This Close to Okay(20)

There were nights when she was feeling low and Nico could detect it in the atmosphere. Knew to bring her flowers or chocolate and wine. Food. He’d stop by her favorite noodle shop without asking, order the spicy pad kee mao with tofu and basil fried rice with shrimp. Calamari and dumplings. He was a proper, much-needed companion in those dizzying mushroom-cloud months after her divorce. She’d lost Joel—her husband, her lover, her partner, her friend, her company—the person she’d shared her entire life with. The person she’d slept next to and gone to the movies with. The person she’d told everything, the person who’d become a part of her family. The person she’d eaten dinner with every night and who went with her to the grocery store on Saturday afternoons. All the big and little things. The stupid, annoying things. The important things. Now she had to do them all alone.

But Nico had been there when she needed him, like a stashed first-aid kit.

Nico knew Tallie wasn’t ready for a real relationship or anything close to one. She was up front with him from the beginning, letting him know she hadn’t been with any man besides Joel in the past thirteen years. She told Nico that he was the last man she’d been with before Joel. She told Nico she was afraid she couldn’t even remember what it was like to be with any man besides Joel. Nico had said he’d help her remember. He’d said “good thing I’m not Joel” before kissing her mouth like he’d done when they were undergrads with spicy ramen breath and stinging eyes from staying up too late studying for finals. It was like a well-written short story: Nico had been an assistant to Tallie’s French professor, and Nico had also become her French tutor with benefits. Oui, they were adults now, with adult lives and the freedom and problems that came with, but. Part of him would always be College Nico.

College Nico in the emerald library light with his belle bouche and slow, stomach-swooping kisses. College Nico’s wide eyes when Tallie learned to translate and repeat his dirty talk. J’ai envie de te baiser. College Nico in a berry raglan sweatshirt, a pencil behind his ear; College Tallie turning into a soft candle watching him slip it there. College Nico in that fisherman’s cable-knit sweater heathered like static—the one she’d wanted to roll around like a dog on, cover herself with his scent. Espresso, peppermint, paper. Nico, je suis à toi.

Nico had been married for only two years when he and Saskia got divorced, and although their divorce wasn’t as gasp-scandalous and drama-filled as Tallie and Joel’s, Tallie and Nico found the same comfort in their similar broken afters. He called and texted Tallie often, checking in on her, and it was supportive and encouraging, not smothering. They’d slept together three times since her divorce, all three times at his spacious, glassy loft downtown. Him, breathless and naked on his back, reminding her before she left the second time that he was down for hooking up whenever she needed to remember that Joel didn’t have the only cock in the world.

It’d been a month since she’d seen him. He’d texted a few days before, telling her he might swing by Lionel’s costume party. Before meeting Emmett, she would’ve almost certainly gone home with Nico afterward, but Emmett was her “date” to the party now. Nico wasn’t nosy and wouldn’t ask too many questions. Their relationship had always been casually intense. Intensely casual. And if Nico wanted, Tallie was sure he could easily find a fun woman dressed like a taco or a clever woman wearing a white slip with the word Freudian written on it and disappear with her down Lionel’s long driveway at the end of the night. Thinking of Nico leaving the costume party with someone who wasn’t her didn’t exactly flick Tallie’s jealousy switch, but somewhere inside—somewhere she couldn’t specifically give voice to—she prickled.

Nico could be exceedingly stubborn and obsessive, fixating on an argument until he felt his point had been made one hundred times, but he was also self-aware and quick to apologize. He was handsome and desirable, like the men from her beloved Jane Austens. She imagined Miss Austen anachronistically describing him as tall, with cowlike Sinatra-blue eyes and long lashes—and an amiable countenance to match them. Nico’s energy was as blue as his eyes. Tallie sometimes found herself wondering why she didn’t go ahead and marry Nico when he asked, but they were in college. Couldn’t get the timing right. And now, any sort of serious relationship with anyone, even Nico, would be too soon after Joel.

She hadn’t acted out after her divorce besides unabashedly leaning into her natural tendency for woolgathering, crying while eating too much ice cream, indulging in a glass or two of wine in the middle of her off days, and spending too much money on yarn, pajamas, and French and Korean skin care. She was secretly jealous of her divorced girlfriends who’d gotten plastic surgery, splurged on tropical vacations and luxury cars, had mindless sex with men they’d met on hookup apps. One girlfriend of hers disappeared to Paris with a dashing Frenchman for more than a month. Aisha cut her hair after her breakups and repainted the walls of her bedroom, burned sage and smoked away even the faintest memories of her lovers. Tallie hadn’t gotten a prescription for sleeping pills when she’d been struggling; she hadn’t even gotten a post-divorce haircut. She hadn’t gone wild yet, but she’d been feeling the pinball lever of it pulled out tight, ready for release after years of ignoring her own feelings and listening to everyone else’s instead. She could be wild! She could do something! Anything could happen!