She left me to her bottle of gummies, but not before turning on the TV and finding some Christmas Eve true crime special, like she was turning on the Discovery Channel for her dog.
I whimpered my thanks, because I truly appreciated the thought.
After she left, I put my phone on the charger, pulled the blankets up to my chin, and popped a gummy in my mouth before I could overthink and change my mind.
They didn’t smell or taste so different from regular gummies. In fact... they reminded me of the wine gummies Mom would bring back from her yearly business trips to Munich when I was younger.
I dug around for another—this time a green star-shaped gummy.
For a brief moment, I wondered what the recommended serving size was as I cherry-picked a third.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I could already feel theedges of my mind and body blurring and my nerves slowly beginning to ease.
Maybe being fucked wasn’t so bad. Maybe we were always meant to be fucked.
Suddenly everything felt so much smaller and more manageable, and was the green flavor supposed to be apple or pear? The only way to know for sure was to try another...
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nolan
My plane landed, but then took forever to get from the icy landing strip to the even icier gate area. After about an hour of trying to nap through the plane creeping over the tarmac, I stepped off feeling tired and scruffy and unsettled. I was excited to be back home and to surprise Mom and Maddie, but I kept having that feeling like I’d left something really important back in Vermont, like my phone or my right lung.
It was Bee.
I missed Bee.
I scrubbed at my hair and then yanked on my beanie as I slouched through the terminal toward baggage claim. It was delusional to miss someone this much after only two weeks, right? To feel like this woman was back in Vermont, holdingmy gasping right lung while I struggled to breathe apart from her? That was moon man talk. Like lyrics from a song that Isaac would have taken lead vocals on, andnotlike real life at all.
I slumped against a cold window in the mostly empty baggage claim section and waited for the carousel to spit out my bag. As the other passengers straggled over, I found my phone and bent my face over it. There weren’t very many people here, and I never minded giving out autographs or pictures when people recognized me, but I was too off-kilter for unexpected selfies right now.
I should call Bee. That was what I should do. I would call her and let her know I landed, and just hearing her voice would make this awfulmissinggo away.
I turned off airplane mode and waited for my phone to scratch its belly and yawn before it decided to connect to the network. I glanced up as the carousel juddered into motion, and that’s when it happened.
That’s when my phone became radioactive.
Seventy-two missed calls. Fifty-eight texts.
And social media notifications numbering in the thousands.
Whaattttt?I mouthed silently at the screen as I tapped open the messages from Steph first. There were seventeen voice messages from her, and I pressed play on the most recent one.
“You knew nothing,” she said, sounding like she’d already deconstructed several Manhattans by the time she’d left the message. “If they ask,you knew nothing. You were supposed to do a movie with Winnie Baker, you were a good sport with the last-minute replacement, but of course you had no idea that you were a little baby boy-band bird in a nest of pornographers. You don’t watch porn and you never would. And you were pressured into taking that selfie with the stripper—you were just being polite to the nice lady with the nipple pasties and stuff. No, I’m still eating this, why would you assume that the woman clutching a fistful of nachos is done eating them? In fact, I want another order, and I’ll give you two hundred dollars to bring me the cherries from the bar.”
That was where the message ended. I didn’t listen to or look at any others. I went straight to my phone icon and saw that nineteen of the seventy-two missed calls were from Bee.Shit shit shit.What hadhappenedwhile I was in the air?
I called Bee, looking up in time to see my bag glide by on the carousel, and walked over to grab it.
“Hey, this is Bee,” came her husky, recorded voice. Just hearing it made me close my eyes and breathe deeply for the first time since I left Christmas Notch. “If you’re calling about a job, make sure to leave your name, number, and what date you’d need my test results by. If this is Mom or Mama Pam, I’m sorry about the thing I just said about test results. If this is Sunny or Luca and you need to be rescued from a boring date, pretend this is me telling you that my goldfish just died and I’m inconsolable. I need a friend. I need a fish wake. I need my friend in the depths of my fish grief, et cetera, et cetera.”
Beeeeep.
Popping up the handle of the suitcase, I began rolling it toward the door as I spoke quickly into the phone. “Bee, it’s Nolan. I just got off the plane and turned on my phone. I’m catching an Uber home, but then I’ll try calling again. I just want you to know that I—”
I stopped, the word I’d been about to speak sitting on my tongue like a note waiting to be crooned. But I couldn’t say that word to her. It was too early and probably not reciprocated and I couldn’t even be surewhatit was that I felt for Bee, because I’d never felt this way before. And if I was thirty-one and hadn’t felt this way before, how could I trust it?
Instead, I finished with “I just want you to know that I care about you. And we’ll figure this out.” The first sentence wasn’t the entire truth. And the second?
