“True, true,” I say, fidgeting now, wanting to scream out to make Eli realize that this is all a big misunderstanding.
“I mean, if he has personal stuff but still slept with her, doesn’t sound like it’sthatbig of a deal,” Celia reiterates. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of this conversation.
“Well, I think it was before he had the personal stuff ...,” I mumble.
“You’re definitely going to have to edit that letter down—it sounds long and complicated.”
“For sure,” I reply, not able to look at Eli for fear that this is spiraling in the wrong direction.
But before I can either dig the hole deeper or somehow fix it, Donna comes waltzing in. “Oh good, Eli!” she says, pleased to see everyone gathered. “I’m Donna. Security buzzed me to let me know you’rehere. Want to come into my office so we can catch up? I’m so grateful you were able to make the time this morning to say hello. I heard about your family troubles, and I’m so sorry.”
“No problem at all,” he says.
“I’m glad I caught you at first glance. I had quite a tartle with one of the designers earlier. It’s been so hard remembering so many new names!”
And I can’t help but look at Eli when she says what I know is his favorite esoteric and normally unused word. And I see his eyes flick immediately to me.
But as she waves him forward, there’s nothing to be done but for him to follow her. He walks slowly, like his joints have stiffened, but he’s moving. As he walks past and away, he looks back to me, and I have to stop myself from grabbing for him. I want my expression to convey everything I’m feeling.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the minute I figured it out.
And the thing that’s the scariest, but the one that’s been pulsing under the surface since the minute I saw him walk through the elevator door:I love you. I love every version of you. Please let me have them all.
Chapter 31
I’m staring at my phone.
Maybe if I stare at it long enough, it’ll come up with the words that I need to say.
I waved goodbye to Celia and left the office in a stupor. And for the last hour, I’ve just been walking. Walking and staring. Letting London swirl around me while I can’t take any of it in.
I wandered past the upscale houses and the shops standing at polished attention in Marylebone, past painted brick and through pedestrianized cobbled roads. I meandered through the open greenery of Regent’s Park. Elegantly spaced-out trees shaded the joyful murmurs of picnickers; bikers and runners and groups of friends churned past me as I just kept walking.
I walked and walked, waiting for the movement to make my limbs feel again.
I’m waiting for the blood to come rushing back. I’m waiting to know what to do. But I don’t know. So I stare at my phone, and I walk.
I walk across the patchy London park grass that never seems to fully fill in, perhaps because of too many cloudy days like this one. I walk past black lampposts and along carefully paved pathways. I give a wide berth to the zoo and go past a playground. And I find myself finally walking up an incline, just as a light drizzly mist hangs in the air.
I get to the top of Primrose Hill and look out on the city. I sit on a stone bench, etched with a William Blake poem. A small beagle runsaround in front of me, collecting a ball over and over as his owner throws it. It adds a jolt of life into the view out onto the London skyscraper skyline that’s now laid out before me, touching the clouds as the gray day continues unabated.
It matches how I’m feeling. A lot of awe and a lot of gray, all stretched out ahead.
The exhaustion of the walk is starting to kick in, and I stare at my phone again, for the umpteenth time, trying to decide what on earth I can possibly say.
I finally type out,??Can we talk? Whenever you have time???And hit Send.
For the first time, writing to Eli seems harder than speaking. And maybe it’s because now I know that to really understand him, I need to see all the parts of him that react to my words. I know the grooves in his smile when I say something amusing to him. I know the way his throat bobs when he nervously swallows. I know the way his forehead crinkles when he disagrees but doesn’t want to admit it. I thought I knew him through just his words—and I did in a lot of ways; I knew so much about him—but I want it all. I want all the parts of him that he was afraid of showing—the messy, inept, unhideable pieces—along with the words.
So I kept my only message to him short. Because I can’t just type and retype a message. I need him to react. When he reacts, he brings outmymessy, inept, unhideable pieces. Eli gave me acceptance when he wrote as J, but it was his needling in person that pushed me to actually do what Ari’s been trying to get me to do for years and accept that whole version of myself. And I never realized how much better I am when all those parts are on display.
As though I’m willing him to respond by still staring at the phone, I see a typing bubble pop up. It starts and stops and starts again. This should be considered a form of slow torture. Especially because now I know that I’m getting the measured Eli, the safe Eli. The Eli in writing is honest, but he’s not raw.
And I just have to wait.
But after what feels like an hour (and is probably only about two minutes), a message comes through.
Eli: Can you meet at the botanic gardens at Kew?
