“Thirty percent?!” she cries. “What the hell kind of dating apps are you on, Nora?”
“The normal ones!” I say.
In the interest of full discretion, yes, I outright inquire about fetishes up front. It’s not that thirty percent of men announce their kinks twenty minutes after meeting, but that’s my point. The last time my boss, Amy, went home with an un-vetted woman, she turned out to have a room that was entirely dolls. Floor-to-ceiling ceramic dolls.
How inconvenient would it be to fall in love with a person only to find out they had a doll room? The answer is “very.”
“Can we sit for a second?” Libby asks, a little out of breath, and we sidestep a group of German tourists to perch on the edge of a coffee shop’s windowsill.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Can I get you something? Water?”
She shakes her head, brushes her hair behind her ears. “I’m just tired. I need a break.”
“Maybe we should have a spa day,” I suggest. “I have a gift certificate—”
“First of all,” she says, “you’re lying, and I can tell. And second of all . . .” Her teeth worry over her pink-glossed lip. “I had something else in mind.”
“Two spa days?” I guess.
She cracks a tentative smile. “You know how you’re always complaining about how publishing pretty much shuts down in August and you have nothing to do?”
“I have plenty to do,” I argue.
“Nothing that requires you to be in the city,” she amends. “So what if we went somewhere? Got away for a few weeks and just relaxed? I can go a day without getting anyone else’s bodily fluids on me, and you can forget about what happened with Aaron, and we can just . . . take a break from being the Tired Supermom and Fancy Career Lady we have to be the other eleven months out of the year. Maybe you can even take a page out of your exes’ books and have a whirlwind romance with a local . . . lobster hunter?”
I stare at her, trying to parse out how serious she is.
“Fisher? Lobster fisher?” she says. “Fisherman?”
“But we never go anywhere,” I point out.
“Exactly,” she says, a ragged edge creeping into her voice. She grabs for my hand, and I note the way her nails are bitten down. I try to swallow, but it’s like my esophagus is inside a vise. Because, right then, I’m suddenly sure there’s more going on with Libby than run-of-the-mill money problems, lack of sleep, or irritation with my work schedule.
Six months ago, I’d have known exactly what was going on. I wouldn’t have even had to ask. She would’ve stopped by my apartment, unannounced, and flopped onto my couch dramatically and said, “You know what’s bothering me lately, Sissy?” and I would pull her head into my lap and tease my fingers through her hair while she poured out her worries over a glass of crisp white wine. Things are different now.
“This is our chance, Nora,” she says quietly, urgently. “Let’s take a trip. Just the two of us. The last time we did that was California.”
My stomach plummets, then rebounds. That trip—like my relationship with Jakob—is part of the time in my life I do my best not to revisit.
Pretty much everything I do, actually, is to ensure Libby and I never find ourselves back in that dark place we were in after Mom died. But the undeniable truth is I haven’t seen her look like this, like she’s at her breaking point, since then.
I swallow hard. “Can you get away right now?”
“Brendan’s parents will help with the girls.” She squeezes my hands, her wide blue eyes practically burning with hope. “When this baby gets here, I’m going to be an empty shell of a person for a while, and before that happens, I really, really want to spend time with you, like it used to be. And also I’m like three sleepless nights away from snapping and pulling a Where’d You Go, Bernadette, if not the full Gone Girl. I need this.”
My chest squeezes. An image of a heart in a too-small metal cage flashes over my mind. I’ve always been incapable of saying no to her. Not when she was five and wanted the last bite of Junior’s cheesecake, or when she was fifteen and wanted to borrow my favorite jeans (the seat of which never recovered from her superior curves), or when she was sixteen and she said through tears, I just want to not be here, and I swept her off to Los Angeles.
She never actually asked for any of those things, but she’s asking now, her palms pressed together and her lower lip jutted, and it makes me feel panicky and breathless, even more out of control than the thought of leaving the city. “Please.”
Her fatigue has made her look insubstantial, faded, like if I tried to brush her hair away from her brow, my fingers might pass through her. I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person this much while she was sitting right next to you, so badly everything in you aches.
She’s right here, I tell myself, and she’s okay. Whatever it is, you’ll fix it.
I swallow every excuse, complaint, and argument bubbling up in me. “Let’s take a trip.”
Libby’s lips split into a grin. She shifts on the windowsill to wriggle something out of her back pocket. “Okay, good. Because I already bought these and I’m not sure they’re refundable.” She slaps the printed plane tickets in my lap, and it’s like the moment never happened. Like in the matter of point five seconds, I got my carefree baby sister back, and I’d trade any number of organs to cement us both into this moment, to live here always where she’s shining bright. My chest loosens. My next breath comes easy.
“Aren’t you even going to look where we’re going?” Libby asks, amused.
I tear my gaze from her and read the ticket. “Asheville, North Carolina?”
She shakes her head. “It’s the airport closest to Sunshine Falls. This is going to be a . . . once-in-a-lifetime trip.”
I groan and she throws her arms around me, laughing. “We’re going to have so much fun, Sissy! And you’re going to fall in love with a lumberjack.”
“If there’s one thing that makes me horny,” I say, “it’s deforestation.”
“An ethical, sustainable, organic, gluten-free lumberjack,” Libby amends.
2
ON THE AIRPLANE, Libby insists we order Bloody Marys. Actually, she tries to pressure me into taking shots, but she settles for a Bloody Mary (and a plain tomato juice for herself). I’m not a big drinker myself, and morning alcohol has never been my thing. But this is my first vacation in a decade, and I’m so anxious I chug the drink in the first twenty minutes of our flight.
I don’t like traveling, I don’t like time off work, and I don’t like leaving my clients in the lurch. Or, in this case, one rather indispensable client: I spent the forty-eight hours pre-takeoff alternating between trying to talk Dusty down and pump her up.