Chapter 32 #2
“The flashbacks are really kicking in for me right now,” Nelle whispers.
“Me, too.” He pulls on sweatpants. “It’s just Jessie, though.”
She nods. “We don’t have to worry about Quill anymore.”
Part of him hopes it is Quill that he hears through the wall, ranting about a novel-to-TV adaptation, and not his cousin Jessie, whom he will have to obliterate on sight for leaving Nelle here unannounced like a surprise welcome-home present.
Nelle is right on his heel as he steps into the hall.
“Would you be okay staying in here for a minute?” he asks. “I want to talk to Jessie alone.”
“Yeah,” Nelle says. “I’ll come out when you’re ready.”
James strides down the hall.
Jessie and Lena are in the kitchen, standing at the island, pouring three glasses of wine.
“You’re home!” Jessie squeals, grabbing another glass from the cabinet beneath the island. “Want some?”
“Please.” James slides onto a stool. Outside the sweaty bedroom, his mind clears, and the reality of the past day slams into him.
Nelle is here. After months away, she’s actually here.
Suddenly half his anger collapses like a pillar of sand, but on principle, he tries his best to sound angry. “I have some questions.”
He chugs half the glass of wine, gagging on the dry bitterness. Lena drifts across the kitchen and leans against the fridge. She glances between the two cousins as if waiting for an explosion. Even Jessie looks like she is bracing for something.
But suddenly, James can’t even fake anger.
Nelle is back, which is all he has ever wanted.
She is in New York, and although he hasn’t asked, he doesn’t think she wants to leave.
Before her return that morning, he was on a personal quest to find happiness, and he was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Now that she’s back, it’s like he’s skipped to the end, and he’s basking in the sun.
“Thank you for not telling me,” James says. “I love you.”
“You’re not mad?” Lena asks.
Jessie blinks at him. “James, are you high?”
“If I’d known Nelle was here, I would have been stressing the whole time I was in Lincoln. Walking in and being surprised forced me to listen to my gut.”
Jessie peers at him warily. “And what did your gut tell you to do?”
“She’s in my bed.” He fights a grin, visualizing her in his sheets.
“Well . . .” Jessie tops his glass off. “I wish I could say I kept it from you because I planned for the two of you to reunite, but honestly, I just didn’t know how to bring it up.”
James laughs. Jessie and Nelle—his two favorite people—are both in his life again. In his favorite city, no less. What could be better than this?
“Is this for Nelle?” He picks up the empty glass.
Jessie leans against the island. “I thought she’d want to join us.”
“Is she asleep?” Lena asks, alight with curiosity.
He grins. “Nelle, come out!”
She pads down the hall in her baggy maroon sweater, legs bare, running her fingers through her bedraggled hair.
“Nice to see you again.” Lena flashes the fakest of smiles. Of course James’s friends and family would hold grudges against Nelle. Whether or not he spun their breakup in his favor didn’t matter. He came home heartbroken, and they needed someone to point fingers at.
Nelle looks down. “I usually have pants on.”
Lena and Jessie laugh, and just like that, the ice breaks.
Over the next hour, the four of them finish off two bottles of wine and order pizza as James tells the story of his visit to Lincoln.
Halfway through his week in Georgia, he sat his parents down and announced that he would be attending NYU.
Like he expected, they didn’t understand why he wanted to leave.
Why waste money on a useless degree? Why throw away thousands of dollars a month on rent?
Why live in such a filthy, overcrowded, dangerous place?
Nelle’s eyebrows jump up behind her wineglass. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t have much to say,” he says, catching his own sadness on the subject.
Maybe his parents’ lack of support cuts deeper than he thought.
“I tried to explain how much I love this city, how much I like my life here, but they’ll never understand.
They’ll never try to understand. So I said my piece, and then we went out for dinner.
My sister was at a friend’s house. It was fine. ”
At some point they migrate into the living room, Jessie cranks up the space heater, and they huddle around it, swapping stories about childhood, their dreams, their fascinations.
