about Eli Mora

aka there's a bonus scene from his POV in this newsletter

I was going to spin a thoughtful intro to this newsletter, but I just received my next round of edits for my 2027 release, Every Ordinary Thing, and I need to save some brain power for that and I also know that you won’t want to hear me going on and on once I tell you that I finished the Eli POV scene I shared a portion of in a newsletter last year (almost to the day!!), and that it’s in this newsletter.

So what I am going to tell you is that one of the things I love about art is how it inspires musicians and writers and painters and [insert literally any creative type of person here] to turn around and create their own art. And what I’m going to tell you that Noah Kahan’s latest album, The Great Divide (specifically the The Last of the Bugs edition) did that for me. If you follow me on Instagram or Threads, you’ll have seen my extended spiral about it (in case you were wondering, my top five songs are “End of August,” “Doors,” “Orbiter,” “All Them Horses,” and “Staying Still”). So many of the songs on this album remind me of myself and my life, but they also remind me of the characters I’ve written, and Eli and Georgia from The Ex Vows were no exception. I heard them in these lyrics:

And these:

And these:

And then Gracie Abrams dropped her latest song—please note that Aaron Dessner is at the scene of most of these crimes—and I saw Eli and Georgia in these lyrics, too:

I was waiting for my EOT edits anyway, feeling the itch to write something, and I thought, you know what? I’m going to finish that Eli POV scene, even though it’s depressing as hell. Even though it’s hard to be in his head because his anxiety feels so much like mine. Even though I know he and Georgia happy now, in their fictional world that still feels so real and immediate to me two years later.

So! That’s what I did. And what you get is 3500 words of agony, I guess! I also made a mini playlist if you feel like listening while you read:

To set it up, this scene is from Eli, Georgia, and Adam’s high school friends’ wedding, which is mentioned in The Ex Vows. It happens thirteen months before TEV begins, and is the last time Eli and Georgia see each other before Adam and Grace’s wedding week. Also, I don’t mention it in the scene, but Jamie isn’t at this wedding because a) she doesn’t know the bride and groom and b) she’s out of town, otherwise she would’ve stepped in last-minute to be Georgia’s date.

If you haven’t read The Ex Vows, this probably won’t make much sense, but feel free to read it anyway! And for all my readers, who like pain (a lot of you), I hope you enjoy (????) it. Also, this is not edited in any way, so don’t expect something intensely polished. Also x2, there is some anxiety/panic attack descriptions on page, so please take care reading if that’s something that impacts you.

Okay, love you, hope you are taking good care of yourselves. I’ll see you on the other side of my edits!

xoxo

jess

---

“Eli?”

I look up and take in the person staring back at me: mildly bloodshot eyes. Mouth hanging open. Shoulders high and tight.

There’s another knock on the bathroom door and I break eye contact with my reflection in the mirror. It was like looking at the Ghost of Eli Mora Future; I know I’m going to be trying to repress that exact look imminently.

“Are you good in there?”

Emma’s voice is muffled by the thick wood between us, but I hear the uncertainty in it loud and clear. Outside of this favor she’s doing me, we’ve only hung out twice, both times in the company of Cole. We were supposed to fly out of Newark together so we could—Jesus, I don’t know, learn each other’s middle names or something? So I could warn her I’d be a mess? Certainly so I could thank her again for coming to Nick and Miriam’s wedding with me, even though I know she’s getting a long weekend with Cole out of it. But I had to push my flight to a red eye at the last minute because of work, so here we are, still strangers. In hindsight, I should’ve just come alone.

But Georgia didn’t, so I couldn’t either.

That thought has the room spinning again. My heart takes off like it does when I think of her in any way, when my phone pings and it’s my boss instead of her, when I’m pacing my room at three a.m. staring at my empty bed or, if I really want to torture myself, our old TV stand stuffed into the corner of an apartment she’s never seen.

Fuck. I cannot have a panic attack right now. The wedding starts in a little over an hour and we’re twenty minutes away from Nick’s grandparents’ house on Lake Tahoe, where they’re getting married.

I resume my white-knuckle grip on the counter and breathe out through my mouth. I don’t even know how to breathe right, I feel like I can’t—

“Seriously, status check,” Emma calls out.

“I’m fine,” I croak. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

“Yeah, you sounded real fine when you were throwing up a minute ago.” The dryness in her voice is not lost through the door. I get why she and Cole are a thing.

I cough out a sound that’s half laugh, half groan. “I’m so sorry.”

“You get a pass, given what you’re about to walk into,” she replies.

