Page 18 of The Best Worst Thing

The Bookshelf

Thursday evening, Nicole drove over to Logan’s to tell him the rest of the truth. Instead, she ended up on his couch, eating microwave popcorn and watching The Matrix. Well, she was more watching Logan watch The Matrix, but still.

“You need a break or something?” he said. “I know how hard this must be for you.”

“No, dingbat.” She tossed a burnt kernel at him. “I do not need a break.”

He paused the movie and smiled at her. Just this ridiculous, shameless smile. He was leaning back into the corner of his sofa—still in his work clothes, still in his dress socks, his stupid face growing scruffier with every passing scene.

“You sure about that? You keep … repositioning yourself.”

Nicole, whose bare legs were currently in something of a lotus pose, scowled at him. When he raised an eyebrow, she pelted a bag of gummy worms at his chest. He caught it, then ate one.

He wasn’t making this easy.

An hour ago, she’d had every intention of telling him about Valerie, the two embryos, and what the attorney had said.

But then he answered the door like he’d just woken up from a nap—his face soft, his hair haywire—and made some stupid joke, scratched the back of his neck, and offered her a beer, and everything else got a little fuzzy and Nicole decided that a movie, a little bit of company, didn’t sound half bad.

And then, by the time she’d realized the movie was indeed very bad, it was too late. Because she didn’t want to leave.

“I won’t say no to actual food, though,” she said. “You have anything like that?”

“I’m sure I could whip something up.”

“Wait, like one of those gas station challenges? Are you going to roll string cheese in Cheeto dust? Will there be a Go-Gurt dipping sauce?”

Logan signaled her toward the kitchen. “Guess you’re about to find out.”

And then, for the next half hour, Nicole sat backward on a counter stool while Logan provided a painstakingly detailed oral history of Seattle’s floating bridges.

He also claimed to be cooking. When he was done, and the heat of his running oven had practically forced them outdoors, Logan directed an eyes-closed Nicole into a chair on the balcony off his living room.

“Okay,” he said, slipping a paper plate into her hands. “Ruin me.”

Nicole took one very careful bite, then nearly gagged. “Logan! What the fuck!”

“It’s that awful? Really?”

She nodded, laughing. “It’s like you took a shelf-stable jar of Alfredo sauce, frozen pita bread, and the cheapest deli meat available, then broiled it all for ten minutes too long.”

When she opened her eyes, Logan had narrowed his. “That is … almost exactly what I did. Were you spying on me? Did you cheat?”

“Excuse me?” Nicole rocked back in her chair. It was the kind you’d buy at a CVS in some sort of strange, I-need-patio-furniture emergency. “I had a childhood too, you know. I’ve definitely played the taste test game.”

“That game was banned in my house,” Logan said. “Matty shoved a raw egg down my throat.”

“What!?”

“I had to crack it with my teeth, I—”

“Why didn’t you just spit it out!?”

“I don’t know! I panicked!”

Nicole was losing it. She didn’t know what visual was worse: ten-year-old Logan spitting out an entire egg, or biting into one, screaming as the shell cracked and his brothers howled.

“Please tell me you’ve never told that story on a date before,” she said.

“Uh, it’s the only story I tell on dates?”

“Because everybody leaves after?”

Logan glared at her. “I love that you think I’m the biggest bonehead to ever roam this planet. That you think I have zero game. Women love me! I know about things! Mesopotamia. The Space Race. Several wars …”

“Really? You are vaguely aware that there have been wars? And they haven’t asked you to write a book yet?”

“Oh, no. They did.” Logan helped himself to a bite of Nicole’s pizza-sandwich thing. He flinched, then took another. “It’s complete garbage, but I’m surprised you haven’t gotten to it yet. You’d read anything.”

“It’s true,” Nicole said, taking a sip of her beer. The evening sky was quiet and steady. Unremarkable, really, for July. A medium blue, fading almost imperceptibly into navy. “I’m just a disgusting book slut.”

Logan snickered, then looked right at her.

Nicole glanced back for a split second, then went off on some tangent about magical realism while Logan nodded intently, only interrupting her twice.

Once, to ask if she wanted to order actual pizza, and then again a few minutes later, just to give her a hard time. The sky stayed perfectly still.

“Anyway, what about you?” she said. “You reading anything good these days? I’ve actually been in a bit of a slump.”

Logan’s cheeks turned the slightest bit pink. Nicole inched forward.

“What? What is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s obviously not nothing. I’ve literally never seen you blush. And now I’ll die if you don’t tell me.”

He tipped back his beer, then set the bottle on the table between them. His eyes, gleaming. It was that same look of his—the one he’d made nearly every day for two years. He was, without question, about to say something ridiculous.

“Rest in peace, Nicole Speyer.” He bit his lip. “Very pretty. Very smart. Very fast and loose with literature.”

“Logan Milgram.” Nicole bit hers back. “Cute enough. Smart enough. Very bad at food.”

