Kiss Her Once for Me (34)

“I just don’t understand how you even go about drawing someone’s hand,” she muses, tracing the edge of my thumb, the crescent moon of my nail. I’m scrambling again, trying to keep up with her sharp-left turns. “There are so many intricacies in the human hand.”

I open my mouth to explain, but my chest feels too crowded again. I have four extra ribs, three hearts, and a fullness climbing into my throat as Jack continues to chart a path down the slope of my thumb, inward across the soft flesh of my palm. If this is how she touches a woman’s hand, I can’t imagine how she kisses.

Except, I absolutely can imagine it—it would taste like pralines and chocolate and feel like this, delicate and unhurried—and the thought curls my toes inside my boots like paper as it burns.

This doesn’t happen to me. I don’t picture kissing total strangers, and if I do, there isn’t toe-curling involved.

I rip my hand away from her.

“Sorry.” She places her hands palms-down on the table. “I should’ve asked before I touched you.”

“No, it’s not… um… I watched a lot of YouTube videos,” I say, “to learn how to draw hands. In high school. That’s how I taught myself how to do it.”

Jack smiles fully—not a quarter-moon or a half-moon, but something unguarded and infectious and a little goofy. “Come on.” She pushes back from the table and grabs her coat. “The snow is getting bad, so we should probably head to our next location.”

“What is our next location?”

She shrugs into her Carhartt jacket. “No idea. I don’t have a ‘plan.’?” I look up to find her smirking at me for a moment before her expression falls. “But look,” she says, holding up that same stern finger, “I’m not your manic pixie dream butch—”

“My what?”

“But if you wanted to, say, spend a few hours with a kind stranger who has attractive hands”—she jazz-hands aggressively at me—“we could just… I don’t know… see where the day takes us?”

Out the window, nearly four inches of snow has gathered along the sidewalk on Burnside. On a snow day, you could get away with not having plans.





Chapter Ten


Sunday, December 18, 2022

“Is this a joke? You’re joking, right?”

“Why the hell would I joke about something like this?”

“Um. Because you’re hilarious?” Meredith guesses. “Especially when you’re trying not to be.”

“Okay, one, that’s harsh—”

“You know what’s actually harsh? The fact that you never watch the TikToks I send you—”

“And two—” I raise my voice as loud as I dare over the silence of the cabin. Everyone else is still sleeping, but I’ve been awake for hours, hiding in the laundry room on the ground floor, working on the panels for episode two of The Arrangement—current working title: “Revenge of the Snow Day.” As soon as I came downstairs, I sent Meredith a frantic, all-caps CALL ME text with twenty exclamation points at four in the morning my time, and then anxiously waited for her to call me back.

“You should not make light of my struggles,” I scold her now, even though I’m just grateful to see her face.

“You’re not fucking with me, then? Andrew is Jack’s brother? Jack is there? With you? Jack?”

“No, I’m not ‘fucking with you.’ She’s here.”

“Well.” Meredith shrugs on the screen. “You definitely have a type.”

“I hate you.”

“I mean, statistically, you don’t develop crushes on dudes very often, so it would make sense that you were crushing on Andrew because he looks like a girl you already slept with.”

“So much. I hate you so, so much.”

Meredith shakes her head. “And she told you not to tell Andrew about your history?”

“Yes, she did. Because she’s clearly a garbage liar person.”

“A sexy garbage liar person.”

“That detail is immaterial to this argument.”

“Feels material.”

I flop back on my washing machine perch. “I can’t stay here! Andrew has a weird thing with his sister’s best friend, and I slept with his sister, and it’s a whole love trapezoid situation that’s going to end disastrously for everyone involved. So, I’m going to find a way back to Portland.”

“What do you mean? You can’t leave. The money!”

“I can’t stay, Mere! She’s his sister!”

“You quit your job! You can’t just go back to Portland! Where will you live?”

“Wherever it is, it has to be better than staying here!”

Meredith sets down her torts flash cards and gives me her full, undivided attention. “It’s eight days until Christmas, Ellie. You’re telling me you can’t suffer eight days in that house for two hundred thousand dollars? That’s twenty-five thousand dollars per day.”

“I know, but—”

“You survived with your shit family for eighteen years, and you didn’t get a cent for it,” Meredith points out. “Think about how you grew up. Think about what money like that could mean.”