Chapter 14
The toaster spits up two brown slices of bread, which Jessie butters with a knife she inherited from her mom’s first silverware set.
A record crackles by the window, mostly guitar, drums, and a woman’s soprano howl.
Beside the spinning vinyl, a white moth orchid shivers in the northern sunlight.
James’s feet catch on the rung of Nelle’s barstool.
She follows the path from his ankles to his mouth until her feelings from last night come rushing back.
Last night.
Dripping on the stairs, Nelle and James stumbled down from the roof and into the unoccupied guest room, a glorified walk-in closet with a bed and a window, where they clumsily swapped their wet clothes for sweats.
Once they were dry, they crawled under the comforter, side by side, tension stretching between their sleepless bodies.
Nelle had never been so aware of him before.
Neither said a word until, eventually, James started snoring.
“Appetizers.” Jessie slides two plates across the tiny wood-top island. “There’s a quiche in the oven.” She sliced up strawberries alongside their toast. Almost the same shade as the fruit, her hair is pulled up in a small, spiky bun, exposing brown roots.
James gives a weak smile to show his thanks.
Nelle sighs. She has no patience for this. He is the one who rejected the kiss, so why is he pissed off? Is this weird tension now a permanent fixture of their friendship? Maybe last night was too much for him. What if it was too much for her?
“Coffee or tea?” Jessie asks.
“Coffee.” Nelle fondly recalls the latte that resurrected her in DC. She accepts Jessie’s mug and tries it black, fighting back a sour face. “Do you have milk?”
“Oat milk.” Jessie grabs a carton from the fridge and pours a quick stream into the mug. “How’d you sleep last night?”
Nelle sips it. Scorching hot, but the taste is tolerable.
“Fine,” James says, crunching on his toast.
Nelle fights the urge to kick him. “Fine, yeah.”
Jessie flings a cabinet shut, and the bang makes Nelle slosh her coffee.
“Why are you both being weird?” Jessie wipes her hands on a rag before planting them on her hips. “Yesterday you were all like, smiley and heart eyes and let’s dance in the rain. Now you’re not speaking?”
Nelle squeezes her coffee mug until it burns her fingers. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Jessie frowns. Squints. “You said you slept fine.”
Well, I did say that. “Um . . .”
“Nothing’s wrong, we were just up all night,” James says. His toast is half gone. “And we’ve been driving for days straight. I can’t speak for Nelle, but I’m exhausted.”
Jessie sets a timer on her phone. “You’re giving me child-of-divorce PTSD. I’ll be gone five minutes tops. Talk it out.” As she pads down the hall in wool socks, she adds, “And don’t let the quiche burn!”
Discomfort settles between Nelle and James. She dares a look at him, hoping to see the James she knows. He rearranges the strawberries on his plate.
Fine. If he won’t talk, she will.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nelle twists on her stool to face him. “Why did you shut down when we got back to the room last night?”
“I didn’t want to talk.” He sits a few inches taller than her, but he seems small.
“Why not?” Nelle purses her lips, her defenses up. “Because I thought—”
Jessie’s phone timer goes off. James reaches over to stop it.
“Not because I don’t like talking to you,” he stammers, catching her tone.
“I do, I love talking to you. It’s just that .
. .” He studies the ceiling as if he might find an explanation written there.
“Oh, what the hell, I wanted to kiss you last night. On the roof and when we were in bed. It was all I could think about.”
“You’re the one who said we have to wait.”
His dimples are dimpling. “I am very stupid sometimes. I have this idea of how things should go, and sometimes I try to . . . orchestrate them.”
I wanted to kiss you last night. Nelle chews on a hunk of buttered toast to keep her focus off the animal inside her going rabid at his words.
So far, she has kept it on a leash, scared of being hurt, scared of the real-world horrors Father warned her about: rapists, murderers, line cutters, heartbreakers.
When she was seven, he sat her down on his knee in the living room and said, “People are the real monsters of this world, Nellie.” She never forgot that, even if she doesn’t agree with it.
Now after feeling the world’s texture for herself, she loves the people in it most of all.
The only real monster in her world, she has discovered, is Father himself.
Nelle blinks from her reverie to find James staring at her lips.
“I don’t have a frame of reference,” she says at last, “but this doesn’t feel like casual breakfast conversation.”
“It’s not.” James pushes back his hair. “Sorry for being cold. It was all in my head, nothing to do with you, and next time I’m feeling anxious, I’ll tell you the truth.”
He leans in and kisses her cheekbone. Nelle shudders, her soul lit up like a glow stick.
Grinning, James leans back on the island and kicks his socked feet out toward the living room.
A bird chirps on the balcony. Nelle’s throat goes dry.
She hadn’t realized that a peck on the cheek could be so sensual.
