Kiss Her Once for Me (52)
She eyes my bare legs, then looks up at my face. “Hi,” she says back. “Who are you?”
I tug on the hem of Jack’s shirt. “Um. Ellie? I’m Jack’s… friend. Who are you?”
“I’m Claire,” the woman with the magenta hair says. “I’m Jack’s wife.”
The crowded, too-much feeling in my chest recedes, hollows out, until I’m standing there with a black hole of absolute nothingness where my rib cage used to be. “I’m sorry.” I blink at this woman. “Who?”
Claire smiles and cocks her hip. “Did she not tell you about me?”
I try to take a breath, but there’s nothing but dead space where my lungs should be.
“Don’t worry.” Claire laughs. I’m standing there half-naked in a stranger’s shirt, and Claire is laughing at me. “I’m not upset or anything. We have an agreement. In fact, I told Jack to go out and have a one-night stand. I just didn’t think she’d actually do it.”
A one-night stand.
A one-night stand.
One night.
Claire looks me up and down again. “And I definitely didn’t think you were her type, but more power to her, I guess. Sorry, I’m intruding.” The woman… Claire… Jack’s wife… she takes a step backward. “I told her I wasn’t coming by this morning, but I was down the street at her favorite coffee place, and I got her a praline mocha….” Claire shakes the coffee cup in her hand. “You know what, actually, don’t tell her I was here. I don’t want to interrupt her special morning. This can be our little secret, right, Ellie?”
She half turns in the snow, ignoring Paul Hollywood at her heels. “I’ll just come back later this afternoon to wish her a Merry Christmas. You’ll be gone by then, right?”
I am gone before Jack is out of the shower.
Chapter Fourteen
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
One night.
It was just one night. That was what Claire said as she stood in the snow outside the Airstream. Like a na?ve fool, I’d abandoned all reason and logic and plans. I’d let myself fall for a woman I barely knew on the basis of snow magic. And the next morning, her wife had shown up to remind me that there is no magic. That falling in love with a woman in a single day is irrational, because you can’t possibly know a person after only twenty-four hours with them.
I hadn’t known Jack was married, or that I was just an experience her wife wanted her to have. None of it had ever meant anything to Jack.
I felt so stupid as I unfastened the buttons on her flannel, as I searched for my leggings amidst the chaos of our clothes strewn across the floor. Paul Hollywood barked and jumped on me, and I cried as I put my still-damp wool socks on my feet. I heard the sound of the shower shut off, and I panicked, not wanting her to see me with tears streaming down my face. So I tucked my boots under my arm and I fled into the snow, and I left my scarf behind.
But Jack kept my scarf.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
I can’t sleep. It’s one in the morning, and I toss and turn beneath expensive sheets beside a snoring Andrew, thinking about the scarf and the drawing and the copy of Fun Home. Thinking about Jack’s feigned indifference and the way she sounded when she asked, What did I do wrong? So pitiful, so hurt.
I left while she was in the shower because I didn’t want to humiliate myself by eating biscuits and gravy pretending like I didn’t know she wanted me to leave so she could get back to her life. Back to Claire.
And now I’m questioning everything I thought I’d come to terms with.
It’s too late to call Meredith, so I try to process it through my art. I sneak downstairs to the laundry room and draw by only the light of my iPad. I don’t distill it down to a few digestible panels. I don’t fictionalize it or disguise it. The images are sloppy and rough, just line work and nondescript backgrounds, recapping what happened in the Airstream last night, flashing back to the Airstream last year, moving between the past and present without an indication of the passage of time. I’m not drawing for someone else to understand; I’m drawing only for me.
When I’m done, I don’t post this to Drawn2. It’s not part of The Perpetual Suck or The Arrangement, even though there are thousands of followers waiting for this story. I hope that seeing it all laid out before me will provide some kind of clarity, but when I look at the pieces, it somehow makes even less sense.
* * *
Finding the perfect Christmas tree: three hours.
By Wednesday morning, Alan still hasn’t arrived at the cabin, and over a French toast breakfast, Katherine, in a rare mood, snaps, “Fuck it. We’re getting the tree without the bastard.”
Like all Kim-Prescott Christmas traditions, this one immediately confuses me. By my estimation, there are approximately five thousand trees on the family’s property, and we could easily just take an axe (saw?), go into the backyard, and cut down any one of the trees in spitting distance of the cabin.
Instead, after French toast, Katherine has us all load into two cars to drive somewhere noble firs grow, because apparently those are the only acceptable species of Christmas tree. Jack is back to avoiding me, so she and Dylan ride in her truck, and I end up sandwiched between the grandmas in the backseat of Katherine’s Lincoln Navigator. While I know I should engage with the grandmas, my social anxiety outweighs social decorum. I slip on my headphones anyway and put “?’Tis the Damn Season” on repeat so I can shut off my brain for a bit.