Book Lovers

30

WHEN I SIT up, Charlie catches my arm, his eyes heavy and warm. “Stay,” he whispers.

My heart flutters. “Why?”

He tucks my hair behind my ear, mouth quirking. “So many reasons.”

“I just need one.”

He sits up, his hand settling between my thighs, his mouth pressing to my shoulder tenderly as the pressure of his thumb moves in a slow circle. “One.”

“In that case,” I say, “maybe two.”

He leans in and kisses me deeply, his hand gentle at my throat, thumb nestling into the dip at its base. “Because,” he says, “I want you to.”

“I don’t stay over at strange men’s places,” I say, blood fizzing.

“Then it’s lucky this isn’t my place.”

“Yes, because if it were, your parents would come running in, bleary-eyed with a shotgun, thinking you were being burglarized.”

“But at least we’d already be inside a getaway car,” he says.

I laugh, and the corner of his mouth hitches higher.

“Stay, Nora.”

I feel that blooming in my chest again, like petals uncurling to leave something delicate exposed in its center. And then a stab of panic, a needle in my unprotected heart.

“I can’t,” I barely whisper.

His disappointment is visible, only for a moment. Then I watch it dissolve as he accepts it, and it feels like some of those healed-over stitches in my heart open back up. He sits up, searching for his discarded clothes, and I touch his arm, stilling him. More than anyone I’ve ever met, Charlie craves honesty, and he doesn’t punish anyone for it. He takes it as immutable and synthesizes it into his world, and I don’t want to be another person dealing in half-truths with him.

“I was staying at my boyfriend’s place.” It actually hurts to say the words. I’ve never had to before. Libby already knows, and I don’t talk about this with anyone else. I’ve never wanted to make myself that vulnerable, to see the pitying looks, to feel weak.

Charlie’s eyes hold mine.

“Jakob,” I say. “I was with him the night my mom died.”

His brow softens.

I haven’t weighed out pros against cons, costs versus benefits of telling him. I just want it out. Want to hand it — this thing I’ve never been able to fix — to him and see what happens.

“He was my first serious boyfriend. Maybe my only serious one, in a way. I mean, I dated other men for longer, but he was the only one I ever chose like that.” Over everything else. Or maybe it was that I didn’t choose him. Just fell headfirst into my feelings for him, without any caution.

“I was twenty, and I was always over at his place, so we decided I should move in. And my mom — she was such a romantic, she wasn’t even trying to talk me out of it. She wanted me to marry him. I did too.”

Charlie says nothing, just watches me, leaving space for me to go on, or to stop.

“My phone died at some point in the night.” My voice is hoarse now, like my throat is closing off to keep the rest in. But I can’t stop. I need him to know. I need to not be alone with this for another second.

“When I was with him, I’d just . . . get so swept up. When we woke up, I didn’t even plug my phone in until after we’d made breakfast.” Eaten. Had sex. Made more coffee.

The back of my nose burns. “Libby had been calling me for four hours. She was alone at the hospital, and . . .” Nothing comes out after that. My mouth is moving, but there’s no sound.

Charlie sits forward, pulls me in against his chest. His mouth presses hard against the top of my head, his thumb brushing over my shoulder.

“I can’t imagine.” He pulls my legs over his lap, crushes me to his chest again, smoothing my hair and kissing it.

I close my eyes, focusing on these sensations, in this moment. I’m here, I promise myself. It’s over. It can’t hurt me anymore.

“Libby would wake up screaming.” My voice is wet now, thin. “For months after Mom died. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I was too scared I wouldn’t be there if she needed me.”

I learned to wait until she woke in a panic, to throw my blankets aside and scoot to the far side of my bed so she could slip in beside me under the quilt. I’d wrap my arms around her until she cried herself back to sleep.

I never told her it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t. Instead I took up Mom’s old refrain for comforting us: Let it out, sweet girl.

“Jakob was great at first,” I say. “I barely saw him, but he understood. And then he got the chance to go to this residency, out in Wyoming — he was a writer.”

“He left you?” Charlie says.

