Chapter 31
Rain slithers down the taxicab window, glass like a sheet of ice against Nelle’s nose.
Water pours off townhome eaves and hideous construction-site scaffolding, steam illuminated by neon lights.
Midnight, but the city doesn’t sleep. Umbrellas fling open and bob between cars as their windshield wipers flicker back and forth.
In the building right outside the cab, three windows up, is an apartment Nelle hasn’t visited in months.
She practiced her speech to James a thousand times during her first eight-hour flight across the Atlantic, before she went back for Penelope.
Now that she is back in New York, moments away from reuniting with James, she is too damn nervous to remember a word she prepared.
Shit. She tries to breathe. What if he’s with someone else?
What if he’s not, and he still doesn’t want her?
“You getting out?” The taxi driver raises his black brows.
“I am.” Nelle blinks at the rain, the lights, the reflections.
He taps the electronic payment device. “You still haven’t—”
She doesn’t mean for the gesture to come off as rude, but she sort of flings a wad of cash at him, way more than the cost of the ride.
“Sorry about that.” She kicks open the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
Nelle hops over a flooded curb, the shoulders of her coat soaked through by the time she makes it to the apartment call box. She trembles and presses the 3B buzzer. Hopefully James is still an insomniac.
“Hello?” she yells into the speaker over the pouring rain. “It’s Nelle. Are either of you awake?”
The building door unlocks almost immediately. Nelle’s stomach drops. This is too real. Only the ice-cold rain coming down in sheets keeps her from sprinting down the street out of pure nervousness. She tries to remember her speech again and comes up blank.
The foyer of the building greets her like an old friend as she swings open the pine-green door.
Dusty mailboxes beside a stack of packages.
The shitty dome light buzzes and pops. She traveled through this room a hundred times during her stay in New York.
Memories flutter past like pages of a book.
James carrying that big daddy pizza box.
Returning too often with coffee and fifty-cent paperbacks to add to Jessie’s overflowing living room.
Leaving that last day to ride to the airport, to fly to Paris, to catapult her onto the spiraling path that led her here, standing like a ghost in a poorly lit room.
What if James sees her only as a relic of his past?
No more thinking. Nelle charges upstairs and knocks on 3B.
She was once so nervous to meet Jessie, to mesh with James’s life, to ruin the fragile thing they’d been building.
A porcelain figurine. Beautiful if handled carefully, broken if dropped.
That was her alone, too. One wrong word and she starts a flash flood, a mere thought and a man’s heel slips on ice.
The door opens, and Nelle sucks in a sharp breath. Holds it.
The chain snaps tight, an eye peeks through.
“Nelle?” Jessie unlocks the door and swings it open. Her hair is all natural now, frizzy and brown. “What are you doing here? Oh, you’re soaked. Come in.”
This place is not her home, never was, but walking in feels like returning to somewhere she wants to be.
“Tea?” Jessie crosses to the kitchen and holds up a full pot.
“Yes,” Nelle says. Barely back in New York, and she is cozily drinking tea with Jessie.
If she composes herself this loosely around James, she might end up spilling all her feelings to him at once, which will kill any chance of him taking her back.
Because if she tells him why she feels guilty, will he see her the same?
Jessie doesn’t ask before adding a dollop of almond milk and stirring it to a creamy brown.
Rain types away at the windowpanes. The kitchen is otherwise quiet, lit only by the iron chandelier over the stained wooden island.
It’s new, probably crafted by one of Jessie’s sculptor friends.
They are always gifting each other pieces that other people pay tens of thousands of dollars for.
“Did I wake you up?” Nelle asks, nodding to Jessie’s bathrobe.
“No, I just thought I’d spare you the sight of my tits. Lena’s spending the night.”
“Oh.” Nelle draws back instantly. If James isn’t here, and Jessie has someone staying over . . . She sets down her tea, prepared to make up an excuse to leave.
“James is out, if he’s the reason you came,” Jessie says. She sips her tea.
“Oh,” Nelle says again. She can barely hide the disappointment that swells her chest, tinged with unexpected relief. “This late?”
“He’s in Georgia, for his mom’s birthday.”
“Why didn’t you go with him? Isn’t she your aunt?”
“I try to avoid Lincoln at all costs.” Jessie opens a bag of cookies. “Plus, someone’s gotta pay the bills.”
She dips a minicookie in her tea and sinks her teeth into the softened part. Maybe she sees Nelle ogling the bag, because she tilts it forward.
