Chapter 7 #2
Nelle’s chest swells with an uncharted emotion, a feeling she has read about but never experienced.
She carries her vanity stool to the window and unlocks the pane, wincing at the resistant groan.
James stands on the other side, beaming up at her.
He takes off his red-and-brown flannel, revealing long arms, gold from the summer sun, a stark contrast to the gray of her own skin, lifeless from hiding in the shadows.
Her relief unspools. “You came back.”
“I came back,” he says through a smile. It’s infectious, and suddenly she can’t wipe a smile off her own face.
“I didn’t scare you?” She doesn’t want to tiptoe around the truth, not if this night is going to end with James telling her that he never wants to speak to her again. She wants to rip the rejection off like solidified wax, in one painful yank.
Hope inflates her as James says, “You did scare me, but here I am. For some reason, I believe you, and for some reason, I just . . .”
“What?” Nelle rests her arms and chin on the windowsill. The air outside is drenched in pine and manure. The smell of Lincoln. “You just what?”
“Want to be around you.”
Nelle watches the bulb of his Adam’s apple as he swallows. He is really here. He came back. For the first time in her life, she has a friend. She feels it with him. Trust. Connection.
And for the first time in her life, she might have a way out of this prison.
“Do you have any questions for me? About . . . you know . . . what I am?”
“You say you’re not human, that Quill wrote you into existence,” James starts. “What does that actually mean?”
“Father was married a long time ago. He had a wife and daughter that he loved.” She looks above the spiky treetops to the stars.
“Bianca and Eleanor. They died in a house fire. Like I told you, it started as a way of coping with his grief. He wrote about having an infant daughter. And one day, he woke up to find me in this room in a pink bassinet. Screaming and crying like a real newborn baby.”
“So your creation was . . . accidental?” James asks.
The idea of Quill creating her purposefully has never crossed Nelle’s mind. He only ever treated her like a mistake.
“I don’t know if he wrote about a baby because he wanted me,” she says, “and honestly, I don’t want to know.”
“Sorry if I crossed a line there.”
Nelle shakes her head. “It just makes me wonder why he’d treat me the way he does if he asked for me. And I don’t want to go down that road.”
“He’s an asshole, that’s why.” James sticks his arms through the sleeves of his flannel, and Nelle mourns. “Anything else I should know about your . . . condition?”
“I don’t like when you call it that.”
“Okay, your magic?”
She cringes. “Sure, magic. I can only go where Father writes for me to go, but I can do whatever I want. Unless he commands me to do something specific.”
“So . . . you wouldn’t be able to jump out of your window right now, even if you wanted to?”
Nelle stands and tries to push herself through the window, into the inviting summer night, but she physically can’t.
Her bones clench, her hands freeze on the windowsill.
Her legs immobilize. Even her lungs contract.
It’s embarrassing, she realizes now that she is doing it in front of someone else, to strain like this without moving a muscle.
She withdraws back to her stool. “I can only go where he lets me go.”
“And he writes for you every day?”
“With my blood,” she says. “It really is ink. I have to fill up vials so he can write my daily commands. Even things like going to the kitchen and the toilet.”
“Surely he can at least give you access to the whole house?”
“If he can, he never has.”
James pauses. “So Quill is your real father? Are you safe here?”
Nelle’s mental walls snap up, reliving every bruise and burn Father has left on her. The pinprick scar from the stove has nearly faded, but she can still feel the ghost of its burn, the smell of sizzling flesh stuck in her nose.
This is what you want, she reminds herself. Someone’s outstretched hand.
“He’s not my father.” Her words are dipped in hatred.
Even the crickets seem to halt their chirping.
“Then . . . who is he?”
A tremor escapes her lips. He is only a few walls away. If he hears her, if he finds James, if he—
Another cooling breath in and out. The heat recedes from her face.
“My captor,” she answers as a drawer closes from the other side of the house. She steadies herself against the window. “You should go, it’s getting late.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow?”
Nelle nods, still focused on that noise. “Tomorrow.”
She starts to shut the window when she remembers her gift for James. The key to her plan.
“Wait!” she hisses. He stops, and his hopeful blue eyes melt her insides.
The curtains rustle as she sweeps away from the window, shuffling papers in her vanity.
She returns with the necklace and unravels the silver chain into James’s palm.
After all she unloaded onto him, it is only fair that he gets to carry around the darkest part of her.
The chain spools around its vial, the size of a fingernail. Filled with black ink. Her ink.
When enough time has passed, when he really trusts her, then she will tell him what the ink is for. Then she will ask him to help her escape. She hates to hand him the reins of her life, but what other choice does she have?
“What’s this?” he asks, holding it up to the bedroom light.
“For you to wear.” She wonders how warm it is inside his tight grip. “So you can carry around a piece of me.”
And so that maybe, one day, I can get out of here.
James switches off his bedside lamp, Nelle’s necklace resting heavy over his heart. He holds the pendant until the glass warms.
Buzz. His phone lights up. He hopes, for a second, that it is a message from Nelle. But she doesn’t have a phone. Or, at least, she said she doesn’t. Curiosity wins and he flips it over to check the notification.
Hi James, I’m glad you enjoyed the show tonight. See you at work.
James shuts his phone off and thinks, I’ll reply in the morning.
But he won’t. When he goes to sleep, all he sees is Nelle. When he wakes up and slides Nancy’s notification away, all he sees is Nelle. When he goes to work and Nancy won’t acknowledge him, he doesn’t think about their date or his rudeness or whatever article he is supposed to be researching—
All he sees is Nelle.