Chapter 31
I’m staring at my phone.
Maybe if I stare at it long enough, it’ll come up with the words that I need to say.
I waved goodbye to Celia and left the office in a stupor. And for the last hour, I’ve just been walking. Walking and staring. Letting London swirl around me while I can’t take any of it in.
I wandered past the upscale houses and the shops standing at polished attention in Marylebone, past painted brick and through pedestrianized cobbled roads. I meandered through the open greenery of Regent’s Park. Elegantly spaced-out trees shaded the joyful murmurs of picnickers; bikers and runners and groups of friends churned past me as I just kept walking.
I walked and walked, waiting for the movement to make my limbs feel again.
I’m waiting for the blood to come rushing back. I’m waiting to know what to do. But I don’t know. So I stare at my phone, and I walk.
I walk across the patchy London park grass that never seems to fully fill in, perhaps because of too many cloudy days like this one. I walk past black lampposts and along carefully paved pathways. I give a wide berth to the zoo and go past a playground. And I find myself finally walking up an incline, just as a light drizzly mist hangs in the air.
I get to the top of Primrose Hill and look out on the city. I sit on a stone bench, etched with a William Blake poem. A small beagle runs around in front of me, collecting a ball over and over as his owner throws it. It adds a jolt of life into the view out onto the London skyscraper skyline that’s now laid out before me, touching the clouds as the gray day continues unabated.
It matches how I’m feeling. A lot of awe and a lot of gray, all stretched out ahead.
The exhaustion of the walk is starting to kick in, and I stare at my phone again, for the umpteenth time, trying to decide what on earth I can possibly say.
I finally type out, ??Can we talk? Whenever you have time??? And hit Send.
For the first time, writing to Eli seems harder than speaking. And maybe it’s because now I know that to really understand him, I need to see all the parts of him that react to my words. I know the grooves in his smile when I say something amusing to him. I know the way his throat bobs when he nervously swallows. I know the way his forehead crinkles when he disagrees but doesn’t want to admit it. I thought I knew him through just his words—and I did in a lot of ways; I knew so much about him—but I want it all. I want all the parts of him that he was afraid of showing—the messy, inept, unhideable pieces—along with the words.
So I kept my only message to him short. Because I can’t just type and retype a message. I need him to react. When he reacts, he brings out my messy, inept, unhideable pieces. Eli gave me acceptance when he wrote as J, but it was his needling in person that pushed me to actually do what Ari’s been trying to get me to do for years and accept that whole version of myself. And I never realized how much better I am when all those parts are on display.
As though I’m willing him to respond by still staring at the phone, I see a typing bubble pop up. It starts and stops and starts again. This should be considered a form of slow torture. Especially because now I know that I’m getting the measured Eli, the safe Eli. The Eli in writing is honest, but he’s not raw.
And I just have to wait.
But after what feels like an hour (and is probably only about two minutes), a message comes through.
Eli: Can you meet at the botanic gardens at Kew?
Where even is that? I open my maps app and type it in. Directions to the Royal Botanic Gardens pop up. Two trains that’ll take a while, but it’s straightforward enough.
Nora: Of course. I’ll be there in a little more than an hour.
He doesn’t respond, just sends the location.
The mist has turned into a drizzle now, and I’m glad to be walking to the Tube, ferreting myself underground as quickly as my legs can take me. That numbness I was feeling has been overtaken by inertia and adrenaline.
Is he upset? Glad? Confused?
I hate that he’s not writing. The person each of us would always write to about our problems has now turned into the person we need to see in person. I guess we were both left knowing that this wasn’t a conversation to be had anywhere but face to face.
I unfortunately have a whole hour to stew in it. I sit on the outdated cloth design of the train seat and fidget, picking at the hem of my skirt, unable to decide what I’m possibly going to say.
I’m relieved to get off the train and wander up to the grand Victoria Gate, the columned entrance with its intricate wrought iron gates leading me into the botanic gardens. I pay my entry fee and walk inside, having swapped one of London’s leafy respites for another on the opposite side of town. I look more closely at the pinned location Eli sent. It’s listed as the Temperate House, and so I meander my way there, past a columned temple and down a wide tree-lined path that—according to my map—has an old pagoda at the end of it.
But the glass-and-iron building rises out in front of me, and it’s impossible to ignore. It’s as long as an entire city block, with white filigreed metal encasing giant windows, large ornate columns topped with stone urns standing sentry. Greenery surrounds it, the fanciest greenhouse I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I walk inside, and the misty gray of London ceases to exist as I’m transported into an interior jungle. It’s like if Paddington Station’s vaulted ceilings held every tree imaginable instead of trains. Straight lines and curves surround leaves of every style. The sudden shift in humidity prickles my skin.
