Nothing Less

  “What did Todd tell you? What is it that you want to know?” This is just her way of still not giving me anything.

  Frustration propels me to my feet. “Seriously? Even now you’re trying to evade my questions.”

  “You haven’t asked any questions.”

  I throw my hands into the air. “Don’t play semantics with me. Just tell me what the fuck is going on. Why weren’t you and Stausey talking? I was more than willing to give you time to trust me, to open up to me. But this is too much. Todd’s in there acting like you’re hiding a freaking atomic bomb under your shirt, something I’m apparently supposed to know about but don’t.”

  Nora sighs but stays seated on the couch. “I wouldn’t go that far. Look, I don’t want to drag you into the middle of my family drama. It’s a mess and has been for a while. My parents will barely speak to me, and my sister chose their side. She didn’t want anyone to think that she could think for herself, so she chose them, and that’s her fucking choice. She’s wrong, and that’s the end of it. Todd shouldn’t be in there feeding his bullshit to you. He’s the better one, for sure, but don’t trust him. He mastered the art of walking the line between his parents and mine.”

  Her explanation only makes things more cloudy. My phone rings in my pocket, for the third time in the last hour. I pull it out, notice Dakota’s name on the screen, and, once again, ignore the call.

  “Would you just answer it, for fuck’s sake?” Nora snaps at me.

  “No. Now, tell me about this accident. Who was in an accident? You?”

  I take a few steps away from her so I can get some fresh air. I put my hands on the rail and look down to the street below. These streets are way busier than those in my neighborhood. The taxi honks are louder, and more snippets of music come from every direction.

  Nora points to the circular building with lights shooting from the top. “Madison Square Garden is right there. Halsey is playing there tonight.”

  The talk of music distracts me from my anger. It’s a nice—if temporary—relief.

  “Why didn’t you go?” I know Nora’s a fan.

  “Because I’m here.” Nora stands up and walks over to me. “Now, stop fighting with me and let me touch you.” She reaches for me and her fingertips run down my covered arm. “Landon.”

  She says my name so softly, I can’t help but let her wrap her arms around my waist and bury her head in my chest.

  chapter

  Twenty-seven

  CAN WE STAY OUT HERE awhile?” Nora’s lips are against my neck. “I’m not ready to go inside and face either of them.”

  “Yeah, we can. Let’s play a game,” I tell her, less spirited than the last time we played this game. “I’ll ask my questions first.”

  I don’t give her a chance to opt out of participating. I lead her to the couch and look around again, to make sure we’re still alone. The wind has picked up on the roof, and her hair is blowing in front of her face. I sit on the opposite side of the couch and prepare my questions. I don’t need much time this time.

  “Why did you and your sister get in a fight? What are the papers they all want you to sign, and why did you bring me here knowing that I was clueless? And how long had you known I was dating Dakota?”

  Nora lets out a dramatic sigh and lifts her legs and props her feet up on the table in front of us. “That’s four. But I’ll let it pass, given the circumstances.” She eyes me. “I was fighting with my sister because she hasn’t had my back for the last three years, and I needed to pull away from my family for a while. I’m skipping the next one, and I brought you here because I wanted to make you happy. I was hoping that for one night my sister wouldn’t be a cunt, and that they would love you as much as I do. I knew for a little while.”

  Nora shrugs and leans up to take her shoes off. She drops the sandals on the dark-stained wood, and I watch her fingers brush over the neckline of her shirt. We are still the only people up here, and for a moment I can imagine the two of us on a rooftop patio drinking sparkling red wine. We are older and without so much weight on our shoulders.

  That moment ends with the obnoxious blaring of a taxi horn. I will never understand why the drivers honk, as if it’s going to get them anywhere. I miss the luxury of having a car and the freedom that comes with it.

  “My turn.” Nora lays her feet back on the table. I wish I would have asked for another glass of wine. Not for me, but for her.

  “Why did you come here tonight? What did you and Dakota do that binds you so tightly to her? And . . .” She taps her almond-shaped fingernails against her chin. “And if I met your family”—another pause—“and they didn’t already know me, what would you introduce me as?”

