Finally Moving On After A Decade novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Day Thirty
Nolan's POV
At eight o'clock on the twenty-fourth of November, I knocked on Freja's door with the thing I had worked out in my hands.
It wasn't flowers.
It was the pencil.
She opened the door in a green sweater, barefoot, with her hair down.
The scratch on her cheek had healed to a thin pink line.
"You're on time," she said.
"I've been on this landing since seven forty."
"Come in, then. You'll frighten the neighbors."
I stood in her living room, in the lamplight, where I had slept with my head on her knee.
She shut the door and leaned on it.
"One time," she said. "Plain words."
"I thought about it for twenty-three hours."
"And?"
"I wrote it down and threw it away. It sounded like a speech."
"Good." Her mouth moved. "Say the bad version."
I held out the pencil.
"For ten years I've been the man who stays," I said. "I didn't know there was another kind. I thought if I stopped being useful, nobody would want me in the room."
Freja did not move.
"On the stage that night, I took off the ring and I felt nothing but air. And then a woman handed me a bottle of water and told me where the garage was." I swallowed. "I didn't need anything from you. You gave it anyway, and you asked for nothing."
"I asked for a thirty-day rule."
"You asked me to be sure. Nobody has ever asked me that."
I took one step.
"I'm not rescuing you, and I'm not hiding in you. I'm not a rebound, Freja, I'm what comes after one." I put the pencil in her hand. "I want you. On a Tuesday, in the shop, with sawdust in your hair. I want to find out who I am when nobody's drowning, and I want to find it out next to you."
She looked down at the pencil.
When she looked up, her eyes were wet and furious.
"That," she said, "is not the bad version."
"It's the only one I've got."
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