He stopped his chair midrock. “Wait, you think I’m cute?”

Nicole rolled her eyes as Logan, grinning, caught her gaze again.

This time, she didn’t look away. She had no clue what she was doing here.

And, strangest of all, she didn’t care. Here, on this patio, there was no dog walker, half naked on her couch.

No positive pregnancy test. No “pause” on her divorce.

No house she didn’t own or career she didn’t have. No ten years down the goddamn drain.

There was only this.

There was only Nicole, demanding answers. There was only Logan, nursing his beer, pretending to hate it. Until, finally, he stood from his chair and nodded her inside.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Come on. Come with me.”

They headed upstairs, Logan a half step ahead as Nicole took it all in. The scuffed, bare walls of the stairwell; the wobbling, faded pine of the handrail; how the carpeted stairs gave way to a washer, a dryer, a couple of closed doors. One of them, ajar—a sliver of his bedroom.

The other, Logan announced as she stepped inside, was his office.

Really, though, the whole place was more of a storage unit: an old pullout couch, a desk, a few dumbbells.

A foam roller, camping gear. Shoeboxes—one, full of old race medals.

The others, just empty. Just trash. There was also a framed print of Mount Rainier leaning against the wall that kind of made Nicole chuckle.

She couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been meaning to hang it.

“Did you bring me up here to prove you’re outdoorsy? Because I already know you drive a Subaru, and—”

“Nicole,” he said. “Stop talking. Come here.”

She swallowed, then took a few steps closer as Logan opened the rickety bifold doors of his closet and nodded toward the bottom shelf. Sandwiched between a dangling wetsuit and a red ski parka: two lidless boxes teeming with books. Hastily stacked, well-loved, crinkle-cornered books.

Nicole knelt down. She traced the fraying covers and peeling spines as Logan stood there, silent. Beneath a Scarlet Sky. Franny and Zooey. Erasure. Men Without Women. White Teeth … They were all there.

“I’m still working on your list,” he said.

Nicole nodded. Her heart, racing. Her mind, spinning. She picked up a copy of The Black Dahlia, thumbed through its delightfully dog-eared pages, traced a few words, then set it down.

He’d read them. He’d actually read them.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Logan said.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That I need a Kindle.”

By the time Logan and Nicole were standing outside her car, it was nearly midnight.

The navy sky; still dull, still dreamy. They’d said their goodbyes twenty minutes ago, but there were other things to discuss, like dim sum and Duck Hunt and what Logan had thought of Three Nights in August (“Fuck the Cubs!”); Normal People (“Fuck that whole year in Sweden!”); and Bridge to Terabithia (“Fuck you for making me read that again!”).

Nicole could have done this forever.

“So, you think I should just skip American Pastoral?” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets as he shifted in place on the cool, cracked sidewalk. His dress shirt was untucked. Above him, a streetlight flickered, and the moon dangled like a crescent, fast asleep.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s outstanding. You’ll love all the LBJ stuff—the history. Watergate, Vietnam. But it’s brutal. It’s lonely. A guaranteed book hangover, you know? We’ll have to get you right into a romance after that. Balance you back out.”

“Is that how you do it, Missouri?”

“That’s exactly how I do it,” Nicole said, looking at him. Trying to forget the way it felt to hear him call her that. The way it felt to stand next to him on his empty street, at an ungodly hour, talking about nothing. Talking about books.

“Were you always like this?” he said.

“A dork? A reader?”

Logan nodded.

“I guess so,” she said. “You know how when you read, you’re just kind of floating?

Like, you can feel your legs under the covers and your hands on the pages, but you’re not quite there?

You’re halfway between your own bed and some other world, and everything blends together, and you kind of just … hover? You’re kind of just … nowhere?”

Logan stared at her. “God, are you something.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said, yanking a loose thread from her sweatshirt. “A book slut.”

“That’s not exactly how I’d put it.”

Nicole wrinkled her nose, reached for the handle of her car door, then turned to him.

“Hey, Logan?”

“What’s up?”

She clutched her arms around her elbows. “There’s something I want to talk to you about. From earlier.”

“Is this about all the plot holes in The Matrix? Because everyone knows that dinner with Cypher and Agent Smith makes zero sense. No way Cypher gets access to the Matrix all by himself. You have to suspend disbelief, Nicole. You of all people should know that.”

She tried not to laugh. “It’s not about your dumb movie. It’s important.”

“Okay,” he said, dropping his shoulders. “What’s going on?”

She knew this version of Logan—the serious one.

It’d always taken her by surprise how quickly he could morph into …

this adult. This grown man. She’d seen him do it that first night in his kitchen, and again last Saturday on the beach.

Yesterday, too, on her stoop. And then, of course, nearly three years ago, when he found her in the hallway at work, hunched over, frozen.

“I, um …”

He looked at her, waiting. She hugged her body tighter, then exhaled.

“I think you should add some citrus to your diet,” she said. “You could get scurvy.”