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nick;
They realise very quickly that despite being all in, their schedules are completely out of sync: he rarely wakes up before noon, and she’s asleep by eleven most days. It means that he hardly gets to see her awake during the week, and he weirdly misses her, even though it’s not like their schedules have ever been in sync. They don’t mention it, let alone talk about it, but things were definitely easier in Mexico, when they didn’t have to worry about things like jobs, and money, and roommates, and could just spend every second of the day with each other.
He wakes up one morning to find his bed empty, Jess long gone. He vaguely remembers her pressing a kiss to his cheek at some point a few hours ago, but the memory’s fuzzy enough that he’s not entirely sure whether he’d just dreamt it. He rolls over with a groan, and that’s when he spots it: a piece of paper, all neatly folded, propped up on his desk, his name written on it in big, bright letters. He squints at it for a second, and then, convinced that he’s not still dreaming, gingerly pulls himself upright, walks over to his desk and unfolds it:
Good morning!
Have a nice day :)
Jess xoxo
He keeps it in his pocket, right next to his – their – coin, and traces his fingers over the words when things get a bit crazy at the bar later that evening. He’s still smiling when he gets home from work, places the note carefully in his not-so-secret box in his closet, and then slides into bed and pulls her flush against him, pressing his face into the back of her neck. Things might be harder now, but it doesn’t mean it’s still not completely, 100% worth it.
It becomes a ritual, of sorts. He’ll wake up when Jess’ alarm goes off, try to convince her to stay in bed, but she’ll just giggle at him, kiss him sweetly, and then squat him away and escape from his grasp. He’ll pull a face, but relent, and then, at some point in between her getting dressed and humming to herself, drift off back to sleep, a grin plastered on his face.
She always leaves a note on his desk for him to find later, which is usually some mixture of have a nice day or see you later, you clown or remember that it’s Winston’s birthday today!!!! or, and these are his favourite, I miss you already. Sometimes he’ll discover notes when he comes home too, on the days when his shift at the bar runs into the early hours and she’s already fast asleep in his bed. These tend to be notes about her day, about things she’d seen that she thinks he might find funny, or stories that she desperately wants to tell him and couldn’t wait. He saves every single one, smooths them out and stashes them away.
He doesn’t write her notes back. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate them, or that he doesn’t want to; it’s the opposite. He just has so many feelings inside of him, scary, terrifying feelings, feelings that he’s never felt about anyone before, and he’s afraid to tell her how he really feels.
He doesn’t want to scare her off.
He tells her that he loves her completely by accident, and she says the words back after some poorly timed finger guns and a conversation with Prince (Prince!)
He doesn’t write her a note even then, but he traces the words that he wants to write into her back when she’s dozed off, his fingertips lightly brushing against her skin, feeling like the luckiest guy alive.
I love you.
It doesn't last forever, no matter how much he loves her, and no matter how much he wants it to.
They eventually break up over a stupid kid’s toy, and he’s never felt worse in his entire life. He’s spiralling, harder than he ever has, harder than after Caroline even, but there’s nothing he can do about it; not anymore. He blew it, and he can’t fix it. He can’t take back all the stupid decisions and things he’d said about wanting to live on fucking Mars when he was too hungover to realise that what he really wanted is her; always has, always will. He spends a week on the verge of running across the hallway to convince her that he’s worth it, but he stops himself at the last moment every time, her words flashing in his head:
If I was always honest with you, then we’d never stop fighting!
He wants to be enough for her, more than he’s ever wanted anything, but deep down, he knows he’s not.
He’s not enough.
Instead, he stares at his desk at the very spot where she used to leave him notes every morning, the spot that’s now uncomfortably empty and bare. He runs his fingertips over the surface, taps it once, and then goes to his closet and rummages around in his box for the little plastic bag he’s been keeping all her notes in. He’s not entirely sure if she knows that he’s kept them all, because she’s never brought it up even though she's clearly been through his box, but—he did. He kept all of them. Every single one. He couldn’t bear to throw any of them away, because each one was a reminder that this was real and she loved him.
