Chapter Nine #2
I want to digest this information, to ask him clever questions and dig into the James beneath the James Neely I still feel I mostly know through Google searches and hazy college memories, but I am sure my death is imminent and my brain can’t absorb anything else.
“At least your funeral will be well attended,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut.
“Mine is just going to be my dad and Serena and her family.” My eyes fly open.
“Oh my god. I can’t die. If I die, Serena and Leonora are going to have to come here, which means that they’ll have to take Misha on a plane.
You know those videos of the screaming babies and the flight attendants who walk them around the plane? ”
“Yeah,” James says.
“Yeah, Misha would have the flight attendants tied up with seatbelts before they had time to offer him a pretzel. If they have to put that kid on a plane, I’ll be dead but Serena’s going to bring me to life and kill me again. She’s going to have Leonora put poisonous plants in my casket.”
James makes an odd noise, but I can’t stop talking.
“Can corpses break out?” I panic. I almost open my eyes to look at James but think better of it. “I’m going to get a rash in the afterlife. I can feel it.”
The odd noise, it turns out, is James’s laugh. Rich and deep and deeply startled. I can see through the narrowest of slits between my eyelids that he’s turned his head away from me like he’ll be able to hide his gaiety.
“Eyes. On. The. Damn. Road. Neely.”
He laughs louder and the Jeep makes a low roar as it crests a particularly steep part of the road, which even through my squinting makes it look like we’re driving directly into the sky. I shut my eyes once more and resolve to never open them again. Ever.
The hill must have been the final boss to beat, though, because I hear rather than see James put the car in park after going a short distance over gravel.
“ We. Are. Here. Green, ” he says, his voice playfully mocking. “Open your eyes.”
Even when he opens his car door, I don’t obey. I’m still holding on to the grab handle for dear life when James comes around to open mine.
He is still laughing.
“Juniper,” he says, and my name on his lips while he’s laughing isn’t something my brain can immediately absorb. “Open your eyes. We’re here. You’re safe.”
I try to squeeze my eyes shut even more forcefully.
“No,” I say.
He’s not outright laughing anymore, but the chuckle is just beneath his words when James says, “Can you tell me why?”
“Because,” I say. “You’re being nice to me. I’m going to open my eyes and we’re going to go film whatever diabolical plan you’ve come up with to reveal our fake-dating and then you’re going to stop being nice to me because you hate cameras and tolerate me.”
James makes a noise like he’s going to disagree but before he can, I add, “Don’t argue.
It’s why you’re being so nice to me. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, an end date to our arrangement, which is two seconds after we finish filming and you make it look like an accident when you shove me off this cliff.
And then I’m going to die and Serena and Leonora are going to have to—”
“—put their kid on a plane and they’re going to deface your casket in retaliation. I caught all that. Is that all?”
I nod.
“Thought so,” James says.
His hands are warm as they wrap around mine, gently tugging my fingers one by one from the handle and coaxing them out of their fists.
“He was an idiot, you know,” James says, his tone conversational.
“Who was?” I ask, stubbornly clenching my fingers to make his job as difficult as possible.
My eyes are still closed but no longer squeezed. I flutter my lids just enough to see James, his arms stretched above me and that damn sliver of his stomach showing again where his shirt rises. He finishes the one hand and moves on to the other.
“The bummer,” he says. “I don’t see how anyone could ignore you.”
I finally open my eyes.
“That could be a compliment or an insult,” I point out. “People tend to be unable to ignore lots of things. Hornet nests, erupting volcanoes, hurricanes—”
“You are hardly a natural disaster,” James says, rolling his eyes. “Well, if you don’t have coffee in hand, anyway.”
Having freed the handle from my vise grip, James leans with his hands braced on the car’s roof so that he’s stretched slightly above me like a human tent.
He still smells good, which all the books I’ve ever read assured me was a thing, but I just knew they were lying.
I still can’t place his scent, especially because the artificial strawberry note isn’t there today.
He doesn’t smell like cedar or burnt oak or the fire of a thousand suns if fire was sweet…
But it is a nice smell. Whatever it is.
The view, it turns out, is even nicer.
My mouth pops open when I turn just enough to catch a glimpse of the rental through the car’s windshield. Before I can stop myself, I casually push a hand to James’s chest to give myself room to get out of the car.