I look around, drinking it all in, and then my eyes land on the one thing I’m actually here to see.
Eli sits on a white bench, staring out at the visual in front of him, his elbows on his knees and his hands on his chin, like he’s completely lost in thought. His body is taut like a rubber band, ready to move at any moment. His shirtsleeves are still rolled up, and his hair is mussed, as though he’s run his hands through it over and over in anticipation. Without knowing anyone is watching him, he’s dropped his mask, the vulnerability of waiting etched into him.
Seeing him like this gives me a sudden pang, a realization that I shouldn’t always read the endings of my books. I don’t want to be a person who always keeps everything safe. Life is meant to be lived. Books end—they have a trajectory and then a conclusion—but people go on. Messy, predictable, messing-up people. We fall down and get up with no guarantee we won’t fall down all over again. Nothing is tidy, and there are no neat bows. Each of us is a hundred different versions of ourselves with different people, and they all converge into a single flawed human.
But when we have someone to share all the mess with, whether it’s a group of friends texting us in the middle of the night or a lover curling around us sleepily, it makes the journey a bit more sheltered.
I want to share the mess with Eli.
So with that determination, I walk straight up to him. And when he sees me, he looks up and gives me a soft, sad smile.
“Hey there, Eleonora,” he says.
“Hey there, Jarvis Eli, otherwise known in some writing applications as ‘J,’” I explain, and he closes his eyes and nods, putting that particular piece of that puzzle to rest.
“When did you realize?” he asks, looking straight ahead again, as though he’s not quite ready to look at me continuously yet.
“Monday morning,” I say quietly, and at that he snaps his head in my direction, stunned.
“ This Monday?”
“Yup.”
“Like . . .” He trails off.
“Yup.”
He slides a whistle, taking that in.
“I woke up before you and heard a phone beep, and I thought it was mine, but then I saw a text from Celia about Ask Eleonora, and it wasn’t on my phone, and I started to wonder.”
“You texted me Monday morning,” he muses, almost as much to himself as to me, those puzzle pieces more fully turning into a shape.
“I wanted . . .”
I’m embarrassed, but he finishes for me. “You wanted to see if my phone lit up if you texted ‘J’?”
“Yeah,” I sigh.
“And it did.”
“Yeah.”
“And so you ran away?” he says with a smirk.
“I walked over to Dane,” I reply, and he chuckles, I’m sure now able to picture the scene. “I needed to talk it out with someone. I was so shocked by the whole thing—I mean, what are the odds?”
“You didn’t want to talk it out with me?” His voice is small.
“Well, I did actually, once I was coming back,” I continue, taking a deep breath. “But then ...” I trail off.
“Then I told you about my mum and said I was leaving,” he says as he realizes.
I nod. He leans over and puts his head in his hands, running his fingers through his hair again, as though taking all of it in is hurting his brain.
I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in that swirling kaleidoscope of a mind of his. But before I can even theorize, he stands up.
“I want to show you something here,” he says, grabbing my hand. His is warm in mine, and it makes my heart pound, like there’s a string of hope now knotted between us. He drags me a few feet and then stops in front of a flower.
It’s a showy one—lavender-lobed petals fan out, with spindly dark-purple tendrils above them, making a circle of dozens of the thinnest jazz hands you’ve ever seen. Rising out of the center is an elongated stalk, with ornamental and multipronged stamens pushing out on every side. I’ve never really seen a plant like it.
“It’s called a passionflower,” he says, and I snort.
“ Is it now?” I smirk, and he shakes his head with a grin, as though he’s disappointed in me but can’t help but be amused.
“That’s not the important part,” he says pointedly. “This is the plant that makes passion fruit actually; it’s a tendril climber.”
“As a New York City kid, you’re losing me with the plant knowledge, I have to admit,” I say with a grimace.
“Eh, it just sort of means it’s like a weed.” He shrugs. We both stare at it for a moment, the whole plant beautiful and wild. But he continues, clearly having some point to get to, even if at the moment I can’t quite fathom what it is. “This was my nan’s favorite flower,” he says, staring at it with a sad smile. “She said she loved it because it can be so many things. It has evergreen leaves all year, so a lot of the time it really does just look like a vine that can cover walls or a fence. Then it has the buds of the flower, which look like they’d just contain quite a normal flower. And then all of a sudden, they bloom, and you have this completely insane, vibrant, wiggly thing. When it goes away, you think that’s it, but then a few weeks later you get these egg-shaped basic-green fruits, and then when you open them up, they’re surprisingly practically neon-yellow, with black seeds.”
