Lucy laughs, then groans. “I can’t decide.”
“At the end of the day, it’s your choice,” James says. “But I’ll say this. For most of my life, I didn’t do what I wanted. When we were kids, Jessie would climb up to the tallest tree branches, while I watchedfrom the ground. I skipped the talent show in fifth grade after I spent weeks tinkering with my poem for it. There was this girl in high school that I wanted to ask to prom, but I chickened out and didn’t go at all. I was always too scared to climb that damn tree. If you want to pursue your MFA full-time, and you feel confident that youcan, don’t hold yourself back out of fear.”
Lucy takes this in with bated breath.
And James does something he would never have done a year ago. He holds her hand.
“You can do it,” he says. “Whateveritends up being. You can.”
“Can you wait out here for me?” She’s trembling, maybe from the cold.
“Of course.” Whatever he had previously planned for this strange Friday morning slips his mind. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” She disappears through the glass doors.
James watches the street while he waits. Nelle would love it here in the winter. She would love the cold, desperate pedestrians, the cars honking and backed up and zooming past, the black snow crushed and piled on the sides of the curbs. She would love every passing person, every stubborn little snowflake.
Nelle would love it all.
“No seriously,seriously, James is my hero!” Lucy wraps an arm around him on the couch, retelling yesterday’s events to a huddle of people. James fake-laughs along. He has barely had anything to drink, far less than Lucy. He started thinking about Nelle again, knocking his celebratory mood off the rails.
A racket of confetti, champagne, twinkling decorations, sunglasses, and party hats, Jessie’s New Year’s Eve party is Christmas’s wild sister. Drunk idiots bounce about the apartment. Too much champagne, toomany shots. Lena climbs on top of the couch and dances to the pulsing music. Jessie rises to join her. Everyone seems to be having fun.
Why hasn’t James partaken in any of it? He has held a flute of champagne for two hours, the liquid flat and warm now, desperate not to fall into the grave he dug himself earlier. No point in losing himself to a drunk depression, too clumsy to climb out.
“I call him up out ofnowhere, freaking out because I’m trying to quit my job, and I tell him that I have no one else to call and don’t know what to do.” Lucy laughs, champagne sloshing. “Little did I know, I wasn’t calling James, I was calling freakingSuperman! He didn’t even question me. In twenty minutes, he was there, calming me down.” Lucy peers at him through a haze of drunken dreaminess.
“So, did you quit your job?” Lena asks.
The room leans in for her response. Lucy laughs a little. “Yes, I did.”
Pride blooms in James’s chest. He claps his hands, a small applause, but it catches like wildfire, and soon enough, the entire room erupts. Whoops and yells and screams.
“Fuck, yeah!”
“Good luck!”
A warm coil tightens in James’s chest.Home.
Jessie slumps onto the couch. “Here, drink something.” She offers him a shot of—he lifts it to his nose—tequila.
He hands it back. “No, thank you.”
“You’ve been brooding all day, moping all night. You barely said a word when we were decorating the place. And you haven’t drunk a drop. I don’t know what’s got you all down, but if you relax, you’ll have fun. Don’t miss out on your first New Year’s Eve in New York.” Then she backs off and says lowly, “But, hey, seriously, if you don’t want to, it’s okay.”
He rolls his eyes and takes the shot. He doesn’t want to be drunk, but he also doesn’t want to be sober, where his dark thoughts, his doubts, stab him like swords. It’s a thin line to tiptoe. Drunk, the bladeson those swords dull. Harder to break skin, but if they do, they hurt so much worse.
Stinging esophagus. Saliva in his mouth, salt from the rim of the shot glass. He spits out lime pulp.
Jessie grabs the bottle of tequila and pours out another shot.
He throws it back.
She pours. He downs it. Another. Downs it. He takes the bottle from her and presses the rim to his lips, and the burning is so good because it makes him forget for a minute that he left Lincoln, that he met Nelle, that he kissed her, loved her, that he was inside her.
He’s laughing now. Collapses onto the couch, rolling in a deep guffaw. Stands up, saying, “I’ve gotta go find Lucy,” but his voice is a distant noise, like it bypassed his brain on the way to his lips.
He staggers into the kitchen.
