Book Lovers

32

NOW I UNDERSTAND why I didn’t cry for all those years. I want it to stop. I want the pain tamped down, divided into manageable pockets.

All this time I thought being seen as monstrous was the worst thing that could happen to me.

Now I realize I’d rather be frigid than what I really am, deep down, every second of every day: weak, helpless, so fucking scared it’s going to come apart.

Scared of losing everything. Scared of crying. That once I start, I’ll never be able to stop, and everything I’ve built will crumble under the weight of my unruly emotions.

And for a long time, I don’t stop.

I cry until my throat hurts. Until my eyes hurt. Until there aren’t any tears left and my sobs settle into hiccups.

Until I’m numb and exhausted. By then, the office has gone dark except for the old banker-style lamp on the desk.

When I close my eyes, the roaring in my ears has faded, leaving behind the steady thud of Charlie’s heartbeat.

“She’s leaving,” I whisper, testing it out, practicing accepting it as truth.

“Did she say why?” he asks.

I shrug within his arms. “All the normal reasons people leave. I just — I always thought . . .”

His thumb hooks my jaw again and he angles my eyes to his.

“All my exes, all my friends — half the people I work with,” I say. “They’ve all moved on. And every time, it was okay, because I love the city, and my job, and because I had Libby.” My voice wobbles. “And now she’s moving on too.”

When Mom died and we lost the apartment, it was like our whole history got swallowed up. The city and each other, that’s all Libby and I have left of her.

Charlie gives one firm shake of his head. “She’s your sister, Nora. She’s never going to leave you behind.”

I’m not out of tears after all: my eyes flood again.

His hands run over my shoulders, squeezing the back of my neck. “It’s not you she doesn’t want, Nora.”

“It is,” I say. “It’s me, it’s our life. It’s everything I tried to build for her. It wasn’t enough.”

“Look,” he says, “whenever I’m here, it feels like the walls are closing in on me. I love my family, I do. But I’ve spent fifteen years coming home as rarely as possible because it’s fucking lonely to feel like you don’t fit somewhere. I never wanted to run this store. I never wanted this town. And whenever I’m here it’s all I think about. I get so fucking claustrophobic from it all.

“Not from them. But from feeling like I don’t know how to be myself here. From — getting in my head about who I’m supposed to be, or all the ways I haven’t turned out how they wanted me to. And then you showed up.”

His eyes flare, flashlights racing over the dark, searching. “And I could finally breathe.”

His voice trembles, skates down my backbone, and my heart flips like it’s inside a bingo cage. “There’s nothing wrong about you. I wouldn’t change anything.” It’s almost a whisper, and after a pause, he says, “You’ve never needed to. Not for your shithead exes and not for Blake Carlisle, and definitely not for your sister, who loves you more than fucking anything.”

Fresh tears sting my eyes. He just barely smiles. “I honestly think you’re perfect, Nora.”

“Even though I’m too tall,” I whisper tearily. “And I sleep with my phone volume all the way up?”

“Believe it or not,” he murmurs, “I didn’t mean perfect for Blake Carlisle. I meant, to me, you’re perfect.”

It feels like heavy machinery is excavating my chest. I knot my hands into his shirt and whisper, “Did you just quote Love, Actually?”

“Not intentionally.”

“You are too, you know.” I think about my dreamy apartment, sun pooling on the armchair under the window, the summer breeze wafting in with the smell of baking bread. I think about schlepping off the train, sticky with heat, paperbacks and towels tucked into a bag, or freshly printed manuscripts and brand-new Pilot G2s.

My city. My sister. My dream job. Charlie. All of it, exactly right. The life I would build if it was possible to have everything.

“Exactly right,” I tell him. “Perfect.”

His eyes are dark, sheening as he studies me.

My heart feels like a cracked egg, nothing to protect it or hold it in place. “I could stay.”

He looks away. “Nora,” he says quietly, apologetically.

Just like that, the tears are back. Charlie brushes the hair from my damp cheek. “You can’t make this decision for me, or for Libby,” he says, voice thick and rattling.

“Why not?”

“Because,” he says, “you’ve spent your life making sure she has everything she needs, and it’s time someone made sure you did. You want that job at Loggia. And you fucking love the city. And if you need to save money, take my apartment. It’s probably half the price of yours. If that’s what you want, that’s what you should have. Nothing less.”

I try to blink the tears back, instead loosing them down my cheeks.

“You should have everything,” he says again.

“What if it’s not possible?”

He tips my jaw up, whispers almost against my lips. “If anyone can negotiate a happy ending, it’s Nora Stephens.”

Despite — or maybe because of — the sensation of my chest cracking clear in half, I whisper back, “I think one of those only costs forty dollars at Spaaaahhh.”

He laughs, kisses the corner of my mouth. “That brain.”

Neither of us leaves the shop that night. I don’t want to leave him, and I don’t want him to feel alone in the dark and quiet. Even if it can’t last, even if it’s just for tonight, I want him to know that I’ve got him, the way he’s had me. The way he has me.

For once, I sleep like a rock.

In the morning, I stir awake and piece together the night. The fight, finding Charlie at the bookstore, falling into each other again.

Afterward, we talked for hours. Books, takeout, family. I told him about how Mom’s nose used to crinkle just like Libby’s when she laughed. How they wore the same perfume, but it smells different on Libby than it did on her.

I tell him about Mom’s birthday routine. How every December twelfth at noon, we’d go to Freeman Books and browse for hours, until she picked out one perfect book to buy at full price.

“Libby and I still go,” I said. “Or we used to. Every December twelfth, at noon—twelve, twelve, at twelve o’clock. Mom used to make a big deal of that.”

“Twelve’s a great number,” Charlie said. “Every other number can go to hell.”

“Thank you,” I agreed.

At some point, we drifted off, and I wake now to the realization that, in our sleep, we’ve begun to move together again. I kiss him awake, and in a heady fog, we give in to each other, time grinding to a halt, the world fading to black around us.

Afterward, I lay my head on his chest and listen to his blood move through his veins, the current of Charlie, as he plays with my hair. His voice is thick and scratchy when he says, “Maybe we can figure it out.”

Like it’s an answer to a question, like the conversation never stopped. All night, all morning, every touch and kiss, all of it was a back-and-forth, a push and pull, a negotiation or a revision. Like everything is between us. Maybe this could work.

“Maybe,” I whisper in agreement. We’re not looking into each other’s faces, and I can’t help but think that’s purposeful: like if we looked, we couldn’t pretend any longer, and we’re not ready to give up the game.

Charlie threads his fingers through mine and lifts the back of my hand to his lips. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.”

I slip my arms around his neck and climb into his lap, kissing his temples, his jaw, his mouth. Love, I think, a tremor in my hands as they move into his hair, as he kisses me.

The last-page ache.

The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.

When he walks me to the door sometime later, he takes my face in his hands and says, “You, Nora Stephens, will always be okay.”