“You okay, Jess?” says Greg as soon as he walks into the room.
It takes him a moment to respond. He scrubs a hand through his hair, making it stand up in places it usually lies down. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down once or twice and then he shakes his head almost imperceptibly.
“Is Mom alright?” Greg’s voice is instantly louder than usual and filled with alarm.
Again, Jess takes a second to respond.
“Uh, no, not really. Neil broke up with her…”
“Oh, no, that’s awful…” starts my mom.
“…she’s not in a good way. She’s spinning out. She’s…She asked me to move back.”
Greg is on his feet at once. There’s a dark cloud around him I’ve never seen before. “No!” he roars. “No!Not again. She isnotdoing this again. She can’t! You’renotgoing any…”
My mom is on her feet too. She has her hand on Greg’s chest, soothing him, seemingly able to sense that yelling at Jessie is the last thing the situation needs.
“Jess, honey, I think what your dad is trying to say is that you have so much going for you here. You’ve made friends here. You got into art school.” She starts speaking quickly, words tumbling out on top of each other as emotion catches up with her. “You have us. Your dad and me. And, and you have Luke.” Her voice creeps up and cracks when she says my name.
Jessie winces and drops his head into his hands. Greg starts up again, “This isnothappening. I can’t go through this aga…”
“Jessie and I need to talk,” I say. The room falls silent. Three sets of eyes blink at me in surprise. That’s the nice thing about having a big, booming voice that you hardly ever use. When you do use it, people sit up and listen.
Jess and I walk to the guest house together. His steps are fast and jerky. Anxiety emanates off him in heavy waves.
“Fuck!” He all but yells as soon as I close the door. “What the fuck? I mean what in the actual fuck am I supposed to do? She’s fucking hysterical, all alone, crying her eyes out. Ican’tleave her like that. She has no-one in Sydney. My dad’s going to hate me. Or she’s going to hate me.What do I do?” He’s not almost yelling now. He’s fully yelling. His voice is ragged and raw. It sounds like it's being torn from his throat. “How the fuck do I decide? How the fuck am I supposed to…”
“You don’t have to decide.” He looks at me blankly. His rage at the situation pauses briefly, then turns around aiming itself squarely at me. It does less than nothing to deter me. If anything, it makes me more certain. “You’re not going.”
“I don’t think that’s up to you, Luke,” he hisses.
“Sure it is.”
“How’d you figure?” His eyes flash emerald and ice.
“Well, you can’t place weight on what either of your parents want. Wish you could, but you can’t. They both want what they’ve always wanted; you for themselves. You’ve been caught in the crossfire since you were a kid. You can’t make this decision without hurting one of them, so you’re not going to. Ordinarily, I’d say my mom could help, but on this she’s blindly on Greg’s side, so in this case I don’t think she’ll be any help. I’m the most impartial person here, so I’m making the decision for you.”
He looks at me in a nasty mix of fury and hurt. “You’reimpartial?Is that right? You don’t care if I stay or go? Whether I’m in Sydney or California, makesnodifference to you?” His rage is petering out, gradually replaced with pain that’s so dense I’m hardly able to stand seeing it. “So all that crap about loving me was bullshit?”
“Believe me, Jess, if I thought there was a single thing there for you, we’d be planning our move to Sydney as we speak. But there isn’t. You didn’t settle there. You didn’t make friends. You dropped out of college and being around your mom hurts you.”
He doesn’t speak for a long time. A single tear runs down his cheek and he wipes it away angrily but seems to lose the will to fight it when the next one falls.
“Y-you’d come with me? You’d do that for me?”
“’Course I’d come with you. Where else would I go? You’re my person. When I said I love you I meant it, and not just for now. I’m going to love you forever.”
He steps towards me, dropping his forehead against mine. “Those are pretty words, Blue, but you can’t know that. I wish you could, but you can’t.”
“Sure I can.” I tilt his face up and brush my lips against his. His eyes are closed, eyelashes dark and wet. He sniffs and swallows hard and then looks into my eyes. I meet his gaze and show him the full depth of the certainty I feel. I see it gradually sink in and take hold in him.
“How d’you know?”
I wrap my arms around him and squeeze him so tightly I hear his rib cage adjusting. I press my lips lightly against his ear to make sure that when I speak he hears me.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Jessie Lewis…I know what good feels like.”
25
