“No.”
Another lie. I’m pretty sure she said it through her teeth.
We’re out here together, but I can feel her getting farther away from me with every step we take, talking to me as if she has to hide herself away. Half of me thinks if I looked over at her right now, I’d see the start of her dissolving into the scenery.
I can’t take it. I’m desperate to remind her that I’m something else to her now.
“Jess. It’s just us out here.”
She slows her steps and her shoulders sag. I stop, and she does, too. She reaches up and rubs both her hands over her face. When she finally drops them, she keeps her head down.
“I used to rehearse what I’d say to her,” she says, so quiet I have to take a step closer to keep hearing her.
“Just in my head, when I was doing mindless stuff around the house, or when I was driving home from some parent-teacher conference where I could tell everyone was thinking that Tegan got the real short end of the stick, being left with me.”
I clench my teeth to keep from correcting her. I doubt that’s whateveryonewas thinking. I bet there were even a few people along the way who were pretty impressed by Jess Greene, people who would’ve been happy to help her out if she’d only asked. Whatever jolted Jess into this stubborn, permanent privacy—whether it was her mother leaving the first time or the second, her fear of the podcast or her fear of what people would think of how she was raising Tegan—I bet it’s stolen more from her than she’s ever realized.
“God. The things I’d say to her in my head,” she adds. “Awful things.”
Jess lifts her head, but doesn’t look at me. She turns it out toward where I’m pretty sure that mountain sits in the distance, brooding and remote. A safer audience for all those awful things in her head.
I clear my throat. “You could say them to me. If you wantedto.”
She keeps her face turned toward whatever’s out there. She doesn’t respond for so long that I start to wonder if she didn’t hear me. If she’s tuned so totally into those speeches she’s rehearsed for the last ten years that she’s forgotten I’m even here.
“I don’t want to,” she finally says, and I’m not only thinking of what my dad said now. I’m thinking of what Salem said, too.
If anyone gets hurt by this, it’ll be you.
Jess looks back, and she must see something in my face, because her own softens, and she steps toward me. Steps into me, setting her palms on my chest.
“I mean—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
She curls her fingers, fisting my shirt. She waits until I raise my eyes to meet hers.
“I don’t want to have those things in my head. When we go there, I mean. If I say them now, I don’t know if—I need to be calm in there. Focus on Tegan.”
I know her enough now to know: There’s no arguing with her about this, no fixing it at four fifteen in the fucking morning on some shitty sidewalk outside of a hotel we’ve got separate rooms in. I’ve got that too-big, heavy feeling again. I want to tear apart the world for putting her here, for puttingushere. I want to beg her to reassure me that when this is all over, she’ll tell me every awful thing she’s ever thought, because when this is all over, she’ll still want me there to hear it.
But this isn’t about you, I remind myself firmly.
“I get it,” I say. I lift my hands and cup her face in my palms, lean down to kiss her once. Soft and reassuring.
But those fists against my chest tighten again and she pulls me closer, kissing me harder—hungry and desperate, a kiss I can tell she wants to get lost in. And I let her—stroking my tongue against hers, getting my hands in her hair and grunting when she nips at my bottom lip. I curve my body into the shape that works best for kissing her this way, no wall to lift her against. I try not to think about the hundred other ways I haven’t kissed her yet.
When she finally pulls away, she presses her forehead against my chest, both of us breathing fast. I rest my mouth against the top of her head, inhale the scent of her, take pleasure in the way it’s mixed with the smell of my detergent on the sweatshirt she’s wearing. Ignore the insistent, aching hardness between my legs.
Her muffled voice vibrates against my sternum.
I lean back. Set my hand against her cheek and tip her face up. I’m not missing anything she says to me.
“What?”
“I wish,” she whispers, then purses her kiss-swollen lips and swallows before continuing, “I wish you could go in with us. Right from the beginning.”
I stare down at her, something huge and hopeful and fragile in my chest. A bubble you could pop with even the slightest disturbance. It’s the opposite of heavy.