“I told him to go,” I admit weakly. “I felt like . . . I didn’t have the time or the energy for him anyway, and I didn’t want to hold him back.”

“Nora.” His chin nudges my temple as he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have been alone through that.”

“He couldn’t have done anything,” I whisper.

“He could’ve been there,” he says. “He should’ve.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But it wasn’t just him failing me. I kept making plans to visit and then canceling. I couldn’t leave Libby. And then . . .”

He brushes my sweat-dampened bangs out of my eyes. “You don’t have to tell me.”

I shake my head.

All this time, deep in the pit of my stomach, the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger.

A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.

“I planned a surprise visit. Got Xanax, took a bus out because that’s all I could afford, left Libby alone. I could tell as soon as I saw him that things had changed. And then, the first night I was there, I woke up in a panic. I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t find my phone. All I could think was — that something had happened to Libby. I was . . . hallucinating, almost. My chest hurt so badly I thought I was dying.

“Jakob thought I was having a heart attack. He took me to the ER, and they sent me home a couple hours later with a huge bill and some breathing exercises. It happened again the next night, and the next. I told Jakob I needed to go home early. He bought me a plane ticket and told me he wasn’t coming back. He’d decided to stay.

“I wanted to figure something out. Libby only had a year of high school left, but I thought maybe I could move her out there with us. A week after I got home, he told me he’d met someone else.”

Like the universe was punishing me, for wanting too much, for even considering putting Libby through that when she was at her breaking point. It still makes me sick to think about.

Charlie’s fingers glide up and down my arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not that I am sure he was ‘the one’ or something.” I close my eyes, heart racing. “It’s just . . . ever since then, it’s been hard to imagine letting anyone close like that. Not when I’m so fucking broken I can’t sleep anywhere but my own bed. Even here it’s hard, with Libby right next to me. I’ve just never trusted myself since then.” I press my face into his warm skin as that ache yawns wide in my chest. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says roughly. “Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”

“It’s embarrassing,” I say. “To be so obsessed with being in control that sleeping makes me panic. I’m a fucking mess.”

He turns me to face him, his hands laced against my lower back. “Everyone’s a mess,” he says.

“You’re not.”

He smiles faintly, the reflection of the embers in the fireplace catching the flecks of gold in his irises. “I’m living in my childhood bedroom.”

“Because you’re helping your family,” I say. “I threw mine under the bus the first chance I got.”

“Hey.” He touches my chin, lifts it. “Your ex left you in the fucking wilderness, Nora, on your own, and you did your best. You’re not the villain in his story. He is — and not because he fell for someone else, but because he exited your relationship the second you were the one who needed something.”

He cradles my face between his hands. “I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he says. “But if you want to stay, and you wake up screaming, it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay. And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.”

I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.

Looking into Charlie’s face, I understand it. The way a crush of feeling and feathery impressions can move through your body, bypassing your mind. How a person can know there’s something worth saying but have no concept of what exactly that is. I’m not thinking in words.

It’s a feeling of not quite Thank you, not just You make me feel safe, but something that dances in between those.

“I want to stay,” I say. “But I don’t think I can.”

He nods. “Then I’ll take you home.”

“Not yet.”

He smooths my hair, tucks it behind my ear. “Not yet.”

We lie down together, my back pressed against his warm stomach, his arm draped over my hip, fingers brushing along my ribs like tiny skiers following the gentle slopes, until he’s hard again, and I’m drunk on the way he’s touching me. We have slow, dreamy sex, and when it’s over, I settle against his chest, feeling his heartbeat thudding softly against me, as calming as the lights and hums of the city blurring past my apartment window, a whole world that keeps spinning while you sleep.

If I don’t say it aloud, I think, it doesn’t count. Maybe it won’t even be true.

But it is true, and I’m not sure I’d want to stop it, even if I knew how: I am falling in love with Charlie Lastra.

In the morning, I skip my run. Libby and I sit on a blanket spread in the meadow, coffee in hand, and I tell her everything.

Eyes lit up from within, she says, “He’s staying?” and my heart crumples in on itself.

