“It’s okay.”
“I just thought she’d be ...” Nelle shudders into his shoulder. “I knew Quill never wanted the best for me.” Snot glistens under her nose. “But for a minute there, I thought Penelope really did, and I’ve never had that before.”
James’s heart breaks for Nelle. For twenty-one years she has had no one. She was alone and ridiculed and tortured by a man who shouldhave loved her. And with Penelope, she finally thought she met family to take her in with open arms, flaws and all. For the first time in two months, homesickness pangs through James.
As Penelope disappears over the lip of the hill, Nelle shatters into tears.
Chapter 26
Light bleeds through the curtains. James doesn’t pull back the scratchy comforter. Doesn’t brush his teeth. Doesn’t start a pot of coffee. He stares at the ceiling, imagining what it would be like to wake up in Jessie’s apartment, to eat his lunch on a park bench before going to a class about literature and complex characters without stressing about those characters coming to life. He winces at the thought.
After Penelope left, Nelle turned into a ghost. James tried to scrub the ink off his body in the shower, toweled off, dressed, and found her staring out the window with a cup of tea, blond mane splattered with ink. He almost told her about NYU but decided not to. Not yet. She didn’t say a word the rest of the day and kept her nose stuffed in one of the books she’d brought from Penelope’s house.
He finally heard her voice at night, when she lit a candle, brushed her mouth across his, and whispered something filthy in his ear. He slid beneath the covers, happy to oblige her, but after she came on his face, while he was moving inside her, he felt uneasy.
He has never considered his time with Nelle ending, but now the thought haunts him, keeping him awake. He peels himself from bed and stumbles into the shower again, where thoughts go clear, time melts, and tears become one with the steaming torrent.
“James?” Nelle calls through the vinyl curtain.
He cuts the water off, pulls the curtain aside. Nelle sits on the bath rug beside the lip of the tub, her demeanor softening at his red, teary face.
The guilt he feels, dragging her along unaware of his wants, has reached a boiling point. Hehasto tell her, or he will hate himself forever. But he doesn’t want to hurt her. He knows what she will say:We don’t need money, we’ll work as we go.
Nelle presses his cheek against her, a damp patch from his wet face forming on the faded red sweatshirt she’s wearing. It’s his, so it swallows her up, while her vanilla scent engulfs him.
“We should go.” She kisses the top of his head.
“Go where?” His hands are trembling now.Let’s run, run, run away.But he doesn’t want to anymore, does he?
“Anywhere,” she says.
Please come with me,scream her tear-filled eyes.
He watches the dripping showerhead. With every splash of cold water on his leg, he builds up courage.
“Nelle, I—”
“We can see the world together, like we planned before.” She holds his bare shoulders and guides him to his feet. “We don’t have to stop traveling. And now I can write for myself. Like you said, with enough practice, I might not even have to write—”
“But what if I do want to ... stop?” James searches her face, wary of an angry response. But it falls instead, crushed. He decides to charge head-on. If he doesn’t now, he will never be brave enough. “What if I told you that I want to go back to New York, and attend college there, and live there indefinitely?”
Nelle flinches. “How indefinitely?”
As he steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist, James lets the last scrap of truth fly out. Bomb deployed and dropped—
“I applied to NYU,” he says. For a breath, he feels relieved to have his secret lifted, but that relief dies the minute he sees the hurt on Nelle’s face.
She twitches. “When?”
“I sent the application at the library in Edinburgh. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. Just to see if I’d get in, I guess.”
Unnervingly graceful, Nelle walks back into the bedroom and spins around at the foot of the bed, her face flushed red. She is furious, yet a smile plays on her lips. The effect, to James, is horrifyingly close to Quill.
“You could have told me ...” She shakes her head. “Talked to me about it. I wouldn’t have held you back.”
James can feel the knife between her shoulder blades, the hilt in his hand. He betrayed her, and even if it won’t kill her, he knows it hurts like hell.
“It’s something I need to do, and I didn’t know how to tell you. I”—he holds on to the bedpost to keep himself upright—“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