“It was only once,” I mumble, but she hears it and laughs, then tells me she’ll go downstairs to grab the rental car from the valet so I can finish up. Once she’s gone, my room descends back into the silence that made me spiral in the first place.

I pull up the playlist Adam sent me in the middle of the night last week called “sad bangers” with an accompanying text that said only, made this 4 u. The first song is a Charli xcx song with a similar title, which was probably the point. Adam loves a throughline.

The beat bounces off the marble countertop while I re-tuck my dress shirt into my pants, adjust my belt, push my hair off my forehead and straighten the gold chain hanging around my neck. It reverberates into my skull while I take another swig of mouthwash, even though I’ve done it twice already.

I try to drown out all my thoughts, but my anxiety loves to feed itself, so it pictures what I’ll be walking into once we get to the wedding instead: the hand Georgia will be holding. The way she’ll look. How she might be wearing a dress that used to hang in our closet. I picture the strangeness of being next to another woman, even though it’s not real, and Georgia being next to another man, because that is. The fucking dance we’ll have to do as always—smiling politely at each other with stupid heys and hellos, like we never belonged to each other. Like I don’t belong to her now. Like I don’t immediately scroll to her name in my contacts list whenever I pick up my phone to call someone. Even four years after we broke up, she’s still my first instinct.

It doesn’t matter, though. She’s moved on, and in a handful of minutes I’m going to see it.

And when I get an urgent email from my boss telling me to tweak a slide in the pitch pack that forced me to take the red eye in the first place, when I text Emma need ten minutes and remember all the times I said the same thing to Georgia, how that added up to hours and days and weeks, when I think about all the time I stole from us—from her—I know I deserve to watch it happen.

***

“Try to look less like someone who’s been puking in the bathroom all afternoon over his ex,” Emma murmurs as we make our way toward the massive backyard that spills right onto the crystal blue lake.

“I told you it was only once,” I reply, scanning the crowd.

There’s a lot of movement: people talking in clusters, people moving toward the white chairs set up facing the lake for the ceremony, waiters handing out champagne. I’m scanning for the jump scare. Trying to get ahead of it, deluding myself into thinking I can. I know what this guy, Julian, looks like; Georgia tagged him in a group photo in an Instagram story once and his face is ingrained in the darkest section of my memory, so I’m looking for blond hair. With my stomach in knots, I’m looking for dark brown next to it, in any variation of how she’d wear it: flowing down her back, up in a ponytail, all pinned back with nothing to distract from how beautiful her face is. How familiar it is to me.

I hope she’s not wearing it like that. I’ve been out of my hotel bathroom for thirty minutes and I still haven’t figured out how to breathe.

“You’re doing it again.”

Fuck. I glance down at Emma. “You must regret agreeing to come to this.”

“Not at all,” she says with a smile that’s calm in a way I haven’t been for years.

“Hard to believe,” I mutter, then add, “At least it’s not a complete waste of your time. You get the rest of the weekend with Cole.”

“Yeah, although I think it’ll be our last meet-up.”

I’ve been searching the crowd again, my heart racing, but Emma’s response pulls me back to her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “Cole struggles with the concept of being serious and I can easily find a non-committal man to be my fuck buddy a lot closer to home. It’s a city-wide pastime in the New York metropolitan area.” Her blonde eyebrow arches my way. “I think our little situation has run its course, is all.”

“Shit,” I say, wincing. “I’m sorry.”

She waves me off. “Don’t be. I’ll get some great goodbye sex out of it from him, and a reminder that men are capable of being pathetically and eternally in love from you.”

I run a hand over my mouth, laughing wryly. “Happy to be of service, I guess.”

She turns to face me, tipping her chin back. She’s tiny, but her eyes are so sharp and assessing that it feels like she’s looming over me. “You think you’ll ever move on?”

“No.”

The word is out of my mouth before I’ve even fully processed the question. No, I’ll never move on from Georgia. I don’t even want to try. Haven’t for the last four years. It’s her or no one, and it’s not her, so I guess it’s no one.

I probably deserve that, too.

“Why not tell her?” Emma asks.

My stomach twists. “You sound like Cole.”

“But nicer,” she replies.

“Yeah,” I say with a laugh. “Much nicer.”

“You’re a fucking idiot, you know,” is what he told me right after he and Emma hatched this plan in the wake of my panic last month. We were sitting at some sticky table at a bar around the corner from my apartment, Emma perched on Cole’s lap, me on the other side, alone, staring at the familiar way his hand curled around her thigh with a hole in my chest. Thinking about how the ghost of me and Georgia wrapped up exactly like that probably still haunted Jake’s Dilemma, the bar around the corner from the apartment we used to share on the Upper West Side. Thinking about how I’d have to watch her be like that with someone else at the kind of wedding I’d imagined for us. For years. For longer than Georgia ever knew. I was always thinking about forever with her.

