Kiss Her Once for Me (36)

My heart squeezes in my chest, almost like it’s shrink-wrapping itself for future mishandling. “What are you making?”

“Waffles.” She cracks an egg against the granite counter and slides the egg whites and yolk into the batter with one hand. It looks impossibly cool. “I always make waffles the first morning at the cabin. It’s on the schedule.”

“The schedule?”

Jack uses a wooden spoon to point to a laminated schedule on the counter. It’s an Excel spreadsheet with the next eight days broken down into structured activities, things like Christmas cookies: six hours and finding the perfect Christmas tree: three hours.

Christmas carols: two hours.

Family ski trip: twelve hours.

The detail-oriented side of me whimpers at the sight of such organizational glory. But the emotional, sentimental side is slightly unnerved that the organization is applied to family bonding time. “Whoa,” is what I ultimately say.

“Yes.” Jack nods, whisking. “That’s my mother for you.”

“Whoa,” I repeat. Yet—there’s something sweet about the laminated schedule, too. Katherine cares about spending time with her family so much, she’s carved out two hours just for a first family walk in the snow. Linds can’t carve out ten minutes for a phone call unless she needs money.

I feel it again, that sense of longing mixed with a nostalgia for family Christmases I’ve never known.

“Katherine does not play when it comes to mandatory family activities,” Jack explains. “Even though we all live close, we only spend quality time together as a family a few times a year, and Christmas is my mom’s favorite.”

“What about your dad?” I set the schedule back down. “Does he usually have to work through the holidays?”

Jack hunches her back and leans into mixing the batter. This involves some rather obscene forearm flexing.

You’re over her. It never meant anything. She’s a garbage liar person.

I hear Meredith’s voice. A garbage liar person with exceptional forearms.

“Yes,” Jack finally answers. “My dad works. And he’ll tell my mom he’s coming tomorrow every night when she calls, and every morning, he will break my mom’s heart all over again by not showing up. He’ll probably be here for Christmas Day, but that’s it. It’s the same every year.”

I glance back down at the laminated schedule. Family holiday movie night: four hours. “That’s… sad.”

Jack stops whisking for a moment and looks up at me. An immediate warmth seeps into my bones from the heat of her gaze. It’s not fair. She broke my trust. She shouldn’t have the power to make me blush anymore.

“It is sad,” she agrees. “But I’m sure Andrew has told you all about our dysfunctional family.”

Andrew clearly didn’t tell me shit.

“I know what it’s like to have a dad who can’t bother to show up for the holidays,” I say, setting the schedule back on the counter. “Or ever.”

Jack’s face and eyes go soft. In the morning light of the kitchen, her eyes shine a dozen shades of brown, each one warm and comforting. Like molasses cookies. Like medium-roast coffee. Like the worn leather spine of an old, beloved book.

No, Ellie. You’re over her.

And it never meant anything to her.

And two hundred thousand dollars.

Jack’s eyes travel down to the iPad tucked under my arm. “So… you work as a barista now?”

I nod and hope against reason that she won’t ask any follow-up questions.

But of course, she does. “Does that mean you left Laika?”

I hold my computer against the front of my body like a shield. Jack knew me as the Ellie with dreams and goals, the Ellie who’d worked toward something her whole life and then achieved it. The Ellie who’d believed that most things worked out, most of the time.

Standing in front of her now as this Ellie—the Ellie who lost everything, the Ellie who failed, the Ellie who stopped believing in most things—I’m not sure what I regret more: my past naivete or my present cynicism.

“Yes,” I say. “I left Laika.”

“Why? What happened?” Jack asks bluntly. She’s always blunt, always direct, never wraps my fragile feelings in bubble wrap. I love that about her, and I hate that about her, and right now, I just want to evade her questioning.

“It didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t work out?” she pushes. “You moved across the country for that job. It was all part of your ten-year plan. You—”

“It just didn’t work out. I failed, and there’s nothing else to say about it.”

“Honesty game,” Jack says, reflexively, flippantly. It’s only after the words are hovering awkwardly in the kitchen between us that Jack seems to realize perhaps she shouldn’t have said them. She clenches her jaw.

There’s a burn behind my eyes, in my chest. Part of me wants to slip back into the dynamics from a year ago, to be the girl who trusted Jack with all the secret compartments of her heart. When I got fired from Laika, she was the first person I wanted to tell, because I knew if anyone could make me feel better about my entire life falling apart, it would be her.

But it’s not that simple. “There’s nothing else to say,” I repeat.