Kiss Her Once for Me (94)
“You have to understand! It’s not just money for me!” I’m frenzied now, shouting at her, shaking at her, wishing I could reach up for her. “I’m broke, Jack. I’m completely broke, and I financially support my mom, and my rent was going up, and—”
“Bullshit,” Jack interrupts. “That excuse is fucking bullshit. You didn’t keep the truth from me because of the money.”
“I—I did!”
“You didn’t,” Jack says. The tears have stopped, and I watch as she battens down the hatches on her own face, tucks away her hurt, turns to stone. “You lied to me because you always had one foot out the door, waiting for things to fall apart. Have you ever stopped to wonder why you were so fucking miserable before this week, Ellie?”
Ellie, not Elle.
“It’s because you make yourself miserable! You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy! The Perpetual Suck, as you apparently call it, is only perpetual because you expect it to be!” She jabs a finger at me again. “You only fail because you assume you already have! And you broke my heart because of that once, and now you’re breaking my heart over it again. I could forgive you for everything else….” She gestures around her, to the cold air and the white snow and the distance between the Airstream and the house. “I could probably forgive you for lying, but I can’t forgive you for assuming we would fail.”
A sob rips out of me, but I know I’m not entitled to it. Only one of us gets to be hurt right now, and it’s not me.
“You know, the fucked-up irony is,” Jack says in her too-loud, sandpaper voice, “that you need trust in order to have physical intimacy in a relationship, yet you violated my trust in every imaginable way.”
She turns on her boots in the snow and stomps off toward the Airstream.
I know this time, Jack Kim-Prescott won’t hold onto a drawer of my things.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday, December 25, 2022
I should not be surprised I find myself back here, in this apartment. Had I really believed I’d escaped this subterranean hell? That I deserved to be liberated from the smell of old garbage wafting in from the dumpster outside the one window? This place—with the crusty carpet and the water stain on the ceiling in the distinct shape of Ted Cruz’s face—this is what I deserve. This is where I belong.
“Your capacity for self-pity is truly remarkable,” Meredith responds. I am not entirely aware of the fact that I am delivering this monologue out loud until Mere pops her head out of the fridge and glares at me. “And you absolutely should have left. This place is the physical embodiment of depression.”
She’s wearing yellow rubber gloves as she cleans out my refrigerator. My brain still hasn’t fully registered that she’s here, with me, in Portland. That she meant it when I called her crying in the snow outside the Airstream the moment Jack walked away from me, and she told me she was buying a same-day plane ticket on her credit card. Meemaw—the only Kim-Prescott willing to acknowledge my presence after everything—drove me back to town, and I found Meredith on my front steps this morning like the best possible Christmas gift.
One look at my apartment, though, and Meredith seemed less interested in consoling my heartbreak and more interested in taking bleach to what she claims is an OSHA violation.
“I’m not sure you’re aware of this,” Meredith announces as she comes out of the kitchen and plops down on top of my legs, since there is nowhere else to sit as long as I’m lying dejectedly across the entire futon, “but your apartment came equipped with this magical contraption where you can step into it smelling like depression and gas station sushi and step out smelling as fresh as daisies.”
“Can’t shower,” I manage, but even those two words feel like knives clawing at the edge of my throat. “Too sad.”
Meredith pulls back the edge of the duvet to get an uninterrupted view of my face. “You could at least change out of these clothes.”
For some reason, the thought of taking off my clothes from yesterday feels like finally admitting it’s all over. These are the clothes I wore skiing with Jack, these are the clothes I took off in the Singhs’ cabin, the clothes I put back on after we ate biscuits and gravy together. A fresh wave of tears threatens to overwhelm me at the thought of washing them. In my mind, they smell like her.
“Ellie, come on.” She attempts to hoist me up. “You can cry just as easily in the shower as you can on this futon. More easily, really, since the water will wash it all away.”
“Mere, I—I can’t.” I choke on the words, choke on the knives in my throat, choke on every second that has ticked past in the last twenty-four hours. “I fucked everything up.”
“Yeah.” Meredith draws out the syllable. “You kind of did.”
“God, Meredith!” I sit up in my nest of used Kleenex and the blood rushes to my head. “You’re not allowed to agree with me! You’re the one who said it would be easy to fake a relationship for money!”
“I did,” she agrees. “But I believe I also told you to stop fake-dating Andrew once things got complicated with Jack.”
I throw the duvet back over my head. “I never would have gone along with Andrew’s plan if not for you!”
“It’s good to see you’re learning from your mistakes and owning your choices like an adult.”