“Nope.”
“Well?”
“Strawberry.” Nelle sucks down another icy gulp. “Tastes like melted ice cream.”
James laughs and pushes his milkshake across the table. “Try mine.”
“Only if you try mine.”
He plugs her straw into his mouth. Heat floods her cheeks, realizing that he has most definitely had a strawberry milkshake before. Probably a few. He hasn’t been Rapunzel in a tower his entire life.
“Oh my God,” he moans.
Nelle tries his. Chocolaty, but not as good as hers.
“Do you want to trade?” He’s already wrapping his hands around her milkshake.
“No, thanks.” She reaches across the table and swipes it back.
A childish voice in her head taunts,Sharing straws, you’re practically kissing. She stares at James’s dimple and jawline, how his throat bobs when he looks at her.
Back to her milkshake. “So you’re a writer.”
“You could say that.”
“The only writer I’ve ever known was Quill,” Nelle says. “What does that say about writers?”
“It says nothing about writers and everything about Quill being the only person besidesmethat you’ve ever met.”
“Valid. So what do you write? Fantasy? Romance, or is that out of your comfort zone?”
James sits back, arches a brow.
“Sorry.” She traces a line through her glass’s condensation. “I shouldn’t assume. It’s just that, well,doyou write romance?”
He crosses his arms. “No.”
“Maybe you should try,” she says. “I think you’d be good at it. Quill only ever found success as a writer when he wrote out of his comfort zone.”
“Not sure if he’s the ideal role model.”
“As a father, no.” Yet Nelle can’t deny Quill’s genius. “But he was a bestselling author. Think about pushing the boundaries of genre, that’s all I’m saying.”
From what she has witnessed, the last few days on the road have been as formative for James as they have been for her. He was living a life he hated in Lincoln. Now he is free to gallop.
“You have to try something new, too,” James says. “Solidarity, sister.”
Nelle scratches the sticky table. For twenty-one years, she has been locked away from the world. Now she can dig her fingers into all it has to offer. She wants to see every mountain, traverse every city, cross every river, dip into every ocean. She wants to talk to people, to take dance classes, to hold a brush again.
“I used to love painting,” she says. “I want to do that, maybe.”
“Oh my God, really? Jessie’s an artist, too.” James’s grin is contagious. “I’m sure she will let you work in her studio.”
Nelle once loved the smell of paint, mixing colors to unlock new hues, transforming an empty canvas into another world. She imagines herself in New York, painting in a tiny sunlit studio ... Quill’s beady eye blinking back at her through the peephole.
Her throat closes up. “Yeah, I think I’d like to try.”
Chapter 13
