Chapter Twenty-Three
NICKY
As they slowly meandered down the hotel hall toward their suites, Nicky heard Lucy sigh heavily. A weary-to-the-bone sort of sigh that he felt himself, but probably not for the same reasons.
He wanted to be near her, to keep her with him.
They had agreed on four more days. Till Sunday evening when her plane took off.
If that was all he was going to have, he didn’t want to miss a minute of it.
He should probably take her to her suite.
Tuck her into bed and leave her to it. But Nicky was selfish, and his door was the first they came to.
He headed for it, pulled her gently forward by their intertwined fingers.
‘Am I coming over?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ He opened the door.
‘I just really want to get into some sweatpants and take a nap,’ she groaned.
‘Okay,’ he said, closing the front door and pulling her toward his bedroom.
‘My sweatpants are about fifty yards that way,’ she trilled, pointing.
‘You can borrow some of mine.’
She smiled. ‘But mine are right there.’
Nicky went to his dresser and pulled out a black T-shirt and gray joggers, handed them to her in a bundle.
‘Just sweats. No funny business,’ he said with a wink. ‘Change in the bathroom to keep me honest.’
She rolled her eyes, but did as he instructed and headed for the en suite.
When Lucy emerged, he was lounging on the couch in the living room in another pair of sweatpants. He’d considered the bed, but was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be able to get funny business off his mind if they were anywhere near it.
Only a sliver of desert sunlight peeked through the closed living room curtains. It was cool, dark, and cozy. Nicky reached for the TV remote and patted the seat next to him.
‘It smells like you,’ Lucy said absentmindedly, as she pulled the shirt up to sniff it.
‘What do I smell like?’
‘Soap. Salt. Man.’
Lucy snuggled in next to him, curling her feet up beneath her.
‘Just generic man ?’ He laughed.
‘Never generic,’ she said, taking another whiff. ‘Not you.’
‘Not generic,’ he said, while pulling the throw blanket from the back of the sofa and tucking them both under it. ‘I’ll stow that in my back pocket in case I decide to start a Tinder profile.’
She smiled weakly – tired, wrung out.
‘Hangover any better?’ he asked, flicking the TV on.
‘Just a dull throbbing behind my eyes now,’ she quipped.
Nicky got up and went straight to the kitchen where he found his stash of Tylenol and a bottle of water.
He handed two pills and the water to Lucy. She swallowed them down and said, ‘Thanks.’
He tucked himself back under the blanket with her, and said, ‘Chloe’s dads all seem nice.’
Lucy’s head fell back against the sofa. ‘You were very tolerant of their questions and gawking. It was kind of you.’
‘It sort of goes with the territory. I’ve had worse.’
‘What are your exes like?’ Lucy asked, eyes on the ceiling.
Nicky tutted. ‘Not like yours.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, my first wife is basically a normal person who only wants me to be slowly eaten by sharks once in a while. My second wife believes I am the worst human to ever walk the Earth, but only because she’s pissed at herself for signing a prenup.
And my third wife doesn’t exist because we weren’t really married. Remember?’
‘ Right ,’ Lucy said with a grin.
‘But it’s safe to say, I can’t imagine them sitting in a room together getting along. And I certainly can’t imagine any of them apologizing to me.’
She cringed to the ceiling. ‘You heard that, huh?’
‘I don’t think it qualifies as eavesdropping since it was all because of the extraordinary acoustics in that atrium.’
‘The acoustics.’
‘Yeah.’
Lucy sighed again, even more heavily than before.
She snuggled deeper into the cushions, more closely into his side.
‘Brandon’s time was always more valuable than mine.
His minutes could be calculated in dollars – thousands of them at a time.
We agreed that I would continue with school, finish my master’s, and go for a doctorate.
But what value did my intellectual curiosity about the cultural significance of boy bands have?
Monetarily? None. Less than none. Or maybe some paltry sum, years in the future.
It didn’t stand a chance. My dreams were insignificant.
Hard to justify with logic. So, I took time away.
It made me resentful. Whereas it made him happy. Hence the conflict.’
Nicky breathed out. ‘Makes sense.’ And it did, but he truly wished that it didn’t. Mostly because he could feel an echo of that very same argument somewhere off in the distance. Wrapped up in his tour and his Pollyanna hopes for the two of them.
‘And you had Chloe full-time?’
‘Brandon had a month every summer. Every other Christmas.’
‘That must have been hard,’ Nicky said.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, closing her eyes as if remembering.
When she opened them again, she added, ‘But I had it easier than a lot of people. Brandon is filthy rich, so a lot of those concerns weren’t an issue.
