5.
five
Noel
K ate arrives first thing in the morning, a flurry of squeals and nearly-dropped take-out coffee cups. She took today off of work so we could spend the day catching up, and I didn’t realize how much I needed to see her until she was standing in front of me.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” she says, bounce-hugging me on the porch. She breaks the hug, pushing my shoulders out. “You look like a fucking supermodel.”
I snort. I’m still in the pajamas I wore to bring Jamie to the hospital since I spent the last few hours staring at the ceiling until sun-up, wondering if there was maybe a book somewhere on how to handle running into the guy you slept with in a psychic vision.
“Why do lies and cuss words come so easily to you?”
She shrugs. “Three years of law school. But I’m serious. Your hair is so long and I’m loving the color.”
I run a hand through it, pulling at a tangle.
It’s past my shoulders now and an unintentional ombre.
The top three-quarters, or maybe a year of growth, is back to my natural near-black, having had zero time to get the warm highlights touched up.
I wonder if Jamie would have recognized me so easily if I’d still had them.
I don’t have time to catch up on my balayage right now, though. Important cosmic questions need answering.
I pull Kate through the wooden screen door, letting it bang with a thwack behind us. “Look at this place.” She kicks off her shoes on the mat in the kitchen and spins around the cottage. “It’s exactly the same.”
“Some of it,” I say, digging through the kitchen drawers. Pixie makes herself known with a stretch and strut, and Kate picks her up. “The property management company put a gingham-lined basket of lobster-shaped soaps in the bathroom.”
Nana never had a cohesive design for this place, but she was fervently anti-kitsch.
“Gross,” Kate says plainly, making me laugh even though internally I’m on a ledge, tipping forward with every second I spend not talking this out.
This has always been Kate’s superpower, pulling me back from a spiral. Whenever I felt myself getting nervous about something as a kid, meeting someone new or straying too far from the safety circle I’d built myself, she’d remind me that my biggest leap was probably a tiny step for most people.
And just like that, the whole thing would snap into perspective.
I need a little of that right now—perspective—because I’m starting to feel like an unwitting character in a movie.
I find the lighter I was looking for in a drawer, and start flinging open cabinets.
Nana’s turquoise stone bowl sits on the top shelf, and I pause, torn between wanting to make sure I do this little ritual right, and the anxiety I feel about holding that bowl in particular.
Like the white pillar candles Nana insisted on, the ones tucked in the top of her bedroom closet, she only ever used this bowl to catch the wax.
I’ve already decided I’m not going into her room to get the candles, so in the name of quality control, I stretch to my toes to pull the bowl down. I should use at least one of her props.
“So tell me how you spent your first night back,” Kate says unaware of my existential angst. She lifts a jar candle from the island to sniff it, and I snatch it from her. I line it up on the island with the lighter and the bowl, now filled with water, and shove my thumbnail between my teeth.
Kate watches me warily. “What the hell is going on?”
“I need to try something.”
“Okaaay.”
“Something… weird happened last night.”
“Oh my God.” Her eyebrows jump to her hair. “Did Nana, like, visit you?”
“Really, that’s where your head goes? Ghosts?” Though, it’s pretty bold of me to scoff at the supernatural considering what I’m about to do.
She shrugs. “She was always so mystical. If anyone could come back, it would be her.”
I nod in agreement because Kate always finds a way to bring me around to her side of ridiculousness.
Though, I didn’t need her help to get to this place, did I?
The place where I’m about to reenact that night on the roof in hopes of…
well, I don’t know what I’m hoping for. The possibility of being assaulted by another hallucination is less than comforting, but if I can make it happen with someone other than Jamie, that removes one complication.
Discovering some latent psychic ability is one thing. But a cosmic link to a stranger, especially one that ends the way my vision on the roof did, is more than I have the capacity for at the moment.
Lighting the candle, I wave my hand over the wick a few times to get a good flame. Kate has seen this enough times that understanding clicks on her face. She sets Pixie down and reaches across the island to press her palm to my forehead. “Babe, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I’m not . “But I need to put an end to something right now.”
“With Nana’s candle thing?”
“Yes. Just let me!”
She holds her hands up at the pitch in my voice. “Fine. If we’re doing this, lottery numbers would be great.”
