“I think that if you try, it might work, and then you’ll be really free.” James clicks off the bedside lamp. A streetlight flickers into the hotel room.
Do you want to get rid of me?murmurs an insecure little monster in Nelle’s head.
James shifts on his side, rousing the scent of sandalwood soap and bar sweat. “I hope I’m not sending the wrong message, but being able to write for yourself would change your life. It’d give you a choice. Andthat’swhat I want. For you to have a choice.”
Nelle swallows. As she feared, she is once again forced to depend on another man. And writing for herself seems to be the only way out, though doing so may not bring theoutshe desires. She would rather have her pen tied to someone else’s journal for the next eighty years than die trying to free herself.
I have a choice, she thinks, her eyelids shuttering.I choose you.
James wakes to a headache, ink in his nostrils. He wipes at his stinging nose, which results in a sneeze that jolts him up. He blinks at the daylight filtering in through the thin curtains. Memories from the night before crash into him one by one. The packed bar with the pink neon sign. Drinking too much. The photographer and his generosity. All the embarrassing things he said to Nelle.
The hotel suite is a wreck. Room-service scraps strewn among minibar bottles. Towels and blankets in clumps on the floor. Sheets of hotel stationery folded into airplanes and scattered on the fireplace mantel, the windowsill, under James’s pillow, and, when he goes to brush his teeth, one paper bird half melted in the sink.
A few scribbled letters peek out from the paper’s fold, so he opens it up. He apparently wrote that his dream was to have a book-release party in New York City. Nelle’s was to visit all seven continents.That’s right.Sometime during their drunken escapades, she decided it was a good idea to write down their goals. It was James’s idea to send them flying.
After a vigorous face washing, he checks the time on the digital hotel clock.I should really invest in a watch, he thinks for the hundredth time since he threw his phone away.
Noon already. They slept through the morning, and despite his shuffling around the room, Nelle has yet to even wince. He watches her for a minute, endeared by the drool slugging from her parted lips, but she doesn’t stir.
“Nelle,” he whispers, “would you be mad if I left to pick up coffee to surprise you?”
Not even a twitch. He gently touches her neck to ensure that her pulse is still thumping, though she has said she can’t die naturally. He yanks apart the curtains, hoping the blast of light will wake her, but all he manages to do is blind himself.
He grimaces at the street below. Someone whizzes by on a red bicycle. Cars wait for the valet. A man in a cashmere suit walks out of the hotel carrying a briefcase.If he turns left, I’ll leave, be gone forten minutes, and surprise Nelle with coffee. If he turns right, I’ll wake her up now.
Nelle stretches like a cat, arms trembling across the cold bed. She yawns and rubs the crust from her lashes, trying to scrub her dream from her memory. In it, she was painting for the first time in years. An oil landscape of a cottage in front of a lake. But when she pulled away from the canvas, the cottage disappeared. In its place stood Father, his black stare boring into her.
Across the street, construction workers move ant-like along the twelfth-floor scaffolding. A drill growls like metal in a blender, springing up a headache to slash her skull in two. Groggy from sleep and cranial pain, Nelle flings the comforter away and pads barefoot to the bathroom, still in her dress from the night before.
God, the night before. The criminal behind this hellish headache. A flutter of pink feelings, a mirror ball, rattling music, the flash of a camera, drinking and drinking, eating greasy food delivered by a hotel waiter named George. The memories zip through her mind like a tape on fast-forward. She switches on the faucet and holds her hands beneath the icy stream. The drill outside stops, and without it, she suddenly feels the eerie silence of the hotel room.
James.Nelle splashes cold water on her face and towels off her last flakes of sleep.Where is James?
She frantically leaves the running faucet to search the main room, rechecks the bed, the closet, the bathroom. At the door she peers through the peephole at the fish-eyed hallway. She is about to pull away when something blocks the peephole.
It takes her a moment to place it—a pupil, an iris. Staring back at her. She leaps back, heart thundering beneath her palm. Behind the fire-escape map on the door, she hears someone breathing.
“James?” Maybe he got locked out. But why wouldn’t he knock? Why wouldn’t he—
The man in the hall chuckles. “Not James.”
Nelle’s blood goes cold.Quill.
“What did you do with him?” she asks.
“No clue what you’re getting at,” says Quill. “If James left you, he did so of his own accord.”
“You’re lying.” Either Jamesdidleave for a good reason, or Quill took him, or ...
He realized he was stuck writing for me indefinitely and ran off.Nelle shakes the thought, refusing to let panic set in.
“When James comes back, he will kill you,” she says.
Quill’s laugh cuts through her like a serrated knife through canvas. “You’re being naive, Nellie.”
Her molars grind until they ache. “That is not my name.”
“What lies did you tell yourself to explain James’s absence?” Quill asks.
