They got on the subway at 181st Street, and Noah said, “It’s a long ride, so we should sit.” He gestured to a seat and waited until she was settled before lowering himself next to her. Their thighs touched. She pulled away slightly. Then regretted it. Then scolded herself for regretting it. Then went back to regretting it.
“What’s the deal with you, Noah Denning?” The magical wine was making her chatty, too, apparently.
“What do you mean?”
I mean why are you so appealing? Why can’t you hate your exes like everyone else?
Why can’t you be the jerk I remember you being?
He was looking at her funny. Right. She hadn’t answered his question. “You live in, as your sister says, a castle in Manhattan, and you’re friends with magical chefs who give you wine to go? You grew up pretty good, my friend.”
“Well, as it relates to the castle, my big secret is that it’s actually pretty affordable. We public servants don’t roll in the bucks like you private firm types.”
That was true. That divide was part of why Wendy did so much pro bono defense work. Why she argued about rats in front of the Landlord and Tenant Board.
“I lived in the dorms at NYU,” Noah went on. “After I graduated, I had this stupid youthful snobbery about Manhattan versus the outer boroughs.” He rolled his eyes. “I was determined to stay on the island, and the only place I could afford was way uptown. I lived in this shitty little one-room apartment.” He shrugged. “I sort of fell in love with the neighborhood, though.”
It was easy to see why. Everything about Noah’s life, from his roomy apartment in an enchanting co-op to the vital street life of his neighborhood, was appealing. He was charmed. Just like he had been in high school.
Actually, that wasn’t fair. Wendy knew better than to say Noah led a charmed life. He’d been dealt quite the blow when his dad died. But despite all that, he managed to move through the world with a grace that Wendy had always envied—and, if she was being honest with herself, been attracted to.
“Functionally, it’s no different from being in, for example, Brooklyn,” Noah said. “The commute is a slog—it’s probably longer, actually. But I don’t know, I like being holed up way at the top of the city.” He stretched and sighed like a happy cat. “But it is going to take us a while, so get cozy.”
Cozy. There was that damn word again.
Chapter Seven
It was nearly dark by the time they ascended the steps to the High Line at Gansevoort and Washington.
“How many times have you been to New York?” Noah asked, taking a sip of his illicit wine as they started walking. Wendy had proven knowledgeable about the subway system and had seemed to know exactly where to go to access the park.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe eight? Nine?”
“You should have looked me up.” He pitched the statement carefully so it didn’t sound like he was miffed or hurt or something stupid like that. But seriously. His sister’s best friend, the girl who’d practically lived in their house growing up, his long-ago running buddy, had been in his city that many times, and she’d never bothered to drop him a line? Wasn’t that a little odd? “I would have been good for a meal or two. Or a run.”
Wendy cleared her throat. “I guess I just never thought of it.”
Well. That stung. As much as he didn’t want it to.
“Anyway, I always travel alone, so I get into this mode where I’m kind of living in my own head—keeping company with myself, that sort of thing.”
“Where’s the farthest you’ve been?”
“Well, geographically, Australia. But in terms of remoteness, I’d have to go with Uganda.” She laughed, remembering that trip. “Uganda was kind of a disaster, actually. I had this idea I should expand my horizons and do a safari. It turns out I’m terrified of animals when they’re not behind bars. So now I just embrace my limitations and stick to cities.”
He had to admit, he was impressed. Other than being friends with Jane, Wendy had always been a loner. He’d never been sure if that was by choice or by default. As a girl, she’d been quiet, serious, and shy with outsiders. He had learned recently, though, that she no longer possessed those qualities—witness her astonishing “why buy the cow?” comment at the restaurant, which he still wasn’t over. Still, there was some core aspect of her, a Wendy-ness, that remained unchanged.
But whether she was still a loner or not was something quite apart from traveling alone. And places like Uganda, too. Wasn’t there a guerilla resistance there? He refrained from quizzing her about the safety precautions he sincerely hoped she’d taken. Because, as he’d been so viscerally reminded by his body’s reaction to her recently, she was not his honorary little sister anymore.
“What’s the appeal of all that travel?” He could appreciate a vacation as much as the next person—in theory anyway. He personally never took them aside from the odd trip home to see his mom and sister. But he had been a devoted reader of National Geographic as a kid.
“I don’t know.” She started slowly, like she was trying to articulate a feeling she had never had to put into words before. “The world is so big. Full of amazing places that are nothing like Toronto. Full of possibilities.” She tilted her head as if she were considering her own answer. As if she were finding it lacking somehow.
“Most people would agree with that statement, but most people wouldn’t translate that into actually getting off their asses and going to Uganda.” He wasn’t sure why he was pressing her. Her explanation had been reasonable, but he couldn’t shake the fact that there was something more she wasn’t saying.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s a bit of a compulsion, I’ll admit. I feel it as a responsibility, almost. An imperative. I imagine it’s like the way some people collect things, like stamps or, I don’t know, vintage records. I feel a certain kind of pressure—it’s self-imposed, I know, but there’s a completist impulse.”
