Kiss Her Once for Me (43)

“This is pretty,” she says, reaching over to touch a single finger to the edge of my hand-knitted scarf. That’s it. One finger. Not even touching me. Touching my scarf. Yet somehow, that one finger is enough to turn me inside out.

“Oh, it’s, um. Meredith made it,” I say.

Jack turns forward, pushing her glasses up her nose again. “It matches your eyes,” she says as she yanks the gearshift into reverse and eases her foot off the brake. And—nothing happens. The tires spin beneath us, the engine whines, but Gillian does not budge.

“Uh-oh.”

“What do you mean uh-oh?”

“I’m just gonna—” She hops out of the truck as if to diagnose the source of the problem, even though the problem is quite clear. It’s the snow. There are parked cars all around us, abandoned and covered with snow, and up ahead is a snarled line of traffic on Ninth Street, cars fishtailing and peeling out.

I jump out of the truck too, and follow Jack around to the back. “I think she’s stuck,” Jack observes. “We’ll have to dig her out. Fucking snow.”

My anxiety feels like a tangle of Christmas lights again—like a horrible, inextricable knot lodged in my chest, spreading up to my throat and down into my stomach. “Won’t they plow the roads soon?” I ask as Jack crouches down behind the rear tires.

“That’s so cute, Ohio, but no.”

“Okay, Portland, why not?”

She begins earnestly shoveling snow with her hands. “We don’t have the infrastructure for snow here because we don’t get it very often. Most winters, we only get about two inches or so, but every few years, there’s a massive storm like this one where all the grocery stores sell out of kale and no one can go anywhere. As for plows, they’ll wait until the snow stops, so maybe by midday tomorrow the main roads will be clear. You know, this would probably go faster with two people.”

But it goes nowhere, even after thirty minutes of both of us attempting to dig the car out. Finally, Jack slumps back against her truck. “Gillian isn’t moving today. I think we might be properly stuck.”

She sounds impossibly calm, as if she hasn’t just announced that we are trapped outside in a snowstorm with no way to get home. I try to take a deep breath, but it feels like all the oxygen has been siphoned out of my lungs. We’re stuck. I’m stuck, with a stranger, in a city I don’t know, cut off from the comfort and the safety of my new apartment.

I’m stuck in the snow, stuck, stuck, stuck.

“Hey.” Jack’s voice cuts through my mental spiral. “Are you okay?”

“No!” I gasp, clutching the sides of my ribs, struggling to breathe through this new probably-not-a-heart-attack. “We’re stuck in the snow! What are we going to do?”

I wait for Jack to laugh at my overreaction, the way my parents used to. I wait for her to switch into problem-solving mode, like Meredith always does. I wait for her to tell me something horribly unhelpful, like you’re fine or you’re going to be okay, even though nothing feels fine and it isn’t okay and I’m having a panic attack in the snow.

But Jack doesn’t say anything at all, not for a long time. She simply unhooks the tailgate so it drops down into a bench, gesturing until I come and sit down beside her, my legs dangling over the edge. We sit in silence, her thigh pressed against mine, her shoulder right there, reminding me I’m not alone with my racing thoughts.

My hands are twisted in my lap, and with the same gentleness from earlier, Jack reaches over with her left hand to disentangle the anxious knot of fingers. Then she slips her warm, callused hand through mine, holding it loosely. “Is this okay?” she asks, and when I nod, she tightens her grasp. “What’s the worst thing your anxiety is telling you right now?”

“Nothing,” I manage. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“Elle,” she says. She started doing that, started calling me Elle on our walk to Voodoo. One syllable, a single letter. I focus on that. “Don’t make me say ‘honesty game’ when you’re clearly having a panic attack.”

“Fine,” I choke out. “My anxiety is telling me that we don’t have a plan, and that we’re going to be stuck outside in the snow forever. That we’ll never get home. That we’ll catch hypothermia and our toes will fall off and we’ll die.”

“Yeah.” Jack exhales. “That would all be less than ideal.”

I study her profile, the sharp lines of her pretty face against the backdrop of so much snow. “Aren’t you going to tell me that I’m being irrational?”

She turns to face me, so close, our noses almost brush. “Is that something that helps you when you’re having a panic attack? Being told you’re irrational?”

“God, no.”

“Then, why would I say that to you?” Without letting go of my hand, Jack fishes her phone out of the pocket of her coat. “My mom has generalized anxiety disorder, and if I ever told her she was being irrational while she was having a panic attack, I’m pretty sure she’d scratch my eyes out. And I would deserve it.”

“What are you doing?” I ask as I watch her jab her thumb against her phone screen awkwardly with one hand.

“I’m coming up with a plan. Okay. I live up on Stark close to Mount Tabor Park, which is… an hour-and-twenty-minute walk from here. Totally manageable. Where do you live?”