Chapter 30
“There’s something I have to do, and I just really need someone I know, even though we don’t know each other that well, but someone I can call a friend, to be there with me.”
James sits up in bed, phone to his ear. He normally declines calls from any number he doesn’t recognize, but it was a New York area code, and his gut told him to answer. Now he tries to connect the voice to a face and comes up blank.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Who is this?”
“It’s Lucy.” She sounds frantic.
He sinks back against the pillows. “Oh, Lucy! Sorry, I didn’t have your number saved.”
She laughs, but he can tell it’s forced.
“Anyway,” he continues. “What were you saying?”
“I didn’t know who to call, but I need help quitting my job.”
“Oh.” He sits up. “I don’t really understand. Do you need me to meet you somewhere?”
“No—yes. Sorry. This is ridiculous, I’m a grown woman, I should be able to quit my own job without moral support.”
James pulls on a long-sleeve shirt, a hoodie, a sherpa-lined denim jacket, two pairs of compression socks, then his boots. He brings his phone back to his ear like a puppet master’s tugging his strings.
“Where can I meet you?” he asks.
“Coffee shop on the corner of Sixth and West Thirty-Eighth.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Okay, but James . . .”
He pulls on gloves. “Yeah?”
“I was panicking, so I called the first number I could find, and I don’t really have many friends in the city. So you don’t have to—”
“No worries, Lucy. I’m on my way.” He hangs up the phone and zips his jacket up to his chin.
As an ex-Southerner, he has yet to acclimate to the cold.
Before this winter, he had never seen real snow.
Now he has mixed feelings about the frequent subfreezing temperatures and sunless days.
On one hand, he loves how people huddle up.
In shops. In cafés. On the subway. New York hibernates for winter, but it is a city of pedestrians, James included.
So every day he joins the lines of New Yorkers marching the sidewalks like ants, ducking into coffee shops and excusing the six-dollar latte because, on the other hand, it is just too damn cold outside.
Lucy’s beneath a green-and-white striped awning. Arms crossed, cheeks red, hair tucked into a fur-lined hood. When she spots James crossing the street, her stance relaxes.
He nods in greeting, hands in pockets, shrugging off the cold. How can he play it cool, like he didn’t sprint six blocks and jump a subway turnstile to meet her here in time?
“How’s it going?” he asks, hoping he sounds casual.
“I want to quit my job. On the spot. No two weeks’ notice.”
For a moment, he is at a loss for words. She already told him this, so he has had time to stew on it. But in that time, he came up with zero advice. He can’t tell her how to make such a major decision.
So he asks, “Why do you want to quit?”
“Because my boss is an utter shithead, and working there makes me feel horrible. I doubt I’ll ever get promoted, and besides, I don’t want to work there anymore. I have a different goal for my life now.”
“Giving up writing?”
Lucy smiles, though he can tell she’s not feeling very smiley on the inside. “The opposite, actually. I want to give my all to my MFA. Thanks to my grandpa, I have a trust fund arranged for my tuition, and I’ll have a teaching assistantship as part of the program.”
“So all you need to do now is quit?”
Lucy squints down the gleaming Midtown street. “Do you want to get coffee first?”
“No stalling.” James shakes his head. “You got this.”
She groans. “Fine.”
He follows her up the street, through a throng of people rushing against them. “So where are you departing from?”
“Random House.”
James wishes he had accepted the coffee so he could spew it out. Instead he just stammers, “Wh-what? Random House! That’s insane. How’d you get a job there?”
“Undergrad at UPenn in English and two years of unpaid internships, then I came on as an editorial assistant. I thought I wanted to go into publishing, but I don’t. Instead of promoting me to editor, they switched me over to marketing, which is . . . not my thing.”
James is still mind-blown when they stop outside the Random House Tower, a silver building full of literary-minded people. He gawks up at it.
“Am I completely stupid for doing this?” she asks. “This could be a stable career, and I’m throwing it away to chase after a dream. Is that crazy?”
“Whatever your gut feels, do that.”
“My gut is telling me to throw up.”
“Okay, don’t do that.”
Lucy laughs, then groans. “I can’t decide.”
“At the end of the day, it’s your choice,” James says.
“But I’ll say this. For most of my life, I didn’t do what I wanted.
When we were kids, Jessie would climb up to the tallest tree branches, while I watched from the ground.
I skipped the talent show in fifth grade after I spent weeks tinkering with my poem for it.
