Kiss Her Once for Me (88)
“I’m sort of having a panic attack–slash–existential crisis over here….”
“It’s related. I promise.”
“Fine.” I cross my arms over my chest, still halfway through the process of putting on a shirt. “Tell me the story, then.”
“You know how school wasn’t my thing, but it was really important to my parents that I go to college, so I enrolled at the University of Oregon anyway and declared as a business major. And the thing is, I’m pretty good at going with the flow,” she explains, “at fitting in. Anyone who saw me freshman year would’ve thought I was having the time of my life, but I was abjectly miserable. I hated college. There was this restlessness inside of me all the time, this emptiness. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with so much energy, I’d have to go for a ten-mile run. Or I’d get in my car, and I’d drive to the coast or the middle of the woods, disappear in a tiny town where no one knew my name. I’d get blackout drunk at a frat party or do ’shrooms with strangers. I tried everything to fill that emptiness in me, but none of it really helped.”
Jack rubs her hands up and down her thighs, like she’s trying to get warm, and shit. She’s probably freezing. I go over to the bed and drape the quilt over her naked shoulders. She looks at me with such tenderness, I feel like I’m wearing my itchy insides on the outside.
“The only time the emptiness really went away was when I was baking cookies for everyone on my floor in the awful dorm kitchen,” she continues to narrate. “That was the only thing that brought me actual joy. And I eventually figured it out—the emptiness was the absence of myself. I was emptying myself to become the person my dad wanted me to be, and I kept searching for all the wrong things to fill me back up. I couldn’t keep living like that, so I dropped out.”
She swallows, that taut tendon spiking from the side of her neck. “I had the same feeling when I was with Claire, in the end. The emptiness came back, because I was siphoning off bit by bit who I truly am to satisfy someone else’s idea of who I should be.”
I swallow, too. Hearing Jack talk about the emptiness… it sounds an awful lot like my ache, like that pit that exists just south of my ribs, the hole I thought was loneliness. But what if the ache isn’t the absence of other people? What if the thing missing inside of me is… me? It’s a terrifying thought, because it means this hole inside my chest can’t be filled by two hundred thousand dollars or a woman with freckles and a quarter-moon smile.
“The day we met at Powell’s, the restlessness was the worst it had ever been,” Jack is saying. “I knew the snow was supposed to get bad, but the thought of being trapped in the Airstream all day made me sick. So I went to Powell’s on a whim and ended up finding you crying in that aisle,” Jack’s voice is thick with memory and affection and longing. “And you were just so—”
My heart sprouts wings and launches into my throat.
“—messy,” she says, and my heart plummets back again. “You were such an anxious, lonely mess, and you had snot all over your face.”
“This took a turn.”
“No!” Jack smiles, a full, ferocious thing. “You were beautiful, Elle, even with all that snot. I thought you were wonderful because you were just you, and for a day, you made me feel like I could be just me. And that would be enough. And that feeling—that’s something I’m willing to fight for.”
“What does any of this have to do with me quitting art?”
“I don’t know.” Jack flicks her hair out of her face. “The thematic arc got kind of muddled there in the middle, but the point is”—she reaches out and takes my hand—“in my good, healthy moments, I know I’m not a fuck-up. I’m someone who spent too much time trying to be something I didn’t want to be. And you’re not a fuck-up, either, Elle. You’re not going to fuck this up.”
Our fingers are stitched together in Jack’s lap, and she has no idea how badly I’ve already fucked this up. I slept with her, and she doesn’t even know the engagement is fake. “And maybe, when you’re panicking, you can tell me about it, instead of shoving it all down and pulling away.”
I squint at her. “I’m not familiar with that concept.”
I feel Jack’s smile as she leans in close to my cheek. “For example, when your mind starts spiraling about failure, instead of putting on your long johns backward, you could take a deep breath and try saying to me something like”—she adopts a high-pitched voice for my part—“?‘Wow, Jack, I’m feeling really emotionally vulnerable right now, and I’m scared of taking this risk again with you.’?”
“That is absolutely not an accurate impersonation of me.”
“And then I would say, ‘Thanks for opening up about that, Elle, because I’m honestly scared, too. I mean, you’re still currently engaged to my brother, and we have a lot of things to work through and figure out. Maybe we take this whole thing one day at a time.’?”
“Wow. Is this that queer-women communication thing you’re always on about?”
“I’ve heard rumors it’s possible for people to just… talk things through.” She’s sitting there completely naked in every sense of the word, a blanket over her shoulders, her face devoid of apathy. She cares so damn much, her expression raw and easy to read. Love and fear and hurt and hope.