The clock slips past midnight before Jessie asks Nelle, “Are you staying in New York?”
Nelle doesn’t even flinch. “Yeah, I am.”
James has been too scared to ask, but hearing the words come from her lips makes his heart implode.
Knowing that she will be here, that his best friend is back, that they can start their life together, he wants to scream with joy.
Mornings cozied up in a snow-crusted café.
Summer afternoons on Coney Island. Weekend trips up and down the East Coast. She can finally learn how to ride a horse; he has already started researching equestrian lessons in the city.
His brain spins like a hamster wheel with the possibilities.
The kids they will adopt. The Brooklyn Heights town house they will raise them in. Endless nights of slow lovemaking.
“So James is a writer.” Lena crosses her ankles on the coffee table. “Jessie’s doing pretty damn well as an artist. I’m in law school. What’s your dream, Nelle?”
The question is casual, but to James it feels like an attack. His instinct is to jump to Nelle’s defense, but he holds himself back, curious. Before, her dream was to see the world, but she must have changed if she is staying in New York.
Nelle finishes her glass, sets it aside, licks her lips. “I think I want to go to college.”
“Very cool,” Lena says.
James stares at the frosted pane of the balcony window.
Something Nelle said that morning resurfaces.
I’ve done some stuff. His curiosity bites, and he almost asks her to step away with him, to confess her sins, but he restrains himself.
She deserves her secrets from those months apart. Same as him.
He thinks of that drunken night with Lucy, sour bile hitting the back of his throat.
Would Nelle still want him if she knew he slept with someone else two weeks ago?
He feels only friendship for Lucy now, but he was attracted to her.
Enough to pull her into bed, even if it was because he was drunk and missed the girl now sitting beside him.
Jessie raises her glass. “To improving ourselves, a venture I’m sure we can all work on.”
Lena lifts her glass. “Except me.”
When James’s wine-addled head starts to loll, he excuses himself to pee. The trip to the bathroom is a nauseating blur, and when he steps back into the hall, Nelle is in front of him. Her eyelids are swollen and sleepy, and she pulls him by his collar into his room.
He protests, “Jessie and Lena—”
“Are already in bed,” Nelle says, rolling onto his comforter. She plucks a book off the nightstand, but knocks out on page two, parted lips rattling an exhale.
James falls asleep happier than he has been since September.
Nelle dreams of the house on Blackwood Road. Clapboard siding. Tin roof. Summer insects flattened to her bedroom window. Sheer white curtains. Vials of ink. Horses prancing beyond the trees. Quill chopping wood in the smoky cold. Dust piling on canvases like snow.
She dreams of James and the night they met. The fireworks, the grill char, the sparklers, the corn dog in her throat.
She dreams of the day the police officer came. The stove’s gas flame tearing her hand apart, over and over, bare palm bubbling, burning, and stitching back together.
Quill’s black eyes as he poured out whiskey bottles across his study.
Fire eating bookshelves full of her lifeblood.
Scalding heat. The gnawing fear that she would disappear with those journals.
She dreams of the pain she felt as the man who raised her—who called himself her father—tried to kill her.
She dreams of acrid smoke and watchful stars, knowing that her life was changed forever as she rode away from Blackwood Road with James.
Nelle clutches the sheets to her chest. She’s not in Lincoln, she’s in New York.
In Jessie’s apartment. In James’s bed. She is sweating, her heart racing, her skin boiling.
Does she have a fever? A bright phantom flashes against the wall.
Half asleep still, she mistakes it as a headlight cutting in through the window. But they are on the third floor.
I’m still asleep. Nelle shakes her head, frozen in fear. This can’t be real.
Returning to New York was not a dream. Choosing to live a normal life, to search for a passion, was not a dream. Spending the day with her mouth on James was not a dream. Waking up in his bed now is not a dream.
But the angry fire consuming his desk, his laptop, the bookshelf . . . has to be.