AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks by the door, then shot off a quick text toKaren.
What’sshakin?
She sat on the couch with a sigh and pulled her feet up under herbody.
Crazy day. Getting ready to leave.You?
Just got home. What are you up totonight?
Hot date withJude.
A second later Karen added the fireemoji.
Nina smiled. Jude was their code name for Niall Belanger, a thirty-five-year-old British author that Karen had been seeing for the past six months whenever he was intown.
Nice.
Nina added the eggplant emoji to be funny, since they’d laughingly looked it up together during last weekend’s dance party. The discovery had led to a series of other lookups that had left them howling with laughter. They’d been punchy and boozy and Nina had laughed so hard her stomachhurt.
Karen responded with the laughingemoji.
See you at yogatomorrow?
Nina gave her a thumbs up and set her phone on the coffee table, then lay her head on the edge of the couch. The apartment was quiet except for the muffled sound of traffic and the footsteps of her upstairsneighbor.
Her breathing deepened and slowed, sleep tugging at her eyelids now that she washome.
Home. What a strange word. If anyone had told her a year earlier that she would feel safe in the tiny apartment in Brooklyn, no Peter to take care of her, not a soul in the world to rescue her if she got into trouble, she wouldn’t have believed them. The city had been noisy and frightening, full of dress codes and customs that had made her feel like a tourist in a strangeland.
Now she looked around the apartment and felt a rush of contentment. She’d started with only the sofa in the living room, but over the past year she’d slowly added to the decor by wandering flea markets and thriftstores.
The worn Turkish rug had been listed in the local classifieds, and she’d half dragged it home in the heat of summer. She’d spent a week washing it with a damp towel and a special kind of laundry soap used for babies, then vacuumed it until it waspristine.
The rich blues and reds were faded, but it was no less beautiful for its wear. It made her happy every time she looked at it. After that she’d forced herself to abandon all her old decorating principles, using instead the same metric she was learning to use in the other parts of her life to decide whether she wanted to bring somethinghome.
Do I likeit?
Does it make mehappy?
Do I really want it or do I just think I should wantit?
The result was an eclectic mixture of modern furniture and vintage accessories, pillows with exotic patterns that made her think of India and Morocco, and houseplants that somehow managed to thrive in spite of her longstanding brownthumb.
The apartment was hers in a way the house in Larchmont had never been. There she’d been engaged in a kind of performance, filling her house with furnishings designed to look like they didn’t match even though they shared common colors and lines, carefully crafting vignettes that would look genuine rather than begenuine.
She hadn’t been aware that she’d been holding her breath until she finally exhaled in the months after she broke things off with Jack and Liam. That had been her greatest crime: pretending she was okay, that she was emotionally balanced enough to enter into not one, but two sexualrelationships.
Her eyes grew heavy as she took in the room she’d come to love, the late afternoon light slanting gold across the apartment’s worn wood floors. Her gaze landed on the photograph leaning against the wall on the console table near thewindow.
In a lot of ways, it had been the catalyst to everything — her job at the gallery, her relationship with Liam, the realization that she was in toodeep.
She’d noticed it by chance right after moving to Brooklyn and had gone inside the Stockholm Gallery to take a look. That’s where she’d met Moni, where she’d been offered a part time job. It was where she’d seen Liam for the third time, where he’d first invited her to dinner after asking which photograph had brought her into thegallery.
She had no idea he’d bought it for her during Janet Wexler’s first show until after she’d ended their relationship. The picture had arrived at her apartment weeks later. There had been no note, but she’d known it was from Liam. Had felt his presence on thephotograph.
She wondered what he was doing right then, if he was under a dark sky in the desert or on an island beach or at the edge of a cliff in themountains.
If he ever thought ofher.