You just keep going, right? As a parent.
You just keep working and doing and going.
Plus, I had a month every summer to work. Write my book, articles, whatever.’
‘You wrote a book?’ he exclaimed, unable to subdue the excitement.
She chuckled darkly. ‘All part of the job. Publish or perish.’ It came out like a groan, and Nicky wondered about it, but didn’t want to push. Not when she was just freely offering up all this good stuff.
‘Can I buy it?’
‘Not on Amazon or anything but—’
Nicky grabbed his phone. ‘Website. Now.’
Lucy laughed and took the phone from him, clicked the browser. ‘It’s boring. Not exactly what I’d hoped. My department chair—’ She stopped herself. ‘Anyway, doesn’t matter, just expect to use it to cure insomnia or as a doorstop.’
She handed the phone back and he saw the book, Pop: American Culture in the 20th Century by Lucy McManis. He noticed that the site took Apple Pay and in seconds had it ordered. He made a mental note to get Damon to ship it out to wherever he happened to be when it finally arrived in LA.
Nicky asked, ‘What happened with Sam?’
‘He fell in love with James.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Sam and I were really good friends. He’s bi.
I knew it all along. That part wasn’t a surprise or anything.
But I thought we were sort of … comfortable.
I guess I should have noticed that it wasn’t everything he wanted.
Then he fell in big love with James. All the trimmings.
Honestly, it didn’t hurt that much when it was over.
I was happy for him. To get the full package deal. ’
‘Very mature of you,’ Nicky said.
‘Or maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.’
‘Devin seems like—’ Nicky couldn’t decide how to word it.
Lucy finished, ‘He wants me to be slowly eaten by sharks?’
Nicky laughed. ‘A little?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I caught that. He’s younger, right? Like, thirty-five?’
‘On the nose,’ Lucy replied. ‘We were uh, hot and fast. He’s a jock through and through and it just …
fizzled. We had nothing in common. The physical part was there, but everything else was …
missing, I guess? It was fun and great and then it wasn’t.
It was a terrible idea to get married. His, but still.
I knew better. I knew it. It was dumb of me.
A recurring theme, in case you hadn’t picked that up. ’
Nicky had never seen a broken marriage – his or anyone else’s – that didn’t have some culpability on both sides. He wondered why she kept putting so much of the blame on herself.
‘Think you’ll ever get married again?’ Nicky asked, grateful that she had her eyes closed and her head tipped toward the ceiling. It was a crazy thing to ask, and he regretted it the second it was hovering there in the air between them.
Lucy laughed. ‘The only way I’ll get married again is accidentally.’
‘How does a person accidentally get married?’ he teased.
Lucy smiled. ‘I don’t know, someone asks “do you want chicken for dinner?” and you say, “I do” and there happens to be a priest there?’
Nicky followed her wild thinking. ‘You’re sightseeing in a church and you stumble through a door and find yourself on the altar just as the guy is saying “do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”—’
‘And I hear, “did you take a wrong turn, dumbass?”’
‘And answer, “yes.”’
‘Exactly!’ Lucy chuckled. ‘Like that.’
In her laughter, Lucy’s head had migrated from the sofa to his shoulder, and it felt like a gift.
‘You know what I miss?’ Lucy said softly.
‘What?’
‘Smoking.’
‘Oh, God. Me too.’
‘It was so fucking relaxing.’
‘And fun.’
‘Yeah,’ she sighed dreamily.
Nicky reached over to the coffee table and picked up his phone. Tapped a few buttons.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her eyes cracking open just a sliver.
‘Nothing,’ he said, not at all subtle with the lie.
Still, she just hummed again and closed her eyes.
Then, he clicked a few buttons on the TV to cue the internet up to a site he’d been damn near obsessed with since he’d found it a few years back.
As soon as the voice started up introducing the show, Lucy’s eyes opened up.
‘ 120 Minutes ?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, discovered the Internet Archive on a long flight from Prague to Brisbane and I can’t seem to stop.’
‘I’ve dug into the Archive for research, but not 120 Minutes , and never just for fun. It’s brilliant,’ she said, rolling her head to smile right at him.
Really, watching the MTV of his youth was self-indulgent and a little bit pathetic if Nicky thought too hard about it. So, he just didn’t .
‘Nineties commercials!’ she exclaimed, her face scrunching up with delight.
‘Sometimes,’ he replied. ‘You never know. It’s like pulling the prize right from the top of the Cracker Jack box when you get ’em.’
‘Amazing,’ she breathed, fully entranced by a thirty-year-old Frosted Flakes commercial.
A quiet knock came at the door.