Chapter 26
Light bleeds through the curtains. James doesn’t pull back the scratchy comforter.
Doesn’t brush his teeth. Doesn’t start a pot of coffee.
He stares at the ceiling, imagining what it would be like to wake up in Jessie’s apartment, to eat his lunch on a park bench before going to a class about literature and complex characters without stressing about those characters coming to life. He winces at the thought.
After Penelope left, Nelle turned into a ghost. James tried to scrub the ink off his body in the shower, toweled off, dressed, and found her staring out the window with a cup of tea, blond mane splattered with ink.
He almost told her about NYU but decided not to.
Not yet. She didn’t say a word the rest of the day and kept her nose stuffed in one of the books she’d brought from Penelope’s house.
He finally heard her voice at night, when she lit a candle, brushed her mouth across his, and whispered something filthy in his ear. He slid beneath the covers, happy to oblige her, but after she came on his face, while he was moving inside her, he felt uneasy.
He has never considered his time with Nelle ending, but now the thought haunts him, keeping him awake. He peels himself from bed and stumbles into the shower again, where thoughts go clear, time melts, and tears become one with the steaming torrent.
“James?” Nelle calls through the vinyl curtain.
He cuts the water off, pulls the curtain aside. Nelle sits on the bath rug beside the lip of the tub, her demeanor softening at his red, teary face.
The guilt he feels, dragging her along unaware of his wants, has reached a boiling point. He has to tell her, or he will hate himself forever. But he doesn’t want to hurt her. He knows what she will say: We don’t need money, we’ll work as we go.
Nelle presses his cheek against her, a damp patch from his wet face forming on the faded red sweatshirt she’s wearing. It’s his, so it swallows her up, while her vanilla scent engulfs him.
“We should go.” She kisses the top of his head.
“Go where?” His hands are trembling now. Let’s run, run, run away. But he doesn’t want to anymore, does he?
“Anywhere,” she says.
Please come with me, scream her tear-filled eyes.
He watches the dripping showerhead. With every splash of cold water on his leg, he builds up courage.
“Nelle, I—”
“We can see the world together, like we planned before.” She holds his bare shoulders and guides him to his feet. “We don’t have to stop traveling. And now I can write for myself. Like you said, with enough practice, I might not even have to write—”
“But what if I do want to . . . stop?” James searches her face, wary of an angry response.
But it falls instead, crushed. He decides to charge head-on.
If he doesn’t now, he will never be brave enough.
“What if I told you that I want to go back to New York, and attend college there, and live there indefinitely?”
Nelle flinches. “How indefinitely?”
As he steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist, James lets the last scrap of truth fly out. Bomb deployed and dropped—
“I applied to NYU,” he says. For a breath, he feels relieved to have his secret lifted, but that relief dies the minute he sees the hurt on Nelle’s face.
She twitches. “When?”
“I sent the application at the library in Edinburgh. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. Just to see if I’d get in, I guess.”
Unnervingly graceful, Nelle walks back into the bedroom and spins around at the foot of the bed, her face flushed red. She is furious, yet a smile plays on her lips. The effect, to James, is horrifyingly close to Quill.
“You could have told me . . .” She shakes her head. “Talked to me about it. I wouldn’t have held you back.”
James can feel the knife between her shoulder blades, the hilt in his hand. He betrayed her, and even if it won’t kill her, he knows it hurts like hell.
“It’s something I need to do, and I didn’t know how to tell you. I”—he holds on to the bedpost to keep himself upright—“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She presses her back to the wall, the farthest she can get from him. “So you’re moving to New York?”
A chasm opens between them.
It’s easier to hear her say it, and a part of him is glad this is happening now. Now, when she can write her for herself. Now, before he falls so in love with her that he can’t recover from losing her.
“I’m not done seeing the world, James.” Nelle’s voice cracks. “We had a plan. You dropped out of school. We were going to travel together. How could you make this decision without even telling me? Until yesterday, I was dependent on you.”
Defensiveness rises up in James. “I’ve always believed you could write for yourself. Or did you forget about the night in DC?”
She winces. “I remember.”
“I can’t run forever.” It’s hard to say what he needs to say when he can read the torment on her face. “You have a choice to make. The world or me.”
He doesn’t want either of them to make sacrifices. If she chooses to travel the world, he will leave for New York without her. It breaks his heart, but he has to do it. He opens his bag and pulls on a sweater and gray pants. No part of this feels like a clothing-optional conversation.
“I could give you the same ultimatum,” Nelle says. “Go to New York or be with me.”
“I ran away with you, Nelle.” James buttons his pants. “I left my home, I traveled across the world, and I’ve shown you everything I can. But our money’s basically gone, and I want to have a life now.”
“And traveling with me isn’t a life?”
“It’s not what I want forever.” The words fly hot but true. Their relationship, whatever it ends up being, will be better for it. He takes a deep breath and says the last part, the part that terrifies him. “I have enough money to buy two plane tickets . . . if you’ll come with me.”
“I don’t want to go back with you,” Nelle says. “I can’t believe you’d rather live a boring, rooted life, going nowhere and doing nothing.”
James sighs. “You know, Penelope has studied every aspect of your family, this cycle of writers, for decades. Maybe she’s right. Maybe, by nature, it’s impossible for you to be content.”
When Quill crafted Nelle, after battling the grief of his lost daughter, he fashioned her out of desperation.
He wanted a daughter more than he wanted to love a daughter.
Because he had already loved one, and no successor could compare.
That hunger, that need, that inability to sit with what is already there and be grateful . . . is that not Nelle?
She stares at him. A lingering, burning stare.
James’s frustration subsides into guilt. “I’m sorry, I crossed a line.”
God, he didn’t mean it. He was only trying to hurt her. To hurt her for turning him down.
“I know you want to travel, but I can’t afford it anymore.
I know I want to be in New York. I need to be there.
Traveling isn’t what I want anymore, but you still are.
Come with me, and we can start a life together.
You are so special to me. Not because of how you were created, but because you’re curious and confident and fiery and vulnerable, and I love you—”
She storms out.
He gives her a minute to cool down, then trails after her.
But the living room is empty. She is nowhere among the startling cleanliness of the place. Every surface is spotless and colorful, sunlight streaming through the windows into the cozy living room and kitchenette. A vague memory of Penelope wiping things down floats into mind.
Outside, an engine starts. James swings open the front door in time to see the back tires of the rental car spinning down the road.
As the vehicle floats up the hill and out of sight, James reaches for the pendant around his neck.
He squeezes the vial, still holding a few drops of Nelle’s ink, and almost rips it from his neck to throw into the loch.
But he should return it to her, in person, as proof that he is not keeping it.
In the bedroom, he dumps out his backpack of dirty clothes and stuffs it full with Thomas Quill’s moth-nibbled shirts and baggy pants.
When James closes the door behind him and starts down the hill, he is greeted by a cold Scottish morning.
Wind hisses in a dance between brown grass and sunlight, leaves scuttling on the unpaved road.
As he walks to the closest town, his destination across the Atlantic, he fights back tears, this unfamiliar misery embedded like a hatchet in his gut.
More bitter than heartbreak. Hopeless without her beside him.
The gray, swallowing pain of losing a friend.