He was nodding. “Yeah, but why travel particularly? Why not vintage records? Or why not stick to Pez dispensers?”
* * *
Because I’m always running away from heartbreak.
Because I’m making sure that I’ll always be able to leave.
And you’re the one who made me this way.
As the answers to Noah’s question—the real answers—popped into Wendy’s head, tears gathered in her eyes. She was body-slammed the way you can only be when you’re confronted with a harsh, unexpected truth. It was the truth, though. It was all true.
She’d started the travel thing as a way to avoid Noah when he came home for visits. She’d been literally running away.
And what had she been running from? Noah and all the pain he had caused. It wasn’t that she regretted any of it. She’d come to love travel for its own sake, but how much of that was because it gave her power? Agency. She felt her most invincible when she was tromping through a foreign city alone. Like no one could hurt her. Travel reinforced the knowledge that she’d never be passively left behind again.
Theoretically. She didn’t really have any people left to leave her. Her parents were dead. Jane was getting married.
Mary, though. She had Aunt Mary.
She gulped back the unshed tears and searched for something diversionary to say, stuffing the astonishing and unwelcome truth bomb down for examination another day.
She pointed at an apartment building that was tucked up against the rail-right-of-way that was the park. “Like, think about those people. What is their story? Don’t you want to know?” There. That was true. She did always wonder about life in the places she visited.
“Their story is that they’re wealthy yuppies who bought into that building years before they built this park, and they regret choosing that particular unit now that a parade of humanity passes by their living room every day.”
She chuckled at his analysis. “Sure, but that’s just an example. The city is full of stories. The world is full of stories. Don’t you want to know them?
”
“Man, you do have it bad.” He bumped his shoulder against hers as they walked. It was an affectionate but meaningless gesture. Exactly the sort of thing you’d do when you were teasing your little sister’s friend.
So why did it send shivers down her spine?
She took a slug of her wine, wanting to recapture that warm, buzzy feeling from before, as dangerous as that probably was. “Anyway, I’m planning a trip around the world, so maybe that will get it out of my system. I’ll have seen it all!”
“A trip around the world,” he echoed. “You hear the phrase, but is that a real thing?”
“Sort of. You can actually book a so-called ‘trip around the world’ with a tour company. They have itineraries that range from a few months to years. But I’m doing it on my own. Six months, thirty-one countries.”
He whistled. “Wow. When is this going down?”
“September. About a month after the wedding—I’m taking a leave from the firm.”
“So you’re just going to pick up and leave your life behind?”
“Pretty much.” It wasn’t like she had anyone to tell her not to. It wasn’t like anyone would really even notice her absence.
Okay, that wasn’t fair. Jane and Elise and Gia would notice. Jane was even going to meet her a few times in a few different places over the course of the trip, saying that she simply could not go six months without seeing Wendy. And Wendy had planned things so she could overlap with Gia during Fashion Week in Milan.
And Mary would notice, as would her colleagues. Wendy’s assistant was already dreading being assigned to another lawyer.
So there. She had a full life populated with people who would miss her. She was just going to take a break from it for a while.
That was a thing people did. Normal people, not just people who were running from their pasts.
Right?
* * *
“Enough about my travel bug,” Wendy said emphatically, stopping near a fountain.
Fair enough. Noah wasn’t sure why he’d been questioning her so intently. It was just that doing something like that, up and leaving your life behind, just putting your job and your responsibilities on hold for six months, was beyond his imagining. What would it be like to wake up in the morning in a strange place, with no agenda? No commitments. Alone.
But maybe she wasn’t waking up alone. After all, as she’d so vehemently declared in the bar, she was the casual sex type now, right?
He had a sudden image of Wendy waking up in some Mediterranean villa, untangling herself from a handsome, charming Italian lothario. She’d throw open the shutters and the sun would come pouring in. She’d declare her need for coffee, and Mr. Italy would say some shit like, “Later, bellissima,” and pull her back to bed.
Goddammit.
“Too bad it’s not deep enough to throw a penny in and make a wish.” Still gazing at the fountain, Wendy ran a strappy black sandal over the sheen of water that ran over black stones. Her toenails were painted cherry red.
“You don’t seem like the wish-making type,” he said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Whoa. He’d offended her. He didn’t remember Wendy being so quick to anger. Yes, they’d always competed against each other, but it had never had a genuinely mean edge to it—not that he remembered, anyway. But there had been a few times lately where he’d felt like she was out-of-proportion mad—at him in particular. “I only meant that you seem more like the hard-work type, not the stand-around-and-wait-for-wishes-to-come-true type.” Or, you know, the jet-off-to-the-Mediterranean-to-be-loved-up-by-handsome-Italian-strangers type.
She smirked. “Oh. Okay. I’ll accept that interpretation.”
He chuckled, that flare-up of anger diffused, and they walked in silence for a while, taking in the greenery of the linear park.
“How’s work?” she asked as they approached West 17th, where the park widened into an amphitheater of sorts.
