Backslide

Chapter 19 Noah Today

And this is literally the last place I expected to be today—at least with her.

Last night, after Damien threw a grenade into my sense of world order and then Ben excused himself to go bring a Coke to his barfing wife, I lay in bed trying to figure out who to be most annoyed with—D, Nell, or myself.

She wants to “hang out” with Damien in New York? What the fuck?

Even the idea of her agreeing to that platonically makes me want to blast the roof off this place.

Why is she willing to spend time with Damien and not me?

Why are they even talking alone? Do I really need to tell one of my oldest friends how uncool that would be?

(Apparently, since he seems to think he’s clear to make a move and was maybe even warning me to step off—warning me?)

Nellie clearly didn’t want to share the suite with him. I assumed that was because he isn’t her favorite. But maybe it was actually for the opposite reason—because she felt self-conscious, living alongside a guy she’s attracted to.

I shuddered, the thought of them together like pure torture.

I was losing it.

On the other hand, Damien definitely wouldn’t have been dumb enough to pause a hot tub hookup—a fucking mind-blowing one, if I’m honest—to check in on her sobriety.

So maybe I deserve whatever I get. When I think about our history, now, in the light of day, I think I definitely do.

I’m such a fucking tool.

It was just that, in the hot tub, I had suddenly imagined her face afterward, eyes potentially filled with regret, and I wanted to make sure that wasn’t where we were headed.

Because I didn’t think I could handle that.

Only that’s exactly where I put us.

I didn’t realize how far that would take us off the rails.

I took a pillow and covered my face with it, so I could scream into the void.

Maybe this infatuation was just about me? My feelings of attachment just an expression of some early midlife crisis about unfinished business from my youth, things I didn’t accomplish, proof that I still had it. That’s what Nell had suggested when she got angry. Could she have been right?

But, lying in my bed, I knew that wasn’t true. This was all about her. A woman I met way too early, before I was ready for her, and who I now know in my gut is the one for me.

Unfortunately, there is just going to have to be more than one one. Because this one is not interested.

I had come on this trip still harboring some resentment, I realized now. But seeing Nell had changed all that, had made me realize it was worth pushing through that pettiness for the promise of what could be.

Was there anything I could do to win her over, at this point? Was there any way to surmount our history?

No. That was the resounding answer. She was never going to be able to see me differently.

I threw my pillow across the room. And I decided resolutely, then and there, to let this—and her—go. I am a focused man. A surgeon. Not easy to ruffle. I wasn’t going to let this thing derail me.

I would be polite and avoid her as much as possible for the remaining couple days and then head home and get back to my functional, full life—which was totally fine before I saw her again.

So, in the morning, I woke up with a renewed commitment to forgetting Nell.

Which lasted about three seconds until I headed into the common room to make a cup of coffee and found her already awake, on the phone.

There she was, leaning over the desk, taking notes on the estate-branded pad, her wavy hair falling around her face and her ass—in throwback velour gym shorts—in the air.

I thought: I am so screwed.

She looked up at me, actually looked at me, which felt in my pathetic head like progress, and then glanced away.

“Uh-huh,” she was saying. “Yes. Totally. Got it.”

I crossed the room and grabbed a pod to start making coffee for us. She held up a to-go cup from the property’s café.

I have never been so offended to have my coffee rejected.

“I got it, CB,” she said. “I wrote it down. And yes”—she took the phone away from her ear and scrolled on it, then returned it to her ear—“I just got your list over email, too. Yes. I will cross-check them. I will not forget,” she said, standing up and shaking her head.

“I’ve got this. You’ve picked the right woman for the job. ”

I poured coffee into a mug and then, as quickly as possible, turned to go back to my room to hide until Nell was gone.

“Hang on,” she whispered at me, a finger in the air.

So I did. Stood there waiting like an idiot. Because I’m a fucking sucker.

“Cara,” she said. “I am literally a professional. People entrust me with million-dollar budgets. Please just have a little faith. Yes. Fine. Bye. No, don’t call me to check in. No, don’t!”