Ignoring that, I lift the candle while the wax turns liquid.
I’ve seen Nana do this a hundred times, on this very kitchen island, but I’ve only done it myself as a joke.
I don’t know the finer details of the ritual.
For good measure, I grab Kate’s wrist the way Jamie grabbed mine that night.
I’m desperate to find the key to this thing and Nana’s not around to ask.
Is it the candle? The candle and the touching? The candle and touching him ?
The wax is pooling, so I take a deep breath and slowly tip it into the water.
The moments before it congeals feel like eternity, but when it finally takes form, I realize I don’t have any idea what I’m looking for.
That night with Jamie, it wasn’t the wax at all.
The pictures just… formed in my head. But right now, the only thing knocking around in my brain is a nagging question regarding my sanity.
Defeated, I shove the bowl away, water sloshing over the edge, and drop my face into my hands.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Kate grabs a dish towel and mops the mess I’ve made.
“I ran into Jamie last night. Jamie Bishop .”
She makes a face, then it dawns on her. “ Wait . Roof Guy?” She slaps her thigh. “Holy shit, the one whose future you told?”
“I didn’t tell his future,” I snap, then bite down on my lip again so hard I taste copper. My standard response to this has recently taken on an air of mistruth, if not become an outright lie. After last night, it seems as though I really did tell his freaking future.
Kate pushes herself to the edge of the stool she’s perched on. “How the hell did you run into Jamie Bishop? I texted you at eight and you said you were going to bed.”
“You’re never going to believe this.” Actually she will and I know exactly what she’s going to say. Kate spent a good six months after that party insisting that the universe was telling me something and that I should “ignore it at my own peril.”
I tell her the whole ridiculous story—finding Jamie bloody and concussed on my porch, how I thought I was going to be murdered. About the long night at the ER where a couple hours into the reunion, another relationship of his ended abruptly.
I tell her that his family owns the house next door, and based on the timeline he gave me, we most definitely had some overlapping nights here. When I’m finished, she stares at me, jaw unhinged.
I flap my hands, blowing some much needed air on my face. “Say something!”
“I can’t believe it worked that quickly,” she breathes.
“What? What worked?”
“Oh, come on , Noel! You come here on a retreat to figure out what’s going to snap you out of this emotional rut, and boom the universe drops the hot guy who starred in your post-coital psychic vision on your literal doorstep.”
I scrunch my face at the word post-coital. “The retreat thing was your idea,” I tell her. “I’m only mildly participating.”
“Liar! This is exactly why you came here. Open the gates. Find something you love. Does any of this ring a bell?”
“I was thinking more like how much I love walking along the cobblestones downtown or smelling the salt water when I wake up. The seagulls.”
Kate groans. “No one loves seagulls, you dork.”
“I do!”
“Oh, really?” She throws the wet dish towel at my head. “Is it their beady eyes? The way they eat trash?”
I toss it back harder. “It’s the way they shit on my car.” I trail off into a laugh and Kate joins, but I know it’s only a stay of execution. She won’t drop this.
“Ugh. Even if I wanted to believe this is meant to be, who am I for the universe to intervene in my love life? Why not just let me struggle on Tinder like everyone else?”
“Maybe not everyone else asks.”
I pull back, eyes wide. “I did not ask for this.”
“No, but you played with the candle that night knowing how much Nana believed in it.”
“I poured wax into a Solo cup as a joke . That’s hardly a plea for supernatural intervention.
” Though, my guilty conscience reminds me that I did know this was never a joke to Nana.
Her predictions were always frivolous and light—a kiss from a boy (Kate), the winning goal in a soccer tournament (me), but even though the consequences may have been frivolous, her belief in it wasn’t. She was all in.
My brain flashes with the little plea I sent up to the sky last night before falling asleep: Don’t let it be too hard to find .
No. No, no, no . Am I here to try to wrestle some feeling back into my life? Sure. But the cosmos guiding Jamie to collapse on my doorstep because we’re supposed to fall in love? That’s ridiculous.
“It’s a small city. A coincidence,” I tell her and myself. “And for the hundredth time, we have no idea if it was a vision.”
