Kiss Her Once for Me (64)

“Jack! Stop interrupting! You don’t know what I’m going to say!”

Jack allows this next snowball to drop from her fingers and fall to her feet. “Okay. What are you going to say?”

For the first time since this interaction started, she’s fully facing me, her body turned in my direction. “I’m sorry,” I say, mesmerized by the sight of those freckles in the early-morning cold. I kissed her last night. And for a minute, under the mistletoe, I think she kissed me back. “About your dad. I’m sorry about your dad. You don’t deserve to be treated that way.”

A puff of white breath escapes her lips. “Are you sure? Because I’ve got twenty-seven years of data to support that this is exactly how the fuck-up child of the prodigious Prescotts deserves to be treated.” She starts reaching for more snow.

“Well, the Airstream doesn’t deserve to be treated this way, so at least stop abusing it! You love this trailer!”

“What?” Jack barks out a humorless laugh as she swings back toward me. “You think I love living in an Airstream?”

“Don’t you?”

“No! I hate this damn thing!” She throws another snowball. “I’m six feet tall! It’s like being a trout in a sardine tin!”

I’m painfully aware of the fact that we’re discussing her trailer and not the fact that we kissed last night. Which is fine. I’m fine with this. We can go ahead and pretend that never happened, too.

“You have definitely led me to believe you love your Airstream.”

“You know what I would love?” Jack says bitterly. “A house in the suburbs with a big yard for Paul Hollywood. A huge kitchen with actual counter space. Room and roots and no wheels.”

“Then why do you live in an Airstream?”

Jack throws her arms wildly into the air. “Because I’m stubborn, Elle! Because this expensive hunk of metal has become a symbol of my freedom from the Prescott name”—she kicks her leg like she wants to kick the trailer, but she’s a good fifteen feet away—“and because I refuse to admit that I want the normcore life my parents would choose for me. Because I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’m still basing all my life decisions around pleasing and/or pissing off my parents.”

“Ah.” I bend down and rub Paul Hollywood’s ears, because it stops me from saying or doing something stupid after this whole passionate declaration. Like trying to kiss her again.

Her cheeks are even pinker now, her ears bright red beneath the rim of her beanie. Jack might see the Airstream as a symbol of her independence, but it’s also a shiny cage. It’s a sardine box that keeps her safe and separate from the rest of her family, maybe even the rest of the world. Her whole life, her dad has made her feel like a screwup; everyone has made her feel like she’s not enough, or too much, but none of that can touch her inside her glossy home on wheels. Nothing can hurt her if she’s always moving.

Yet what she craves most is to plant herself. And for one day last year, I felt like she let me see behind the mask of indifference, the cool aluminum exterior.

Absolutely no good can come from imagining that life of roots and routines with her.

“Look, your dad sounds like a real piece of work,” I say, refocusing, “but don’t let that diminish what you’ve accomplished, Jack. You’re about to open a fucking bakery!”

“I just—” Jack winds herself up like she’s going to launch into another rant, but she collapses instead, literally, her knees buckling beneath her as she topples into the snow. Her legs stick out in front of her an awkward angle, making her look much younger than twenty-seven. “I wouldn’t have done it without you.” She releases a resigned exhale and sends up another puff of breath.

I drop back into the snow beside her, my pajama bottoms immediately soaked through. “What?”

Jack kicks a deep groove into the snow with the toe of her boot. “The Butch Oven. I—I wouldn’t have decided to do it if you hadn’t believed in me that day. I thought it was spite, actually.” Jack smiles a little, but my entire body is coated in permafrost, unable to move, even though all I want to do is get closer to this woman who is an arm’s length away. “I was so hurt when you bailed while I was in the shower, and for some reason, I turned that into, I’ll open my bakery all by myself, and that will show her.”

“God, you’re stubborn,” I say. Even as the permafrost spreads to my heart, my brain still struggles to adjust to this new version of our shared history. The version where I ghosted. The version where she kept my scarf.

Jack nods and stares at our feet. Our legs are stretched out in the snow, four parallel lines so deliberately not touching. “But really, that moment in front of the warehouse—that was the first time it felt like someone actually believed I could do it. I mean, Dylan supports me, but they also know my whole history of false starts and abandoned dreams. But you just… believed. So you being here right now, telling me to ignore my dad’s criticism—it’s all very full-circle for me.”

Jack tilts her left foot so it bumps my right. “I guess that’s me saying thanks, or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” I say, bumping her back. We leave our feet that way, tilted toward each other, touching. Boot to boot, leg to leg. “I’m sorry that it started out of spite, though. I’m… I’m sorry that I ghosted you. I should’ve said that last night.”