Chapter Fifteen: “Getting to Know You”
Chapter Fifteen
“Getting to Know You”
A TABLE AND TWO TO-GO CUPS OF COFFEE BETWEEN THEM, SEWANEE
heard the doors close and felt the cabin lurch gently beneath her and it occurred to her she was on a train, about to roll over the Italian countryside, with Nick, and how the hell had that happened? She’d always wanted to travel through Italy and now she was. She was beginning to glimpse how difficult she could make things. How she tended to see obstacles instead of answers. Why did she overcomplicate everything?
It was too early–both in the hour and her own introspection–to be asking herself this, so she gazed at the outskirts of industrial Venezia, and said, “Forty-eight hours ago, I was in L.A.”
“And seventy-two hours ago, we were fighting in the garden of an assisted living home in Burbank.”
Sewanee turned to him. “And three months ago, we were in Las Vegas.”
“I still dream about that steak.”
“The steak?”
“It
was
Wagyu.” He grinned. “And that wine.”
“The wine.”
“The wine.”
At the heat in his eyes, she lost her courage, looked back out the window. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. Don’t you like surprises?”
“Sure. Long as I know what they are.”
“Where’s the fun in that, eh?”
Sewanee assessed him, the very fact of him, sitting there across from her, on a train in Italy. She felt like she knew so much about him, but it seemed backward, as if she had watched a film from the end to the beginning. “Well, if it’s going to be a while, entertain me. Tell me the story of Brock McNight.”
Nick dropped his chin to his chest. “Jaysus. All right.” He took a breath. “After the band broke up and Jason got out of treatment, we moved back to Prescott to get on our feet. We started seeing old friends and one of them mentioned this kid we all knew in high school, this defensive lineman, Brad. She says, you won’t believe what Brad’s doing now. And she pulls out her phone, brings up a . . .” He lowered his voice to the point where he was almost mouthing the words: “porn site. And Brad had a whole channel. His name was upandcoming69–I know–and he would . . .” Nick shifted in his seat and Sewanee peered at him, already feeling herself start to redden. “He wanks into the camera and–
buongiorno
!” Nick bleated at the man who’d materialized to check their tickets in the slots by their headrests. He only grunted in reply and moved on.
Sewanee stifled a laugh. Nick leaned in and lowered his voice once again. “And he’d dirty-talk. In this caveman voice. And look: I’m no expert and Brad having a hand shandy is definitely not my, er, kink? But even I could tell it was hot.”
Sewanee wasn’t sure her grin could be any bigger, that the laws of physics would allow it.
“So, me being me, I ran with it. I started messing with Jason, doing the voice around the house. Like, he’d be on the phone
with his ma and I’d get right up next to him and say, ‘you like seeing Daddy hard, do ya? Give that tight little ass to Daddy.’”
Sewanee covered her mouth, but too late to smother the laugh that blasted through the train.
Nick helicoptered a hand and Sewanee noticed a little pink tinge appear on his cheeks. “You get the picture. And then one day, I lost a bet to Jason, and the penalty was I had to talk in the Brad voice the whole day. And then whenever I lost a bet–we bet a lot because we’re overgrown children–he’d make me use the voice. Go talk to that girl. Ask for directions. Order takeout. And it started . . . working. People responded to it. And then June was casting one of her books–this is after you stopped doing ’em–and I thought, well, I could do that. Not one of hers, obviously, that would just be–”
“Right.”
“But I sent one of her friends a sample of the Brad voice . . .”
“And the rest is history.”
“Yes. And now it needs to
really
be history.”
“So, you do want to stop? What you said in the e-mails wasn’t bullshit?”
Nick heaved a sigh. “Sewanee, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it as many times as you want, but nothing in the e-mails–or the texts–was bullshit. That was me. That was real. All of it. Every bit.”
Sewanee believed him. Or certainly wanted to. “But you have such a good thing going. You could maybe pull back a little to focus on the band, but why do you want to stop completely?”
