Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(60)

If I could ever get this guy to kiss me, is the thing, who would he be kissing? I’ve never doubted myself before.

I knew who I was, and everyone else did, too. I looked for the world around me in everything that I saw.

I looked for the world even as a young woman. I looked and I fought for the world one f*cking cell at a time, and just when I thought I’d learned everything I wanted to, the whole world would change again.

When I just didn’t know, when no matter how I looked I was left in the dark, it would be Christmas again.

The lights shining and as high up as we could hang them.

I don’t want him to kiss a sad-sack microbiologist who takes one bus and has given up vegetarianism because she’s afraid to go to the good grocery store and sits in the dark at night passing notes with a stranger and needs her mom to talk her asleep.

I want him to kiss Christmas Jenny.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s cleared up all the fights and misunderstanding with herself, and will have love, for a whole year.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who has figured out how to collect all this new data on her new life where the equipment’s changed.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s remembered that even if everything looks different, it doesn’t mean what she sees isn’t good data.

I’m a scientist, I don’t know enough, right now, to make a theory.

All those nights I’ve sat alone in my place, afraid of the dark, there was probably all kinds of stuff I could have been seeing and understanding and I didn’t f*cking look.

I am not a bad scientist.

I want him to kiss Jenny, who is a motherf*cking-awesome microbiologist and is learning to drive again so she can go to museums on the weekends and the farmer’s market and lives her very own life, not the life I think retinitis pigmentosa is telling me I’m supposed to live.

And actually, retinitis pigmentosa never told me anything at all about how it was I was supposed to live.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’s told me how I’m supposed to see, either.

I won’t sit in the dark and wait for the whole goddamned world to spin around the sun to bring the light back.

I’ll hang up my own lights and they’ll burn with joy and discovery.

I can learn to see however I want to.

“Yeah,” I say again, “I want to talk about my goals for therapy.” I pull open my desk drawer and grab the voice-recognition-software CD he gave me weeks ago. “Let’s start with this. We’ll eat grilled cheese and french fries and you’ll put this on my computer and show me how to use it.”

I hold out the CD to him, and he takes it, slowly.

“You kissed me,” he says, and he looks right into my eyes and there are places along his cheekbones I watch get almost as pink as his shirt.

“You kissed me.”

“Yes.”

“Right here,” I put my finger on my forehead, at my hairline.

“Right here,” he says, and touches his cheek. “And here,” he says, and drags his finger to that spot just a little east of his mouth.

“I’m just saying.” I take a deep breath. Then another. “Until it’s right here”—and then I put my finger on my mouth, in the middle of my bottom lip, and I watch his eyes sink to that spot—“I’d like you to help me with this stuff. Also, this is your fault for showing me how much therapy could help me.”

Our eyes meet again, and his have gone dark. He’s fixing his eyes, I can tell, so he won’t look at my mouth.

So I look at his, and remember how it felt along my hair, how his hand held me to him.

“Okay?” I whisper. “Please help. I’m ready.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. “Yeah, okay. Of course.” He slides his chair forward, next to mine, and reaches in to insert the CD. His head is alongside mine, his body, like when we were in the lab.

I hear him take a deep breath. “Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

“We still have to talk about this other thing.”

I turn my head, and we’re close enough to end this.

We could really get into the kind of horny, rubbing, hot kiss that happens after you’ve not kissed for way too long.

I could feel his breath on my face, and something about that is painful and unbearable and makes me sore between my legs, but I want to choose myself more than I want to kiss Evan at this moment.

And in this moment, I want to kiss Evan more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.

But I want myself the most.

I keep my eyes on his, the tension so hot and sweet I have to fist my hands to resist it. “Let’s talk about the other thing when it’s me, really me, that you’re talking to.”

“Okay.” He says this on a breath, hardly speaks at all, but then he turns away and takes my mouse and starts opening the new application.

“Can we eat, too?”

*

“Jen-nee R-eye-t iz fuh-rum See-at-tul.”

Jay knee right is fulcrum sea cattle.

“Shit,” Evan says, reaching over me to fiddle with something while I laugh, again, so hard my face is starting to hurt.

“Wait, wait, lemme say something else,” I gasp, and hold my stomach so that I can suppress my giggling.

“Eh-ven iz vuh-ary fer-us-tray-ted.”