James takes a moment to appreciate her. The whisper of wisdom behind her sharp stare. The curve of her shoulder. The tops of her breasts, dusted with freckles.
Lucy adds, “I’m sorry for being such a ...”
“A dreamer?” James supplies.
“Yeah.” A dimple creases the corner of her mouth. “I guess you could put it that way. Whoever I end up with, Iknowthat I’ll feel a connection eventually. Like a lock sliding into place. But I was with Noah for two years and never felt it.”
“Two years,” James whistles. “I’m sorry. When did you break up?”
“September.”
“Really?” He sits up. “That’s when Nelle and I—” His voice breaks. He should have known saying her damn name would mess him up. Not just saying it, but saying it now. “We ended in September, too, though we’d only been together since July. Still, she made me who I am today.”
“She made that much of an impact?”
“She showed me the world.” He stews in silence, Lucy beside him. He finds comfort in the sound of her breathing. “Friends?” he asks after a minute, hoping not to lose the only New Yorker he has had a compassionate conversation with in months. It’s not that the people here are cold. They are people. Boil it down, and everyone’s the same. But in New York, people are busy with plans, jobs, a forty-minute subway ride away. Nothing, no one, is ever truly convenient.
Lucy beams. “Friends.”
Chapter 31
Rain slithers down the taxicab window, glass like a sheet of ice against Nelle’s nose. Water pours off townhome eaves and hideous construction-site scaffolding, steam illuminated by neon lights. Midnight, but the city doesn’t sleep. Umbrellas fling open and bob between cars as their windshield wipers flicker back and forth. In the building right outside the cab, three windows up, is an apartment Nelle hasn’t visited in months.
She practiced her speech to James a thousand times during herfirsteight-hour flight across the Atlantic, before she went back for Penelope. Now that she is back in New York, moments away from reuniting with James, she is too damn nervous to remember a word she prepared.Shit.She tries to breathe. What if he’s with someone else? What if he’snot, and he still doesn’t want her?
“You getting out?” The taxi driver raises his black brows.
“I am.” Nelle blinks at the rain, the lights, the reflections.
He taps the electronic payment device. “You still haven’t—”
She doesn’t mean for the gesture to come off as rude, but she sort of flings a wad of cash at him, way more than the cost of the ride.
“Sorry about that.” She kicks open the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
Nelle hops over a flooded curb, the shoulders of her coat soaked through by the time she makes it to the apartment call box. She trembles and presses the 3B buzzer. Hopefully James is still an insomniac.
“Hello?” she yells into the speaker over the pouring rain. “It’s Nelle. Are either of you awake?”
The building door unlocks almost immediately. Nelle’s stomach drops.This is too real.Only the ice-cold rain coming down in sheets keeps her from sprinting down the street out of pure nervousness. She tries to remember her speech again and comes up blank.
The foyer of the building greets her like an old friend as she swings open the pine-green door. Dusty mailboxes beside a stack of packages. The shitty dome light buzzes and pops. She traveled through this room a hundred times during her stay in New York. Memories flutter past like pages of a book. James carrying that big daddy pizza box. Returning too often with coffee and fifty-cent paperbacks to add to Jessie’s overflowing living room. Leaving that last day to ride to the airport, to fly to Paris, to catapult her onto the spiraling path that led her here, standing like a ghost in a poorly lit room. What if James sees her only as a relic of his past?
No more thinking.Nelle charges upstairs and knocks on 3B.
She was once so nervous to meet Jessie, to mesh with James’s life, to ruin the fragile thing they’d been building. A porcelain figurine. Beautiful if handled carefully, broken if dropped. That was her alone, too. One wrong word and she starts a flash flood, a mere thought and a man’s heel slips on ice.
The door opens, and Nelle sucks in a sharp breath. Holds it.
The chain snaps tight, an eye peeks through.
“Nelle?” Jessie unlocks the door and swings it open. Her hair is all natural now, frizzy and brown. “What are you doing here? Oh, you’re soaked. Come in.”
This place is not her home, never was, but walking in feels like returning to somewhere she wants to be.
“Tea?” Jessie crosses to the kitchen and holds up a full pot.
“Yes,” Nelle says. Barely back in New York, and she is cozily drinking tea with Jessie. If she composes herself this loosely around James, she might end up spilling all her feelings to him at once, whichwill kill any chance of him taking her back. Because if she tells him why she feels guilty, will he see her the same?
