She should have returned the dress, shoes, and jewelry. She should have left it on his doorstep. That’s what she should have done. She kept telling herself to. Yet it was still hanging in her closet calling to her.
“Screw this,” she muttered to herself. She knew what she had to do. Get lost in a cleaning spiral. Annihilate every last germ, fingerprint, and microbe from every conceivable surface. That would work.
“Alexa, play cleaning playlist.”
The robot chirped to life as if it lived to serve her mood swings. “Playing cleaning playlist,” it announced with the smug finality only a piece of AI could muster.
Then the universe, or perhaps some algorithmic deity, decided she hadn’t suffered enough, and the opening bars to “Bed Chem” piped through her small, echoey room. Jenna let her head fall back and stared up at the ceiling.
Of course.
Of course. There was no one alive who had more bedchemistry with Deacon St. Claire. The memory of him was like a static charge, her pulse kicked up, her body thrummed, and her skin flashed hot and then cold, hot and then cold, like a bipolar thermostat.
She’d had sex before, obviously, but that… the sex they had… was something else. That was hall-of-fame sex. That was sex that made you believe in fate, and curses, and maybe even true love, if she were the kind of woman who allowed herself that kind of vulnerability.
She wasn’t, of course. That was why she was skipping the gala. She’d rather clean grout than share a room with a man she couldn’t, under any circumstances, allow herself to be with.
But Jiminy Cricket, if she were normal, if she had even one less deep-rooted neurosis, she would just go to the dinner, have fun, let things happen, see where it went. Would it be great if she could just live her life like that? Abso-freaking-lutely. But Jenna knew herself too well.
She was the kind of person who spent two weeks,two actual weeks, going back to the same bar every single day after a one-night-stand, just in case he showed up. Two. Weeks. In the middle of a full-scale personal crisis, she’d sat in a parked car outside an Irish pb, running through hypothetical conversations with a man she’d spent a handful of hours in her thirties. That wasn’t even a little bit normal.
Whatever genetic mutation her mother had, it had absolutely been passed down to her. She came by it honestly, though, and at least she’d learned not to indulge the sort of craving that led to complete personal obliteration. She would not let herself get addicted to anyone, especially not someone as dangerous as Deacon St. Claire. Not when she had a business to build, a life to salvage, and most importantly, a daughter to raise.
Jenna stared at the ceiling and breathed in a sharp and shallow breath. She’d already lost enough. She’d been fucked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, chewed up and spit out by a system that had never been designed for women like her, women who tried to do the right thing and always ended up with the shortest end of the stick. Lawyers. Fucking frat brothers. Why had she trusted him?
That was just money, though. It didn’t matter. She had Blake. Nobody could take Blake from her. Even if she lost everything else, she’d still have her daughter, and that was what mattered. She’d never let Blake feel alone the way she had, never let her go hungry, and never give her a reason to not trust her own mother. She’d built her life around those promises, and she’d kept them, no matter what.
Since moving to Hope Falls, she finally had the community she’d always wished for. Not just for herself, but for her daughter. This place—this town with its pancake breakfasts, its insufferably charming Main Street, its parade of well-meaning weirdos—was like the mythical Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls, only with better lattes andslightlyless public shaming. It was the town she’d always wanted to grow up in, the one she’d spent her entire adolescence daydreaming about, convinced that somewhere out there was a place where everything made sense and everything worked out. She never found it for herself, but she’d found it for Blake, and that was enough. Well, Asher found it, and she’d tagged along.
He’d given Blake the stability of a real home with Ava. He’d moved her to this mountain town, this perfect snapshot of Americana, and Blake would always have somewhere to come back to. A place that was hers, no matter what. Every time Jenna let herself dwell on that, she felt like she might die from gratitude. Asher hadn’t hadthat, and neither had Jenna, but together, they’d given it to their daughter. That counted for something.
Jenna’s phone vibrated on the nightstand, so she sat up. It was a text from Blake saying she was going to babysit Tabitha on Monday because it was a teacher in-service day. She stared down at the phone for a moment in confusion, then realized Blake must have agreed to babysit for Deacon, and then he probably said that she needed to check with Jenna first, and this was her version “checking” with her mom. She messaged back.
Blake
thanks for the update in your itinerary
She set her phone back down, and the next song that came on, because God had a sense of humor and a direct line to her emotional underbelly, was “Dress” by Taylor Swift. Of course it was.
First “Bed Chem” then “Dress.” Who made this playlist? Oh right, she had. But not recently, she made it the summer before last.
Forget cleaning. Maybe she should go on a run. Leave the house completely.
A run? Who was she kidding? She hadn’t run since…damn, she hadn’t run since she found out she was pregnant and her entire life went up like a tent in a hurricane.
She’d never forget the morning she peed on the stick knowing those two lines meant no more Olympics, no more scholarship, no more Carrie Bradshaw life. She traded it all for a crying baby, a husband who loved her until he didn’t, and a certificate from the community college in cosmetology. And she never regretted it, not for one day. How could she when she had Blake?
Still, she wondered if she had any of the old Jenna left in her. Did she even have running shoes?
She should be exhausted. She’d been at the salon since eight that morning, double-booked all day, and she’d only sat down once, and that was to eat half a granola bar in the supply closet. But she was amped up with unspent energy that she was sure had a lot to do with the vintage Valentino hanging in her closet and the invitation attached to it promising debauchery.
Jenna brought the garment bag up to her room the first night after dinner and forbid herself from opening it. Going from trying it on to attending, she’d decided, was a slippery slope, one that she’d been worried she would be tempted to throw a Slip-N-Slide on and ride down if she allowed herself to venture too close to.
She pushed off her bed, opened the closet door, and got down on her knees to search through her piles of shoes when she heard Taylor singing aboutsilence,pining,patience, anddesperately waiting. Check. Check. Check. Check. It was as if Tay Tay had taken a page out of her diary. All she did was silently, patiently, desperately pine and wait for Deacon. It was literally the soundtrack of her life since she’d met him at O’Grady’s.
Having no luck finding fast-moving footwear, she stood and tried to push all thoughts of Deacon from her mind when she came face-to-face with the bag that heldthe dressat the exact moment Miss Taylor declared she’d only bought the dress soyouwould take it off.
The words put an image of Deacon taking the dress off of Jenna in her mind’s eye. She didn’t do it consciously, it just flashed there. A shiver ran from her head to her toes, and she shut, slammed,the closet door.
