27
CHAPTER 27 – NELLIE
In this moment, the camping chair felt like best thing Nellie owned, which was saying something, because the camping chair had been purchased from a thrift store in Bozeman for six dollars and had a small fraying strip along the left armrest where something had once, in a previous life, been stapled to it. But it reclined at exactly the right angle, and it was positioned three feet from Dolores’s open side door, and the Douglas firs overhead were doing their late-afternoon light thing where the sun came through in shifting columns of gold and amber and turned the whole forest floor into something so beautiful it was almost rude. So, Nellie had decided that the camping chair was a minor treasure and the thrift store in Bozeman deserved a very good Yelp review.
She had eaten a great breakfast, by which she meant toast and two hard-boiled eggs, and was considering this an exceptional nutritional achievement. The forest smelled like pine and something faintly musty from the afternoon sun hitting the undergrowth, and Eleanor stood twenty feet to her left,enormous and magnificent, her ancient bark lit gold at the base where the light reached.
It was, Nellie thought, an extremely good situation to be in. After such relentless physical activity the night before, she was considering a mid-morning nap when she was suddenly jolted upright by her own ringtone.
“Hi—”
“Where are you?” Sawyer asked, with something dangerously close to a Nellie-esque whine.
“That’s a fascinating opener.” Nellie laughed. “VeryRebecca. Very ‘the new wife has disappeared from Manderley.’”
“Where are you?” Sawyer asked again. This time, there was definitely more than a hint of whine.
“I’m in the forest.”
“Are you being vague to torture me? Where in the forest? Back at the cottage?”
“No, I’m back with Eleanor.” Nellie was thoroughly enjoying this needy side of Sawyer. “I needed trees. After last night, I’m sure you understand.”
“I thought you’d be here when I got home.” Nellie could hear the pout in Sawyer’s confession.
“I’m sorry. I got bored,” Nellie said, which was not entirely true but was partially true in the way that all good half-truths were. The full truth was that she’d woken up that morning in Sawyer’s bed and stared at the skyline through those floor-to-ceiling windows and felt her body quietly, involuntarily longing for the ground. Not because she didn’t want to be there; she had wanted quite desperately to be there. But she’d been surrounded by marble and glass and the alien, moneyed hush of a building that had been designed to make the outside world recede. After a point, she’d needed to hear birds.
“There’s a full refrigerator,” Sawyer said, as if this were a compelling counter-argument.
“I know there’s a full refrigerator. It has six varieties of mineral water in it.”
“You don’t have a refrigerator in the forest.”
“I have a very small refrigerator.”
“You have a cooler.”
“A cooler is a refrigerator. Don’t be elitist about it.” Nellie had propped her feet up on the cooler in question. “The thing is—and I mean this gently, with a great deal of affection—your apartment is very beautiful, and I feel like I’m living inside a magazine while I’m in it. A very expensive magazine that would never photograph me because my boots have mud on them.” She tipped her head back against the chair. “The marble, Sawyer. It’s alotof marble.”
“It’s a penthouse.”
“There are, I counted, four different kinds of marble. Four. In the bathroom alone!”
A small sound came down the line that was extremely close to a snort. “You counted the marble?”
“I had time. I was surrounded by it.” Nellie looked up at the canopy, at the flat green light filtering through the firs. “Also, the walk-in shower is enormous. Which is great if you enjoy standing in an enormous shower alone, but I found it slightly isolating.”
“The walk-in shower is good for some things,” Sawyer purred down the phone.
Nellie’s grip tightened slightly. “I’m— Yes, well. That’s a fair point. Abstractly, I accept that argument.” She cleared her throat. “But the point stands about the marble.”
“Where exactly is Dolores parked?”
“I told you, I’m with Eleanor. Don’t you remember where she is?”
“I know where Eleanor is, Nellie. That’s where we first met.”
“Then you know exactly where I am.” Nellie grinned up at the towering giant and fondly recalled the first time she’d laid eyes on Sawyer. “I’m parked right beside her. I wanted to celebrate.”
