Page 137 of Backslide
“And so you’re just going to listen? Not even try to convince her?”
“I don’t have a choice!”
“Don’t you, though?”
I go silent. What’s the point of trying to convince Nell to give us a chance? She’s already made up her mind. And she’s not wrong—shit is complicated. Emotionally. Logistically.
Who cares what my heart wants?
“Dude, listen,” Ben says. “I was with you when you broke up the first time and I’m with you now. I’ve been listening to you struggle with this shit forweeks. You’re better together. Both of you.”
“Both of us?”
“You think she’s not a fucking wreck too?”
I honestly don’t know.
“You say you don’t have a choice,” Ben says. “That you have to let her be. I think you don’t have a choice… youhaveto go get her.”
My knee is starting to bump up and down. Even if my mind isn’t there yet, my body is starting to wrap itself around the idea.
“What’s the worst thing that happens?” he asks.
She slams the door in my face. She says no again. We spend an amazing few days together, so I’m in even deeper, and then she sends me packing.
She doesn’t choose me…again.
My heart combusts into a billion pieces. Again.
“There’s nothing I can do if she still doesn’t think I’m good enough, that I’m even worth a try.”
“Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t think you’re good enough,” Ben says. “Maybe that’s onyou.”
And that’s when it hits me like a giant wave that I don’t have time to dive under: Since we were kids, I’ve been asking her to choose me.
I’ve told myself over and over again that she didn’t choose me.
But maybe it’s time I choseher.
31NELLIETODAY
“I think you should give him a chance,” Cara is saying to me for the hundredth time.
I have been getting the same kinds of messages from Sabrina too.
But I am way past that. It’s been weeks since I said goodbye to Noah. Weeks since he asked me to stay, to come to LA, to try some version of us being together, to ignore this feeling in my gut like I was still just one of his many followers—a sycophant in the cult of Noah.
Like he still just expected me to fold intohislife.
Nothing has changed.
It’s been weeks since the taxi pulled up at my brownstone apartment building, dumping me out onto a street that felt familiar and looked strangely smaller at the same time. A place I once really adored and is objectively lovely, but have maybe outgrown like so many once on-trend denim silhouettes.
Weeks since the bodega cat sauntered up, his plush belly almost brushing the ground, and shot me a dirty look like he’d hoped I was gone for good.
You can never go back, I tell my friends. The past is the past.
And Noah hasn’t reached out. No call. No text. No snail mail letter or singing telegram.
