Chapter 12 #2
“You’re such an idiot,” she says, rubbing his tummy. “But you’re a good boy.”
“Too far.” He sits up, breathless. “We need to implement safety words because the furry talk crosses a line for me.”
“What?” Her hand is still out where his stomach was. “You were acting like a dog; all I did was play along.”
“I’m kidding.” His laughter dissolves into worry that he hurt her feelings. “I thought that was clear with the whole furry comment.”
She hates feeling stupid, but for the thousandth time she has to ask, “What is a furry?”
“A person who—how do I put this?—imitates an animal, both in how they dress and how they act. And sometimes, not always, but definitely sometimes, people do it for sexual scenarios.”
“Oh.” New wires connect in Nelle’s brain, an epiphany. “Humans are weird creatures.”
James folds an arm behind his head. His white Henley wrinkles up his torso.
“I forget sometimes that you’re not a human,” he says, his face giving away no emotion.
“It’s confusing,” Nelle says. “Even for me. I’m essentially alone, the single member of the rarest species in the universe.”
“You’re not alone.” James puts his hand over hers, rattling every molecule of her body.
“You grow old, right? I mean, you were a baby, and you looked like a baby, and now you’re twenty-one, and you look twenty-one, so by that logic, you do age.
And you said someone can write that you die if you want to?
So when you’re really old, like ninety-nine, and your husband passes away, then you can have someone write for you to go, too.
Maybe one of your kids? Unless you want to live longer, then by all means. But do you see what I’m saying?”
Nelle shakes her head, still hanging on to the husband comment.
“I’m saying . . .” James takes her shoulders.
“You’re free. Quill can’t hurt you anymore, so do whatever you want.
Go out, find love, make friends, break hearts, start a business, watch it crash, start another one, become a lawyer or a scuba diver or whatever it is you want.
You may not’ve been born like the rest of us, Nelle, but you’re no less human to me. ”
Nelle sways from a wave of dizziness, grateful for his grip on her. “Thank you.”
“Why are you thanking me?”
“Because you’re the reason I can be free.” Nelle tries to ignore his throwaway comment about her hypothetical husband. If she thinks about how that word sounded on his lips, how amazing a partner he would be, she will rip off his pants with her teeth.
A firework goes off behind James’s eyes.
“I have an idea,” he says.
Nelle squints.
“I think you should try to write for yourself.”
“I can’t do that,” she says.
James folds his arms behind his head. “Because Quill told you it’d kill you.”
“Yes, precisely that reason.”
“Did it ever cross your mind that he might have lied?”
Nelle’s irritation spikes. “The first thing that crossed my mind anytime Quill said anything was that he was lying. But he never used my death as a consequence in any other regard, never included it in a lie, so I’d rather not risk it.”
“But you could just try,” James says. “You painted, right? That’s basically the same, and nothing happened there.”
“I didn’t paint with my ink.” Nelle has never been so exhausted in her life, and the bed seems to grow plush arms that pull her in.
“I think that if you try, it might work, and then you’ll be really free.” James clicks off the bedside lamp. A streetlight flickers into the hotel room.
Do you want to get rid of me? murmurs an insecure little monster in Nelle’s head.
James shifts on his side, rousing the scent of sandalwood soap and bar sweat. “I hope I’m not sending the wrong message, but being able to write for yourself would change your life. It’d give you a choice. And that’s what I want. For you to have a choice.”
Nelle swallows. As she feared, she is once again forced to depend on another man.
And writing for herself seems to be the only way out, though doing so may not bring the out she desires.
She would rather have her pen tied to someone else’s journal for the next eighty years than die trying to free herself.
I have a choice, she thinks, her eyelids shuttering. I choose you.
James wakes to a headache, ink in his nostrils.
He wipes at his stinging nose, which results in a sneeze that jolts him up.
He blinks at the daylight filtering in through the thin curtains.
Memories from the night before crash into him one by one.
The packed bar with the pink neon sign. Drinking too much.
The photographer and his generosity. All the embarrassing things he said to Nelle.
The hotel suite is a wreck. Room-service scraps strewn among minibar bottles.
Towels and blankets in clumps on the floor.
Sheets of hotel stationery folded into airplanes and scattered on the fireplace mantel, the windowsill, under James’s pillow, and, when he goes to brush his teeth, one paper bird half melted in the sink.
