Chapter Sixteen
Nolan
stare at the unmarked door in front of me.I While I don’t have the best awareness of passing time, I do know that I’ve been sitting in this heinous, gold-patterned chair long enough for one of my legs to go numb, an uncomfortable tingling up the back of my calf every time I so much as think about shifting. It’s another novel development in my ever-changing existence.
I lift my leg and drop it, a shock of itchy discomfort exploding beneath my skin. One of the sales associates wanders by with a faintly amused look on her face, a bundle of silk and wool in her arms. Harriet has been locked in the changing area for close to twenty-five minutes trying on dresses for her parent’s gala, while I remain marooned on this torture device masquerading as a chair.
She agreed to help me, but she’s been distant ever since. She was tight- lipped about her plans for the day when I met her on the sidewalk in front of her home, only caving when I bribed her with a blueberry Danish I picked up on a whim. She had stared at it for an uncomfortably long time. I thought I had made a mistake, but then she gave me a half-hearted smile and inhaled it in three bites, reluctantly inviting me to join her for her morning errands.
But she’s not making eye contact. Her smiles are harder to earn. I’ve made a misstep, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know where to start.
I thought she’d be pleased. Smug doesn’t suit Harriet, but I thought she’d at least be cheery about being right.
There’s a ruckus behind the closed door and another navy blue dress flies over the back of it, draped haphazardly with the others. A carnage of heavy, starchy material. I drag my hand over the back of my head and sigh.
“This was your idea.” Harriett’s voice snaps beneath the door. “No one said you had to come dress shopping with me.”
I thought I’d have a front-row seat for Harriet in evening wear, but all I’ve seen is the flecked white paint of the changing room door, Harriet fighting with various materials on the other side.
I dreamed about her again last night. She was wearing one of her matching pajama sets, one I’ve never seen before. An oversize flannel shirt that hit mid-thigh, the creamy expanse of her legs bare beneath. I was wearing the matching pants as she crawled onto my lap, setting her elbows on my shoulders and her knees at my hips. I slid my hands up the back of her shirt and traced her warm skin with my palms, just looking at her.
When I woke up, I could have sworn I smelled peppermint. “Could you get me this one in another size?” Harriet’s arm emerges from behind the door, holding a dress. She wiggles it back and forth while I try to clear the cobwebs of my fantasy.
I stand with a grunt and grab the garment, wedging my boot between the door when she immediately tries to close it again. One wide brown eye peers back at me, a haphazard collection of curls over half of her face.
“You haven’t let me see a single dress,” I say.
“No one said you’d get to see the dresses.”
“It was implied.”
“By who?”
By me, I think wistfully, and this ache in my chest. This … longing I can’t seem to get rid of.
I haven’t wanted anything in decades, but I think I want you.
I study one of the discarded dresses with a frown. “Why are you wearing this color?”
“Because that’s the dress code for this event.” A wrinkle appears between her eyebrows. I gently poke at it. She swats my hand away. “And I don’t deviate from instructions.”
I know she doesn’t. It’s probably the most endearing and frustrating thing about her. Harriet does exactly what she says she will, no matter the cost to herself. No matter how she’s treated in return.
“I think you should wear red,” I tell her. She belongs in something vibrant.
Something that makes her glow.
“And I think you should get me a different size,” she singsongs back, nudging me away from the door. I roll my eyes to the ceiling and gather the smooth material of her dress, retreating to the aisle she pulled it from.
I hook the dress on the right rack, flicking through the options. I can’t make sense of the tiny tags, so I abandon them, meandering to a completely different section instead. A garment catches my eye and I smirk as I grab it, wandering back to Harriet’s fortress of solitude and knocking twice.
The door opens. Her hand reaches out. I give her the new dress. “Nolan,” she says immediately. “This isn’t what I asked for.”
“You’re right. It’s better.” I reclaim the chair and stretch out my legs. The numbness has receded, replaced by giddy anticipation instead. “Go on. Try it.”