There was this girl in high school that I wanted to ask to prom, but I chickened out and didn’t go at all.
I was always too scared to climb that damn tree.
If you want to pursue your MFA full-time, and you feel confident that you can, don’t hold yourself back out of fear. ”
Lucy takes this in with bated breath.
And James does something he would never have done a year ago. He holds her hand.
“You can do it,” he says. “Whatever it ends up being. You can.”
“Can you wait out here for me?” She’s trembling, maybe from the cold.
“Of course.” Whatever he had previously planned for this strange Friday morning slips his mind. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” She disappears through the glass doors.
James watches the street while he waits.
Nelle would love it here in the winter. She would love the cold, desperate pedestrians, the cars honking and backed up and zooming past, the black snow crushed and piled on the sides of the curbs.
She would love every passing person, every stubborn little snowflake.
Nelle would love it all.
“No seriously, seriously, James is my hero!” Lucy wraps an arm around him on the couch, retelling yesterday’s events to a huddle of people.
James fake-laughs along. He has barely had anything to drink, far less than Lucy.
He started thinking about Nelle again, knocking his celebratory mood off the rails.
A racket of confetti, champagne, twinkling decorations, sunglasses, and party hats, Jessie’s New Year’s Eve party is Christmas’s wild sister.
Drunk idiots bounce about the apartment.
Too much champagne, too many shots. Lena climbs on top of the couch and dances to the pulsing music.
Jessie rises to join her. Everyone seems to be having fun.
Why hasn’t James partaken in any of it? He has held a flute of champagne for two hours, the liquid flat and warm now, desperate not to fall into the grave he dug himself earlier. No point in losing himself to a drunk depression, too clumsy to climb out.
“I call him up out of nowhere, freaking out because I’m trying to quit my job, and I tell him that I have no one else to call and don’t know what to do.
” Lucy laughs, champagne sloshing. “Little did I know, I wasn’t calling James, I was calling freaking Superman!
He didn’t even question me. In twenty minutes, he was there, calming me down.
” Lucy peers at him through a haze of drunken dreaminess.
“So, did you quit your job?” Lena asks.
The room leans in for her response. Lucy laughs a little. “Yes, I did.”
Pride blooms in James’s chest. He claps his hands, a small applause, but it catches like wildfire, and soon enough, the entire room erupts. Whoops and yells and screams.
“Fuck, yeah!”
“Good luck!”
A warm coil tightens in James’s chest. Home.
Jessie slumps onto the couch. “Here, drink something.” She offers him a shot of—he lifts it to his nose—tequila.
He hands it back. “No, thank you.”
“You’ve been brooding all day, moping all night.
You barely said a word when we were decorating the place.
And you haven’t drunk a drop. I don’t know what’s got you all down, but if you relax, you’ll have fun.
Don’t miss out on your first New Year’s Eve in New York.
” Then she backs off and says lowly, “But, hey, seriously, if you don’t want to, it’s okay. ”
He rolls his eyes and takes the shot. He doesn’t want to be drunk, but he also doesn’t want to be sober, where his dark thoughts, his doubts, stab him like swords. It’s a thin line to tiptoe. Drunk, the blades on those swords dull. Harder to break skin, but if they do, they hurt so much worse.
Stinging esophagus. Saliva in his mouth, salt from the rim of the shot glass. He spits out lime pulp.
Jessie grabs the bottle of tequila and pours out another shot.
He throws it back.
She pours. He downs it. Another. Downs it. He takes the bottle from her and presses the rim to his lips, and the burning is so good because it makes him forget for a minute that he left Lincoln, that he met Nelle, that he kissed her, loved her, that he was inside her.
He’s laughing now. Collapses onto the couch, rolling in a deep guffaw. Stands up, saying, “I’ve gotta go find Lucy,” but his voice is a distant noise, like it bypassed his brain on the way to his lips.
He staggers into the kitchen.
“Lucy?”
Turns around, back into the living room, and there Lucy is, on the couch. Her face—faces—split into a laugh, and she stands up. He has her hand, he is leading her to the balcony, where he opens the glass door and pulls her outside.
“Look up there,” he says, and he feels like he’s yelling, but he sounds so quiet.
Only rooftops and darkness.
“Where’d all the stars go?” He chuckles. “That’s what they say, right? No stars.”
“Not in the city.” Lucy smirks. “The light covers them up.”
