Chapter 16 #3
“Again. My job,” I say.
“Maybe. But still. Listening, I’ve learned in my lifetime, is not a skill regularly practiced. To be a good listener is to
be . . . amazing.”
I take in a breath.
A pinched breath, true, as the darkness of the room around me raises my anxiety to a level hard to keep in line.
But still a nearly happy, honored-by-his-attention breath.
“Anyway,” Nash continues, “I went right up to where I envisioned the book ending, then backed up over the hole where I was stuck, and I hadn’t even had time to ask you what you’d recommend when you swirled your salmon in lemon aioli sauce extremely casually and said, ‘Have you considered adding sky-liners to the plot? It’d be a bear to change in those early chapters, but if a few sky-liners crossed paths with the brothers as they guide their herds through the Rockies, they could face a showdown in the hole you’re stuck at and give the readers a climax they’re hoping for.
I think it would be something worth thinking about. ’
“And then the cake came. Hugh had ordered, and everyone was singing happy birthday to you, and I didn’t even get a chance
to say thank you. And your face, as they brought out that cake and everyone was singing all around us, was something else.”
“What did I look like?”
“Like a person surrounded by a family who loved them.”
I nod. Rub my nose.
“And that’s when I decided to join the ragtag group. It was solely because of you.”
The idea is mind-blowing. I backtrack as I raise a finger. “I’m sorry. We’re going to need to back up here. You’re saying
I helped you in your book—”
“And every book ever since. You know I don’t send it to my editor without your vote.”
“And you joined the group,” I say for clarification, “not because of the all-star cast. Or the fame. Or the glory. But because of me.”
“Yes.”
“And you . . .”
Suddenly there is a thunderous pounding on the piano directly behind me, two dozen keys launching into a fiery war.
For a hundred reasons now my heart feels like it’s about to jump out of my chest.
“You decided to tell me this now to . . .”
“To clear myself of murder.”
I nod briskly. “Right. Yes.”
“And to let you know XY ABJASD KGJ$EH.”
The words that come from his lips are halfway muted by the pounding on the second piano adjacent to the first.
“What?” I yell.
He gives me a full-charm smile, the kind that says you are adorable and I’m being patient. “XJEDBJWEHIBDFB,” he says louder.
It feels embarrassing, a point against me and my pathetic ears for having the audacity to not hear. But the pianos are in
a full-on war right behind me.
I scoot the chair over until I’m but two inches away from his face.
Mark my words, I will not miss it this time. “One more time,” I say.
And with a smile that creases the corners of his eyes, he grabs my shoulders and draws me in until his breath tickles my ear.
“I’m in love with you.”
I don’t move.
I’m frozen.
People are moving around me, trickling closer to the stage behind my head. Grins on. Cameras out to capture the dueling pianists.
The bright light of the cruise hall is dimming with the influx of bodies, the room getting darker by the moment.
People are blocking the path to the entrance of the bar.
The only entrance.
The only exit.
Closing us in.
Flashes of underwater scenes come to mind as another pound on the piano roars in my ears.
Did Nash just tell me he loved me?
Did I hear that correctly?
Or am I in the middle of a panic attack and every sense in my body is overstimulated and I’m only hearing what I want to?
It’s terrible timing.
Surely he didn’t say . . .
“You are . . .” I breathe.
“In love with you,” he says again.
My heart is pounding.
My ears are pounding.
“And I’m telling you now . . . at the worst time . . . because I’ve been the unlucky soul knowing you were the right one at
the wrong time for the past four years, and now you’re free, and I can’t let another minute pass without letting you know.”
Michael.
He never told me because of Michael?
A flipbook of memories from the past four years comes to mind, of dinners and events and coffees and conferences and meetings.
Of emails and text messages and phone calls. A mix of Michael and Nash side by side in the timeline of my life, but never
touching. Never overlapping. Of course, Michael was hardly in the city, and when he was, on those rare occasions when he was
going to go with me to events, Nash always stepped into the corner of my periphery.
Or ended up not attending at all.
Or ended up not attending at all.
Was that . . . why?
On those mysterious days when he suddenly went from a firm yes to can’t attend, that was why?
Little . . . old . . . me?
I never thought anything about it.
To be more exact, I knew I wasn’t worthy of being thought of like that.
Correction: thought.
I thought I wasn’t worthy of being thought of like that.
