Kiss Her Once for Me (35)

The problem is, I know exactly what it would mean. Money like this… it wouldn’t solve all of my problems, but hell if it wouldn’t solve a lot of them.

Our FaceTime lapses into awkward silence, and for a moment I think she’s frozen, her curly red hair framing her sleepy face, a pencil shoved into her half bun. Then she speaks: “How was it? Seeing her again?”

I swallow. “She said it didn’t mean anything, Mere.”

“But you already knew it didn’t,” she tells me gently, “and I thought you said you were over her.”

“I totally am.”

I totally am not. But I want to be, so badly, and isn’t that kind of the same thing?

“If you’re over Jack, I don’t see what the big deal is with this arrangement,” she says. “Who cares if you slept with your fake fiancé’s sister?”

Despite the absolute ridiculousness of that sentence, she does have a point. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter…”

Meredith pauses. “You’re really over her, then?”

“Mmm,” I say. It’s either the beginning of the Campbell’s Soup slogan, or the least convincing syllable in the English language.

“Okay. It’s decided.” Meredith delivers this verdict with finality. “You’ll stay with Andrew at the cabin for eight more days and pretend to be his fiancée. For the money. And for the creative material, honestly. I can’t wait to read the next episode of this new webcomic. Did you see the numbers on the first episode? People really love a fake-dating trope. Or is this more marriage of convenience?”

I ignore her. “Okay,” I say, strengthened in my convictions. Jack be damned. This is about two hundred thousand dollars. I can’t allow a silly crush to ruin my chance at two hundred thousand dollars.

I can totally be over her. But just to be safe, I can also totally avoid her in this giant house for the next eight days.



* * *



The “avoiding Jack” plan lasts all of five minutes, four of which I spend uploading the second episode of The Arrangement even though it’s more of a sloppy draft than a finished product, since I did it in five hours hunched over a washing machine. I try not to think about the people on the other side of the screen, but Meredith is right: tens of thousands of people read the first episode.

I slide my iPad back into its case and hop off the washing machine in search of breakfast. It’s almost nine now, and I can hear someone banging around loudly in the kitchen. When I come up the stairs, I see that it’s her.

Jack is wearing an apron over a “Stop Asian Hate” T-shirt with AirPods sticking out of her ears. She’s sifting flour, so her head is bent low, a lock of hair falling across her face. She hasn’t noticed me yet. She’s preoccupied with measuring her flour on a small kitchen scale, bobbing along to an unheard song.

I should take advantage of her ignorance and leave the kitchen before she sees me. I don’t want to hear the sound of her raspy morning voice or see the soft purple bags under her eyes. I don’t want to think about how she looked when she woke up next to me, when I briefly and foolishly thought she might always wake up next to me.

Two hundred thousand dollars. You’re doing this for two hundred thousand dollars.

Before I can make my escape from the kitchen, Jack’s head snaps up in anticipation of adding the flour to the mixing bowl, and when she sees me standing there, her dark brown eyes go wide. She pulls out one AirPod, and I hear three seconds of “Pocketful of Sunshine” playing at damaging volume before it cuts off.

“Good morning,” she says. In that raspy fucking voice.

“Hi, uh. Hey,” I say, in a nervous fucking voice. “Good morning.”

Her eyes linger on me for another beat before she drops them down to the mixing bowl. “Sorry if I woke you,” she says. “I know I can be loud.”

I smile. Calling Jack loud is like calling her decent looking: she crashes into every room, takes up all the space, demands all the attention.

“You didn’t wake me,” I say.

The kitchen falls silent, with Jack’s concentration consumed by her baking, and my concentration consumed by watching Jack bake. I catch myself a solid ten seconds into a stare fixated on her hands and try to come up with some kind of verbal diversion. I have so many questions about what happened between us a year ago. Questions about honesty and dishonesty, about trust, about Claire. About how seeing me again can be so fucking easy for her.

But I can’t ask her about any of that. So I ask, “Do you always bring your Airstream all the way up to the mountain for Christmas?”

“Paul Hollywood isn’t allowed to sleep inside the house because my mom doesn’t trust that he won’t climb up on any furniture in the night.” Jack gestures to the floor, and I peer around the island countertop to see the dog curled into a ball at her feet. “And I like being able to escape to my own space at the end of the day. As much as I love spending Christmas with my grandmas and my mom, it’s best for my mental health if I have a place that’s completely mine.”

She offers this information freely, as if we’ve picked up our relationship exactly where we set it down on Christmas morning a year ago, halfway through a round of the honesty game. As if there are no boundaries between us, no hurt feelings to protect. She hands over vulnerability like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and maybe it is if you’re Jack Kim-Prescott. If you didn’t leave last year with hurt feelings.