“Because it’s been four hundred books and five draining years and because . . .” He chewed on his lip. “Because I’ve lost track of who I am when I’m not pretending to be stupid Brad.”
Before they knew it, the train was pulling to a stop in Padua and Nick popped up and shuttled Sewanee out of the train and, as she said, “Padua? Why Padua?” Nick led her to a bus. With an
eyebrow raise from Sewanee and an answering smirk from Nick, they climbed aboard.
After settling into two small seats, Nick’s knees tucked up hard against the seatback in front of them, he turned to her and said, “So. L.A. Really?”
She pointed a finger at him. “There’s the New York snobbery! I knew it was only a matter of time.”
“It’s just so . . .” He moved his head around, the namby-pamby, ineffectual gesture more accurately descriptive than any word could be.
“Hey, that’s my hometown you’re
not
talking about.”
“Is it?” Nick looked surprised. “I figured you were there because of acting.”
Sewanee shook her head. “Born and raised. I went to college in New York, though.”
“Where?”
“Julliard.”
Nick whistled. Then he looked at his lap. “You ever think you’d consider going back? To New York?”
Not too long ago she would have said absolutely not. The weather, alone. The expense. Her family and friends in L.A. But now? “Anything’s possible, I guess. Given everything that’s changed over the past few years, I don’t
have
to be in L.A. Other than for my grandmother.” She paused. Swallowed. Waited. She found she couldn’t use her voice just then.
Her phone hadn’t rung once since she’d arrived in Italy. Sewanee had wondered: that last call they’d had, where Blah had talked about what losing her grip on reality was like . . . had she rallied just long enough to say goodbye?
At her obvious vulnerability, Nick stayed silent. He simply reached over and took her hand in her lap.
“That’s why I’m doing the series to begin with, you know,” she forced out. “To pay for her care.”
“And here I thought you’d just wanted to meet me.” Sewanee chuckled gratefully and Nick asked, “I am curious, though, what would you do with the money if you didn’t have your gran to care for?”
Sewanee didn’t have a quick response. She couldn’t honestly say she’d never thought about it. Of course she had. But she had never given it voice. “I suppose I’d pay off debt. School and medical. I’m going to have to start thinking about moving, so maybe a down payment for a place somewhere more affordable than Hollywood?” She made an idle gesture at her eye patch. “Maybe get another surgery.”
“You need another surgery?”
“No.”
“Then why would you be getting another?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not saying I would, I . . . I mean, it’s never going to look normal. But they can do a lot now, so.” She did her best to make that last bit sound offhanded.
“Does it make it harder to do your job? With how much you have to read?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore. In the beginning, it was exhausting, getting used to reading with one eye. Doing anything with one eye. Left to my own devices, I could sleep fourteen, sixteen hours easily.”
“I can do that easily and I’ve got both of mine.”
Sewanee bumped his shoulder appreciatively. Her head found its way there, and his arm came around her, resting itself effortlessly against her side. He gave her a light squeeze when he said, lowly, “I’m truly sorry that happened to you.” There was a silence. He took a breath. “And I’ve been thinking about what I said to
you the other night, about why I came up to you at the bar, and your friend, and that whole palaver, and it didn’t come out the way I . . . I didn’t get a chance to say everything I wanted to say.”
Sewanee lifted her head and met Nick eye to eye. “If Adaku hadn’t been sitting with me, if she never existed. If all you saw in that bar was this woman”–Sewanee pointed directly at her eye patch–“would you have come over–”
“Yes. And that’s the exact hypothetical scenario I was going to give you. The answer is yes, I would have come over.”
“Truth?”
“Yes, absolutely. But–”
“
But
.”