He sits himself on his bed, gingerly pulls the notes out and rereads them all, even though he knows that he’s torturing himself, his lips silently mouthing the words. He gets to the last one, and he feels like he might be crying because his cheeks feel damp and his shoulders are shaking, but he’s too physically and emotionally exhausted to check. He holds his breath as he slowly uncrumples it and smooths it out. She’d left this for him the night before that fateful game of True American, back when things were simple and everything in his life made sense. It’s a short note, a note that was clearly never meant to be the last, but somehow is.
You need a haircut, but I still love you.
Jess xxxx
He gets a haircut, but he doesn’t stop loving her.
He’s not sure if he ever will.
Another week passes, and it doesn’t get any easier. He hears Jess crying across the hallway as he gets home from work, and every time, it feels like someone’s punched him in the gut. It’s not so much that she’s crying that stings, though he’s always hated to see her upset (and especially upset over him), but that he knows that if this was two weeks ago, she’d be all tucked up in his bed asleep by now, not all the way across the hall, and he’d have a note waiting for him on his desk. Instead, he’s alone, painfully, achingly, alone, and he crawls into his bed, stares at the ceiling, and listens to the muffled sounds of her crying and curses himself in his head over and over again. He wants nothing more than to run across the hallway and pull her into his arms and hug her and tell her that everything’s going to be alright, but he—he can’t. He knows that if he does, he won’t be able to stop himself from doing something that he’ll regret, and this—this is for the best. (Except, if it’s for the best, why does it feel like he’s dying?)
It gets to about 5 AM in the morning – or, at least, it feels like it, anyway – and Jess is still awake and crying, and he can’t take it anymore. He’s not brave enough to face her, not when his head is all messed up and he knows that he’s the cause of all her sadness, and so, he does the only thing that makes sense in the moment. He grabs a scrap bit of paper from his desk and scribbles down a message and slides it under her door before he can think twice. He’s vaguely aware that this might be the first note that he’s ever written to her, and also, the last, and that realisation makes his heart plummet down to his toes all over again.
I’m sorry.
Nick
He’s not sure exactly what he’s apologising for: whether it’s for all the notes that he took for granted and didn’t reply to, for not being enough, for screwing everything up, or some complicated mixture of all three, but he’s sorry all the same. He knows that she’s read it, because he hears a break in her crying, just for a second, and then he hears her sniffling all over again. He retreats back to his own room, slides down onto the floor, his back against his door and rubs a hand over his face.
She doesn’t reply.
He tries to move on.
He starts to feel okay again eventually, but even then, he doesn’t throw the notes away.
jess;
She moves on, and so does Nick.
Or, at least, she attempts to. She dates Ryan for a while, and he’s everything that Nick’s not and everything that she thought she wanted: he’s responsible, knows what he wants in life, and he’s mature… but then, he goes and does the one thing that she knows that Nick would never do: he breaks a promise to her and leaves her all alone in her hometown. The others tag along for her tour instead, doing their absolute best to cheer her up, and she knows that Nick put them up to it.
She lies on her bed alone later that evening, wondering why she ever thought that Nick wasn’t enough or needed fixing (he’s here, isn’t he? he’s always here when she needs him), and wonders if she’d just replied to that last note he’d left her, maybe everything would be different. She snaps out of it fast, because there’s no point revisiting the past, not when it’s been long enough now that it’s too long, and they’ve gotten to a place where they’re friends—it’s fine. Really.
She throws a stone into Crush Pond and convinces herself she’s not thinking about Nick.
He keeps the sex mug.
She’s not sure what that means, tries not to read into it too much, but she’s kinda relieved.
She heads off to jury duty, and things are not the same when she returns. Nick can’t stop talking about Reagan this and Reagan that, and he’s happy: happier than she’s ever seen him, maybe happier than he was with her, even. She’s not upset about it, she really isn’t, because she likes seeing him happy and they haven’t been a they for years, but—it still stings a little, all the same.
