Kiss Her Once for Me (82)

Tell her the truth. “Because…”

“Because why?”

“Because!” Tell her the truth, tell her the truth, tell her the truth. “Because my life was a fucking mess before I met Andrew!” I confess, because it’s at least a truth. “Because I had hit rock bottom, and everything was utter and complete shit. I got fired from Laika, and I was stuck working for a boss who bullied me. I had no friends, I never left my apartment, I was going nowhere with my ten-year-plan. I was going to get evicted! My mom only called when she needed money, and I was going to spend Christmas alone.”

“And that’s why you’re marrying my brother?” Jack repeats. “Because you’re lonely?”

“No.” Yes?

Maybe I thought what I needed was the money, but what I really wanted was a family at Christmas. A mom who planned bonding time and a grandma who loved me anyway and friends. Maybe just for one Christmas, I wanted all the things I’d never had.

On the record player, Dolly goes quiet, spinning into static.

“Let’s listen to something less melancholy,” Jack declares, sitting up so she can riffle through the records again. When she repositions the needle, the cabin fills with an ominous piano and something with strings. It takes a second for me to place it. Then: “Celine Dion? Really?”

Jack nods solemnly. “I love this song.”

“You love ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’?”

“You sound surprised, like you don’t already know about my taste in music.” She stands up, and her wool socks slide along the hardwood floors. Before I have time to fully process what’s happening, Jack starts dancing, swaying. It’s intoxicating to watch, but I’m also just plain intoxicated, so I stand up and join the one-person dance party, bobbing and weaving beside her. Quite seriously, eyes closed and both hands balled into tight fists against her chest, Jack belts the first line in a perfect impression of Celine’s breathy soprano, only awful sounding.

Laughter explodes out of me with an unexpected force, like an unburdening, and I grab my partially exposed stomach. All the tension of the moment leaves my body as I laugh wildly at her performance. Jack does not relent, doesn’t stop putting her heart and soul into it, and she knows every damn line of this melodramatic song. She even sings the backing vocals.

“I finished crying in the instant that you left—sing with me! Don’t act like you don’t know the words!”

The song builds up to the chorus, and she’s right. I do know the words. I haven’t thought about this song in years, but it is, in fact, all coming back to me now.

And fuck—it’s a good song.

I dance and dance and drunkenly dance, and the song rises and falls and rises again, until Jack and I are both screaming the lyrics. I forget about Andrew, about the money, about failed dreams. I twirl on the toes of my socks, and when I wheel around to face her, I see her eyes are on me, burning like open flames. She’s watching me dance, and even when I catch her, she doesn’t look away. She keeps watching, and I keep dancing.

Maybe I enjoy the feeling of her eyes on me. It’s almost like she’s touching me, and my skin prickles and burns in every place her eyes land. My throat, my stomach, my wrists, my ankles.

Maybe I should never drink alcohol again.

But I did drink alcohol, so as the song falls again, sweeping low into the final bridge, I do something incurably stupid. I touch her like this: two hands on her hip bones in an imitation of a middle school dance posture. I hold her like this: tugging her close, until she puts both hands on my shoulders, and we sway and sway.

It’s a joke. We’re joke-dancing, like in middle school. We exaggerate our movements, and we mouth the words, and I remind myself it’s only a joke. But she smells tangy and sweet, and I shift my hands so they cup around her soft sides, shrinking some of the space between us. I pull her closer, as close as she’ll let me. She lets me rest my cheek against her shoulder, so I do, feeling the soft fabric of a Cornell sweatshirt and the hard edge of her muscles and bones beneath. But it’s obviously only a joke.

Jack whispers the final lines of the song, and I feel the way they hit my temple like a light breeze. The song slowly eases into silence, but we don’t stop swaying in each other’s arms, and it’s not a joke, but I also don’t know what happens now. A pathetic dinner and a surplus of whisky are swirling in my stomach, and Jack is letting me touch her and hold her, and I don’t know what I should do next.

I know what I want to do next. I want to reach up and wind my fingers through her hair. I want to push myself up on my toes and seize her mouth with my teeth. I want another taste. I want to devour her. I have a huge, aching, lonely hole inside my chest and a memory of the way she once filled it, the way Jack smoothed the rough edges others had cut inside me over the years.

I don’t want to be Jack-Kim Prescott’s friend, and I definitely don’t want to be her sister-in-law. What I want—all I want—is to be hers.

Except she’s already pulling away. The song has ended, and now Jack shakes her head and laughs breezily as if to emphasize that it was a joke all along, that it never stopped being a joke.

I do the same, releasing my hold on her hips and giggling, so she’ll never know that for one minute, dancing with her in this stolen cabin, I thought it all was real.

Jack takes her loose limbs and tucks them back into a rigid posture. She busies herself with the record collection. My body buzzes with anxiety and an almost-kiss, and I think we’re both going to pretend that moment between us never happened, let it float away in a haze of whisky and Celine Dion. But then Jack settles another record on the turntable, and “Holly Jolly Christmas” fills the room.