Nick forged ahead. “But! Ultimately, I don’t think it matters what I say, does it? Will you ever truly believe, deep down, that anything other than pity brought me over to you? Nothing I say can make that scar disappear
for you
. I can tell you I don’t see it and you will always see it. I can tell you you’re everything that keeps me up at night and everything I daydream about and how that makes you feel might last a day or a week or an hour. Feelings are temporary. They stick around as long as you believe in them and then they’re gone, waiting to be believed in again. If they were permanent, then we’d only have to say I love you once and be done with it for the rest of our lives.”
Sewanee stared at him. “Did you practice that?”
Nick smiled. “It was a long flight.” He squeezed her hand.
The bus began to slow and Nick leaned over her to look out the window and stood, pulling his hand away. She glanced outside and saw a two-lane country road lined with coastal pines. Though as far as she could tell they were nowhere near the water. Nick pulled her up. They disembarked.
The air was crisp, fresh, a slight note of citrus blossom, but
there were no citrus trees. There was an open field. A warehouse at the far end of it. A house painted a Tuscan orange. A squat redbrick apartment building.
Nick began walking. She followed. She felt him watching her. “What?”
“I think I’m a bit in shock that I can just . . . look at you. That I can think about you and then just . . . look at you.”
Sewanee smiled. “If you’d rather text, I’ll understand.”
Nick hooted a laugh. “Not when the reality is so much better than whatever I’d cooked up in my head.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
She stopped walking. She had to. “Nick. I heard what you said on the bus and I understand it, I do.” He stopped walking, too, but that made it feel like too much of a
discussion
, so she started walking again. “But it’s hard for me. You met
this
me, but there was another me once. And for the record I found it as difficult to believe men and what they saw when they looked at me then as it is to believe you and what you see when you look at me now.”
“Is that supposed to help us?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “What I’m saying is, I want to move forward. I just don’t think we can realistically forget how this whole thing started.”
“But how it started is not how it ended.”
“But it did end.”
He laughed. “Then for Pete’s sake, what are we doing here?”
She stopped again. He had a point. But it still didn’t feel settled. So she threw out her arms. “Where is
here
, anyway? Where the hell are we?”
Nick only smiled and reached for her hand and she let him take it. And they walked like that down a sidewalk somewhere in Italy.
When the silence got to her, she looked over at him and found he was watching her again. “What?!”
He looked down. “Just thinking this time.”
She smiled. “About?”
“Honestly?” He looked up. Then back at her. At her hairline. At her mouth. At her eye. Taking stock. “Right now? In this moment? About moving to L.A. and taking you down to City Hall and figuring everything else out later.”
“Nick,” she breathed.
He shook his head, squeezed his eyes closed. “Sorry. You know I don’t have a filter.” He took a breath. “Ignore me, I’m jet-lagged.”
But what if I wanted that, too? she thought. It was appealing, the prospect of it. Of giving up on figuring anything else out right now. To have someone instead of herself to focus on. To just be happy for as long as possible. To ignore the future.
She realized she’d been silent for too long when Nick asked, nervously, “Now, what are you thinking?”
She looked wistfully up at a tree. “That we should finish the series. Here.”
A beat. “What?”
She smiled at him. “We’re together, the scripts are ready. Jason wanted to do Duet Narration for the sex scenes. Why not?”
Nick dropped her hand and skipped out in front of her, turning around to walk backward. “Recorded on location in Venice, Italy!”
Sewanee chuckled. “Ready-made promotion!”
“Ka-ching!”
Energized, Nick whipped his phone out of his pocket. “Let me text Jason, see if he can find a studio for later today.” He quickly typed while Sewanee gazed about. Eventually, Nick stopped walking and she figured he needed to concentrate on his phone, but when she looked at him, he was looking up at
her, his hand wrapped around one pole in a large, open iron gate. A sign proclaimed:
L
UXARDO–
M
ARASCHINO
.
Sewanee blinked at it. Then she blinked at Nick. “As in . . . the cherries? The liqueur?”
He smiled. “Fancy a Last Word?”