She goes back to Sam for a while. It’s not really because of Nick; her and Sam really were great together back then, back before kisses she didn’t really ask for but also didn’t not ask for, but it’s maybe, partly, because she’s feeling a touch nostalgic as of late.
Things take a downhill turn, very fast (restraining order not included).
She finds out that the helmet that Nick had given her? The one that she’d always thought was a throwaway gift? It really wasn’t at all, and even though she’s supposed to be with Sam now, she can’t help but wish she could go back in time and rewrite history. He’d cared about her so much back then, just in his own trademark Nick Miller way, and she’d been too caught up in her own ideals to appreciate it.
…and then, of course, because the universe hates her (and, well, let’s be honest, because of her own intervention), Sam realises he’s in love with his best friend.
He tells her that she’s in love with hers.
He’s probably not wrong.
He’s definitely not wrong.
The problem is, she might be in love with Nick, but he’s moved on. For good. He follows Reagan to New Orleans for three months with no hesitation (because he's incredible), just books a flight and leaves without looking back. It might be the bravest thing that he’s ever done, and she’s so, so proud of him, but also—she feels weirdly empty inside knowing that he’d done this for someone who wasn’t her. (The other problem is, well, she really does like Reagan: she’s cool, and she’s smart, and she’s clearly good for Nick, pushes him in all the right ways. All the ways she didn’t.)
She finds the note, his note, buried underneath all her night peanuts where she knows no-one would ever find it. She reads it again to herself over and over, and then she writes him one back, but she doesn’t send it.
I’m sorry too.
Jess
Nick comes back home early, looking like an entirely different person, both physically and emotionally. He tells her he’s written an entire novel and acts like it was nothing, when they all remember how many years it’d taken him to write Z is for Zombies. It’s another reminder that Reagan is great for him, and she needs to move on and stop her mind from drifting to places that aren’t going to lead anywhere. (Except, he’d dedicated it to her, hadn’t he?)
…but, as it turns out, and as she’s already found out once before, it’s not that easy to move on when the person you want to move on from lives across the hall from you.
She dates Robby for a bit, but—um, the less said about that the better. (Cousins. Cousins.)
Reagan moves in, and moving on gets even harder.
She cracks eventually, somewhere between Nick casually dropping sentiments about how in love he is and Reagan telling her she’s her girlfriend. She’s not sure what changes, but suddenly she’s no longer okay with them coming to her with their problems or being the convenient third wheel at book readings and literary conventions, and she’s on a plane before she really knows what she’s doing.
He texts her, tries to call her, and leaves her a hundred voicemails.
She listens to them all, but she doesn’t call him back.
She can’t.
That’s the real problem, isn’t it? He’s moved on, and she can’t do anything about it.
Her dad isn’t happy about her being home to say the least. He grumbles about her presence for days until she finally breaks and tells him what’s really going on. He doesn’t stop grumbling after that, because he’s never liked Nick, never believed that he was good enough, but at least he stops trying to book her plane tickets to California.
Nick is good enough though; more than good enough.
She just figured that out (years) too late.
Nick continues leaving her messages, filling up her phone even though she’s not sure he even knows he’s doing it. She misses him, desperately, but she tries to keep their conversations limited, because anything else hurts too much—
—except, then she finds out that him and Reagan broke up while she was away, and her dad’s convinced that Nick’s still in love with her. He almost seems approving when he talks about Nick for once, and the whole notion of her dad actually approving of Nick is frankly so bizarre that she agrees to go home.
She makes up her mind when she listens to the latest voicemail he’d left her. It’s nothing special, a simple I miss ya, kid, but she rewinds it and plays it back until she’s smiling again.
She’s going to do it.
She’s going to tell him how she feels.
