Kiss Her Once for Me (87)

Meanwhile, I’m scrambling for my clothes, searching for my bra and underwear. “I just… I just feel like, it’s Christmas Eve, and we should probably—”

“Elle.” Her voice is abrupt, stern. “It’s seven in the morning. It’s not even light outside yet. What’s going on?”

I trip and fall my way back into my long johns. “Nothing is going on.” My voice is an unholy shriek of panic, and Jack would have to be a moron to believe me. “I’m just sure the family is worried about us. We need to get back to—”

Jack is not a moron. “To Andrew?” she asks.

I glance at her on the bed. She’s sitting up, the quilt around her waist and her breasts exposed to the cold morning air. Our fire went out sometime in the night.

“Elle, don’t do this.”

“I’m not doing anything,” I sputter.

“Are you…?” Jack shoves a hand through her greasy morning hair. “Do you regret what happened between us?”

“No,” I say. And I don’t. Do I? Why do I itch everywhere? “I just need a minute to, you know… think. Regroup.”

“Elle.” She keeps saying my name like it’s a string tying me back to her. “Don’t do this. Don’t freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

I am absolutely freaking out. A year ago, I went home with this woman and ended up with my heart broken. Ten days ago, I signed a napkin contract because I thought money was the only thing that could fix my broken life. There’s a hole in my chest and a family two miles away who are never going to forgive me when they discover the truth. Andrew is a guarantee and Jack isn’t and I—

On the bed, Jack clenches her jaw. “Are you going to go back to him?”

“Who?”

“What do you mean who?” She spits. “Andrew. Are you going to marry him?”

“I can’t marry Andrew.” Even if he is a guarantee, I know I can’t.

Jack climbs off the bed. “Then what is this? Why are you pulling away from me?”

“This…” I flail a hand back and forth between her naked body and my half-covered one. “Us… we… we’re going to fall apart.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve already fallen apart once, and we’ll fall apart again, and I can’t. I can’t go through that a second time.” There are tears blinding me from the sight of her, which honestly helps. If I can’t see her, it’s a little easier to say this to her. To be honest.

She takes my face in those large, bruised-knuckled, bread-kneading hands. “Why do you think we’re going to fall apart?”

I put my hands over hers against my cheeks. “Because…”

“Because you think you’re going to fail,” she answers for me. She reaches for me, pulls me close against her chest, so her body is squeezing mine tightly, leaving no room for the panic attack. “But you’ve never failed.”

“I did. I got fired from Laika because I couldn’t cut it, and—”

“Elle.” Jack releases me, holds me carefully at arm’s length. “I’m going to say something I know you don’t want to hear but is the absolute truth: you didn’t fail at being an animator. You quit.”

“I did not—”

Jack holds up both hands, ass naked and asking me to hold on with a single gesture. “What do you love about art? And the answer can’t be that you’re good at it.”

“I’m not good at it, clearly,” I say, but Jack’s expression is so serious, I stiffen. There’s a dull undercurrent of anxiety coursing through me, but I answer her. “Okay. Well, I fell in love with art because… because it used to be a way to escape. My parents would fight, and I would hide away in my room, creating these colorful worlds where everything was better than my real life. And then I used to share my art with other kids in my class, and it brought them joy, too, and it was like… here’s this way that I can make something good, even though everything my parents touch is absolute garbage.”

Jack nods, like we’re getting close to the realization she’s clumsily dragging me toward. “And when did you fall out of love with art?”

I think about undergrad at Ohio State, when I was holed away in my dorm, teaching myself Photoshop and InDesign for assignments I hated, creating fanart at four in the morning because it was the only time I had to do something for me; in grad school, making sure I never faltered from my ten-year-plan, never wasted time with silly doodles or stories in my head; at Laika, truly struggling for the first time and not knowing who I was if I wasn’t the best, if I wasn’t Artist Ellie. Nothing could ever be a rough draft.

“It just… it became my whole identity,” I tell Jack. “I felt like I had to be perfect at it all the time, because it’s who I was, and then I wasn’t perfect at it, and my art and my identity were so tangled up in each other that I just…” quit.

I don’t say it. I don’t give Naked Jack that satisfaction. She is right, though. I got fired from Laika, and I just quit trying. But she’s wrong about that not making me a total failure.

Naked Jack sits down on the edge of the bed, and the bed frame groans. “Did I ever tell you the story of why I dropped out of college?”