Save the Date(54)

She shot me a look. “Jesse. What’s going on with you two?”

I thought about pretending I didn’t know what she meant, but I was pretty sure that would raise her suspicions even more. “Nothing’s going on,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, right this minute. We . . . um . . . hooked up over Christmas break.” Linnie’s jaw dropped open and I hastened to add, “We didn’t sleep together.” I figured that right this instant, Linnie didn’t need to know just how close we’d come to it.

“So, was this a drunken hookup? Like a one-time thing?”

“Not for me.” I took a breath, suddenly wishing I’d told Linnie all this years ago—that I’d talked to her the very first moment I’d looked at Jesse and felt my face get hot, suddenly not sure how to work my hands and feet when I was around him. She should have known about this from the beginning. “I don’t know,” I said, not sure how to explain it. It seemed like the second you tried to tell someone why you loved someone else, it took the luster off it, like pinning a butterfly down in a case—it never quite captured it. But it also occurred to me that this would not be a helpful metaphor for someone who would be speaking vows about why she loved someone in front of a hundred-person crowd tomorrow. “He’s Jesse.”

“I know he’s Jesse,” she said. “I just want to know when he became Jesse.”

I shrugged with one shoulder, looking at the wallpaper, dotted with black-and-white pictures from when the Inn wasn’t an inn at all, when it was just a family home, people who lived in these rooms and called them their own. “It started as a crush,” I said, my voice hesitant as I tried to find the right words, realizing that I’d never had to explain this before. “Like, just the kind of crush you have when you’re a kid. Nothing’s ever going to happen. But then . . .” I flashed back to the night of his party, how dreamlike and fated it had all seemed, like a line of dominoes being nudged just the right amount, then falling perfectly. “At Christmas, it was like he saw me for the first time.”

“Uh-huh.” I could practically feel all that my sister wanted to say but was holding back, like air pressure outside a car window.

“He’s just . . . ,” I started, then let out a breath as I realized that even if I could articulate this, Linnie wouldn’t understand what I meant, not really. She’d almost always had a boyfriend in high school, and she’d found her soul mate three months after graduating. She didn’t know what it was like to look and wish and want, always two steps behind the person, always on the edges of their life. What it was like to stand next to someone and know you weren’t registering with them, not in any meaningful way. That you thought about someone a thousand times more than they’d ever thought about you. To know that you were just a face in the crowd scenes while they were center stage. And then, all at once, to have the spotlight finally swing over to you. To suddenly be visible, to be seen, no longer one of the people in the background who never get any lines. To suddenly be in the midst of something you’d only ever looked at from the sidelines. What that felt like when it finally happened, dropped in your lap when you were least expecting it, like a gift you were half-afraid to open.

I looked up to see Linnie still looking at me, patient, and I knew she’d wait until I found the words. “It was like my best dream coming true,” I finally said. “I just wanted to be able to travel back in time and tell my twelve-year-old self that this was actually happening. That there was a world in which it could happen.”

“So, kissing Jesse. How was it?” The second after she’d asked this, she shuddered. “First of all, ew. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you about this. Jesse is like two.”

“He’s older than me,” I pointed out.

“You’re like two.”

“Thanks, Lin.”

“But,” she said, looking steadily at me. “How was it?”

I had a flashback to the night, to the heart-pounding sensation of it, the knee-weakening kisses I couldn’t even remember without getting flushed and losing my train of thought entirely. “Amazing.”

“And now?”

I glanced back at the lobby and saw Jesse standing next to Mike by the bar, laughing at something J.J. was saying. “I don’t know,” I said, even though I did know, a little, as I thought about the way he’d looked at me when I’d dropped Mike off, the way that he’d slipped his hands under my shirt to touch my bare skin, the way he’d just touched the small of my back. “He texted me that he would see me soon, but that was before I knew he would . . . you know, be here.”

“But what do you want to happen?”

I just stared at her for a moment—the answer to that question was so obvious. I thought of Jesse, that night up in his guesthouse. And I thought of the years before that, of all the years that he’d been Jesse Foster, always just out of reach.

Linnie must have been able to read what I was thinking, because she nodded. “Well, it’s too bad. I think Bill likes you.”

“Bill?” I blinked at her, then shook my head. “No.”

“You don’t think he’s cute?”

“Sure he’s cute,” I said, since he was. “But he’s not Jesse.”

Linnie looked at me for a long moment, then gave me a smile. “Go have your fun. Be safe,” she added sternly, as I made a face.