Except the belly button thing, and the haircut, his thriving small business that he straight up told me he only has because of that night… My heart takes off in a sprint.
“Whatever it was,” Kate says, “it was you and him naked .”
“I can’t stand you. Truly.” I twirl a lock of hair around my finger and tug.
Kate knows me well enough to see this for what it is. A stress response. A nervous tic. This whole thing is so far beyond my comfort zone that I’m led to believe just those few hours with Jamie Freaking Bishop could count as a life-altering experience. Check the box and head home.
“Okay,” Kate says. “Start back. Did you flip the fuck out? Because that’s how I imagine you handling this.”
I scoff self-righteously and lie through my teeth. “Of course not. But mostly because I didn’t recognize him at first. He was pretty beat up and it was dark. But then he said my name and he called me the angel .”
She snorts. “Smooth.”
“He said it more than once, this guardian angel thing. That night was a big deal for him.” In a different way than it was a big deal for me. “He named his business after me. Or… the incident. His whole life changed that night, Kate.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes! And I googled him, obviously.” I pulled out my phone as soon as I dropped him at the bar —Jamie Bishop, Portland, Maine , click — and my screen filled with his face, unbruised, just as handsome.
In addition to his personal Instagram—checkered with candids of him on the beach, dressed up downtown, on a mountain somewhere bundled in cold weather gear—and the brewery’s account with staged photos of pint glasses and taps, I’d also found a plethora of articles and interviews.
He’s quite successful it seems, turning a small microbrewing operation into a mid-scale craft beer business and a popular local taproom in the Old Port district.
There were pictures of Jamie behind a row of taps, his arms crossed over his chest, hat backwards, and a huge grin on his face.
Others of him in a dress shirt being interviewed for a piece on the future of craft beer.
Article after article about the new kid on the brewery scene had appeared in my search, but the headline that stuck out the most read: In a city that boasts beer juggernauts like Shipyard and Gritty’s, local man Jamie Bishop is somehow keeping up and keeping on .
“Holy shit,” Kate says again like she’s forgotten the rest of her vocabulary.
“I know.”
“All of this time, you’ve been pretending that vision was some side effect of the alcohol and he’s been building his whole life around it.”
“I wasn’t pretending.” Except last night on the porch when I lied about remembering him. “It never happened again. Not once. What was I supposed to think?”
“That the universe is trying to set you up with a smoking hot, super successful guy, and you should probably say thank you!” Kate makes a sound like I am truly dense.
“A smoking hot, super successful lunatic! Kate, the man took a party game and made a huge financial decision based on it. He’s…” I wave a hand, searching for the right word. “ Reckless ! You know who would do something like that? My mother.”
“That’s not untrue, but it is irrelevant. We’re not talking about your mother here.”
“We might as well be. That kind of impulsiveness ruled my entire childhood. There’s no way I’m fated to a guy like this.”
“The universe works in mysterious ways. What about him? Did he leave that cheating girlfriend?”
“I guess so. He seemed to be dating someone else, but she, ah, couldn’t come to the hospital, so I stayed.” Longer than I needed to if I’m being honest. But I’m not.
Kate throws her head back. “God, aren’t you the least bit curious, Noel? If not for the sheer hotness factor here? I mean you made out well if it’s true.”
Leave it to Kate to focus on the fact that Jamie is good looking. Beautiful, actually, with that careless hair and the dimples of a damn cherub… but that’s beside the point.
“There are a lot of handsome men out there who don’t cosmically belong to me, and we’ve already established that this one is bonkers.”
“Welp.” Kate folds her hands under her chin. “I hate to break it to you, babe, but you said it yourself: this city is like the size of a high school. You can’t expect to avoid him indefinitely. Something wants the two of you in the same space.”
Well, that’s foreboding.
I let my body slump forward, dramatically resting my cheek on the cool countertop. “Why is it that you don’t think I’ve completely lost my mind? This whole time, you never questioned this.”
She pulls one of the takeout coffees she brought from the tray and pushes the other toward me.
“I was there that night, Noel. There’s no way all of us were imagining that, drunk or not.
And besides, if this thing is some kind of mental breakdown…
” she shrugs. “I still kind of want to see how it plays out.”