Emma’s laugh slices through my Georgia-shaped fog. “He has the delivery of a pickaxe, but it comes from a good place.”

I know it does. I remember the way he stared me down, annoyed and empathetic, and said, “Stop martyring yourself, for Chrissakes. Just tell her you’re still in love with her.”

“I’m sure her boyfriend would love that,” I replied. Calling him that brought the beer I’d swallowed a minute ago back up my throat.

There were a hundred reasons I couldn’t tell Georgia how I still felt, but her being with someone else was now number one. Number two was that I didn’t deserve to tell her. That she deserved someone better and she knew it. That’s why she left. And anyway, I was the exact same guy she’d walked away from. Worse now, probably.

Cole stared at me. “I’d bet Blue Yonder that she doesn’t give a shit about that guy.”

I thought about that for the next ten minutes while Emma and Cole worked out the schedule for their part of this weekend. I thought about it ten minutes later when I got a text from Andrew—or Luce, as Georgia always called him—and had to go back to my apartment to work. I thought about it while I stared at my ceiling three hours later, feeling like the walls were caving in on me. I wondered if I’d be able to tell how she felt about this guy when I saw them, and immediately knew the answer was yes. She’s good at hiding messier emotions but the ones that would fuck me up in this scenario—happiness, attraction, infatuation, love? Those she’s always offered up so easily. That night, I closed my eyes and pictured every single one on her face, played look after look after look on a loop. All of them directed at me. All of them memories.

My stomach rolls. I feel like I’m going to throw up fucking again.

Emma leans in, catching my eye. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about how you want to play this.”

“This?” I repeat stupidly, swallowing hard.

She gestures into the space between us. “Our fake thing. Like, do you want to hold hands throughout the night? Be cuddly?”

“Not that,” I blurt out, sliding my hands into the pockets of my pants as my brain slides four years into the past: Georgia’s hand in mine. My hands curled around her shoulder, around the back of her neck, around her waist, pulling her closer. Georgia draped over me on the couch. In bed. Georgia with her arms looped around my stomach from behind, her laugh pressed against my shoulder while she guided me down the street to the bodega. Georgia with her fingerprints all over my skin, always. Still. I don’t want anyone else near them.

I clear my throat. “Maybe just—I don’t know, touch my elbow occasionally or something? I’ll do the same?”

To her credit, Emma tries to suppress the pity in her smile. To my embarrassment, she can’t. “Sure, we’ll touch elbows.” She nods her chin over my shoulder. “You want to start now? She’s here.”

“She—” Me and my heart trip over the word as I turn.

I’ve had four years of practice pretending that the world doesn’t tip sideways when Georgia enters a room—or in this case, a backyard—but it never gets easier. Now, as I catch sight of her walking across the lawn with Adam and Grace, everything in my body comes to a halt: my blood, my brain, my heart. The only upside is that no one can see any of that happening. I drink her in, aware that I only have a handful of seconds before I’ll have to look away.

I make every one of them count.

She looks perfect. She always does. I love her in sweatpants, no makeup, and I love her in jeans, in my sweatshirt, getting strands of her hair all over it. I love her in nothing and I love her exactly like this: in a flowery pink dress that skims down a body I know by heart and touch and taste, with thin straps meant to wind a hand into. With a zipper down the back meant to be a finger path at the end of a night like this.

I’ve never seen it before. That’s the thing that snaps me back into reality. It hurts more than if she’d worn something familiar, but I need the reminder. She buys clothes I don’t get to see. She has days I don’t get to hear about. She has a life I have almost no access to. It’s an outcome I never imagined the night I brought that cupcake to her apartment on her twenty-first birthday with my heart beating out of my chest, the night I told her I loved her with my heart already in her hands, the day I asked her to move to New York with me, during any of the moments I spent writing the reasons I love her in the paper rings I used to make.

But it’s the outcome I’ve lived with for the last four years. It’s the one playing out now to the soundtrack of Nick and Miriam’s string quartet as she gets closer and closer.

“E,” Adam calls out happily, one hand raised above his head, the other pressed to Grace’s back. She waves, too, and I return it, but I’m already hungry to get back to Georgia.

Her eyes crash into mine. They’re the color of the sky and the lake behind us, the color I see behind my eyelids when I’m trying to sleep or pushing my fingers against them in the middle of a late night at the office. I see the flash of discomfort there before she puts it away.

