Chapter Nine and a Half - Nora, with Jules
Jules had known her since college, which meant Jules had earned the right to say things nobody else got to say. She used the right liberally, over brunch, on a Sunday.
"You've got a work thing," Jules said, around a mouthful of eggs. "I can tell. You get this face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have several. This is the one where you're thinking about a man and pretending you're thinking about a client deck." She pointed her fork, unbothered by the aggression of the gesture. "Spill."
Nora considered lying. Weighed it against how badly she wanted to say some of this out loud to someone who wasn't in the room every time it happened.
She folded.
"There's a guy on the Hensley account. Art director. We've been working together for like five weeks."
"Okay. Normal so far."
"He's —" She stopped. Started again. "I think he's into something. About me. Specifically."
"Into you, or into a specific thing about you."
"That's the part I can't figure out." She turned her coffee cup a slow half-circle to buy a second. "He keeps looking at my feet. Not in a gross way. In a — I don't know. A focused way. Like it means something to him."
Jules didn't laugh.
Nora hadn't known how braced she was for a laugh until it didn't come. Something in her shoulders dropped an inch.
"Okay. And how do you feel about it."
"That's the actual problem. I don't know. Some part of me is doing things. Leaving my shoes off. Propping my foot up where he can see it. And I don't understand why until after I've already done it."
"Sounds like you know exactly why and you just don't want to say it out loud yet."
Nora didn't answer. Jules wasn't wrong. That was the trouble with being known by someone since college — nowhere to put the argument.
"It's weird, right? To like being looked at like that."
"It's not weird to like being wanted." Jules shrugged. "People go their whole lives trying to get somebody to want something specific about them instead of, like, the general concept of them. You're acting like you found a bug."
"I'm not saying it's a —"
"I think you found a feature. Eat your eggs."
"You're very calm about this."
"Am I?" Jules stole toast off her plate without asking, which was somehow comforting.
"I've watched you date guys who wanted you smaller.
Quieter. Easier to manage. Three years of that.
" She chewed. "This one wants your feet.
On purpose. Out loud. That's the least confusing thing you've told me about a man in ages, honestly. "
"Does he make you feel good, or does he make you feel like a thing he's cataloguing?"
Nora thought about the stillness in him that night. The careful way he'd looked and then looked away. *Just an observation*, sitting with her for days.
"Good. Weirdly, embarrassingly good. Like — seen. Not looked at. Seen."
"Then I don't see the problem."
"The problem is I don't know how to say any of this out loud to him without it becoming A Thing."
"It's already a thing. You just haven't said it yet.
" No edge in it. The gentle bluntness of someone who'd earned the standing.
"You've spent your whole career being the person with the answer before anyone else in the room.
This might be the first time in a while you get to not know something and just see what happens. That's allowed. Not knowing."
Nora didn't have a comeback, which was its own kind of answer. She finished her coffee instead.
Walking home she felt lighter, and it wasn't because Jules had solved anything. It was that the thing had finally left the inside of her own head, where it had been getting heavier the longer she carried it by herself.
She texted that night, unprompted: *thank you for brunch. and for not making it weird.*
Jules wrote back immediately: *i would never make your foot thing weird. i WOULD like updates though. keep me posted.*
*there's nothing to update yet.*
*sure. "yet" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and we both know it.*
Nora put the phone face-down and lay there smiling at the ceiling like an idiot.