It’s not quite what I mean. She’s herself, turned up to eleven. In the months I’ve been working with her, I’ve seen her be cagey, impatient, willing to push boundaries. I saw it in the weeks we were first working with Tegan, back when we thought she was Jess. But since she returned from Boston, there’s something desperate about her. Something that worries me.
“She is being . . . a lot,” Jess says.
She pauses, and I feel her thigh tense slightly beneath my hand until she looks across the room and spots Tegan. She relaxes again. Or at least she relaxes as much as she can after staring in a trance at a photo of her mother in disguise for the last hour.
“But I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Again, I get that sense where I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or to herself, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I heard it either way, and I can’t make myself believe her. This version of Jess—the one who wants to talk, the one who only hears half of what Tegan says, the one who wants towait for Salem—isn’t the one I know best, or maybe at all. To me, she’s the same as that woman on the phone screen.
I can recognize her, but she looks so different.
“I want to do it. I can handle her.”
I blink down at my drink, disoriented. It’s the hot, dry air or the fact that I haven’t eaten enough or the cumulative upside-downness of this entire day.
It’s the fact that Jess Greene and I seem to have entirely switched sides in this fight over whether the story of her mother gets told.
“I still need to talk to her,” I say, meeting Jess’s eyes again. I’m desperate to remind her of the plan, the one we made together last night. In bed. After sex, after me telling her things I keep mostly to myself. As close as I’ve ever felt to anyone. We negotiated this like we were a team, a couple, and Jess had been . . . she’d been sowithme. Open to me in a new way.
But I can tell this photo changes things for her, and I’m afraid to ask how much.
She nods, then looks down at my phone again.
“Can you send this to me? AirDrop, or whatever?”
Before I have the chance to answer—the chance to say,Once I offered to AirDrop you a travel itinerary and you looked like you wanted to stab me through the heart—Salem’s voice cuts in from behindus.
“Sorry,” she says, as she moves around our table to pull out a chair. “That took longer than I thought.”
Jess stands as soon as Salem sits, and my hand, obviously, falls away from her thigh.
“I think Tegan and I are going to go take a walk. See some of the city.”
I’m pretty sure what that means is that I’m meant to talk to Salem about the plan. To make it so Salem gets prepped to do the interview I don’t think either of them seem ready for.
I watch her go. A black and cream and spun-gold column. Already I miss her enough to make my gut clench.
“I’ll have a gin and tonic,” Salem says to the waiter who I didn’t even see arrive. “More gin than water and more limes than ice.”
She dismisses him by turning her sharp gaze onto me.
“How’s Pen?” I preempt her, because I’m not ready to talk about the plan.
“She’s frustrated.” It’s more forthcoming of an answer than the brief, sharpfineshe gave us all at the airport. “She has a long road of physical therapy ahead and she’s afraid she won’t ever be the same as a dancer.”
I nod, opening my mouth to say something reassuring, but Salem speaks over me.
“Patrick can handle it for a few more days,” she adds, which I guess means both her daughter’s physical therapy and emotions. Either way, she’s got that look in her eyes, again, the one that says she’s not interested in talking about this anymore.
“Obviously, you’ve made progress in my absence,” she says.
I swallow, feeling sick.Progress.
“Jess trusts you, that much is clear. She—”
“I’m involved with her,” I blurt, because I doubt I could stomach whatever she’d planned to say next. “You don’t need to know the details, but you do need to know that. I’m involved with her in a way that’s not professional.”
I’m sorry, I almost add, automatically, but I clamp my lips shut. I’m not sorry, I guess except for the fact that I am right now not back in Missouri, before this goddamned story caught up with us again.
