Kiss Her Once for Me (25)

“He’s less dignified than he seems on Bake Off.”

“They say you should never meet your heroes.”

She begins stripping off her layers, and as much as I want to watch her, the desire to survey her house takes precedence over my unexpected lust. I do a slow circle in spot, taking in the details of her messy, cramped living quarters. It feels like a study in contradiction: she lives with wheels beneath her, always restless, always ready to be on the move, yet this trailer is a home. She’s nested here, accumulated a life. There is an unmade bed on one end of the trailer, a stack of what looks like unfolded clean laundry in the corner. Shelves overhead house dog toys and boxes of treats, half-finished macrame projects, mason jars with rings of cold brew crusted to their bottoms.

On the other end of the trailer is a kitchenette with cookbooks stacked on every shelf, bulk ingredients in glass jars, a stand mixer and a food scale, a small trail of spilled flour. There are prints on the walls, succulents behind the sink, the smell of dog and body sweat, of peppermint tea and freshly baked bread, always bread.

It is both fixed and transient, restless and grounded, subtle control amidst unbridled chaos. In short, it’s Jack.

“I can’t believe you live in an Airstream. It’s so…” Romantic, I don’t say.

Paul Hollywood comes bouncing back inside, and Jack closes the door. The dog circles three times and flops down in a fluffy bed on the floor packed with half-chewed stuffed animals. “How are your feet?” Jack asks me.

I groan. “Still frozen and sore. And I think there’s a good chance several of my toes have detached and are just rattling around inside my boots at this point.” We’d walked three miles to get here, across the Burnside Bridge, where she’d held me in her arms and whispered the words to “White Christmas,” then on through the neighborhoods of Southeast Portland. “How are yours?”

She shrugs. “I’m not worried about my feet.”

“Oh, really? Miss ‘Fuck the Snow’?”

“Sit down,” she orders, pointing to the bed behind me.

I sit down. On the bed. On her bed.

I wait for the alarm bells to go off in my brain. The signal that usually tells me it’s too much, too fast. The alert system that tells me to flee when people get too close before I’m ready. This isn’t me. I don’t follow a woman home after a single day together, but for some reason, over the course of a few hours, I feel like I know this woman better than I’ve ever known anyone.

She crouches down before me, kneeling so her face is level with my torso. Her quarter-moon smile and her white scar and her sweet freckles so close. My pulse throbs against every inch of my skin as she bends forward, her hair falling over her eyes. She begins to untie the laces on my boots. “Do you want to know why I live in an Airstream?” she asks quietly. Well, quietly for her, which is still sort of yelling.

And I want to know every fucking thing about her, and she has to realize that by now. We’ve spent the day bartering for facts about each other, collecting them like seashells on the Oregon coast. My pockets are full of pieces of Jack, and I want to spend the rest of this snowstorm begging for the rest of her story, putting it all together until I can draw her accurately on a sketchbook page, figure out all the lines of her.

“My parents had a rule for me and my brother. As long as we were in school, they would continue to financially support us,” she explains, her fingers still working my laces. I don’t speak. I can barely breathe. She slips off my boots to reveal the soaking wet wool socks underneath. “But I dropped out of college at nineteen, so my parents cut me off. I spent a few months couch surfing with friends until I got the job at Patty’s Cakes. Patty took care of me in a way my parents couldn’t at that time in my life. She taught me how to stand on my own two feet, without my family’s money, and she made me feel like I could be happy, even if I didn’t follow the prescribed plan for my life. Patty’s brother was going to sell this Airstream, but she convinced him to let me pay for it in monthly installments so I could have my own place. It’s the first thing I ever bought on my own, with money I earned. The first thing that’s ever truly been mine.”

Carefully, tenderly, she peels off my socks one at a time, her warm fingers grazing the cold skin on my ankles. I shiver.

“So, yeah,” she says with another shrug. “I live in an Airstream, because it reminds me every day of what I value most. Now, would you look at that?” Jack asks in her too-loud gravelly voice as she bends low over my bare feet. “All your toes are still attached.”

She takes my sweaty, damp right foot between her hands and rubs, trying to warm my skin. Then she presses my foot against the soft flannel of her clearly beloved shirt, pressing my foot to her heart. It is the grossest thing anyone has ever done for me.

It is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.

“How does that feel?” she asks, kneading my skin like her fingers knead dough.

I swallow. “Better.”





Chapter Eight


Saturday, December 17, 2022

I can’t believe she’s here.

Or maybe I can’t believe I am here.

I can’t believe that of all the people living in the Portland metro area, Jack and Andrew are related.

Not just related. Siblings.