Chapter 3
Jade
“You can’t keep doing this,” Cat said, and I sighed, turning away, back to the bookcase. She put her hand on my shoulder, tugging me back towards her. “Don’t do that. Look at me.”
I sighed, a short and frustrated noise. Not that it would make any difference—Cat was deaf, and if I had my back to her where she couldn’t read my lips, I could scream and she wouldn’t notice—but my head was a jumbled knot of angry thoughts, and I was frustrated with myself trying to pull the threads out of the tangle.
I pulled down a book, and I held it in a tight grip as I turned back to her.
“I’ve got plenty to do,” I said, holding up the book. “I’m just not feeling an event.”
She shook her head, eyes welling up with emotion.
Dammit, her and the puppy-dog eyes. Why was I being beset by helpless girls with puppy-dog eyes today?
Her voice wobbled when she spoke—she’d lost her hearing as a teenager, and she generally had good volume control, but it wavered when she was emotional, and she signed the important words as she spoke.
“I don’t want to ruin things for everyone. ”
“You didn’t ruin anything for anyone. I just…” I spoke while signing the key words, or at least as best I could around where I was clutching the book like it was life support. “I don’t feel like going out tonight.”
“You’re a liar.”
I held up the book. “I’m reading.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Without looking right now, what’s that book even called?”
“Uh—it’s, er.” I looked. Didn’t even do it consciously—my eyes flicked down, and I realized there was nothing I could say to salvage it. She took the book from my hands.
“You don’t want to read,” she said. “You want to go see everybody again.”
I groaned, walking past her and dropping down on the faded old green couch by the big window, here at the back of the living room, where the view opened up over the mountains beyond.
I picked up the mug of chai that Cat had made me, with just a splash of almond milk, how I liked it.
“It’s complicated,” I said, finally, hunching over the mug.
“If you just said something, I couldn’t see it.”
I sipped the tea, forcing myself to relax, letting some of the tension out of my shoulders, before I looked up and met her gaze, sinking into the armchair across the old teak coffee table from me.
It was a cluttered table in a cluttered room—busy, but everything in its place, with a system I knew well.
I didn’t have a lot of visitors over here, pretty much just Cat and Daniela, and now it was down to just Cat.
She was a short woman with warm, tanned skin and short auburn hair, a little coarse and shaggy, like she was a little scruffy cat herself.
We’d always made jokes about her being top-heavy, and she was living up to it today, with a high-collared sweater and a heavy jacket on over top, and tiny shorts.
If my heart is warm, the rest of me is warm, she’d always argue, even though when she’d kick her feet up on my lap in a group setting, I’d feel like her legs were icicles. Linda always teased her about it, too.
But none of that was happening now. After the whole falling-out, Cat was persona non grata with the friend group, and I was the only one who’d taken her side, which meant I’d made myself a public enemy too.
Hard to sit with the fallout in a small town like Paxton Ridge.
I’d gone from being friends with everyone in the street and being able to drop into the queer community lounge and bar the Birdhouse whenever I wanted and have a spontaneous evening with friends I’d known for years, and then overnight, I was alone.
“I said, it’s complicated,” I signed, not really up to putting it into words this time.
She frowned, mimicking the complicated sign back in confusion, and I shrugged, sipping moodily from the mug before I spoke.
“I don’t want to see everybody, not while I’m angry with them for what happened.
It’s not like I want to go but won’t because of you. It’s just…”
She sighed, slumping back in her chair. “I should really have just let things go, huh?”
“You did the right thing, and you know it.”
“I don’t know if I do.” She drew her body language in closer, signing in smaller gestures. “I mean, things had been going on for a while without me saying anything, and I could have just talked things over with Drew in private, and maybe—”
“Stop,” I signed, and that was enough to get her to drop it, slouching. I waited for her to look at me again before I spoke. “It’s not your fault. You’d never fault anybody else for doing what you did.”
She pursed her lips. “Okay, but I’ll fault myself for it.”
“Don’t make me get the spray bottle, kitty-cat.”
She hissed, mimicking cat claws. I mimed a spray bottle, and she laughed, waving away the imaginary spray, and I relaxed a little bit, although it was just the moody irritation settling into something quiet and sad.
“You do want to go, though, don’t you?” she said, and I groaned.
“Not really,” I said. “Party at the Birdhouse. Whatever. Happens twice a week at a minimum.”
“It’s for a new person. That’s exciting, right? You don’t want to meet them?”
I cleared my throat. “Already met her,” I said, and she stopped, cocking her head.
“You met her? When?”
“Out on road patrol,” I said. “I got called in to help around a fallen tree, and this girl comes streaking in with her Camry sliding like an emergency brake drift and almost hits the tree.”
“Oh my god. And you didn’t mention it?”
“I wasn’t planning on having a conversation at all today. Then there was a stray cat in my driveway.”
She stuck out her tongue. “I was worried about you and had a feeling you’d be holing up hiding from everyone!” she said. “And what do you know, I was right. Like I always am. So what happened? Did you talk to her?”