They’re fundamentally different and they don’t work together, or, at least, that's what Nick thinks. He's sure enough about it that he says this all at a reading, in front of a bunch of people that don't know anything about her or them.
It’s never going to happen.
She moves out of the loft, because she can’t continue living like this.
It’s not healthy.
Correction: she tries to move out of the loft, but she can’t.
She almost makes it, manages to get all her belongings – all the memories – packed up in boxes and in a truck, but then before she knows it, she’s abandoning Winston and Aly in the middle of the road and she’s running, running, running back. She can’t leave like this, not without talking to him. She has to be brave and try, right? It’s not like she has anything to lose at this point.
—except, Winston’s got her keys, and she can’t get into the building, and the stupid dog won’t bark (okay, maybe not stupid, she takes that back, but—ugh), and:
There’s Nick, staring down at her, right here when she needs him, like always, and how did she ever think she could really let him go?
She pulls her notecards out of her purse, the heartfelt speech she’d written to tell him everything she’s been feeling as of late, and runs all the way up to the loft... except, he’s downstairs for some reason and so she jumps in the elevator all the way back down.
He stops the elevator when they’re on the first floor, shouts something at the guy in front of her about being in love with his best friend, and she thinks she’s dreaming.
She’s not.
She doesn’t need the notecards in the end.
She wakes up the next morning in Nick’s bed (!), and it’s oddly familiar, but also not—and there’s a note on his desk that she knows that she didn’t leave, all propped up proudly with her name on it. She blinks a little in surprise, because she’s pretty sure they’d gone to sleep at the same time, both exhausted from all the whispered confessions and not-so-whispered confessions, and she didn’t think the silly notes that she used to leave him were something that Nick would remember, but clearly she was wrong. She extracts herself from Nick’s grip despite his sleepy protests, presses soft kisses against his forehead until she sees his breathing regulate again, and then gently pads over to his desk and picks the note up.
She hadn’t read him the notecards, not yet, but it turns out that he’d read them himself at some point in the night. She’s holding the last card in her speech, the one that just says I love you, but Nick’s scrawled his own addition underneath in his messy handwriting that’s both messy enough that it’s almost illegible, but so very Nick that it warms her heart all the same:
Me too.
Nick
—and then, because it’s Nick, there’s an afterthought underneath:
I didn’t mean that I love myself.
Just thought I should clarify.
She grins softly to herself, then slides back into bed, except he’s awake now, rubbing at his eyes a little blearily.
“You remembered?”
Nick shrugs, almost lazily, but then he pulls his box out from his closet and hands it to her silently. It’s no longer filled with piles of unpaid bills or letters asking him to do jury duty; instead, it just has all the notes that she’d left him, from all the way back then.
He’d kept them all, even after Ryan, after Sam, after Reagan.
She loves him, and he loves her, and they’re going to make this work.
them;
Their schedules are almost completely in sync now because he’s no longer working bar shifts at ungodly hours and instead, pursuing writing mostly full time. She still tends to wake up first though because no-one on this planet could ever get Nick to get out of bed before 7 AM, not even her, and so she’ll leave him a note on his desk for him to find whenever he finally rolls out.
Things are different this time around.
This time, he replies to every single one of her notes, leaving messages on the shelves by the entrance to the loft for her to read when she comes home from school. They save every one, tucked away in his – their – box, hidden in her - their - closet.
They spot The Pepperwood Chronicles in a bookstore on a Sunday, the published, edited version, and she’s so, so excited for him. She can’t sleep that night, even though she knows she should because she has school the next day, her mind all alert and awake on adrenaline. Nick fell asleep a while ago, a sleepy smile still plastered on his face as he snores gently besides her, and she pulls out a pad of paper from their bedside table and scribbles down a note for him:
You did it! By gosh, you did it!!!!
Of course I always knew you would!
<3 <3 <3
Jessica xxxx
He frames it, and he hangs it up in his office, and it’s maybe - definitely - his favourite thing in the world.