She pokes her head out of the changing room. Her shoulders are bare, her hair pulled to one side. I grip the back of the awful chair until the wood
creaks in protest.
“I can’t wear this.”
I stop trying to count the freckles across the slope of her shoulder. “Says who?”
Her nose wrinkles. “My mother. And the previously mentioned dress
code.”
“Do you always do as she says?”
“Yes,” Harriet replies simply. “I do as everyone says. It’s a defining character trait.”
“You don’t do as I say.” I gesture to the dress at her side. “Case in point.”
“Well, you’re you.”
I grin. I like being the exception to Harriet’s rules, even if it results in my frustration. “I seem to remember a little girl who delighted in stealing a boat.”
An answering smile flirts with the corners of her mouth. “That was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lesson or two since then.” The smile fades away, replaced by a thoughtful frown. “It’s easier this way.”
“For you or for everyone else?”
She doesn’t respond, but the downcast look on her face says enough.
I bite my tongue against a sigh. Harriet hides so much of the person she wants to be behind the person she thinks she needs to be. It’s clear her mother has played a heavy role in making her think she’s not allowed to be anything outside perfect and reasonable, but it’s also evident that Harriet feels the need to make up for something. I wish I knew what that was.
“Perhaps you need a nudge in the right direction.” I nod at the plum- colored silk in her hand. “Humor me.”
She gives me a long look, then disappears back into the dressing room without another word. I sit there and stare at the door and let myself imagine it.
The smooth glide of the dress over her body. The thin straps against her shoulders. Her hair, flirting with the tops of her breasts. The press of her
nipples against the delicate fabric. The tiny zipper at the back and how the bite of the metal would feel between my fingers. My mouth at her neck and my nose in her hair. I wonder how far down her blush would go. If I could gather the silky, smooth material of her skirt in my fists and press her up against the mirror. If she would watch me drop to my knees behind her in the reflection, or if she’d turn around. Sink her fingers into my hair while I pressed my face between her thighs and— “After I finish up here, we can get on the road,” she calls through the door.
I’m jolted so forcefully from my daydream that I drive my knee into the tiny, ineffectual marble table next to the chair. The sales clerk drifts past with a smug snort, a knowing look shot in my direction.
I stretch out my knee with a scowl. “On the road?”
“Traveling,” she says slowly, with all the subtlety of a fog horn. “You know. To places we’ve visited in the past.”
Amusement settles in the middle of my chest. “Yes, I follow.” I pause, still busy trying to tug my brain back from flashes of bare skin and smooth silk. I click my tongue. “We can get on the road, or we could grab some lunch first.
Whatever you prefer.”
“Lunch?”
“I’m told that’s a thing people do.”
She’s quiet for the stretch of three heartbeats. “It’s a thing people do,” she finally says.
I laugh into my fist. “I’d like to be a person with you, Harriet.”
Harriet hums on the other side of the door. The hum quickly turns into a grunt. There’s a sharp exhale of breath and then a thud. It sounds like she’s
wrestling a badger in there.
“All right?” I ask.
“I think I’m stuck.”
“In the dress?”
“Yes, in the dress.” She mutters something under her breath that I don’t quite catch. “The zipper is twisted or … something. I’m not sure you got me the right size.”
I’m almost certain I didn’t. I only gave the tag a quick look, choosing instead to eyeball the stretch of the material and imagine it over the curve of Harriet’s ass. It was not a logical decision.
I’m at the door in two quick strides, both arms braced against the frame.
“Open up.”
The sound she makes is offended. “Absolutely not.”
“Harriet.” I drop my forehead to the door and tap it there twice.
This woman. “Don’t be proud.”
“It’s not a matter of pride.” She pauses for a long minute. “It’s a matter of decency.”
Something tight and aching catches me by the throat. I clear it once, then clear it again. I’m imagining plum silk and alabaster skin. The pink of her blush and the honey blond of her hair. “I’ll close my eyes,” I tell her, my voice like gravel.
