Kiss Her Once for Me (54)
The truck hits a patch of ice, and for a second, my stomach defies the laws of gravity as we fishtail. Jack quickly regains control of the car. “No,” she says. “Claire and I aren’t still together.”
The truck goes silent, and I wait for Jack to open up the way she always has with me.
“Claire and I met after I dropped out of college, when I first moved back to Portland,” Jack starts. “My family had just cut me off, and I was desperate to feel like I belonged somewhere, with someone. We got married at twenty-two. Claire and I…”
Jack traces her thumbs along the seam of the steering wheel, her eyes firmly fixed on the road in front of her. I notice the jut of her wristbone, so surprisingly delicate compared to the rest of her. “We didn’t know ourselves well enough to meld our lives together forever. Two years into our marriage, Claire realized she is polyamorous. And at the time, it made sense to me to try polyamory,” Jack continues. I stroke Paul Hollywood’s ear to calm myself. It feels like we’re still fishtailing.
“Monogamy felt like this patriarchal vestige I was supposed to hate, and most of our friends were poly. I didn’t have any interest in seeing other people, but Claire started dating outside of our marriage, and for a while, it worked. Claire was happier, which meant I was happier.”
Jack pauses, and I stare at the tendons in her throat as she works her jaw, at the leap of muscle beneath her skin. She’s still not looking at me. It’s almost like she’s telling this story to herself, the way I told our story to myself in a series of messy comic panels.
“Unfortunately,” Jack exhales ironically, “it turns out I like outdated patriarchal vestiges, and I had a hard time with Claire dating other people. And then I felt shitty for having a hard time with it, because I felt like I should be evolved enough to not be jealous. I didn’t want to want to be monogamous. But I don’t know…. I guess I like the idea of having that one person to be your witness through life. Maybe that’s… regressive.”
“That doesn’t sound regressive,” I say without thinking, my fingers stroking the soft skin of Paul Hollywood’s ears. “That sounds… nice.”
In profile, I see the smallest tug of a smile in the corner of her mouth. “Claire didn’t lie to you that morning,” Jack says, sighing. “She’d been pushing me to have a one-night stand, because she thought I would feel better about her dating outside the marriage if I started seeing other people, too. But that’s not why I slept with you. The day we met—”
The engine releases a ghastly whine as we hit another patch of ice. Gillian fishtails, the truck bed swaying behind us. Jack holds the wheel steady with her left hand, completely calm despite the semi in the lane beside us as we pitch back and forth. She downshifts with her right hand, and the car straightens out. So confident and sure.
“That day I met you at Powell’s,” she repeats, “my marriage was already over. Claire had wanted to spend the holidays with her new girlfriend, and I’d stayed in Portland alone because I didn’t want to explain to my family why my wife wasn’t coming to the cabin with me. I didn’t want them to think I’d failed at my marriage like I’d failed at everything else.”
I’m shivering in the passenger seat, my teeth rattling against my jaw as I try to process what she’s saying, what it all means in the context of the story I’ve been telling myself for the past year. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married? We spent an entire day together playing the honesty game, and you never once mentioned Claire.”
Jack releases one hand from the wheel and pushes back her hair. “Because I didn’t want you to judge me for getting divorced at twenty-six. And because I really liked you.” Jack’s voice cracks again, and I crack right along with it. The scarf and the drawing and Fun Home. The way she smiled at me in the snow and the way she held my foot to her chest and the way she tried to reassure me. I’m not a pumpkin.
Why hadn’t I trusted her? Why had I been so quick to assume I’d misunderstood every touch, every word of affirmation, every moment we had together in the snow?
“Look, I know this doesn’t change anything between us.” She grabs a handful of her hair now, and I tell myself not to look at her in profile, not to watch the way the growing dusk outside the truck paints her in pale purple. “You’re with Andrew, but I just felt like we needed to clear the air. I mean, I’m really happy you and Andrew found each other, as weird as it is. You deserve… you deserve the best. Oh shit. You’re shivering.”
I can’t seem to stop my body from shaking. I wrap my arms around Paul Hollywood to get warm, but it’s useless, because it’s not the cold that’s causing me to tremble like this. It’s everything else.
It’s Jack really liking me. It’s Jack keeping my scarf. Jack here, in this car, smelling like bread and telling me about her divorce. She pulls over on the side of the road and reaches for my hand. “Here, this is the only heat vent that works. Let’s get you warm.”
Her fingers circle my wrist as she tugs my hand closer to the middle vent, and the feeling of her skin against mine sparks my nerve endings, floods my empty insides with an overwhelming swarm of feelings. Jack touches me, and the ache in my chest fills with warmth instead. With wholeness.
Jack looks down at the place where her skin is touching my skin. Then she looks up, and there are the freckles. There’s the white scar. In the low light of the truck, there is that stupid strand of hair I want to brush out of her face. She’s close enough that I would only have to move a few inches to press my lips to hers.