  With that, it’s Nora’s turn to stare out into the skyline. It really is beautiful up here.

  “I came here to get to know you a little more. I had planned to do that by meeting your sister and her husband. That didn’t go as planned . . .”

  I hesitate, but realize I need to answer the questions Nora listed for me. If we are going to move toward any sort of relationship, I shouldn’t be skipping questions. We are past that, right?

  Dakota . . . Dakota, Dakota. Where should I start?

  “Well, for starters, she is all alone in the world. Except me. I’m it. So regardless of what happens between us or how irrational she’s being, I’m always going to look out for her. I know it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to you.” I move closer to Nora and stretch my legs out onto the table a foot or so away from hers. “But she’s like my family. I can’t just completely quit her.”

  “Quit her?” Nora’s brows curve together, but she moves closer.

  “I mean quit on her. And for my third answer . . .” I look up at Nora to show her that I’m not skipping. I crack my biggest grin for her. “If you didn’t know my family, I would say, ‘Mom, Ken, Hardin, this is my lady friend, Nora.’ ” I dramatically wave my hands through the air, presenting her to the imaginary crowd of the Scotts.

  Nora laughs and puts her finger into her mouth. She sucks at it, and I don’t know if she’s doing it on purpose, but it sure as hell seems like she wants to disarm me.

  Not on my watch.

  Well, not if I can help it.

  I look away from her tempting mouth and pretend she wasn’t making vulgar, and sexy, suggestions at me.

  “Your ‘lady friend’?” Her voice is high and light through the fall air. The wind has died down a little, and her hair sits calmly over her shoulders. The ends, no longer pin straight, have started to curl up. I lean over and touch the strands. I rub my thumb over them, and Nora studies my face. Her hair is so soft. She is just so soft.

  “Yes. I think that’s a suitable reference for such a qualified woman.” I tuck a section of her hair behind her shoulder. I smooth my fingertips over her shoulder blade.

  Her chest rises and falls between each word as she says, “And what qualifications are those?”

  I hum and continue petting her skin. She’s like a kitten who wants to be rubbed and fussed over all day. Suddenly, I’m a cat person. I don’t know if I could handle the hair-ball thing, or the pooping-inside-the-house thing. So never mind: I only like kittens in Nora-form.

  “Well, you have these.” I drag my finger over her lips and up to her eyes. “And these.” I touch her lips. My fingers lead down to her breasts, and I stop over her nipple, gently circling. “And this.” I touch over her heart and feel it drumming beneath my palm. “This is my favorite part.” I flatten my hand out over her, and the moment I do, she’s all over me.

  She uses her palms to push my shoulders against the back of the couch. My “Whoa” is lost in the cloud of her. She’s on my lap, kissing my cheeks, my jaw, my lips, my eyes. She’s so soft in my arms, so warm. She’s frenzied in a way that I haven’t seen her before.

  I keep my little antic going, reminding her why she’s so special to this world. “Also, you went to college.”

  Her lips touch against my forehead, and she lau
ghs. When she cups my cheeks and kisses me, I have to open my eyes to make sure this is all real. I have this piercing feeling inside my ribs, poking at my already fragile heart, that the worst is yet to come with us. I can see images of us inside my head, and they come as clear as day. But when I focus on one, it fades quickly, and one by one everything disappears. Nothing feels permanent with her. Why is that?

  “Anything else?” She grinds her hips down on me.

  When I stop her body from moving, she scowls at me. I lift her hips higher so she’s barely touching me. “Not so fast. We were in the middle of a game.” I lean forward and touch my face to her chest. “You almost had me.”

  I bite at her breasts, and she yelps, climbing off my lap.

  “Fine, fine,” she says, catching her breath. Her skin is lovely under the glittering city lights. The moon is more visible than I imagined it would be from Manhattan. It’s still so crazy to me how vast the difference between Brooklyn and the city is.

