9. Three Weeks in January

He didn't kiss her that night. What he did was walk her to her bedroom door — they had been standing in the kitchen for a long time after that conversation, neither of them quite ready to resolve it into something specific — and say, with the careful deliberateness of someone who had thought about what he wanted to say: "Give me until January." She had looked at him. "I want to do something first," he said. "Send the demos. See my dad. Sort out a thing or two that I've been not-sorting for a while. And then — if you're still —" "I'll still," she said. He nodded. The hallway was very small between them. He looked at her the way she had been not-looking at him since October, and then he stepped back, and went to his room, and she stood in the door of her own room for a moment before she went in. December finished. Winter break, such as it was — she worked the pharmacy and the accounting firm and spent Christmas with her mother and her aunt in their mother's apartment, eating dumplings and watching movies and accepting, with a kind of mature peace, the way her mother looked at her when she thought Nora wasn't watching: with pride and guilt in equal and complicated measure. On New Year's Eve, Sofia threw a small party at the apartment. Fifteen people. Music from a speaker. Eli was there, and they were careful with each other in front of Sofia's friends in the specific way of people who know something that the room doesn't, and she thought that his careful was its own kind of tender. At midnight they were standing on opposite sides of the room and he looked at her across it and raised his cup slightly, and she raised hers, and that was that. January. On the sixth of January, he told her he had sent the demos to three producers and an independent label. On the twelfth, he told her he had gone to dinner with his father. He came home late and she was in the kitchen, pointedly not waiting up, and he sat down across from her and described it in measured terms that she understood to mean: hard, survivable, necessary. He said he wasn't sure what it would become but that he had said the things he needed to say. She said that was enough. He said he knew. On the nineteenth, one of the producers responded. She was at the accounting firm when the text came through. She read it twice and felt something surge in her chest that was not entirely removed from what she'd felt about her own scholarship email, except that this feeling had a different coloring to it, a warmth that was something more than vicarious. She texted back: I told you. His response was a single line: You were right about most things. This is one of them. On the twenty-third of January, which was a Tuesday and which she would think of later as the day the maybe became a yes, he knocked on her bedroom door at eight-thirty in the evening. "I said until January," he said, when she opened it. "It's still January," she said. "Technically," he agreed. "I'm choosing," he said. "I wanted you to know that. Not falling. Choosing." She looked at him standing in her doorway with the hallway light behind him and the careful hopeful guardedness of a person who had made a decision and was now living in the few seconds before they knew how it would be received. "Okay," she said. "Okay?" "Come in," she said. "I have tea." He came in. He sat on the edge of her desk and she sat on her bed and they talked for two hours about everything and nothing — about the producer, about her new transfer timeline, about his father, about her father, about Sofia and the ex-boyfriend who she was, despite all evidence and stated intention, probably getting back together with. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, without it being a moment, just a natural continuation of the conversation, he reached across the small distance between the desk and the bed and held her hand. She looked at their hands. She looked at him. "This is going to complicate things," she said. "Yes," he agreed. "I'm still doing the plan." "I know. I'd be concerned if you weren't." "You're going to be in the city for a while?" "For now. We'll figure it out when 'for now' runs out." She considered this. It was the least specific plan she had ever agreed to. It had no lamination. "Okay," she said, for the second time that night. Outside, January was doing its cold grey work on the city, indifferent to the small warm things happening inside it. Sofia was at her ex-boyfriend's apartment. The guitar was in the living room. Somewhere on a desk at a production company, a set of demos sat in someone's inbox, waiting. Nora sat in her room with her hand in Eli's and thought: this is what it feels like to step off the ledge on purpose. It felt, she thought, like choosing. Like deciding the thing was worth it before you knew how it landed. Like maybe that was the whole point.