Page 88 of Backslide
“Wow,” Nell gasps, pressing her palm against the glass. “It’s like hobbit green out there.”
It’s been so long since she last spoke that I’m almost startled. “Is that an official Pantone color?”
“It should be. Hobbit Green. Jane Austen Green. Cotswolds Green.”
The art director would know. Even if she wouldn’t be caught dead within a mile of anythingLord of the Rings.
It’s a gray day today. Even inland at the estate, the weather felt changeable before we left, the clouds low and heavy above us. It’s not like a late-spring storm brewing on the East Coast, where you can almost smell the rain before it comes, humidity building like it has no choice but to give. This feels cold in a way that’s more heedless of humans and their convoluted seasons—cold to the bone.
The closer we get to the coast, the more the temperature drops. And the scenery grows more rural. Nurseries and garden stores replace wine and sandwich shops. There are cows and sheep behindbrown metal fencing, roaming meadows of grass so thick and verdant that it looks thatched.
Craggy rock formations and eucalyptus trees line the narrow dirt road beside wildflowers with free rein. It is shamelessly ample. And it’s impossible not to be moved.
Nell sighs. Almost contentedly.
I love the sound.
I wonder if she likes road trips. I never got to learn that about her. We were too young when it all came crumbling down.
“Have you ever been to Ireland?” she asks now, tapping the window absently with her knuckle.
“Yes,” I say. “But only Dublin. I really liked it though.”
“I went abroad to London in college,” she says. “I never got to Ireland, but I visited Scotland. And it’s so weird, but it kind of looked like this.”
Great minds.
It feels so odd. To know someone so well and also not at all.
“I was just thinking that,” I say. “It’s crazy that this is forty-five minutes from the town plaza where we were baking in all that sun.”
The mention of the town plaza is probably a misstep. I can’t be sure where Nell’s mind wanders, but mine veers directly toward that almost kiss in the shade, her lips parting with a nearly inaudible sound that echoed through me. And maybe that’s why she goes silent again.
It’s better than thinking about the hot tub, which it’s now my goal in life to move beyond. Forget becoming the world’s most renowned surgeon. Instead, I just want to forget the feel of her body on mine. I’m pretty sure it will haunt me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens. Her hair wet at the ends, curling into ringlets, dripping rivulets of water down her neck and chest, as she leaned in and nipped my lip, shot me a secret smile.
Focus on the road.
I take this as encouraging though, I tell myself. The fact that she’s willing to engage at all. The fact that we can talk without biting each other’s heads off, if only for a short reprieve.
“My fiancé was from London,” she says, finally, still gazing out the window. “Not that I met him when I was abroad. It was years later in New York. But we went to England together a bunch of times, to see his family.”
“That sounds nice.”
“You’d think.”
Not for the first time, I wonder why that moron let her go. I wonder about the morons before him, too. The ones who came after me.
“Didn’t Cara say he was a political journalist? Does he cover American politics?”
She nods.
“But he’s a Brit.”
“Oh, yeah. And very high and mighty about it. Don’t get him started on ‘your American system’ and so on.”
“He sounds fun.”
She actually lets a small laugh fly. “He wasn’t themostfun.”