But Cara had clearly hung up.

“God help us all,” Nell groaned, looking up to the ceiling and then at me. “Okay. So, here’s the deal: Cara feels like shit. She and Ben need a day to chill, but they have a bunch of errands they need to do on the coast, like forty-five minutes away.”

“Yeah. I know. I told Ben I’d handle it for them last night.”

“Right,” she said, a hand on her hip. “That’s cute. I love that both of you thought Cara would entrust that task to you alone.”

“Excuse me, but I’m a functional adult. Why can’t I handle it?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re not Cara.”

“Cara doesn’t want to go.”

“Right. So, that’s why she asked me.”

I shake my head at the absurdity of it all. “Okay—so you’re going instead?”

“Yes. But I need a car.”

I shrug. “Okay. You need to borrow my rental?”

Nell bit her lip. Sighed, clearly steeling herself. “Unfortunately, I need your driving skills too.”

I cocked my head to the side. “Wait. Are you one of those New Yorkers who never learned to drive?”

“No!” she protested. “I went to school in California.”

“I know,” I said quietly, because I know that one stings for us both. And suddenly I was reminded of her driver’s ed classes. The ones she mentioned that day when I finally called. After… everything.

I felt like scum.

“I learned to drive,” she said. “But… I haven’t driven in a really long time and I’m rusty. Too rusty to drive those windy roads. It’s John’s day off, and no one else here seems to have a car and no plans today, so… I’m out of options.”

I leveled her with an amused look. “You’re out of options?” Like I was the bottom of the barrel and she wasn’t bothering to pretend otherwise—fair enough. “Hey, thanks.”

“Actually, we’re out of options,” she said, clearing her throat. “Unless you want to call Cara back and tell her we can’t help.”

And so here we are—driving toward the Sonoma coast. In complete silence. And the view, both in and outside the car, is breathtaking.

I have lived in California for a while now.

I resisted it at first. Turned down the multiple opportunities that kept landing in my lap, drawing me out here like it was inevitable.

I guess because of what the place represented about my past. But, since I finally gave in and made the move, I have fallen head over heels for this state.

And one of the things I love most is how much it changes from place to place. There is so much variation in such close quarters.

People are fond of saying that in California you can go to the beach in the morning and ski in the afternoon. That’s technically true, I guess, though, if those locations are anywhere near each other, the water will be freezing, and the snow will be pretty damn spotty.

But there’s so much more than that here.

I have visited deserts to drink date shakes in the shadow of towering dinosaur statues.

I have seen Central Coast rocks crowded with gluttonous elephant seals, and old mission towns with Spanish-style porticos above New Age hipster wellness shops.

An entire Danish-style fairy-tale town that would make Hans Christian Andersen proud; and the “Garlic Capital of the World” that reaches your nose miles before you reach your destination.

I have seen impossibly bountiful farmers’ markets, perused by world-famous chefs, and mini-mall parking lots crowded with Hollywood types waiting hours for the best soup dumplings, the most luscious al pastor tacos, the most decadent Italian subs.

I have eaten pie and burgers in Pasadena and West LA, and burgers from drive-thrus that can’t be beat.

I have tubed down rivers and surfed waves in the ocean and taken dusty hikes around reservoirs blocks from art galleries and cool kids boutiques.

I have sat below fairy lights in the countryside; and behind home plate all over the state.

I have even checked out the LA River, which is nothing like a river at all.

But I have never seen anything in California like this.

Because, for a second, my mind plays tricks, and I wonder if this is the Scottish moors instead.

“Wow,” Nell gasps, pressing her palm against the glass. “It’s like hobbit green out there.”

It’s been so long since she last spoke that I’m almost startled. “Is that an official Pantone color?”

“It should be. Hobbit Green. Jane Austen Green. Cotswolds Green.”

The art director would know. Even if she wouldn’t be caught dead within a mile of anything Lord of the Rings.