She’s so good at that. I wish I was, too.

I turn my attention back to Adam, calling out, “Hey, Kiz.” My pause is microscopic, I think, while I rearrange my mouth from its instinctive forming of Peach and say instead, “George, Gracie.”

The three of them pick up the pace and my heart does the same, but it stops when Emma murmurs, “Where’s her guy?”

My gaze ricochets back to Georgia and that’s when I see it: not any of the expressions I was scared for, but something worse. It’s the expression I saw for months before she left New York— her smile is tight. Her eyes are tight. Her shoulders are, too, like she’s bracing herself or holding herself up.

I know with that look that Julian isn’t parking the car or in the bathroom or grabbing drinks for them. I know that he’s not here at all.

I know that she’s alone, just like she was all those months with me.

***

Georgia and I don’t hug. We rarely do, unless it would look weird not to. It’s one of the rules we fell into but never talked about in order to keep our friendship with Adam stable.

But when she gets close enough that I can smell the perfume that used to sit on our bathroom counter, when she says, “Hi” in the voice I used to hear every day and now hear every six months if I’m lucky, if I’m tortured, it feels like she’s putting her hands all over me. It feels like she’s reaching straight into my chest. It always does, but right now it’s concentrated down into a sharp pain. For her. For me. For the us who would’ve been here together in another timeline.

“Hey,” I reply, trying to rearrange my expression. I know I look shocked, and I know she sees it. She stares at me, nostrils a little flared, before her gaze bounces away, straight to my—fuck—fake date.

This is a disaster. She’s alone, I’m not. Hers was real, mine isn’t.

And she doesn’t know any of that.

“Hi, I’m Georgia,” she says to Emma, but that’s all I hear before Adam is pulling me into a bone-crushing hug.

“Hey, there’s my best guy,” he says. “I’m glad you made it.”

I can feel his smile against my ear, but I don’t have time for jovial greetings. “Where’s—”

“They broke up.” Adam’s arms tighten around me, keeping me in place. “She didn’t give me details and she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

So, don’t, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. I’d never ask, and she’d never tell me. It was always like that before we got together, too, and now that we have years of history between us? She’d probably rather sink herself into the lake behind us than give me a single detail. Georgia doesn’t do messy conversations, and given that look on her face, I know what happened anyway: he fucked up.

A quick, soft smack against my cheek brings me back to Adam, replaces the rage and anxiety in my veins with surprise. He raises his eyebrows. “You good?”

“Yeah, of course,” I say, blanking out my expression, pulling my mouth into a smile. “I’m great.”

But I’m not great or good or even okay. Not as I hug Grace absently and introduce her and Adam to Emma.

Not as I watch Georgia’s eyes drop to Emma’s hand at my elbow before she looks away and says, “Let’s grab our seats,” or as I watch the long line of her spine as we follow her.

Not as I toy with a gum wrapper between my bobbing knees while Nick and Miriam say their vows, barely stopping myself from shaping it into a ring, or as I let my eyes wander sideways, over Adam and Grace’s laps to Georgia’s, where her hands are clasped, knuckles white.

And most of all, not as I watch her from across the table at dinner, her wine glass full on an endless loop, the seat next to her empty until Adam finally slips into it. It brings me back to the night of her work’s holiday party when I didn’t show up for her, when that seat was empty. I remember how fucking scared I was running home, how I knew even before she said it that we were done, and I feel that sensation in my chest all over again. I’ve been pushing it down for four years, numbing it with work, but now it breaks open like panic, like grief, and I know I can’t stay here. I know that if I do, I’ll get down on my knees at Georgia’s feet like I wanted to the night we broke up. I know I’ll lay my head in her lap and beg her to take me back. And I know I’m too fucked up to put her in that position—to say no. Worse, to say yes, because I am the same guy she walked away from.

I don’t do any of that. Instead, I leave—the wedding, and then, on a 7:40 a.m. flight out of Reno the next morning, the state. I go back to New York and inevitably get pulled back into the tide of my never-ending, relentless work. But while I do that, I think about that look on Georgia’s face every second of every hour of every day. I think about the tightness in my chest that never leaves. I think, for the millionth time in four years, that I don’t want to be the Eli she walked away from, then realize, maybe for the first time, that I can’t be. That it’s killing me slowly. I don’t know how to get out of this endless loop of anxiety and panic, but I want to. I need to. Georgia doesn’t deserve this version of me, but I don’t either.

And so a month later, staring at a therapist’s number on my computer screen, I pick up my phone and do something about it.