“Drove her to Daniela’s place, because the road was blocked. Her car’s still down there, just pulled off to the side while we get the road cleared.”
She softened, smiling warmly. “That’s sweet,” she said. “What’s she like?”
What had she been like, anyway? Alyssa Taylor, a little all over the place, not very good at shutting up.
I wasn’t one for idle chatter and people running their mouths, but it had almost been kind of endearing with her.
Pretty privilege, probably. She was cute, blue doe-eyes and long, sleekly styled blonde hair, soft skin and perfect features, with an annoyingly infectious smile.
“She slapped me in the face,” I said, and Cat went wide-eyed.
“She slapped you?”
“That’s what the cut is,” I said, and she clasped her hands over her mouth. “She was wearing a ring.”
“Oh my god, I thought it was from road work. Why did she slap you?”
I laughed, a small weight melting from my chest as I did. “It was a mistake. I surprised her showing up at her car window when she’d just narrowly avoided a crash, and she backhanded me across the face. She apologized.”
“Yeesh. I mean, I guess she was shaken.”
“She’s chatty,” I said, and I fingerspelled the name before I said it.
“Alyssa. She’d been living in Boston, and she’s coming to stay with her long-distance friend Daniela, because things went sideways in the city.
So I feel like I know what I need to know about her.
Don’t need to get involved in the dynamic. ”
Cat chewed her lip, picking up her own mug and taking a long sip of her black tea before she set it down and spoke carefully. “Do you think it’s going to be like this forever?”
She always did that—whenever she was about to deliver something cutting, she’d take a while thinking it over, and the playful spark would disappear from her eyes and get replaced with something serious, and then she’d drop it like a bomb.
I made a short frustrated noise, pinching my brow, and I took another drink of tea to buy time before I set it down and sat back hard in the couch, kicking one foot up in a figure four, trying to look unbothered, before I gave up.
“Wish I knew,” I said. “Maybe I should just give up on this damn place.”
“Jade, er…”
Dammit, I wasn’t letting her watch my lips and I’d stopped signing. I really was out of sense right now. I took a breath, steadying myself before I looked at her head-on again, signing as I spoke. “Don’t know,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”
She sighed, her chest heaving as she dropped her gaze, thinking it over, and she looked me in the eye before she spoke in a slow and steady voice. “You should make things right.”
“Easy to say…”
“Everything is easy for me, Jade.”
I rolled my eyes. Still smiled, though. She was just like that.
“They’re your friends. Your community. What else are you going to do, anyway? Live as a hermit in the woods forever?”
Leave, probably. Big world. Paxton Ridge had been good to me, but it was just one corner of it.
I’d been wondering for a bit now if it was really the place for me—I’d set up here because it was easy and convenient, and then the next thing I’d known, it was six years later and I was wondering what I was doing with myself.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say that to Cat.
Especially right now. She’d be all alone in this town if I left at a time like this…
I tightened my fingers around my cup, feeling the heat of the tea penetrate my fingertips.
Maybe Cat had a point, just not in the way she thought.
If I had one foot out the door anyway, what was the harm in trying a little bit?
Not to fix these connections, but in trying to fix the connections for her.
Try to get her a place back in the community, get people to realize it had been Drew who was in the wrong and not her, and then once I’d burned my social capital for her sake, I could make myself scarce.
Cat’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Are you fantasizing about living as a hermit? It’s not as fun as it sounds at first.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“I know I am. You can’t go to the bakery café for scones in the morning or anything if you’re a hermit.”
“I guess I’ll go.” I took a sip and set the mug down, the knot in my chest loosening just a little. “I don’t know how much they’ll appreciate seeing me, but I’ll at least show my face.”
“Yeah?” She sat up taller, practically glowing. “Oh, thank god. I know they’ll be happy to see you again. I feel so much better already.”
“Ha. Happy might be a stretch. But for the record, if it turns out they are, I’ll admit I was wrong.”
She winked, her big smile radiant with the little gap between her front teeth. “I look forward to hearing it.”
“Planning on hearing it, are you?”
“It’s a figure of speech, jerk. But yes. I’m going to be so smug about being vindicated that my hearing will come back just for that.”
“If anyone would do it, it’d be you.” I stood up, signing with a more relaxed posture now. “It’s still a minute before I have to leave, though. So, I’m guessing you’re going to invite yourself to dinner with me while you’re here?”
She laughed. “You don’t want to read that book instead? I know you’ve been looking forward to it.”
I signed funny and nodded to the kitchen. “I’ve got some wax samples testing for my next round of candles, though, if you want to sample some scents with me.”
“Ooh, good call,” she said. “Maybe you can take a candle as a gift and brighten up the space! They’ve probably run out of your last one.”
Not if they were sick of me. But I wasn’t about to explain to Cat I was doing this to try repairing her relationships, not mine, so I’d go along with it.