you would never do that.” I don’t know why, but the assessment stings a little. “So what did happen?”
“First of all, you talked to him about the roof! Without telling me!”
She holds up her hands. “Guilty as charged. So what? He asked me not to tell you because he didn’t want you to feel like he was doing it to get into your good graces, which I thought was kind of a rad way to deal with it. The dude has integrity.”
I snort, and she raises an eyebrow.
“Unless for some reason he did something that would make us believe he has no integrity and we have to murder him?”
I shake my head.
“Good,” she says, that momentary defensive hackle lowered. “So okay, he did a nice thing. That’s not a reason to jump him.”
“I didn’t jump him ,” I sigh.
“All right. You very calmly realized you like him. As was obvious to anyone else with eyeballs. So what happened, other than his chivalry about the roof?”
I roll my eyes at her description, and she just smirks, enjoying needling me.
But I have bigger fish to fry today than trying to get Dane to take me seriously. I explain the note to her. The button. The tension. And then, yeah, the kissing and everything else.
“Was it good?” she asks, and I love that on this she’s sincere. Dane could rib me a thousand different ways, but when it comes to my happiness (and sex), she’s not going to accept anything less for me.
I can feel my cheeks burn, and Dane nods, getting the answer she needed. I can’t even begin to contemplate how good it was, because that’ll start another whole spiral.
“So excuse my ignorance, but what’s the leap from the obvious liking of Eli to deciding that because you like both Eli and J, that they must be the same person.”
“Well, that’s the crazy thing,” I say quickly. “See, to me, they’re two different people. They’re not alike at all. I would never have assumed that just because I was attracted to Eli, that he was somehow the same as J.”
“That’s selling Eli a little short,” Dane says with a frown.
“No.” I shake my head. “They’re just different . I do like Eli. I do. But with J, we’re on the same wavelength, always. It’s effortlessly open.” I pause, thinking about last night. Thinking about that heat, that ethereal feeling of total synchronicity, and it stops me in my verbal tracks. But I shake it off, reminding myself that that’s not the same as actual verbal emotional openness. “Eli is like an onion that he forces everyone to peel bare-handed. He doesn’t let people in; he isn’t free with his feelings.”
“Maybe he is,” she says, but I shake my head again, determined to make her understand, because I need this to make sense.
“We talk all the time. We walk George, and we hang out. He’s shared some personal things, but they feel few and far between. He’s not introspective or sensitive the way J is.”
“Well, he is , since he apparently is J,” Dane notes. “But maybe in person he doesn’t feel he can be the same way. You’ve seen particular sides to him, Nora; that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have others.”
I put my head in my hands again and let out another heavy sigh, unable to keep up this mental jujitsu. There’s no point arguing with her when of course she’s right.
“Celia texted him,” I explain.
“Your column editor?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I was discombobulated this morning—”
“By the great sex.”
I shoot her a look, and she snorts at the look on my face. I deliberately ignore her.
“It was early and I was getting my bearings and I heard a phone beep and I thought it was mine. She texted him about a call but also about Ask Eleonora. No one else other than J would be talking to Celia about it that casually. So on a hunch, I texted him. I texted J, and it came up on Eli’s phone.”
“Doesn’t Eli have your number, though?” she asks, confused.
I shake my head. “With J, we’ve always texted on WhatsApp, because he gave me his British number. Eli gave me his American number. So hilariously I must be in his phone twice—as Nora in his regular contacts and as Eleonora in WhatsApp. When he added my number into his regular phone, the WhatsApp contact wouldn’t have changed.”
“That’s ... huh,” Dane says, considering, taking another sip of coffee. “But you’ve been talking to J for weeks about meeting up in London. If he lives in New York, why didn’t he just say that?”
“I don’t know,” I reply slowly, that particular question already buzzing. “I’m so confused by having to reorient my entire mind around J being Eli that that part is making everything seem so much more complicated. Like J isn’t who I thought he was—not just because he’s a particularly damaged and difficult real man I already know, but because the J I knew wouldn’t lie . He might not share everything, but it’s just so out of the spirit of our conversations to pretend to be in London when he wasn’t. It’s like I really don’t know him at all.”
“But again, maybe you know one side of him. Or now, I guess two sides,” she says, squinting at the mental gymnastics of putting these two personalities into one person. Welcome to my morning.
But she’s not done with me yet. “You have to have known all along you weren’t seeing everything with J?”
I put my forehead onto the table. This is all too much. Have I known that all along? Or did I actually believe that J was a living, breathing embodiment of only what he told me in his messages?
How could I have believed that, really? He wasn’t claiming to be some perfectly evolved man. On the contrary, he was openly, constantly admitting to his failings in his own life and finding solace in having one person he could actually say things to. I should’ve known he was a person who wasn’t forthright in his everyday life.
Especially since I’m exactly the same.
I’m one version of myself to acquaintances, a less inhibited version with my closest friends, and another slightly different version with my family. Are any of those versions of me untrue ? Or are they just different shades of the same thing, some holding more honesty than others?
I can’t help but smile thinking of Esther’s plaque unveiling and all the versions of her that collided together in that single moment, stunning the one person who thought he knew her best. We’re all made up of so many sides, tiny jewels sparkling at different angles.
But maybe that’s why this is all the more confusing. With J, it seemed like he saw more of me, because I felt like I could speak without hedging. And he’d implied he felt the same.
So why did he hedge on the one thing that could have brought us together sooner?
“Isn’t this good news?” Dane says, interrupting my spiral. “Like ... the guy you have a crush on and just had great sex with is actually the same man you suspected you’re in love with? What am I missing that makes this bad?”
I lift my head up and stare at her. I don’t quite know how to answer that. It’s natural for me to be surprised , but why am I feeling so much dread ?
As though she can read the confusion, Dane puts her hand out and covers mine. “For a person who reads the last chapter first, I get that going out on a limb with J was already hard. There’s a lot of unknown here. And now it’s palpable. He’s a real person.”
“He was always a real person,” I grumble, taking another necessary sip of coffee.
“But this is different. Someone you’re writing to, you can write and rewrite what you want to say. Someone you write to, they aren’t standing in front of you telling you what to do or forcing you to make any choices. In words, we can be honest, but we can also be measured. Reality is messier than that. And Eli is the opposite of measured,” she chuckles, and I scowl, not loving how much amusement she’s still deriving even when she’s switched into supportive mode. “So I get why this is scary, Nora, I really do. I get that you had to take on the emotional labor of your dingbat parents from a young age, and the idea of adding anyone else into your equation who needs something from you is hard. And not to mention, the fear of rejection is scary.”
My mouth falls open at the succinct diagnosis Dane has given me. Damn, I always thought I liked Dane in part because she’s not a therapist, but maybe I’ve underestimated her.
She’s still not done with me. “But you have to tell him. This is a good thing. It’s harder and it’s not the fairy tale, but it’s also better.”
“I know,” I say quietly. I close my eyes and rub my temples, trying to stave off the headache I can feel pulsing below the surface.
But Dane isn’t going to give me an inch. She stands up, like she’s ending the conversation for me. “So go talk to him, yeah? You talk about feelings for a goddamned living.”
“Other people’s feelings.”
She stares at me, disappointed but not surprised. And then she grabs my arm and hoists me up. “Nobody said love was easy,” she laughs, then pushes me out the door.