Kiss Her Once for Me (103)

I set the flyer down on the bedspread in front of me, too overwhelmed to look at the cute font and the even cuter Dutch oven. “Jack was always capable of this. She just spent her whole life being told she was a slacker and a fuck-up, and she just needed—”

“Someone who could really see her?” Andrew fills in, looking at me pointedly. “Ellie, what happened between the two of you?”

I shift back against the pillows. “You just said Jack told you everything.”

“I want to hear it from you,” he says. “Because based on what I do know, I’m having a difficult time understanding why you’re not together right now.”

“Probably because I was fake-engaged to her brother and lied to her about it,” I joke.

Andrew isn’t joking. His tone is completely serious when he asks me, “Why did you and Jack fall apart?”

I shift again. “Because—because I assumed we were always destined to fall apart. Jack and I were never supposed to meet. We were two lonely girls searching for the same book who found each other on Christmas Eve.”

And it’s hard not to believe some part of that was fated, that it wasn’t random chaos that brought us together and trapped us in the city for the entire day. It’s hard not to feel like Jack was created especially for me, and me for her. Some divine being who built her out of hard angles and tough sinew built me out of softer materials, curves and dimpled flesh. Jack is the steadiness to my sway, and I’m the control to her chaos, yet I’m the one who screwed us up.

“I convinced myself that someone like her could never love someone like me, so I self-sabotaged in the most epic way possible by assuming we weren’t meant to last. And I did that twice.”

Andrew looks serious for a moment. “Third time’s the charm?” he tries.

I shake my head. “People don’t give third chances. And it’s okay—Jack clearly doesn’t want to talk to me and that’s okay. I’m trying to change my patterns. I’m trying to be better at accepting failure is a part of life, and that means accepting that I messed things up with your sister and moving on.”

“Are you actually trying, though? I mean, sure, with your art and your life, A-plus for effort, but”—he places both hands flat on his knees, the way he placed those hands flat on a table before he asked me to marry him—“did you really try with Jack? Look, as we’ve established, I’m not your fiancé, and I’m not your brother, and if you want to tell me to fuck off, you can—”

“Fuck off,” I say. I halfway mean it.

“But,” Andrew continues, “it seems to me like you’re still assuming you’re going to fail before you’ve even tried. You said Jack doesn’t want to talk to you, but have you even reached out to her? Did you even try?”

I stare down at the purple flyer crumpled on top of my duvet.

“People do sometimes get third chances,” Andrew says. “Dylan and I did.”

On the bottom of the flyer, beneath the details about when and where, is a little postscript. Come exactly as you are. All are welcome.

“You should go,” he says.

“Go where?”

“To the soft opening. It’s on Valentine’s Day.”

“I can’t show up to her soft opening. She doesn’t want me there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Do you know she does want me there?”

“No. That’s kind of the point. You have to take a risk and find out.”

My finger traces the glossy paper over the words Butch Oven. An imperfect rhyme.

“I don’t want to show up to her big event and ruin it,” I tell Andrew. “That sounds like a ridiculously idiotic plan.”

He reaches across the bed to grab my foot again. “Sometimes,” he says, “ridiculously idiotic plans work out mostly for the best.”





Chapter Thirty-One


Tuesday, February 14, 2023

The air smells like the possibility of snow.

I step out of the car and into the cold evening, wrapping my blue scarf closer to my face. It hasn’t snowed in Portland all winter, but now the promise lingers in the sharpness of every deep breath I take. And I’m taking a lot of deep breaths.

“Is this a ridiculously idiotic idea?”

Ari finishes paying through Parking Kitty on her phone, then loops her right arm through my free one. “Oh, it’s definitely a ridiculously idiotic idea. That’s why I love it.”

She gives me a tug, as if she knows my internal resistance is about two seconds away from becoming external, that I’m about ready to plant my feet into this sidewalk and never move. That I’m ready to freeze.

Ari doesn’t let me freeze.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like my stomach is going to fall out of my ass.”

“God, it’s so sexy when you talk about your anxiety-based GI issues,” Ari says, and I laugh as she nestles closer to me while we walk, pressing her crown of hair to my shoulder. She smells like coffee and essential oils and unconditional love.

“But is this fucked up? That I’m crashing her soft opening?”

“You’re not crashing,” Ari argues, “because her entire family invited you.”