A few scribbled letters peek out from the paper’s fold, so he opens it up.
He apparently wrote that his dream was to have a book-release party in New York City.
Nelle’s was to visit all seven continents.
That’s right. Sometime during their drunken escapades, she decided it was a good idea to write down their goals.
It was James’s idea to send them flying.
After a vigorous face washing, he checks the time on the digital hotel clock. I should really invest in a watch, he thinks for the hundredth time since he threw his phone away.
Noon already. They slept through the morning, and despite his shuffling around the room, Nelle has yet to even wince. He watches her for a minute, endeared by the drool slugging from her parted lips, but she doesn’t stir.
“Nelle,” he whispers, “would you be mad if I left to pick up coffee to surprise you?”
Not even a twitch. He gently touches her neck to ensure that her pulse is still thumping, though she has said she can’t die naturally. He yanks apart the curtains, hoping the blast of light will wake her, but all he manages to do is blind himself.
He grimaces at the street below. Someone whizzes by on a red bicycle. Cars wait for the valet. A man in a cashmere suit walks out of the hotel carrying a briefcase. If he turns left, I’ll leave, be gone for ten minutes, and surprise Nelle with coffee. If he turns right, I’ll wake her up now.
Nelle stretches like a cat, arms trembling across the cold bed.
She yawns and rubs the crust from her lashes, trying to scrub her dream from her memory.
In it, she was painting for the first time in years.
An oil landscape of a cottage in front of a lake.
But when she pulled away from the canvas, the cottage disappeared.
In its place stood Father, his black stare boring into her.
Across the street, construction workers move ant-like along the twelfth-floor scaffolding.
A drill growls like metal in a blender, springing up a headache to slash her skull in two.
Groggy from sleep and cranial pain, Nelle flings the comforter away and pads barefoot to the bathroom, still in her dress from the night before.
God, the night before. The criminal behind this hellish headache.
A flutter of pink feelings, a mirror ball, rattling music, the flash of a camera, drinking and drinking, eating greasy food delivered by a hotel waiter named George.
The memories zip through her mind like a tape on fast-forward.
She switches on the faucet and holds her hands beneath the icy stream.
The drill outside stops, and without it, she suddenly feels the eerie silence of the hotel room.
James. Nelle splashes cold water on her face and towels off her last flakes of sleep. Where is James?
She frantically leaves the running faucet to search the main room, rechecks the bed, the closet, the bathroom. At the door she peers through the peephole at the fish-eyed hallway. She is about to pull away when something blocks the peephole.
It takes her a moment to place it—a pupil, an iris. Staring back at her. She leaps back, heart thundering beneath her palm. Behind the fire-escape map on the door, she hears someone breathing.
“James?” Maybe he got locked out. But why wouldn’t he knock? Why wouldn’t he—
The man in the hall chuckles. “Not James.”
Nelle’s blood goes cold. Quill.
“What did you do with him?” she asks.
“No clue what you’re getting at,” says Quill. “If James left you, he did so of his own accord.”
“You’re lying.” Either James did leave for a good reason, or Quill took him, or . . .
He realized he was stuck writing for me indefinitely and ran off. Nelle shakes the thought, refusing to let panic set in.
“When James comes back, he will kill you,” she says.
Quill’s laugh cuts through her like a serrated knife through canvas. “You’re being naive, Nellie.”
Her molars grind until they ache. “That is not my name.”
“What lies did you tell yourself to explain James’s absence?” Quill asks.
“He’s coming back.”
“No, he’s not, and I don’t blame him.” His voice gets closer, mouth brushing the door. “I think he woke up and realized how much trouble it is to take care of you. To write for you. To know that a single day won’t go by that you don’t need him.”
“Shut up.” Nelle stands, back to door. “Maybe you feel that way, but I know he doesn’t.”
“Where is he, then?”
She slides down, knees to her chest. The bathroom sink whispers through the wall.
“How did you find me?”
“We’re soul-tied,” Quill says. “I had a dream, saw you here, took the next flight to DC. Listen, Nellie, I’m not here to force you to come with me. I can’t anymore. But I want to give you a choice.”
Lies, lies, lies. She presses her fists into her eye sockets. Don’t believe a word he says. Just make him leave.
“James left you.”
No, whispers her heart, he didn’t.