Landline(38)

Neal looked away, and Georgie took in three gallons of air.

He was shaking his head. “I’m . . . sorry,” he said. “I wanted to see you. But then I got angry. I didn’t know what to—you’ve been ignoring me.”

“I haven’t been ignoring you,” she said.

“You stopped coming back to talk to me.”

“I thought I was bothering you.”

“You weren’t bothering me,” he said, facing her again. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you never come talk to me.”

“I never had to come talk to you.” Neal looked bewildered. “You always came to me.”

“I . . .” Georgie finished her drink so she could put down the cup.

Neal took it from her. He set the cup and his bottle on a desk behind him.

“I thought I was bothering you,” she said. “I thought you were just humoring me.”

“I thought you got tired of me,” he said.

She brought her hands up to her forehead. “Maybe we should stop thinking.”

Neal huffed and nodded, smoothing down the hair at the back of his head. They were both quiet for a dozen awkward heartbeats; then Neal motioned toward the bed. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Oh,” Georgie said, looking at the bed. There was another sign there:



NO, SERIOUSLY. HE WILL END ME.

Get out of here, okay?

—Whit



“I don’t think we should,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

They should leave. They were violating someone’s privacy. But . . . Georgie looked up at Neal, with his black T-shirt and his pale skin. He was smoothing down his hair again—ridiculously, it couldn’t be even a quarter-inch long in back. His elbow was in the air, his triceps flexed.

Georgie slid against the bed, sitting on the floor.

Neal looked down at her and nodded. “Okay . . . ,” he murmured, sitting next to her.

After a few seconds, she nudged her shoulder against his. “So. What have I missed?”

“When?”

“Since I’ve been sitting at my own desk,” she said, “playing hard to get.”

Neal smiled a little and looked down; his eyelashes brushed the top of his cheeks. “Oh, you know. Ink. Talking rabbits. Singing turtles. A chipmunk who wishes he was a squirrel.”

“Your comic last week was one of my favorites.”

“Thanks.”

“I put it in my Save Box,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s actually just a box. I, uh . . . I hate that feeling, you know, when you’re thinking about something you’ve read or heard, and you thought it was so smart at the time, but now you can’t remember it. I save things I don’t want to lose track of.”

“Must be a big box.”

“Not as big as you’d think,” she said. “I started putting your comic strips in there before I knew you were you.”

“Before you knew I was me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Thanks.” Neal’s legs were bent in front of him, and he was picking at loose threads on his thighs.

He seemed uncomfortable. Georgie had that feeling again, that she was the only one keeping the conversation alive. Maybe she should shut up and see if Neal would say anything. No. No more games. “Would it be easier to talk to me if you were holding a pen?”

Neal lowered his eyebrows, and his head bounced. “Huh. I guess so. Too bad I don’t smoke.”

“What?”

“Oh, you know—something to do with my hands.”

“Oh,” Georgie said. And then, because she wanted to, she reached out and took his hand. Laid her palm on the back of his hand. Curled her fingers behind his thumb. Neal looked down at their hands, then slowly turned his palm up, bending his fingers around hers. Georgie squeezed.

Neal’s magic hand. (This was the left one, so maybe it was slightly less magic.) Neal’s wide, square palm. Neal’s short, straight fingers—softer than Georgie expected, smoother than her own.

Neal, Neal, Neal.

“Before I knew you were you . . .” He shook his head. “There is no ‘before I knew you were you.’”

Georgie pushed her shoulder into his, and Neal pushed back, still looking at their hands.

“I saw you the first time I came down to The Spoon,” he said. “You were sitting on the couch. And Seth was there, and you kept shoving him away. You were wearing that skirt you have, the blue and green plaid one, you know? And your hair was a mess.”

She jabbed him with her shoulder, and he smiled a one-sided, one-dimpled smile for a second before he shook it away.

“It looked like spun gold—that’s what I remember thinking. That your hair wasn’t a real-person color. You’re not blond, you know? Your hair isn’t yellow. It isn’t yellow mixed with white or brown or orange or gray. It defies four-color CMYK processing. It’s metallic.”

Neal kept shaking his head. “Whit told me your name, and I didn’t believe him—Georgie McCool—but I started reading everything you wrote in The Spoon, and every time I came downstairs, there you were, on the couch or at your desk, always surrounded by half a dozen guys or just . . . him. I thought . . .” He shook his head some more. “When you came back to introduce yourself—Georgie, you didn’t have to introduce yourself. I always knew you were you.”