Chapter 18
Legs sore from the twelve-hour southbound train, James relishes the walk from Nice’s city center to the Plage de la Réserve. He follows a staircase down to the pebble beach, seawater stinging his nose. Nelle’s white cover-up billows off as she hops over scorching pebbles to the aquamarine shallows.
Without warning, James bolts to the water, Nelle’s laughter trailing him like popping bubbles.
He barrels into a wave, spray splashing cold on his chest, salt on his lips.
When he turns around, Nelle is gone. He scans the crowded beach for her, but he definitely heard her running after him.
His heart races, jumping from thought to thought, bouncing back and forth between the beach and the water.
Suddenly, the roiling waves are menacing as they swell and sweep into the ocean.
The undercurrent’s fingers curl around his ankles.
He’s about to dive under to search when Nelle shatters the surface wearing a pearly grin. James tries to hide his panic as she grabs on to him, laughing, her hair wet and slicked to her neck.
“I’ve never swam in the ocean before. It’s so . . .” Nelle licks her lips. “I knew it was salt water, but I never knew you could taste the salt.”
James’s panic eases like the shifting tide.
This is why he loves traveling with Nelle.
Everywhere they go, every experience, is new to her.
New car, new road, new city, new food, new views, shiny new seawater.
Every time she is awed by something James finds mundane, he steps back and appreciates that thing anew, and in that moment of disassociation, he realizes: Yes, it is incredible that you can taste the salt in the ocean.
It is incredible that I am on a beach on the French Riviera with the girl I love.
He freezes, repeating his own thought back to himself while Nelle dolphin-dives in and out of waves.
The girl I love?
She wades to him and wraps her arms around his neck, dragging him down to her level, chin-deep in the water. His toes dig into the rocks and sand as she fits her body to his, soft in places he is embarrassingly hard.
Her eyes widen. “Is that . . . ?”
Fire engulfs his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I—”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” She shifts against him, and for a split second, he worries he’s going to come in his swimsuit.
“Your freckles are starting to show more,” he points out.
Nelle squints down at her nose, searching. “Do you like them?”
“Love them,” he says, testing the word. It flies out effortlessly.
She laughs, a sound like silver wind chimes.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.
“Thank Jessie, not me.” His chest tightens with the need to say three specific words to her.
It feels like a lie to keep them in. He needs to know whether she feels the same way.
Whether she, too, needs to wrap her arms around him and never let him go, to know how his skin feels under her tongue, to study him like a poem so she can remember the lines of him forever.
“James,” Nelle says, her lips a shivering inch from his. She takes on a serious tone. “I need to do something, but I don’t know where to go.”
He bobs in the water. “Whatever it is, do it here.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .” She drops her voice. “Because I need to pee.”
“I feel dirty.” Nelle climbs out of the water and finds refuge on her towel. She folds herself on the red-and-blue striped rectangle and hugs her wet legs, craving a scalding shower.
“It’s completely normal.” James picks up Ravel, bookmarked halfway. “Everyone does it.”
“Everyone does not pee on themselves.”
He glances up from his page. “It’s not really peeing on yourself if the water is cleaning you off while you do it.”
“Would you clean yourself off in the ocean any other time?”
“Well . . . no.”
“My point proven.” Nelle picks up her own book, a mystery. “You wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t clean you at all. There are probably urine particles on my legs right now. Still inside my bikini, too.”
At the mention of her bikini, James’s cheeks go apple red.
Nelle’s lips become the south pole to his north, aching to connect. Heat swells behind her pelvis.
“Think of it this way.” He nudges his book against her stretched legs. Not even skin-on-skin contact, but it sets her aflame. “Peeing in the ocean is yet another new experience.”
When he returns to his book, his hair hangs over his dense eyebrows. A droplet of seawater slides down his temple, his chin, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand.
Nelle runs her fingers through his wet, silken brown hair.
Almost black. Touching him is the most exhilarating thing she has ever done, more than traversing New York, more than tasting salt in the sea, more than leaving Quill.
Somewhere in her chest, a dam breaks, releasing a deluge of golden magma.
She wants this feeling to bury both her and James, to hold them there forever, hardening under her lava.
Nelle has been alive for twenty-one years.
Between the Technicolor men on the boxy TV she used to sit cross-legged in front of and the men in the pages of her books, she has grown familiar with her sexuality.
But she has never felt this before. This pining, more powerful than lust. It is new, electrifying, and the moment she feels it, she knows what to call it.
She never felt love with Quill. Only fear. What she has with James is freedom. It’s an old country road, laughing late at night, drinking coffee, kissing in the sea.
“Why’d you do that?” He touches above his ear, where she ran her fingers to the nape of his neck.
Nelle sucks in a breath, winded by her own epiphany, and lets out the easiest words she has ever said. “I love you.”
James opens his mouth like he’s going to respond, then shuts it. He bridges the space between their towels and kisses her. Sunbaked salt. The flick of his tongue and the seam of her opening lips. Wetness and his hands finding her waist, holding her in place.
He hums against her mouth. “I love you, too.”
The bus from the beach rattles as its six wheels hit potholes like they are picking guitar strings.
James sways in his seat and traces circles over the back of Nelle’s hand.
His clothes scratch his reddened skin, and he smells of sand and sunscreen, but he doesn’t care. He is in France. In France with Nelle.
And, since the night he dropped out of school in Paris, he has been keeping a surprise up his sleeve. Well, actually up his pants.
James unravels his fingers from Nelle’s, digs into his pocket, and pulls out an envelope.
When he made the decision to buy the tickets, he knew exactly where he wanted to travel to, a place where, coincidentally, Nelle likely has living relatives.
Still, he doubted his choice, banking solely on Nelle loving anywhere she has yet to go.
He unfolds the crackling envelope, passes it over, and waits a minute for her to open it, pull out the slips of paper, process what they are.
Silence stretches between them like a heavy rope.
Nelle squeals.
Train tickets to Edinburgh, leaving tomorrow.
They dented James’s dwindling savings account, but he still has enough for a couple of weeks of frugal travel and plane tickets home.
Enough to give Nelle a fortnight of freedom, and then what?
What is his home? Without college tying him down to his old life in Georgia, he can go anywhere. Be anyone.
New York whispers in the back of his mind like a drug. Come back.
Nelle kisses his cheek, his temple, his neck. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”