  “Whose turn is it?” She scoots her butt all the way to the other end of the couch and turns to face me, her legs crossed under her body.

  Well, if she doesn’t remember . . . “Mine.”

  “Liar!” she cries out with a smile. I shrug, playing innocent. “Do you think you could be with me? Do you think we are crazy for this?” She points her finger back and forth between us. “And what’s your biggest flaw?”

  My biggest flaw? Could I be with her? Are we crazy?

  Are we crazy?

  I don’t even give my doubt the chance to creep into this moment with Nora. This is between us, no other voices, just hers.

  “I am here, with you,” I tell her.

  She looks away from me, but she’s fighting a smile.

  “My biggest flaw is that I take on too much from everyone around me. It gets heavy sometimes.” I feel guilty admitting it, but I want to be honest with her. She lifts her eyes to mine for a brief second, then looks out to the view again. “And, yeah. I think we are crazy.”

  “Good crazy or bad?”

  We both have reasons to believe the other one is a little . . . I won’t say crazy.

  Interested?

  Obsessive?

  I’m not sure what to categorize our behavior as, but maybe it’s as simple as the two of us wanting to learn more about the other? I followed her all the way from her job to a city over an hour away. I stalked her family on Facebook, and she knew who I was before she led me to believe. We’ve both had our share of “nosy,” and maybe that’s why we understand each other?

  “Is there a difference? It usually ends the same, doesn’t it?”

  She inhales a deep breath, thinking this over. “Yeah. It does.”

  Neither of us looks at the other, and we continue the game. The questions stay neutral and impersonal. Questions that you could ask your friend. What’s your favorite season? Hers was summer, mine was winter.

  Snow or rain? I took snow; she chose rain and told me about her thirteenth birthday party, when no one came, but her sister took her up to the roof of their villa to dance in the downpour. Her parents were furious when the girls came inside soaking wet, ruining the freshly scrubbed floors. Stausey took the full blame, saying she thought the cat had run outside.

  Her mention of the cat led her to tell me about Tali, her family cat, who once jumped onto her mom’s back when she was walking down the stairs. Nora swears that the cat did it as a favor to Nora, who had just been grounded for two weeks. She can’t finish the story because she’s laughing so hard, and I decide that my favorite thing in the world is this: I love the way she tells a story, with every single detail intact. She gives a full backstory and supporting details, too. Maybe she should be a writer. She tells me about her sister braiding her hair and teaching her how to apply lipstick. I learn how her mom started to change over the years. She went from a broke cafeteria worker in Bogotá to the socialite wife of one of the country’s most prestigious surgeons.

  Nora doesn’t sound impressed by her mom’s lifestyle. I can’t tell why.

  “What else? I want to know the important things, not what she does for a living. I want to know your favorite things about her. Memories, things like that.”

  Nora comes closer, and her fingers caress my chest. She runs an index finger through a patch of hair. “Why do you always ask the most intrusive questions?”

  “They’re only intrusive if you don’t want me to actually know.” My voice sounds much sadder than I meant it to.

  “Fine. My mother is . . . well, she is . . .” Nora struggles for words. “She used to make the best arroz con leche.”

  “Is that your favorite dessert?”

  “It’s the only one I like.”

  My jaw drops. The only one? I must have heard her wrong. “The only?”

  “Yep. The only.” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “Confession: Sweets aren’t my favorite; I’m more of a salty kind of gal.”

  “What? What kind of fraud—!” I’m only half pretending my horror. “But you’re a baker—I mean a pastry chef!”

  “And?” Nora’s smile grows, and I like the way her eyes twinkle under the city lights.

  “And? This is such . . . I don’t even know who you are anymore.” I laugh.

  She nuzzles farther into my chest. “So now you question me when I admit that I don’t like sweets, but not when I tell you about my mess of a life?” I hear the pain in her voice, the shame dripping from each word.

  “Well, everyone makes a mess now and then.” I want to soothe the ache inside her ribs. “But I don’t think I can come to terms with this.”

  I start to pull away from her. She latches her arm around mine, but I keep pulling.