“No, thank you. I’ll figure it out.” I wait, patient, listening to the sounds of her struggle. “Okay. I think I need to be cut out of this dress. Can you get that sales lady?”
I peek over my shoulder. The sales associate is nowhere to be found.
“Sure,” I lie. I don’t move an inch.
“I can see your feet beneath the door, Nolan.”
Damn it. “I don’t know where she’s gone off to. If you let me in, I’ll make quick work of it.” I wince. I couldn’t sound more like an eager, green boy if I tried. “I just meant—”
The door unlatches. Her face looks like—she looks the same as she did when we spun through her past, that first time. Pink-cheeked and a little
thrown off. Frazzled, but brave.
Beautiful.
“I know what you meant,” she says, defeated. She reaches through the crack in the door, her hand fisting in the front of my shirt. She tugs me into the minuscule room and then swiftly shuts the door behind me. She turns, offering me her back, her shoulder shrugged up to her ears.
One of the straps is twisted. Caught in the zipper that’s halfway down her back.
Her bare back, without an undergarment in sight.
I stare at the collection of freckles at the base of her neck and release a breath from the depths of my soul.
She shimmies her shoulders. “Help, please.”
I think I’m the one that requires help. I’m struck speechless by the bare expanse of her back. The gentle curve of it and the two dimples at the base of her spine teasing me from in between folds of rich fabric.
I want to grab both sides of the dress and pull. I want to drop to my knees and see what those indentations taste like.
“Nolan,” Harriet snaps. “Fix the zipper.” The zipper. The zipper. I don’t see a zipper.
“I’m—what are you—that is to say—” My jaw pops and I snap my mouth shut. I need to collect myself, but I don’t know where to start. “I cannot locate the zipper,” I grind out.
She peers at me over her shoulder. I drowned in the ocean once and I think I could just as easily drown in Harriet. Sink down into her and lose myself for days.
Perhaps coming into this tiny room with a half-clothed Harriet after a series of illicit dreams about her was not the best of ideas.
I underestimated the dress.
I underestimated Harriet.
“You said you’d help,” Harriet whisper-yells, her shoulders inching up higher. One of the straps falls down the curve of her arm and I unthinkingly
guide it back up.
“I’m trying to help.”
“By doing … what, exactly? Standing there? Grunting occasionally?”
I answer with another deep sound from somewhere in the middle of my chest. “I’m strategizing.”
“Strategizing,” she repeats, her voice dry. “Yes. I’m trying to figure out where to begin.”
“Begin with the zipper,” she snaps. “And go from there.” I hesitate. “Are
you sure?”
“Nolan, I swear to—”
“All right, all right.” I find the zipper at the very small of her back, twisted in the fabric. She shivers when I grasp it, my knuckles brushing against her skin as I carefully tug at the caught material. I ease one finger in between the dress and her spine to get a better grip and grit my teeth when my touch drifts over the curve of her ass.
“Another moment,” I urge, my hand at her hip, fingers fanned wide to hold her steady. All this warm skin. The way her body bends to meet mine. I feel like I’m having a heart attack. “Almost got it.”
I free the zipper with another gentle tug and it glides up smoothly, the sides of the dress coming together.
It’s a perfect fit, once the material is no longer twisted.
“There,” I say, letting my hands drop. I look over her shoulder at our reflection in the mirror. “Fixed.”
“Thank you.” She sighs, relieved.
“Not a problem,” I say, distracted, letting my gaze drop to the dress and the way the deep purple material clings to her curves. The bodice is tight, the soft swells of her breasts pushed up. The skirt spills over her hips like water, gathered at one hip. She shifts on her feet and one pale thigh appears through the high slit on the side.
Christ. She looks like something carved out of marble. Like something that
deserves to be worshipped.
“You’re staring,” she whispers.
“Can’t help it,” I whisper back.
Her hands flutter in front of her before she fists them in the material of the
skirt.
“Is it—does it look bad?”
“Bad?” I snap my eyes back to hers. “Harriet. You’re lovely.”