“Oh my god.”
James isn’t laughing anymore, but he’s not frowning, either.
“It’s a house,” he admits.
“It’s beautiful. ”
It isn’t a traditional tree house. The structure isn’t sitting atop a huge, thick-trunked tree, but it feels like it grew out of the forest itself, a strange human-abode appendage that a woodland witch might inhabit.
Paneled green with red wood shutters and accents, it looks charmingly biological, and I catch myself wondering if the low stone wall that borders the front yard entry is to keep the house from running off deeper into the mountain woods where it surely belongs.
“Is…is that a brook I hear?” I ask.
James is watching me, of course.
“It is.”
“It’s…it’s babbling,” I say.
“Brooks do tend to make noise when they run.”
“But that one is babbling like we’re in a fairy tale,” I say, mildly irritated at how casual he is being about what might possibly be my dream house. “You rented this ? Like online? Like somebody owns this and doesn’t spend every waking second they’re able here?”
It doesn’t sit right with me, the thought of this house sitting empty.
There are metal decorations in the garden of purple flowers that twinkle in the breeze.
There’s a cobblestone path that leads to the front door but also branches off to the side of the house, where there’s a sitting area with a bench against a tiny green shed that matches the house.
The shed has scraps of fabric nailed all over it so it rather resembles a fading, multi-textured mop.
It’s giving forcibly abandoned dream home, not fixer-upper rental investment property.
“It’s a rental,” James confirms.
“That sucks,” I say.
James seems to think for a moment.
“I thought you wanted to live in the city,” he says.
“I want to live in the city because I want to work with books and that’s where you go to work with books,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to live anywhere until five minutes ago when I saw this place.”
I let it happen again, the runaway imagination thing.
I let myself imagine what it would be like to live here, to call that horrendous drive into the sky “the path home” and end each day locking the burgundy-painted front door before bed, tending the purple flowers and nicely shaped bushes placed haphazardly around the perimeter of the stone wall.
Mom’s painting could sit above the mantel of the stone chimney I just know is inside.
I can’t see my job. Did I give up on publishing to live here? Did I just find something to do in Tatum to make enough money to afford this place? And that’s where even my brain hits a wall of unsuspended disbelief: that I could ever afford something like this, no matter my job.
“We should get to filming,” James says, yanking me from the impossible daydream inside my head.
I hold up a finger.
“One more second,” I say, staring at the house. “I just want to remember what paradise looks like so I can hold it in my head on the fall down.”
“The fall down what?” James asks.
I point beyond the car.
“The mountain when you shove me off it.”
James scoffs and opens the metal gate, gesturing for me to go ahead of him.
“If your grip on that handle was any indication, you’d catch yourself halfway down and I’d have to come and fetch you.”
“You’d push me off a cliff and still come get me?” I gasp. “My hero.”
He closes the gate behind us. Something about him standing behind me makes my spine tingle, and I remind myself for the umpteenth time that any tingles where James Neely is concerned are not on the list of concerns. Not even close. Fake-dating or not, the spine tingling is a hard line.
“I’m not going to push you off a cliff,” he says, stepping around me. “Come on. I thought we could film in the backyard.”
When we round the corner of the house, I can see why. The backyard is as perfect as the front. There are at least a dozen places to sit: low swinging benches, heavy metal lawn chairs with cushions that match the house’s green paneling placed around a firepit, and—my personal favorite—a tire swing.
“I’d pay good money that I don’t have to see you get on that swing,” I tell James, coming to stand beside him on the wooden deck.
“You could have had good money,” he reminds me.
“Moo, thank you,” I say, letting my backpack slide from my shoulder so I can dig out the tripod.
“Is that your plan? We’re going to announce our dating as I push you around on a tire swing with a soundbite from The Greatest Showman in the background?
Because if that’s the case, you’re absolutely right: The views will roll in. ”
“You’re ridiculous,” he says, but there’s no bite in it.
When I get the phone attached, I go to my regular camera app instead of a streaming one. It’s what we’ve done every time with the exception of our first attempt at a live. Though he refuses to do more than one take, it’s obvious James prefers pre-recorded to the livestream.
“Not a video,” he says over my shoulder.
I look up, and of course he’s watching me.