Nelle takes one, dipping it in her cup. When she nibbles, cinnamon and shortbread swirl on her tongue in a mellow concoction, and she relaxes.
Jessie folds her arms. “Why are you here, Nelle?”
“I want to see James,” she admits. She opens her mouth to continue, finally remembering the speech she has practiced a thousand times, but Jessie cuts her off with the tip of an antique silver stirring spoon.
“And what do you think James is going to say?” She waves the spoon around emphatically. “Do you think he will be glad to see you?”
Nelle swallows, but it doesn’t make the knot in her throat disappear. “I . . . I thought he might be.”
“Do you not realize how upset he was after what happened between you two?”
Nelle feels her defenses snap up. Of course she understands that he was hurt, but he lied to her.
He told her he would travel with her, that they could see the world together, all the while crafting a life for himself in New York and springing it on her as a fully formed plan.
It still seems too coincidental that the moment she learned she can write for herself, he bailed.
“And he doesn’t complain about this part, don’t get me wrong,” Jessie says, “but it pisses me off that you went and spent all his savings on a summer fling, just to dump his ass the minute the money ran out!” Red flushes her cheeks. She breathes in and out, her anger deflating.
Nelle is an empty shell.
Was I really too close-minded to care about him wasting his savings?
Tears burn. How did I not see it?
You were playing with life like it wasn’t real, whispers a voice in the back of her mind.
“I’m sorry,” Nelle says, and it’s all she can manage. Her tears speak for themselves.
Jessie melts. “Come here.”
Nelle collapses into her arms and falls apart, shuddering on Jessie’s shoulder. A hand rubs her back, up and down. How could she have been so stupid for so long, running from James instead of straight at him? This is where she belongs.
“You’ll be all right,” Jessie says. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”
Nelle’s eyes are so swollen now, she can barely see the time on the stove clock. She squints. It’s almost 1:00 a.m. She pulls back and wraps her shaky fingers around the mug. A space heater in the corner puts off oven-level warmth.
“I can find a hotel,” she says, and she hates how pitiful she sounds.
“Absolutely not,” Jessie snaps. “You can take James’s room. Bathe if you’d like, and I’ll find you clothes.”
Nelle follows the orders without question.
She scrubs her skin until it’s pink and clean, washes her hair, dries off, and puts on the clothes Jessie left folded outside the bathroom door, a frilly pajama set fit for a nineteenth-century grandmother.
Nelle loves it. She is envisioning herself in the bathroom mirror, in this new life, when the door cracks open.
“You all right in here?” Jessie asks.
“Just trying to dry my hair.” Nelle bunches the soaked strands in a towel, but they pull away just as dark and clumped as before. “To no avail.”
“Let me help.” Jessie rummages under the sink and pulls out a blow-dryer.
“I’ve never used that before,” Nelle says.
Jessie flicks on a switch and it roars to life. “You can keep it.”
Hot air blasts Nelle’s head, and she leans back into the feeling, losing herself as Jessie works through her hair.
The blow-dryer switches off, but before Nelle can open her eyes, she feels the bristles of a hairbrush prickling her scalp, gliding through her tangles.
She watches in the mirror as her golden hair smooths out.
Not quite straight, and far from curly, but voluminous.
“Much better,” Jessie says. “You’re welcome.”
Nelle follows her into the kitchen, a bit lost as to what she should do. A creative of the night, Jessie resumes a sketch on her tablet, her pen moving furiously. The one time Nelle pulled an all-nighter for a painting, the flying palomino, it drained her dry.
She feels similarly now.
Jessie looks up. “Go get some rest.”
Nelle picks up her tea. “Can I borrow a book?”
Jessie points to the shelf in the corner between the balcony windows and the TV. “That one has the kind you’ll like.”
“How do you know what I’ll like?” Nelle drifts over to the shelf and slips out a slim volume translated from French, with a watercolor of flowers on the soft paper cover. Before she heads down the hall, she asks, “When will James be back?”
“What’s today?”
Nelle has to think. “January eleventh.”
“He will be back Friday, the thirteenth.”
Nelle imagines the different ways their reunion could go.
James may be furious with her. Or deeply depressed.
Or apathetic. Or maybe he will want her back.
Maybe he still craves her the way she does him.
Maybe he misses their long conversations, their gut-stabbing laughter, their sex, the comfort and ease of being together.
She climbs under James’s sheets and stares at the ceiling, listening to the noises of the street. Exhaustion hits, and she is out before she can crack the cover of the little book.