Her hands smooth over the skirt again. “It’s quite the dress,” she says.
“I’m not talking about the dress.”
Her head drops to the side and it takes every inch of my willpower not to gather up all her hair and expose that delicate bone at the top of her spine.
The place my fingers always itch to touch. Tension leaves her body with a gentle sigh, a pleased smile replacing the distance she’s been holding on to all morning.
“You didn’t even see the other dresses,” she says.
“I don’t have to.”
She ducks her head to hide the way her smile blooms, but I still see it.
“I’ll have to ask if they have it in blue.”
“You should stop indulging your mother.”
She twists back and forth slightly as she studies her reflection, watching the skirt swish around her ankles. “I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work out
for me.”
“What happened?”
Harriet’s body goes still, her eyes clouding over. “It broke her heart,” she says faintly. “The least I can do now is wear whatever color she picks out for me.”
“Did stealing boats eventually lead to light vandalism? Perhaps a flirtation
with pyromania?”
“No. Nothing as dramatic as that.”
I give in to temptation and let my fingers dance through the ends of her
hair. “I find it hard to believe you’ve ever intentionally broken anyone’s heart. How’d you manage that?”
Her shoulders rise and fall, listless. Her eyes find mine in the reflection. “I followed mine.”
I reclaim the horrific gold chair while Harriet changes back into the tiny tweed skirt and knee-high boots she was wearing earlier, emerging with her hair twisted back in a hastily drawn braid. She avoids my eyes as she hands over the dresses she tried on, plum-colored silk on top.
“These didn’t work,” she says to the sales associate who has finally deigned to reappear, her fingers trailing over the material like she’s reluctant to let it go. “But thank you.”
We walk out the glass double doors at the front of the shop into the bright winter afternoon sunlight, Harriet’s hand shielding her eyes as she fumbles with her bag. She’s only managed to get one arm of her jacket situated, the other half of her body flailing as she attempts to slip the rest of it on. I watch her struggle for a moment, amused. She looks a bit like a dog chasing her tail.
“Need help?”
“No.” She spins again, trying to catch the sleeve of her jacket. “I’ve got it handled, thank you.”
I gently grab her collar on her next rotation, guiding it around her shoulders. I reach through the sleeve and loop my fingers around her wrist, tugging until her hand pops free. Then I bend down and collect her dropped
bag, and I wedge it under my arm.
She scowls at me. “I can carry that.”
“I know you can. So can I.” I fix her with a look. “Why are you fighting
me today?”
“I’m not fighting you.”
“She says, as she’s fighting me.”
“I’m not. I’m—” She flutters her free hand in front of her in a vague explanation, still digging around her pockets with the other. “I think I’m just tired. I’ve been having these weird dreams and I can’t—”
She cuts herself off, fighting with her pockets now, instead of me. “What are you looking for?” I ask. She’s digging around in her coat like she’ll find
salvation in there. It’s a good thing she’s not wearing the mittens today.
“A candy cane,” she whines. “I thought I put one in here earlier, but it’s not—oh. Where did that come from?”
I unwrap the end of a candy cane and pop it between her lips. “I figured you’d need a fix.”
She pushes it to the side of her mouth with her tongue. “Have you been carrying this around in your pocket the whole morning?”
I have six in my pocket, actually, which is ridiculous because I can summon them at will with my magic.
“Got it for free from that man dressed like Santa on the corner,” I lie.
“Been holding on to it.”
Harriet beams at me, the end of her braid swinging over her shoulder.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t be worrying yourself,” I answer, still studying the lamppost so I don’t have to watch the way her cheeks hollow as she enjoys her candy. I’m slowly deteriorating into the worst version of myself. Perhaps this is hell, and my punishment is wanting a woman I cannot possibly have.
“We should look for clues today,” I say, reluctant, “when we travel.
Anything that sticks out or seems unusual.”
“You mean, apart from all the jam.” She smiles at me, her bad mood temporarily soothed by sugar. She considers me. “You think there are clues in the memories?”