I guess that’s what happens when the person you’re already with continually makes you feel like you are not enough. Why would you be special to anybody else if you can hardly measure up to the one you’re with?
Nash was and is wildly independent, and whenever he didn’t make it to something, it could be chalked up to him racing away
to the wilderness.
Never once did I think there was a correlation between the times he skipped out on events and the times I brought Michael.
Nash never brought up Michael in conversation, I remember.
Ever.
It was like . . . Michael didn’t exist to him.
And all of this . . . is why.
Nash dips his head, his face overshadowed by the brim of his hat. When he looks up again, his eyes are soft. A rare moment
of vulnerability.
“Look. I know it’s a terrible time. An insensitive time. But if I have to wait one more day to tell you how I feel—and worse,
if I risk not telling you before something else gets in the way—I just won’t be able to live with myself. It’s just . . .
the day you walked into my life, I started thinking about you. And I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind since.” His
smile twists. “No matter how many trips I take out into the wilderness to try to shake you. You’re just . . . unshakable.”
I truly can’t breathe now. My breaths are coming in short spurts. “That’s why you went off-grid? Part of it . . . was me?”
His steady gaze is my answer.
“But . . . but you could’ve told me,” I say. “You could’ve said something. This wasn’t marriage with Michael.” I cringe even saying his name. Bringing him into the purity of this conversation—it’s like dragging a dirty
wet rag over a white wall. “You could’ve . . .”
“Pip,” he says. He shakes his head. “I didn’t resist because of honor.
I resisted because you wouldn’t have listened.
I saw that from the beginning. You were all in.
He got you to lock yourself in and throw away the key a long time ago and nobody could get you out.
Even if we pried the door open ourselves, you would’ve stayed. Right. There.”
He was right.
Michael had so twisted me up over all the years, flipped rights and wrongs upside down, shaken up my certainties until they
were so confused I couldn’t see through the glass, convinced me that clouds were concrete and the air was sea.
I didn’t have eyes to see anymore.
I didn’t have ears to hear.
It would’ve taken nothing less than watching the whole thing unfold at a gas pump on public television in front of the whole
world to open just a crack in the door for me to see.
I’ve always admired Nash.
Always cared for him.
But never in the past have I let the thought linger even that far.
Was it . . . love . . . all that time, hidden under covers?
But of course it was.
There are things the heart knows even when the mind won’t acknowledge them.
And as if the pianos couldn’t have escalated any louder, they do, and people begin to whoop and clap. A hundred crystals on
the chandelier quake above the windowless tomb where I sit, deep underwater.
I feel the press of Nash’s hands over mine.
They’re warm.
Encapsulating.
Suffocating my hands, just as the crowds are stealing the air.
Nash frowns. “Pip, you’re sweating.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’ll be the oncoming panic attack.”
“The—what?” He inches back, inspecting me closely for a blink, and then quickly moves to standing. “Come on.”
Swiftly he gathers me up and takes me by the hand as he snakes me around people, making a way with his broad chest where there
was no way, the sound of the pianos dimming to a mere loud throb as we work to exit the restaurant.
When he breaks through the last of the crowd and jams his finger over the elevator door, the breathing comes a little more
easily.
It isn’t until the elevator opens at the very top and I step into the humid sea-salt air of the observation deck that I take
my first full breath.
I’ve sweated through my cardigan.
I’d be embarrassed, except that there are bigger things to deal with at the moment.
A flood of things.
Too many things.
“Let me get you a water.” Nash starts to walk off in the direction of one of the several water stations dotting the halls
and then turns back as if remembering himself, grabs hold of my hand, and takes me with him. Even twenty feet is too much
distance for him.
Gently he sets the cup in my hands. His hands linger on mine, the warmth of his palms set against the cool water in mine.
“Listen, Pip. Don’t . . . don’t answer me now. Everything is just . . . crazy right now and I know you have a hundred things
you’re going through. I don’t even want to know your thoughts until everything settles down. Just . . . just do me a favor,
will you?”
“What’s that?” I whisper.
“Just don’t fall in love with anyone else before you give me a chance.”
It takes another five minutes before my heartbeats slow.
But my head is now throbbing, a sizable migraine coming on in a hurry. I feel swept up in intense moment after intense moment,
with only one anchor to cling to: Nash loves me.
Nash, after all, loves me.