Opposite of Always(85)

I fish my phone out. I’ve missed nine calls, a slew of texts. All but one text is from Jillian. The other one from Mom asking if I’ll be home for dinner. “Sorry, J.”

She leans into me. “I missed you, baby.”

I wrap my arms around her. And she feels so good. So warm and comfy.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you been in a nursery?”

“Why?” I ask, glancing down at the top of her head. “Don’t tell me someone’s baby spit up on me without me noticing.”

“Not that kind of nursery. I mean a plant nursery. You smell like you’ve been rolling around in a flower bed.”

You know how in the movies the two people who are in love and who will inevitably wind up together by the end have all these artificial obstacles thrown in front of them? How as we, the audience, watch the two lovers fight through these obstacles in the name of true love, we can’t help but want them to be together at all costs; no matter what, they have to be together, right?

Except at least one of them, if not both of them, are already in semiserious relationships. And everyone knows your two main characters need to be somewhat likable, so you can’t just have them be complete assholes and dump their SOs. And so, to make the inevitable happy ending more plausible, the writers decide to make their SOs complete assholes—that way we hate the people that they’re with and have no problem rooting for our two lovebirds to kick their crappy relationships to the curb, and to run into the waiting arms of their true, always-meant-to-be loves— And boom, our Hollywood happy ending. Everyone wins.

Except I don’t have an awful relationship with Jillian. She’s pretty much perfect. The only fault I can possibly attribute to her, you know, other than the minor transgressions, like how she squeezes from the bottom of the toothpaste tube (uh, weird) or how she leaves the toilet seat down after she’s finished (the nerve!), is that she’s not Kate.

She’s not Kate.

But of course she’s not.

She’s Jillian.

And Jillian is incredibly awesome in her own right.

And we’re happy together, right?

Right.

Then how come it feels like I’ve made a mistake?





Like This


“There was a time,” Jillian admits, “when I thought you and I would end up together.”

By now, after all that’s happened, I’ve mostly cobbled this sentiment together, but it’s different to hear her say it, to echo what I’d always thought, too.

“Really?”

She cocks her head to the side like she’s considering this even as she says it. “Maybe not in the near future. Certainly not like . . .”

We both know the word she’s omitting.

Not like this.

But that word never materializes. It hangs, a ghost in the room.

“But still,” she continues. “I thought maybe something would happen at college, you know. And if not at college, then after we’d graduated, and gone off to different grad schools.”

“Yeah.”

“When you were this great writer and I’m a pretty decent entertainment lawyer . . .”

“The best entertainment lawyer,” I interject.

“. . . and we show up at the same work meeting and we’re all grown up and single and finally ready. Or something like that.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Something like that.”

But maybe not like this.





Duffel Bag Baggage


He hands me a black duffel bag, disbelief frozen on his face. “C’mon, don’t do me like that. You gotta tell me how in the hell you knew.”

I don’t look inside the bag. I’ve only held $200K in my hands one other time before, but this is roughly the same weight.

“I got lucky.”

“Stop. This wasn’t luck. Somehow you knew. You knew. And now you don’t wanna tell the man who helped you make it happen.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“How about the truth, Jack?”

“I’m from six months into the future and I already knew that Mandrake was going to win.”

Franny’s dad waves me off. “Fine, don’t tell me. But this is the last bet I make for you. I had a hard time collecting. You pull another rabbit out of your hat and we’ll both be floating in Lake Erie.”

“I’m done with gambling.”

“Good,” he says, folding his arms.

“But there is one more thing.”

“Fine, you can tell me at the bar. Drinks on you. But first, we drop this money off. I’m not the nervous type, but damn.”

The bar’s a ghost town.

There’s a couple sitting at the end, their faces twisted, the woman picking up her drink every so often and sloshing its melting ice.

After Franny’s dad orders, he turns to me, says, “So, what’d you want to talk about?”

I opt not to mince words. “You haven’t seen Franny.”

He slumps forward on his bar stool, pulls from his beer. “Yeah, well, I’ve been busy. I’ll get to it, when the time’s right.”

“You’ve been busy. You’re going to get around to it,” I say. “You’ve been out of prison for weeks and you can’t manage one phone call? To your only son?”