It’s a gray day today. Even inland at the estate, the weather felt changeable before we left, the clouds low and heavy above us.

It’s not like a late-spring storm brewing on the East Coast, where you can almost smell the rain before it comes, humidity building like it has no choice but to give.

This feels cold in a way that’s more heedless of humans and their convoluted seasons—cold to the bone.

The closer we get to the coast, the more the temperature drops. And the scenery grows more rural. Nurseries and garden stores replace wine and sandwich shops. There are cows and sheep behind brown metal fencing, roaming meadows of grass so thick and verdant that it looks thatched.

Craggy rock formations and eucalyptus trees line the narrow dirt road beside wildflowers with free rein. It is shamelessly ample. And it’s impossible not to be moved.

Nell sighs. Almost contentedly.

I love the sound.

I wonder if she likes road trips. I never got to learn that about her. We were too young when it all came crumbling down.

“Have you ever been to Ireland?” she asks now, tapping the window absently with her knuckle.

“Yes,” I say. “But only Dublin. I really liked it though.”

“I went abroad to London in college,” she says. “I never got to Ireland, but I visited Scotland. And it’s so weird, but it kind of looked like this.”

Great minds.

It feels so odd. To know someone so well and also not at all.

“I was just thinking that,” I say. “It’s crazy that this is forty-five minutes from the town plaza where we were baking in all that sun.”

The mention of the town plaza is probably a misstep. I can’t be sure where Nell’s mind wanders, but mine veers directly toward that almost kiss in the shade, her lips parting with a nearly inaudible sound that echoed through me. And maybe that’s why she goes silent again.

It’s better than thinking about the hot tub, which it’s now my goal in life to move beyond.

Forget becoming the world’s most renowned surgeon.

Instead, I just want to forget the feel of her body on mine.

I’m pretty sure it will haunt me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.

Her hair wet at the ends, curling into ringlets, dripping rivulets of water down her neck and chest, as she leaned in and nipped my lip, shot me a secret smile.

Focus on the road.

I take this as encouraging though, I tell myself. The fact that she’s willing to engage at all. The fact that we can talk without biting each other’s heads off, if only for a short reprieve.

“My fiancé was from London,” she says, finally, still gazing out the window. “Not that I met him when I was abroad. It was years later in New York. But we went to England together a bunch of times, to see his family.”

“That sounds nice.”

“You’d think.”

Not for the first time, I wonder why that moron let her go. I wonder about the morons before him, too. The ones who came after me.

“Didn’t Cara say he was a political journalist? Does he cover American politics?”

She nods.

“But he’s a Brit.”

“Oh, yeah. And very high and mighty about it. Don’t get him started on ‘your American system’ and so on.”

“He sounds fun.”

She actually lets a small laugh fly. “He wasn’t the most fun.”

“Was he smart?”

“Yes.”

“Was he funny?”

“I thought so at first. And then I realized it was ninety percent accent and ten percent bitterness.”

I nod in recognition. “Was he at least a nice guy? Or I guess, is he a nice guy, since he’s still alive?”

“Eh. He’s dead to me.”

I snort. “It kinda sounds like you dodged a bullet.”

“Yeah,” she says, turning toward me, so I can feel her eyes on the side of my face. “Apparently that’s my move.”

“Ouch,” I say, because we both know what she means. I’m not gonna lie. Being equated with some pompous asshole with no sense of humor. Being someone with whom she narrowly avoided being saddled. It stings.

We go silent again, but maybe more companionably so. Outside, it has started to mist. She puts up her window and suddenly it feels like we’re cocooned in our own little cozy warm bubble.

And I realize that, even in this state, with all the tension and the bad blood, I’m happy to be marooned with her.

Which is probably a terrible sign.

It starts to drizzle.

We pass a small cemetery, a ravine that bottoms out in a creek. And then we’re coming up on the coast at our first destination—an oyster farm.

When I pull to a stop, she pulls her hood up over her head, gets out, and jogs toward an outdoor area with an overhang for cover. I am close behind.