  “This is too much.” I pretend to cry. For a moment, I consider that I’m a total freaking geek on the roof of this fancy apartment building where I don’t belong, but the moment passes and I decide that I don’t give a shit. “The betrayal!” I bury my face in my hands.

  Nora shrieks with laughter. “Oh, stop,” she giggles, trying to pry my hands from my face.

  I’m not stopping. She’s laughing and I love it. I shake my head in despair, my hands hiding the huge grin on my face. “I thought I knew you!” I mock-cry, and she can’t stop laughing as she tries, again, to move my hands from my face.

  When she pulls harder, I stop resisting and her arms fly with mine and I grab her waist and lay her down on the couch. Playful surprise fills her face, and her eyes are wide on mine. The neckline of her shirt is ridiculously low now that I’ve rumpled her perfect outfit and pinned her underneath my body. I run my nose from one side of her chest to the other, following the soft curve of the fabric over her soft breasts.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I ask, and she groans under my feverish touch. I lick her skin, then pull away. I keep an arm’s length between her body on the couch and myself, and I hold myself up using my arms, like I’m doing a push-up.

  “I could think of a few things,” she says, inches from my mouth.

  If I knew for certain that none of her sister’s neighbors would join us up here, I would have dropped my mouth between her thighs.

  chapter

  Twenty-eight

  Nora

  DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD go inside?” he asks me after another two rounds of our game. I have come to love this game, and he still hasn’t skipped a question. He thinks I don’t notice.

  I notice everything about him. My head is now in his lap, and his fingers are on my scalp, softly rubbing. I could fall asleep like this. When you go so long without being touched by another person, you forget how important that is. It’s ingrained into our brains, that we need the touch of another from our first day of life to our last.

  “One more round,” I suggest. I’ve saved my planned questions for the last round.

  Landon gently pats the top of my head. “One more.”

  I close my eyes and brace myself for the turn in the conversation. “Did you believe me when I told you that Dakota cheated on
you? Did her brother disappearing make you feel like you had to protect her?” Landon’s fingers freeze on my scalp. I force myself to continue. “And—”

  “Her brother didn’t disappear.” Landon puts his hands under my shoulders and lifts me off his lap.

  This is it. This is the trigger on their loaded gun.

  “That’s what I know,” I carefully explain. That’s the story she told me the night that I found her screaming his name in her sleep. I can’t imagine—what could be worse than that?

  Landon’s face is turned away from me when I look at him. I sit up, facing the door to the staircase behind us.

  “You don’t know anything, then.” His voice is flat.

  “Well, then tell me. Because this is a wall between us. You want answers to all of your questions, but you don’t want to give me anything in return. That’s convenient. This is what links you to her so fiercely.”

  He shakes his head, still not looking at me. “It’s not my story to tell.”

  “Yes, it is. You were a part of the story—it’s yours, too.” I’m starting to get frustrated; I could be more understanding if I knew what happened. “Landon, you can trust me. I just want you to open up to me.”

  The irony of this statement is not lost on me.

  Landon seems to take this in. He looks uncomfortable, and I feel like a bitch for pushing him this far. I have my share of secrets around my ex and divert Landon’s every effort to get to the bottom of what’s up there. I will share them with him one day, one day soon. I just need a little more time to make sense of what’s happening. I thought I had my mind made up, but Landon is clouding everything, making me unsure about my future.

  His voice starts out quiet, and I keep my mouth closed and my hand close to his, in case he wants to take it. “Carter was having a rough time at school. He was the target of a lot of people in our plat, his dad included. Our plat was the worst of them, all families from Kentucky and West Virginia. Stuck in their old ways and bigotry. It was one of those neighborhoods where you would see a rebel flag hanging from the window where there should be a curtain. Unemployment was incredibly high, and the grown-ups had nothing better to do than gossip about what the young people were up to. It was rumored that Carter and his best friend, Julian . . .” Landon pauses, gazing straight forward. His eyes aren’t focused. “It was said that they liked to kiss.”