Work was a topic he could deal with. Talking about work was much more his wheelhouse than talking about trips around the world. “Busy. We’ve had a couple people leave and they haven’t been replaced yet, so the caseload is brutal these days.”
“Do you ever think about going to the private sector?” She smiled and answered her own question. “No.”
He raised his eyebrows. She’d answered correctly, but how had she known?
“You’re pretty much in the perfect job. You’ve always had an impulse to help people, I think. And you were never afraid of hard work or clocking long hours.”
“You noticed that?”
“Well, you pretty much worked full-time in high school.”
“Not by choice, though.” He glanced down at her. He rarely talked about those days. In fact, the last time he’d spoken openly about how ground down he’d been back then had probably been with Wendy, on that run that day he couldn’t keep up with her.
“I know,” she said quietly. “Bennett and I were teasing you about being overly responsible, but you did what you had to do back then.”
Well, shit. Of course he knew his mom and sister appreciated how hard he had worked. But he had always tried to downplay it. When teachers asked about the bags under his eyes or his tendency to fall asleep in class, he would laugh it off and vow to cut back on his hours. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t.
He hadn’t been looking for glory. He still wasn’t. But somehow, all these years later, to know that Wendy, who back then had felt like the only person who really saw him, still remembered the sacrifices he’d made…Well, it was stupidly gratifying.
He cleared his throat. “I guess it just became a habit—the long hours, I mean. So I suppose law was a natural place to end up.”
“I would have thought you’d go for corporate law, though. A more lucrative subfield than being a public prosecutor, given your obsession with taking care of Jane and your mom.”
“My obsession?” That was taking it too far. He’d had a responsibility. He still did. That wasn’t the same as an obsession.
“Poor choice of word, but you know what I mean.”
He did know, that was the thing. “I thought about it.” He might as well tell her the truth. “I even interned at an M&A firm. It was fine, but…”
“But what?” she prompted.
“There was a series of high-profile sexual assaults in the city at that time. They arrested a suspect and charged him. It was all over the news. I followed the trial, as did most New Yorkers. At one point, the lead prosecutor was featured in New York magazine. They did an interview with him, asking why he’d gone into law, and why he’d been so dogged with that case in particular. He said, ‘I have a mother. I have two daughters. I have a sister. I have a responsibility to make sure they can walk through the world feeling safe. Everyone should be able to walk through the world feeling safe.’ Or something like that.” It wasn’t “something like that,” though—that had been the exact quote. It was burned into his consciousness.
“So you widened your protector thing from your family to the public.” Wendy wasn’t looking at him as she spoke; she was nodding and looking up at the dark-blue, starless city sky.
“Okay, what?”
“That outweighed the desire to make shitloads of money to send home, is what I’m thinking.”
“I do well enough,” he said, suddenly defensive. Sure, he could be making much more in corporate law, but he was fine. He had a good life. There was nothing wrong with wanting to help people.
“So what about Cameron?” She startled him out of his thoughts with the sudden shift in topic.
It took a moment for him to extricate his mind from the past. “Cameron? What about him?”
“Do you ever get the feeling that he and Jane are kind of a…weird match?”
Whoa. “What does that mean?”
“Okay, that came out kind of wrong.”
“Kind of? I never pegged you as a snob, Wendy. Cameron may not have a lot of money, but—”
<
br /> “That’s not what I mean!” she protested. Then she made a vague noise of frustration and walked away.
The sight of her marching away ignited a spark of annoyance in his chest. She thought she could drop that cryptic remark about Cameron into conversation and then just take off, hips swaying beneath her fitted dress?
His inner litigator awakened, he jogged to catch up with her as she reached the entrance to the Chelsea Thicket, a narrow passageway through a miniature forest. He had the momentary, absurd thought that he had been transported into a fairy tale, and that he was following a magical creature of unknown allegiance into a forest that might or might not contain the seeds of his doom.
“Explain yourself.” He fell into step beside her and put his hand on her forearm to stop her from going any farther.
She shrugged off his hand. “Don’t get your undies in a bunch. I just worry sometimes that they’re moving too fast. That they’re too different.”
“Evidence?”
“Cameron is rough. Jane is refined.”
He set his travel mug on the ground, put his hands on his hips, and tried to stare her down, like he would a hostile witness in court. She was unmoved. She just gazed back up at him, her raised eyebrows telegraphing the degree to which she was unimpressed by him.
As annoyed as he was, he couldn’t help but admire her backbone, the way she gave as good as she got. He could imagine her in court, the fearsome warrior. But he knew all about courtroom image, about how winning was at least partly a function of projecting confidence and an unwavering belief in one’s argument, so he wasn’t going to let her see any of that admiration. Instead, he moved on to oral arguments. “Wendy. My sister is a lot of things. I love her more than anyone else in this world. But she is currently sitting in my apartment eating a Big Mac Extra Value Meal. Jane is not what you would call refined. Why don’t we just drop this little charade and you say what you really mean?”
It Takes Two Page 8
