Sneak Peek of Elephant and Castle
Nora Shrapsan spun in a slow circle on a street just south of the Thames.
Not that she knew which direction was north or south or which way was to the river or to Buckingham Palace.
Seven years ago, Nora had zipped through the streets of London like a local, hopping on red double-decker buses and hailing midnight cabs, emerging from the labyrinth of underground stations with the ease and confidence of someone who’d lived there for years, though it had only been one summer.
Nora had found her way around the city without any problems when she was a teenager with few responsibilities and nowhere in particular to go, so she had foolishly assumed that she could just pick up right where she left off in her relationship with ye olde London Town.
She had assumed that she—an expert traveler and experienced tour-book copy editor—could jump on the Tube with ease and get to where she was going.
She was wrong.
When she’d gotten off the Underground and pulled up the address on her phone, the little blue arrow kept spinning in circles, changing its mind about which way she should turn.
If Nora didn’t figure it out soon, she was going to be late for the first meeting with her new editor, and she was going to have moved all the way across the Atlantic just to get fired, which would really be a shame, honestly.
She’d been preparing for months—paperwork and visas, packing and parting words to friends.
She had even broken up with her super-hot boyfriend, abandoning the comfort of upstate New York and regularly scheduled above-average sex.
The breakup was a thrill for her mother, who always said that she shouldn’t bother with Brandon anyway.
Too pretty, too shallow. According to her mother, above-average sex wasn’t worth the hassle of dating someone who made you watch Monday Night Football, but Nora was quick to point out that this was coming from a woman who wasn’t getting laid at all.
“We’re very comfortable together,” Nora had explained to her mother again and again.
Kathleen Shrapsan, cancer survivor and member of the Binghamton City Council, did not take “comfortable” for an answer.
They had the same conversation in perpetuity: “Brandon is very easy to look at,” her mother would say.
Even she couldn’t deny it. “And he’s nice to you.
Heck, I feel comfortable with him too, but that doesn’t mean he has any interest in marrying and impregnating you. ”
“Mom—”
“And you’re too smart for him,” her mother complained. Nora stopped arguing that a lot of men didn’t care as much about smart.
“I want you to get married and have lots of babies and be happy, happy, happy, but I don’t want you to do any of that with a man whose favorite book is Sports Illustrated. Also, not getting laid is a choice.”
As usual, Nora knew her mother was right.
Kathleen had been overjoyed when she heard the news about the London job, and she immediately waved off all the guilt Nora felt about abandoning her in-recovery matriarch.
That was just a minuscule con in a long list of pros: no more football, no more dinners with finance bros, no more Brandon.
With little regard for any of Nora's fears or concerns, her mother was praising the Lord that she wasn’t going to just be comfortable anymore.
Even though her breakup was so fresh, and Nora kind-of-rudely told him two weeks before leaving the country, she was only partly concerned about the end of her relationship with Brandon and only slightly more concerned about the fact that she couldn’t read a map.
There was also the matter of the diary. A diary that had turned up while she was searching for her passport.
A diary that was still sitting at the bottom of the overstuffed backpack slung over her shoulder, practically throbbing like it was a freaking tell-tale heart.
Nora decided she better just pick a direction and take her chances.
She had done this before, after all; she’d trekked all over that city by herself or with her British boyfriend and his friends.
She’d walked in the footsteps of The Beatles and Anne Boleyn and Idris Elba, probably.
She shouldn’t have a problem finding a company office in Southwark.
She lifted her chin and marched down the sidewalk.
“Make a U-turn,” her phone said. Nora wanted to fling it into oncoming traffic.
The diary had only started taunting her recently, and in fact she didn’t even remember it existed until a few weeks ago when she’d opened an old shoe box, praying it wasn’t going to be a smelly pair of Keds.
Inside, there were old photographs, ticket stubs, a crinkled map, and a loose bunch of old tampons (not used, obviously).
There was no passport, but underneath it all she found a diary with a pink, faux-leather cover that she recognized immediately.
With her fingers touching the fake leather, Nora couldn’t help abandoning the search for items that may have actually had some use to her as she prepared to move to a different country, and she took the little book over to the couch where she could sink into the cushions, crack it open, and remember for a second what it felt like to be nineteen.
It was impossible not to memorize the words while studying the pages like an anthropologist who had uncovered a discovery that could unlock the secrets of a lost world.
London, June 5
Hugh keeps saying such romantic things, things that I don’t know if I believe, but it’s nice to hear them anyway.
“I was perfectly content before I met you,” he says, “but now I can’t imagine what I’ll ever do without you.
” He tells me he’s sure I will ruin him.
I know in my head that it’s cheesy and he probably says stuff like this to every girl he dates, but I can’t help feeling like it might be possible that he’s falling in love with me too.
London, June 29
Here’s the honest truth. There is nothing like getting kissed by a British man in an elevator at three o’clock in the morning…
London, July 7
I have never slept with anyone before...
well until now. I have roommates, and Hugh has roommates, so it’s not like we get a lot of privacy, and even when I would stay over at his place just to cuddle, I still felt a little embarrassed at what Dev might be thinking.
One morning I walked out, and Julian was over, and I think we both turned bright red.
Dev eavesdropping on my love life is one thing, but Julian…
he’s so sophisticated and shy. So Hugh got a hotel room, and that’s where we went.
“I think maybe I’m a bad influence on you,” he said.
Maybe he’s right. He’s five years older, and he’s a man, and I know very little about men.
But I wanted it to happen all along. I wanted him to take me somewhere private.
I wanted to kiss him all over, even if I was worried about looking like an idiot and not knowing what I was doing.
When I was there with him, I didn’t really worry about that at all.
Nora could admit that discovering this significant artifact may have had something to do with her breakup as well.
Sure, she’d been preparing to leave the country, but long distance was a thing.
She and Brandon could have tried that. She wasn’t sure exactly how long she would be in London; they could get back together when she returned.
But after reading those pages and remembering how she felt that summer, Nora thought maybe she had known Hugh Jeffries better than Brandon from just three wonderful British summer months.
She knew she was probably being stupid and idealizing their whole relationship.
For one, she had been so young and had never been abroad before, and she was already inclined to indulge in romantic notions.
Then there was the man himself. Hugh was a musician.
With an accent. And he wrote songs about her.
How could you not be head over heels for someone who wrote songs about you? It really wasn’t a fair fight.
If she had stayed, she would have grown up, and the rose-colored glasses would have come off.
They would fight, and she would get bored, and he would get lazy and messy and forget her birthday after spending more time in the pub with his friends than making her happy.
They had just never gotten to that part.
A long time ago, she stopped fantasizing that Hugh Jeffries would show up on her doorstep and sweep her off her feet.
Still, Nora realized as she shuffled down the street—slightly frazzled and increasingly panicked—one part of her brain was looking for her office, but another part was disobediently searching for Hugh, as if she could imagine him into existence just by standing on a street in the city where he lived.
You would think that someone who had finally gotten the chance at her dream job—or at least a lot closer to her dream job than sitting in a tiny office copy editing articles about beautiful places she would never get to visit—would have more important things to think about than men they’d been in love with when they were teenagers.
She should be worrying about money, or how to actually do well in her new position, or the fact that she would only be freelance and the company could drop her contract and abandon her in the UK at the drop of a hat.
So no more NSFW British ex-boyfriend fantasies. She should probably wall the diary up behind a big stack of bricks and never look at it again. Oh, wait. That was “The Cask of Amontillado.”