“Nolan, I don’t need—”
“But that’s just it,” he snaps. “I think you do need to hear this. Listen to me, Emerson, and listen to me carefully. If you love this girl, if you really, truly love her and if you’re ready to fight like hell for her, you have to know what it means. What it could mean. I’ve been there—hell, I am there. In the movies and books, the end scene, the happily ever after, is the couple riding off into the sunset, in love, feeling so complete and easy. It’s a fucking joke.” His voice becomes harsh. “I don’t say this to knock Sierra. That woman is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, hands down. But what I’ve got with her, it’s kicked my ass. Stripped me bare. At the risk of sounding like a complete ass, I’ll admit it. I’ve had times when I wanted nothing more than to run as far as I could away from this, from her. Not because I didn’t love her but because I did.” He almost chuckles. “Because that woman will be the near-death of me. She challenges me, terrifies me. Because that’s what love is—a teeter-totter where you’re both always fucking moving and sometimes, there’s a wind. Other times, a goddamn tornado. You ready for that?”
“I...” To say that I hadn’t expected this out of Nolan would be a huge understatement. I can’t remember the last time he said this many serious words in a sentence, let alone several sentences strung together. “I don’t know.”
“Not good enough,” he says. “You’d better not go to her until you do. Because you’ll be doing both of you a big fucking disservice.”
“I know I want to be with her. That’s not enough?”
“Not unless you accept that it will be hard. Not always, maybe even not soon, though it sounds like it. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“I don’t know about that,” I say. “Relationships can be a success, even if they end early. As long as you learn things.”
“I don’t disagree,” Nolan says neutrally. “Here’s what I don’t joke about in any of my shows because it’s too damn sad, and this world is sad enough already. We’re a people distracted to distraction. Most of us can hardly read a book, let alone concentrate on a conversation we’re in. Commitment isn’t trendy these days. We lazily change our minds at the slightest good argument. We secretly wish for other lives, other partners at the first glimpse of something better. We don’t have God or morality or even tradition telling us what to do anymore, so we don’t stick with it. We like the new and we like the exciting. We’ve seen the flipside of too much commitment, and it’s so ugly and hideous and haunting, a life wasted with a slow noose of a partner, that we’ve thrown ourselves at the opposite.”
“What are you getting at?” I snap.
This is both typical and atypical. Nolan has a thing for ranting on the abstract, debating on both sides. But almost never seriously. Why is he taking this so seriously?
“What I’m getting at here, Emerson,” he continues, “is that before you go chasing Wynona down, you’d better make damn sure this is what you want, for good. Otherwise, you’re putting you both in a world of pain.”
“Dude.”
“What?”
“We were at the beach resort for two weeks. I can’t have a bit more time to figure out where this is going?”
“I thought you knew you wanted to be with her.”
“I do, but... you’re talking like I need to know the end of this already when we’ve both barely just started.”
“Right now, it’s an easy transition point,” Nolan says, “an easy break from a paradise world to the real one. She’s given you an easy out, little brother. I’d make sure that you don’t want to take it. I mean, you gave her up once.”
“I only did that for her own good.”
Nolan makes a skeptical noise. “And what about after that?”
“After that, I... I felt ashamed, okay? I didn’t want to reach out too soon and derail everything she’d accomplished, how far she’d gotten, and then, even later, I saw how well she was doing and I tried to reach out, and when she wouldn’t go for it, you know what, I recognized that I deserved it. Expecting her to get her shit together and wait years for me, what was that? What was I thinking?”
Silence.
Hell, this is not the conversation I expected to be having when I called my brother up.
I can’t tell if the sudden hit of weariness is from it or my recent flight.
“Nolan?” I ask.
“Yeah?”
“What made it click for you? You never had many serious girlfriends, you never even believed in marriage, and then...”
“And then, Sierra,” he says. “What made it click for me was that I stayed. That when it got so hard I usually would’ve fucked off, given up, I stayed. I wanted to stay more than I wanted to leave. And she stayed too.”