James frowns. Sad. The cold air grants him a moment of clarity. Lucy, in this moment, really is beautiful. Soft brown hair flowing over her slender shoulders. A gold dress that reveals long, toned legs. Sapphire eyes. Full lips.
“Hey,” she says, her voice a husky wish.
He closes the gap between them and plants a warm, sloppy kiss. Her hair flows through his hand, and suddenly his lips are on her neck, and her skin is fire.
Somehow, they make it to his room, and Lucy’s on his bed.
He unzips her gold dress and trails his fingers down the tan curve of her back.
Twisted in the sheets, he touches the wetness between her thighs.
He strokes her until she’s moaning. Then he’s inside her, her hair twisted in his hand like a rein, breathing hard, slamming in and in and in—
Until he can’t even remember Nelle’s face.
Until his release shoots across the bedsheets and he collapses. Lucy settles in at his side. For the first time in months, James thinks about nothing.
He wakes to a girl’s face in his mind, not the girl sleeping beside him. He curses himself for that. The curtains are pulled shut, but daylight leaks through a slim crack.
Lucy’s lashes flutter in her sleep, mouth parted. A wet spot of drool dots her pillow.
James shoves his legs into pajama pants and pads out of his room. From the kitchen, he smells breakfast, and his stomach drops. It is too damn early to face an interrogation from his cousin, but he can’t avoid it. Jessie flips bacon strips as a pot of coffee drips on the counter.
“Bless you.” He pours a cup. The bitterness pounds away the pain in his skull. He decides to bring it up first, so he can take control of the conversation. “Guess who’s in my bed?”
Jessie cuts him a look. “I noticed you two disappeared before midnight and never returned.”
“Yeah.” James scans the room. The aftermath of the party is depressing. Glitter on the floor, lit up by the daylight through the balcony window. Cups and streamers scattered. Sticky stains on the hardwood. “Need help cleaning up?”
Jessie waves a dismissive hand. “Tomorrow. I’m going to Lena’s tonight.”
James glances back toward his room. “I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t want to. I mean I did, obviously, it wasn’t nonconsensual. But—”
“You’re still not over Nelle,” Jessie says. “It’s okay. Sometimes you have to rebound.”
“No, it’s not like that,” James says. “Lucy’s beautiful. We have so much in common, and she’s really smart, and if I were to ever be with her, well . . .” He sighs. “I didn’t want it to be like that. I wanted it to be when I’m ready, and she’s ready. When I’m not strung up on someone else.”
“Go talk to her.” Jessie hands him a full cup of coffee. “Bring her this.”
James finds Lucy sitting up in bed, staring at him beneath groggy eyelids.
“Hey.” He passes over the coffee. “How’d you sleep?”
“Oh, thank you.” She wraps her hands around the mug. “Fine. You?”
“Yeah, good.”
Lucy taps on the coffee cup, brushes back a strand of sleep-tangled hair. “Look, if last night wasn’t what you wanted, that’s okay. I remember what you told me on Christmas. If you want to stay friends, we can.”
He wasn’t expecting her to be so open to exactly what he needs.
“I never told you this, but I broke up with someone not that long ago, too,” Lucy says. “His name was Noah. There was nothing really wrong, but it wasn’t right. He wasn’t the one.”
James takes a moment to appreciate her. The whisper of wisdom behind her sharp stare. The curve of her shoulder. The tops of her breasts, dusted with freckles.
Lucy adds, “I’m sorry for being such a . . .”
“A dreamer?” James supplies.
“Yeah.” A dimple creases the corner of her mouth. “I guess you could put it that way. Whoever I end up with, I know that I’ll feel a connection eventually. Like a lock sliding into place. But I was with Noah for two years and never felt it.”
“Two years,” James whistles. “I’m sorry. When did you break up?”
“September.”
“Really?” He sits up. “That’s when Nelle and I—” His voice breaks. He should have known saying her damn name would mess him up. Not just saying it, but saying it now. “We ended in September, too, though we’d only been together since July. Still, she made me who I am today.”
“She made that much of an impact?”
“She showed me the world.” He stews in silence, Lucy beside him.
He finds comfort in the sound of her breathing.
“Friends?” he asks after a minute, hoping not to lose the only New Yorker he has had a compassionate conversation with in months.
It’s not that the people here are cold. They are people.
Boil it down, and everyone’s the same. But in New York, people are busy with plans, jobs, a forty-minute subway ride away.
Nothing, no one, is ever truly convenient.
Lucy beams. “Friends.”