Nelle doesn’t even flinch. “Yeah, I am.”
James has been too scared to ask, but hearing the words come from her lips makes his heart implode. Knowing that she will be here, that his best friend is back, that they can start their life together, he wants to scream with joy. Mornings cozied up in a snow-crusted café. Summer afternoons on Coney Island. Weekend trips up and down the East Coast. She can finally learn how to ride a horse; he has already started researching equestrian lessons in the city. His brain spins like a hamster wheel with the possibilities. The kids they will adopt. TheBrooklyn Heights town house they will raise them in. Endless nights of slow lovemaking.
“So James is a writer.” Lena crosses her ankles on the coffee table. “Jessie’s doing pretty damn well as an artist. I’m in law school. What’s your dream, Nelle?”
The question is casual, but to James it feels like an attack. His instinct is to jump to Nelle’s defense, but he holds himself back, curious. Before, her dream was to see the world, but she must have changed if she is staying in New York.
Nelle finishes her glass, sets it aside, licks her lips. “I think I want to go to college.”
“Very cool,” Lena says.
James stares at the frosted pane of the balcony window. Something Nelle said that morning resurfaces.I’ve done some stuff.His curiosity bites, and he almost asks her to step away with him, to confess her sins, but he restrains himself. She deserves her secrets from those months apart. Same as him.
He thinks of that drunken night with Lucy, sour bile hitting the back of his throat. Would Nelle still want him if she knew he slept with someone else two weeks ago? He feels only friendship for Lucy now, but he was attracted to her. Enough to pull her into bed, even if it was because he was drunk and missed the girl now sitting beside him.
Jessie raises her glass. “To improving ourselves, a venture I’m sure we can all work on.”
Lena lifts her glass. “Except me.”
When James’s wine-addled head starts to loll, he excuses himself to pee. The trip to the bathroom is a nauseating blur, and when he steps back into the hall, Nelle is in front of him. Her eyelids are swollen and sleepy, and she pulls him by his collar into his room.
He protests, “Jessie and Lena—”
“Are already in bed,” Nelle says, rolling onto his comforter. She plucks a book off the nightstand, but knocks out on page two, parted lips rattling an exhale.
James falls asleep happier than he has been since September.
Nelle dreams of the house on Blackwood Road. Clapboard siding. Tin roof. Summer insects flattened to her bedroom window. Sheer white curtains. Vials of ink. Horses prancing beyond the trees. Quill chopping wood in the smoky cold. Dust piling on canvases like snow.
She dreams of James and the night they met. The fireworks, the grill char, the sparklers, the corn dog in her throat.
She dreams of the day the police officer came. The stove’s gas flame tearing her hand apart, over and over, bare palm bubbling, burning, and stitching back together.
Quill’s black eyes as he poured out whiskey bottles across his study.
Fire eating bookshelves full of her lifeblood.
Scalding heat. The gnawing fear that she would disappear with those journals.
She dreams of the pain she felt as the man who raised her—who called himself her father—tried to kill her.
She dreams of acrid smoke and watchful stars, knowing that her life was changed forever as she rode away from Blackwood Road with James.
Nelle clutches the sheets to her chest. She’s not in Lincoln, she’s in New York. In Jessie’s apartment. In James’s bed. She is sweating, her heart racing, her skinboiling. Does she have a fever? A bright phantom flashes against the wall. Half asleep still, she mistakes it as a headlight cutting in through the window. But they are on the third floor.
I’m still asleep.Nelle shakes her head, frozen in fear.This can’t be real.
Returning to New York was not a dream. Choosing to live a normal life, to search for a passion, was not a dream. Spending the day with her mouth on James was not a dream. Waking up in his bed now is not a dream.
But the angry fire consuming his desk, his laptop, the bookshelf ... has to be.
Chapter 33
Smoke and ash sting Nelle’s eyes. She sits in stunned disbelief, blinded by the fire.
The fire.
The room is on fire.