“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

She tucks her nose into the steam rising from her mug. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Like you would love nothing more than to put Charlie Lastra on a ship bound to permanently circle the earth?”

“It’s not that! It’s just . . .” She scoots around in her chair. “I guess it changes how I see him. He qualifies for the list now.”

“How helpful.”

“Nora.” She sets her mug in the grass. “If you’re really this excited about him, you should explore it. I can’t remember the last time you actually were excited about someone. No, wait, I can. It was a full ten years ago.”

The deep pain, like a pulsing phantom limb, doesn’t feel quite so severe as it usually does when I think about Jakob. I meant what I told Charlie — that it wasn’t about missing my ex so much as the loneliness of being unable to trust myself with anyone.

“It doesn’t matter what we ‘explore,’ ” I say. “We know how this ends.”

Libby squeezes my arm. “You don’t know. You can’t, until you try.”

“This isn’t a movie, Libby,” I say. “Love isn’t enough to change the details of a person’s life, or — or their needs. It doesn’t make everything fall into place. I don’t want to give up everything.”

I can’t let myself do that.

There’s still no happy ending for a woman who wants it all, the kind who lies awake aching with furious hunger, unspent ambition making her bones rattle in her body.

My cozy West Village apartment with its huge windows. The café on the corner that knows my order. All four seasons on the Central Park mall.

The job at Loggia, I think, the image of their gallery-white offices and balsa wood floors burning bright in my mind.

Knowing my sister is okay. Waking every night believing to my core that I’m safe. That nothing can get me.

How does a vast, uncontrollable feeling like love fit into that?

It’s a loose cog in a delicate machine.

When I look back to Libby, her lips are parted, her brows knit together. “Love?” She repeats the word in a small voice.

I look back toward the cottage, gleaming in the sun, surrounded by lazily twirling butterflies. “Hypothetically.” I lie to my sister. She lets me.

In the early afternoon, Bea and Tala come bounding up the hillside — Bea in frilly pink and Tala in navy overalls. My heart soars, and to no one’s surprise, tears rush to Libby’s eyes as I help her off the blanket. They scream Mommy in their impossibly high voices and hurl themselves at her legs, where she peppers their tangled hair with kisses.

“I missed you so, so, so much,” she tells them. Tala looks grumpy and resentful as she wraps her arms around Libby’s leg, and Bea, of course, immediately starts crying like she’s in bad need of a nap, and then Brendan comes huffing up behind them, looking roughly twenty-three times as tired as Charlie Lastra ever has.

When his and Libby’s eyes catch, their smiles are calm. Not overjoyed, but relieved: like they’ve slipped back into the current and don’t have to work quite so hard.

The final ounces of anxiety I’ve been carrying around dissipate in an instant. These two people love each other. Whatever I thought was going on between them, they’re okay.

They belong together, in some mysterious way, and they both seem to know it.

While Libby finishes her penance with the girls, Brendan pulls me into one of his famously awkward and excruciatingly earnest side hugs. “Good flight?” I ask.

“There were some tears,” he says warily.

“Oh, were they showing Mamma Mia! on the plane again?” I say. “You know you can’t handle anything with Meryl in it at that altitude.”

Right then, the girls pry themselves from Libby and barrel at me, screaming, not quite in unison, “Nono!”

“My favorite girls in the whole world!” I say, catching them.

Tala screeches, “We flew on the airplane!”

“You did?” I sweep her onto my hip and squeeze Bea’s hand. “Who drove? You or Bea?”

Bea giggles. It is, very likely, the sound that the earth made the first time it saw the sun come up.

“Noooo.” Tala shakes her head, irritated by my incompetence. Honestly, when she’s grumpy, it’s the cutest thing in the world. May all our sour moods be so adorable.

I guide them across the grass, away from Libby and Brendan so they can have a second alone. Brendan looks like he could use a few years in a cryogenic chamber, whereas Libby is grabbing his ass like that is not at all what she needs.

“Hey. I forget,” I say, leading the girls toward the flowers nestled around the footbridge. “How do you feel about butterflies?”

They have a lot of thoughts, and they’re sure to scream them all.