I nod, starting to understand where he’s going with this. “They have a lot of sides to them,” I say.
“They have a lot of sides, yeah.” He pauses and breathes in the humid air. “No one in the building seems to remember it, but Nan had a few of these plants on the roof when I was a kid. She had two chairs and two planters, and she’d sit upstairs with me, and we’d read books and she’d have a gin and tonic and I’d have a soda—which felt pretty exciting because my mother never let me have anything sugary. And because each flower only lives for about a day, there’s only a couple weeks a year when they all come out on any given plant. So she would always get really excited about it. She once woke me up out of bed to say the first one bloomed, and we ran upstairs together to see. She told me the plants reminded her of me, because in the right conditions they open up and then once you think you’ve figured them out, they surprise you. After she died, I wondered if I’d lived up to that assessment.”
He reaches out to touch the leaf of one of the flowers, tender, like the memory is right in front of him.
“I think she was absolutely right,” I whisper.
“Yeah?” he says, turning back to me.
“You’re full of surprises, Eli Whitman,” I chuckle. “There’s so many beautiful pieces of you that some people are lucky enough to see all of.”
He gives me a small smile and turns back to the flowers.
“That’s what I was building the planters for, by the way. Dane says there’s only a few varietals that’ll grow as far north as New York City, but I ordered the ones she recommended. I think they’re the ones Nan used to have.”
“There’s so much Dane didn’t tell me,” I grumble, and I love the laugh that unintentionally hiccups out of him at that.
“But we have said quite a lot to each other over the years,” he whispers. He turns to face me and gently tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the small movement flint enough to practically set my whole body on fire. One finger lingers at my jaw.
“Apparently so,” I respond, holding my breath in and wondering what comes next.
“I know ...” He pauses and breathes deep, as though he’s got to get ready. “I know you kind of already know what I’ve been thinking, because apparently I texted you all my internal thoughts,” he says, his cheeks turning red in a way I’ve never seen before.
“I wasn’t trying to deceive you or not tell you—” I try to explain, but he cuts me off.
“I know that,” he says thoughtfully. “When I ran into you this morning, it really blew my mind.”
“I know the feeling,” I chuckle.
“My first thought was about those texts from yesterday.”
I nod, knowing exactly all the lines he must be thinking about, because they’re the ones I woke up with blazing through my mind.
My favorite friend.
The one person I don’t wreck things with.
The woman I’m in love with.
I can see it written all over his face too. But he continues. “I was so embarrassed that you knew all my inner thoughts. It was like having your crush find your diary. Every insecurity, every fear ... all the pieces I don’t show anyone. I’d somehow already shown them to you. Only to you.”
He blows out a steadying breath, like the realization is happening all over again. “But as I sat there, ignoring poor Donna—who, by the way, let me leave pretty quickly, because it was fairly obvious my mind was somewhere else, and thankfully she assumed I was distracted over my mother—I started to think about all the implications of you knowing everything you knew. I started to think about how over the last few months, I found myself opening up to two people. And one of them I’d suspected I was falling in love with, even if she probably still mostly despised me.”
The words zip through me and steal the air from my lungs, because even though he’d written them yesterday, there really is something entirely different about hearing them said aloud. The words were speaking louder once again and making my heart pound.
He doesn’t seem to notice the effect he’s having on me, though, because he keeps going. “And all the while I’d been also wondering how this person I was writing to had unexpectedly become my best friend—this therapist, who I also spent a lot of time wondering about. The first person other than Nan I’d felt comfortable sharing pretty much everything with. And suddenly, what seemed like a total impossibility almost felt like an inevitability. I wasn’t opening up to you in person because writing had made me more open; it was because you were you . You were always the person I wanted to talk to. So once I’d sort of mentally processed it, the first feeling was relief. But then the fear came back, because I remembered everything I’d said before, and ...” His forehead wrinkles as he’s lost in thought. “I guess I’m mostly wondering what you were going to say before I ruined everything by bolting on Monday?” he says finally.
And I laugh, because of all the things he could be wondering, that’s absolutely the easiest.
“I was going to tell you about how a few months ago I told my therapist that I might be going insane because I was in love with someone I hadn’t even met.”
His eyes widen, and I adore watching that statement roll over him, like a tidal wave of information, the implications crashing and settling in.
And then he pulls me close.
Unlike our first kiss—frantic and reckless—this one is sure. It’s full throttle, needy, but undoubting. It’s hands in my hair, gripping like they’re never letting go. It’s deep sighs and hungry gasps and—a whistle from a bystander that makes us break apart with a sheepish grin.
“I think the botany lesson is over, yeah?” He smirks.
I grab his hand. And hastily pull us both back outside.