I’m notin lovewith Eli. I’m attracted to Eli, obviously. IlikeEli. But Eli isn’t J.
EliisJ.
Crap.
I don’t write anything else on the note. I walk out the door and go back upstairs to the safety of my apartment.
Chapter 25
Dane flings her door open.
“Someone better be dying for you to be knocking so fucking—Oh. Nora?”
Dane is in a T-shirt and boxers. Her stick-straight black hair is mussed, and I have to admit I’m not used to seeing it without a Pacers hat perched on top. She peers around me, as though someone else must’ve been the one doing the loud knocking on her door, but when she doesn’t see anyone else, she looks at me, bewildered.
I guess I’m not the banging-on-the-door-at-seven-in-the-morning-on-a-Monday type usually. And because Dane works for herself and is project based, she rarely gets up this early, so I must’ve roused her.
She rubs her eyes and pulls me inside.
“Nora, what the hell? And ... George?”
I almost forgot I’d dragged George over with me. He gives Dane a curt snort and then wanders into the apartment. George has never accepted Dane, and since Dane isn’t one to beg, they’ve always remained sort of cold to each other. Unlike with most people George doesn’t like, though, he never barks at Dane. I think she’s too dominant a personality for him to even attempt it. So he stays content just eyeing her with disdain. But I don’t think I’ve ever forced George into Dane’s apartment. Clearly I’m not in my best mental state.
“He needed a walk,” I say, waving the presence of her canine frenemy away as though that sentence explains everything.
Dane’s watching me, unsure of how to react to this completely out-of-character version of Nora, but after a moment she decides to go to the cabinet to turn on the coffee maker. Caffeine is absolutely needed for this conversation.
“Did you bring anything to eat?” she asks, scrounging through to see what she has.
“I sort of just ran over here,” I point out.
Her eyebrows furrow, like she’s still waking up and trying to make sense of me bursting into her apartment unannounced and without any baked goods. Highly unusual. I guess I can wait for her to get her bearings.
Mostly because I have no idea what to say. My feet took me here on autopilot, and I still don’t have myownbearings, so I’m happy to wait until we have coffee.
And apparently ... veggie straws and peanut butter?
“What the hell is this,” I ask when she unceremoniously puts a plate down in front of me.
“Don’t knock my snacks, okay,” she says, wandering back over to the coffee maker to grab our cups. “I’m hungover from drinking withyou, and it’s way too early to cohesively think about something to eat.”
“Most people are awake by this time on a Monday,” I rationalize, like my uncharacteristic appearance can be chalked up to plausible formality.
She clunks a cup of coffee in front of me on the table and sits down, indicating I should do the same. “You look like shit, too, by the way. It’s not just me. So out with it. Whatever you’ve got on your mind seems like it’s a lot.”
I take a sip of the coffee and try to think of how to put this. But there’s no way to sugarcoat anything, so instead I blurt out, “Eli is J.”
She does a spit take. Like an honest-to-god, coffee-spurting-out-of-her-mouth-right-onto-the-table spit take.
“I’m sorry . . . what?”
“Eli.Is.J,” I repeat, as though maybe the problem is she just didn’t hear me. As though maybe I need to say it again for myself so I’ll hear it and believe it.
“Back up,” she says, grabbing a towel to wipe off the table and herself. “When you left the pool hall last night, you were going back to your apartment. What could have possibly transpired in the last”—she looks at her phone to see the time and grimaces—“seven hours to have allowed you to come to that theory.”
“It’s not a theory,” I say quietly.
She stares at me for a minute.