Jessie’s door squeaks open. “Are we finished making out and making up?”
“Yes,” Nelle calls down the hall, taking a plucky bite of toast. It is good, for being plain butter on bread. Maybe the flavor she tastes is freedom. Food made with the care and love of a sentimental hand-me-down butter knife. Food not prepared by a sociopath.
Jessie clears the air as she strides in. “All good now?”
“Yes, all good.” James smirks behind his coffee mug. “Miscommunication is a bitch, you know.”
The corner of Nelle’s mouth tugs upward, as if James planted a hook where he kissed.
“Oh, I know, I—” Jessie cracks open the oven, and smoke spills out into her face, the dead smoke detector watching in amusement. “My quiche!”
Washington Square Park is a rare patch of green among the concrete, brick, and glass of the city.
James drops his empty coffee in a recycling can and finds a bench to sit on. Nelle settles in beside him. The last sentence in the journal reads, Nelle roams freely around the park.
After Jessie went to work, they spent the morning and early afternoon testing the boundaries of Nelle’s existence.
“Father already experimented with how much I can be controlled,” Nelle said before they left the apartment. “Time to figure out how I much I can’t.”
Though her independence doesn’t stretch beyond Jessie’s apartment door, James successfully wrote for her to roam all four floors of the Union Square Barnes & Noble.
Why she can traverse one multifloor building and not another boggles him, but who is he to question the fickle rules of magic?
Bryant Park also proved to be a success, so long as she stayed within its border. Central Park was a failure.
James discovers that he can write for her to go places by herself, like Quill did on the Fourth, but doing so requires a written command to return.
They tried it with the coffee shop on the corner, and Nelle came back with two iced lattes, smiling brightly.
James mirrored her glee, but in truth her joy only made his chest ache.
Having been imprisoned by Quill her whole life, a simple solo walk down the street was a miraculous experience for her.
And James takes it for granted every damn day.
He knew New York was a walking city, but holy hell, his legs are tired.
He sits and digs two battered paperbacks from his back pockets, both from Jessie’s bookshelf, a romance and a thriller.
In his left hand, a half-naked man and woman sit enraptured on a cliffside, wind thrashing their orgasmic expressions.
In his right hand, a rain-streaked window looks out on a lamplit street.
“What’s this one about?” Nelle asks as he hands her a book.
“I think it’s a murder mystery.” He cracks open the romance novel, research for trying something new. The dedication makes him smile: To my cat. Three pages in, he is walking in the author’s world. Two chapters later, if the two leads do not end up together, he will riot.
He looks up during the book’s turbulent midpoint, startled to see that his shadow has grown longer. People gather around the fountain, tossing pennies into its rippled water. A woman in a flat fedora strums a folk song, an open guitar case at her feet containing two crumpled dollar bills.
“Do you like your book?” Nelle asks.
“I do,” James says, flipping it over to examine the cover again. “It’s like if a strawberry milkshake was a novel.”
She jabs his side. “Inspirational?”
He thinks about the beats of the plot, the character-focused scenes, the banter between the two love interests. Would it be refreshing to take a break from castles, dragons, and battles to write about something softer? Something slightly more real?
He pulls out the pen with Nelle’s ink. “Want to grab another coffee before we go back to the apartment?”
“Sure,” Nelle says, “but I have another idea for after coffee, before home.”
Fresh cortado in hand, ice rattling, James steps after Nelle through the door of an antique store.
Dust coats every shelf, yellow-paged book, and creepy doll.
He gags on the smell of mildew as the doorbell tinkles.
The old man behind the narrow counter smokes a cigarette and flips his magazine page.
“Nice place,” James mutters, steering clear of a supersize teddy bear covered in brown stains. “Are you looking to buy a demon-possessed Barbie?”
“No.” Nelle scans every shelf, low and high. “Just looking. How cool is this?” She plucks a gold locket from a necklace rack, the smooth oval engraved with a rose. Inside are tiny empty frames, waiting to house two floating heads.
James watches as she clicks the locket open and closed. “We should get it.”
Nelle double-checks his face. “Really?”
“Yeah.” He holds it up to the dim light. “We can put our faces in it.”
“I’d love that.” She spears down another cluttered aisle. “But we need to find a souvenir for you, too.”
He waves the idea away. “I don’t need anything.”
She gasps. “James!”
He ducks around the shelves and finds her kneeling on the floor next to a small suitcase.
“Isn’t this gorgeous?” She unbuckles the case and opens the lid.
A red manual typewriter sits inside. James examines it. Fresh ribbon of ink already installed, the keys intact and functional, as far as he can tell. The carriage lever slides smoothly.
Nelle searches for a tag. “How much is it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” James says. It’s coming home with him. His hands tremble as he carries it to the front counter. “Is this still functional?”