I shrug. “I don’t know why else we’d be watching you cut down a tree unless it was a metaphor or a hint at something bigger.”
I hold out my elbow for Harriet to take. She does so without hesitation, her fingers twisting in the material of my jacket. We wander down the crooked street, red bows on the streetlights, heavy strands of garland strung between.
“There was the fancy lobby at my parent’s firm, the jam making—” She holds up a finger for each of the memories we’ve visited.
“Your tree massacre,” I add.
She laughs. “Yeah, my tree massacre. Then we somehow went to your past.” She sneaks a look at me from the corner of her eye. “The day at the beach,” she says carefully, like she’s afraid of my reaction.
I pull in a deep breath and let it out again slowly. Now that the shock of it has worn off, it’s easier to think about. Easier to bear. If I treat it like a clue instead of a crucial piece of my heart I’ve forgotten, it’s manageable.
“I don’t see a connection off the top of my head. Not besides the obvious.”
“The obvious?” Harriet asks.
I nudge her shoulder with mine, turning on the street that leads to the Crow’s Nest. It sits at the bottom of the cobblestone like a beacon—like one of the gingerbread houses Harriet loves so much— the windows glowing gold against the sun dipping in the sky.
“You stole a boat when we were in that fancy lobby,” I tell her. “I was once a fisherman.”
A laugh bursts out of Harriet. “That’s the connection you’ve come up
with?”
“I don’t see you connecting any dots.”
She shifts her candy cane to the other side of her mouth, thoughtful. “I don’t think it has anything to do with my memories at all. I think—I think it might have something to do with me, and the shop, and the collection of odds and ends we have there. The memories are just your magic doing what your magic does.”
She mentioned this before. “You believe there’s something in your possession at the shop that’s holding me here.”
“More or less. I think it’s possible there are clues in the past, but—” She rolls her lips together, thinking. “But I’m a collector of very old things. And you’re—”
“A very old thing.” I laugh, finishing her thought. “Clever.”
She squeezes my arm through my jacket. “That’s not what I was going to say.”
I pat her hand and continue guiding her down the street. “And yet, it’s true.”
“It’s just—who knows what’s in my shop? We keep an inventory, sure, but I’m always finding nooks and crannies where my aunt Matilda shoved things.
There could be something hidden in there that’s connected to you. It’s like an interdimensional scavenger hunt.”
I consider it. “Is interdimensional the correct word?”
“Transtemporal?”
“Possibly.”
It seems like too obvious an answer, but I suppose it’s worth investigating.
A hope to cling to, when I’ve had so few.
“I don’t think I owned anything that I was passionate about. Certainly nothing that would keep me floating in a state of purgatory, waiting for its eventual return.”
“Your boat?” she asks.
I arch an eyebrow. “Do you have a boat at the shop?”
She smiles. “No. Though it’s an idea to consider.” We continue walking down the street, bells ringing from the Santa on the corner with the fake white beard. It’s hanging crooked today, the end of it discolored by what must have been a rogue jelly doughnut.
“Maybe you don’t remember what it is. You’ve forgotten things before,”
Harriet offers as I toss a coin in his shiny red bucket.
“Aye. I have.”
She eases closer. “Maybe something will jog your memory, then. Maybe these trips to the past are exactly that. We just have to keep our eyes and ears open.”
Easier said than done, when my eyes and ears seem to be fixed solely on Harriet. “An adventure.”
Harriet smiles at me. “I like the sound of that.” We slow to a stop at the entrance of the Crow’s Nest, light from the trees in the window bathing everything in a warm glow. The sun melts into the water over the harbor, the sky cotton-candy pink.
These are the nights I loved best when I was out on the water. When the whole world seems to hush, waiting for that last bit of sunlight.
Harriet reaches for the door handle. An ornate, gold thing, shaped like a lion’s paw.
“And for the record,” she says, her smile edging into something sly. “I happen to like very old things.”
