Chapter 12 #3
“He’s not coming back,” Quill says. “This is your one chance, Nellie. Come home, and I’ll forgive you. I’ll keep you safe, you’ll see. You’re too fragile for the world. It’s too dangerous.”
“Go away.” It’s feeble, but it’s all she can manage.
“We will be different,” Quill says desperately. “Nellie, I’ll be a better father. I promise. No more punishments. And I’ll let—”
“Fuck. Off.” Nelle’s fists clench by her sides.
After a minute, Quill’s footsteps move down the hall.
She lets out a breath, and with it come the tears. Peeling herself off the floor, she only makes it as far as the bed before she crashes out entirely. Sobbing, sweating through the bedsheets, puffy and red, praying that James didn’t leave for good. That she isn’t stranded here.
When James returns, she is almost too numb to notice. She curls into his chest, under the shelf of his chin, sobbing.
“Quill was here. He came.”
“What?” James’s arms tighten around her. “He’s alive?”
“He knew what room we’re in,” Nelle grits out through her tears.
His jaw rests on top of her head. “God, how did he even find us?”
“I don’t know.” She sees Quill through that peephole every time she blinks. “But I think he’s been following us since we left Lincoln.”
“Impossible,” James says. “We would’ve seen him.”
Nelle is still too frazzled to defend what she knows is fact. “Quill was here. How he found us doesn’t matter. He did. And he will find us again.”
Slowly, as James whispers his apologies, his arms tug her back to earth.
When Nelle finally pulls away, she fists the front of his shirt and growls, “Don’t ever leave again without telling me first.”
James kisses her knuckles gentler than a butterfly.
“I never will again.” He holds out his pinkie. “I promise.”
“What’s that?” She watches his finger.
“It’s a pinkie promise,” he says. “Seriously, you don’t—? Oh, why do I even ask anymore. It’s like . . . a way to seal your promise. To make it official.”
“Isn’t the point of a promise that your word is enough?”
“Take it or leave it.”
Begrudgingly, Nelle curls her pinkie around his.
“I promise not to leave you without your permission,” James says. “Ever again.”
As if he has performed a spell, her tight chest unspools. “Why did you leave, anyway?”
“I wanted to surprise you with one of my favorite things.” He produces a plastic cup filled with brown liquid and ice.
She takes the cold drink as a peace offering. It’s milky, bitter, and cuts through her in a way that jolts her nerves.
“What is this?”
“An iced latte.”
James clinks his cup against hers. The ice rattles.
She sits back against the creamy pillows, drinks her latte, and watches him watching her.
How is it possible for someone to cure her anxiety so quickly?
She knows it’s an unhealthy habit to form, but right now, wrapped in his clean, intoxicating smell, she can’t help but give in to her innate desire to relax beside him.
“You were sleeping so hard, I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Oh no.” Nelle wants to crawl inside herself and shrivel up. “I know I drool.”
“After last night, I don’t think we can afford to be embarrassed around each other,” James says. “The karaoke competition?”
Memories hit Nelle’s head like bricks. Singing off-key to songs she didn’t know, jumping on the bed amid liquor bottles and sheets of paper, clutching the TV remote as her microphone.
James was wild, too, screaming at the top of his lungs to guitar- and drum-heavy ballads.
Honestly, they should have been thrown out for a noise complaint.
“I think I’ll cross singing off my list of possible career paths,” she says.
James drops his swollen duffel bag on the bed and digs through it for clothes. In the bathroom, Nelle showers and changes into a cropped black tee and denim shorts.
When she reemerges, James has changed into his Henley and baggy jeans. Despite the warmth, he tugs on his dad’s weathered jacket.
“So, navigator,” he says, “where to next?”
Nelle presses her hands to the window and looks out at the city, beyond the city, to the sky. The world out there waiting for her. Just as exciting as before, but it is tainted now by Quill. He could be lurking around every corner, watching, waiting.
“I don’t know what to do about him.” She chokes on the name Father.
James’s sigh rattles with real fear. “Neither do I. What if he’s waiting at the truck? Or in our next hotel room? I don’t think he’ll stop after today.”
“I’m sorry,” Nelle says.
“Why on earth—”
“For pulling you into all of this,” she finishes. “I knew better than to mess with Quill.”
“You didn’t pull me into anything.” James nudges her chin up. “I jumped in headfirst. And as for Quill, I think all we can do is hope he stays away.”
She rests on his hand. “Hope.”
“Where to next, Nelle?”
“I’m thinking . . .” She pauses, mostly for dramatic effect. “New York.”
On the drive north, Nelle and James find a diner at 3:00 a.m. in a ghost town off the interstate.
Its black-and-white checkered floor sticks to her shoes, but she loves the red-vinyl booths, the foggy plastic menus, the cloud of grease that wafts from the kitchen door with its circular window.
James slurps a chocolate milkshake from a thick red straw, the glass as tall as his forearm. Nelle tastes hers.
“Have you ever had a milkshake?” James asks.
“Nope.”
“Well?”
“Strawberry.” Nelle sucks down another icy gulp. “Tastes like melted ice cream.”
James laughs and pushes his milkshake across the table. “Try mine.”
“Only if you try mine.”
He plugs her straw into his mouth. Heat floods her cheeks, realizing that he has most definitely had a strawberry milkshake before. Probably a few. He hasn’t been Rapunzel in a tower his entire life.
“Oh my God,” he moans.
Nelle tries his. Chocolaty, but not as good as hers.
“Do you want to trade?” He’s already wrapping his hands around her milkshake.
“No, thanks.” She reaches across the table and swipes it back.
A childish voice in her head taunts, Sharing straws, you’re practically kissing. She stares at James’s dimple and jawline, how his throat bobs when he looks at her.
Back to her milkshake. “So you’re a writer.”
“You could say that.”
“The only writer I’ve ever known was Quill,” Nelle says. “What does that say about writers?”
“It says nothing about writers and everything about Quill being the only person besides me that you’ve ever met.”
“Valid. So what do you write? Fantasy? Romance, or is that out of your comfort zone?”
James sits back, arches a brow.
“Sorry.” She traces a line through her glass’s condensation. “I shouldn’t assume. It’s just that, well, do you write romance?”
He crosses his arms. “No.”
“Maybe you should try,” she says. “I think you’d be good at it. Quill only ever found success as a writer when he wrote out of his comfort zone.”
“Not sure if he’s the ideal role model.”
“As a father, no.” Yet Nelle can’t deny Quill’s genius. “But he was a bestselling author. Think about pushing the boundaries of genre, that’s all I’m saying.”
From what she has witnessed, the last few days on the road have been as formative for James as they have been for her. He was living a life he hated in Lincoln. Now he is free to gallop.
“You have to try something new, too,” James says. “Solidarity, sister.”
Nelle scratches the sticky table. For twenty-one years, she has been locked away from the world.
Now she can dig her fingers into all it has to offer.
She wants to see every mountain, traverse every city, cross every river, dip into every ocean.
She wants to talk to people, to take dance classes, to hold a brush again.
“I used to love painting,” she says. “I want to do that, maybe.”
“Oh my God, really? Jessie’s an artist, too.” James’s grin is contagious. “I’m sure she will let you work in her studio.”
Nelle once loved the smell of paint, mixing colors to unlock new hues, transforming an empty canvas into another world. She imagines herself in New York, painting in a tiny sunlit studio . . . Quill’s beady eye blinking back at her through the peephole.
Her throat closes up. “Yeah, I think I’d like to try.”