Chapter 23 #2
Of course, I wasn’t the only one who was looking a lot at Jade.
It was the first time since I’d arrived that Cat and Jade were in a group with this many people, and Charlie’s attention kept going pointedly back to Cat, but Linda seemed more focused on Jade, loaded looks with her eyes narrowed before she pulled away.
Even once we ended the circle and broke off into our little groups to relax and enjoy the scenery, the weather, the food, the energy of the group oriented itself around Jade, and even when the evening was getting on and the sky started to splash with purple from the edges and I knelt by the gas stove to help Linda turn it on, I could tell from the glances she kept sending Jade’s way that she was thinking about her too, and I couldn’t help myself.
I never did manage to keep my mouth shut.
“Are you okay?” I said suddenly, and she stopped fighting with the dial on the stove that was refusing to cooperate, looking up at me instead. “I mean, with Jade here. You seem a little uncomfortable.”
I shouldn’t have said it, and she made it abundantly clear, from the way she narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, I know whose side you’ve taken in the whole thing.”
I cringed away at first, but I took a second to relax into it.
She was pushing back because she was hurt and insecure, and that was all.
I relaxed, sitting down cross-legged, pulling my coat tighter against the cool wind.
“I’m not trying to take anyone’s side,” I said.
“I think a lot of people have just said a lot of things they shouldn’t have.
Do you want me to talk to her about something?
Because I’m happy to be a neutral party. ”
She pushed out a frustrated sigh, going back to the stove, trying the same thing, clicking without lighting. “Don’t bother. People can think what they like.”
“I mean, it’s not about what she thinks so much as—”
“So much as what everybody thinks about me and my partner now, because she’s gone around smearing my relationship to people.”
I frowned. That was nothing like the Jade I knew. Because she wouldn’t try to tear somebody down like that, and also because, well… gossip wasn’t really the word I’d use to describe her. “She has?”
“I figure the mask’s kind of come off by now. Figure you’ve been talking to me and Charlie less because of whatever she’s been telling you about me.”
“Oh.” I furrowed my brow. “She hasn’t said anything about you.”
“Right.” Her expression quivered, just a little.
“I mean, she’s mentioned you in casual contexts, like she does everybody, but she’s never said anything about your relationship or about you as a person or…
” I shrugged. “I’ve just been spending more time with her and Daniela and Cat ever since Daniela reached out and started clearing things up between them. ”
She grunted. “So Daniela’s in on it too, then.
Nice to know.” She tried the same thing with the stove again, turning it off and on again, clicking without starting.
I reached in without thinking, taking her hand off the dial, and she gave me an odd look, but I tilted the stove and reached under it, and I adjusted the plug at the base, pulling it out and reseating it.
I pushed the dial in and twisted, and it clicked a few times before it lit up, flaring high before it settled into a steady burn.
“If you wanted to spend more time together or something,” I said, “you can just say so. I didn’t mean to leave you feeling ignored. I just tend to get in my own head thinking people don’t want me around too much.”
She stared at me for a second, and then at the flame, before she groaned, settling back to a seat on the grass, looking up at the sky.
“Not looking to get in trouble inviting too many people around to the house. Or going out too much. And Charlie is sore with Cat, so she’s not likely to approve it. ”
“Approve it?” I felt a sinking weight settle in my stomach, looking at that hard-edged expression on her face, her eyes off on the long, thin clouds above us instead of me.
I recognized the feeling all too well—needing to run everything by your partner, get permission to invite people around, permission to have friends, permission to associate with the right groups.
Losing friendships because of your partner and not wanting to admit to it, because the last thing anyone wants to do in a hard relationship is admit they got themselves into a hard relationship.
I should have picked up on it earlier—all the little comments Linda made about tending to the house the way Charlie liked it, about doing something so she didn’t get in trouble, how she would wear pretty dresses when she was hosting someone at the house but then dress more androgynously when she was out on her own, manicures she always seemed vaguely uncomfortable in.
Jesus, I of all people should have been able to see it.
Maybe I just liked Charlie and didn’t want to compare her to Sawyer.
“Right,” Linda said, her voice tight. “Don’t need to say a word. I can already see you’ve drawn the same conclusion as Jade.”
“It’s not—”
“Just because I have one issue, suddenly she’s a predator and I’m a stupid hapless child who can’t advocate for herself.”
I shook my head. “Linda, I wasn’t—”
“Be my guest,” she said, pushing herself to stand up. “If you want to sit around with your little group and talk shit about me behind my back, I’m not—”
I turned off the stove. She paused halfway to standing, frowning at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you to sit your butt back down if I have to be petty to do it.” I gestured to the stove. “You turn it back on.”
She scowled, but the look in her eyes was more curious than angry. Slowly, she sat back down, her hand on the dial. “If this doesn’t work for me again after it worked just fine for you, I’ll be pissed off.”
“You just have to believe in yourself. It can sense your feelings.”
“You’ve been hanging out with Skye, huh?” She turned the dial, and it lit up. I smiled.
“See? You just have to believe in yourself.”
“Just have to fix the fuse, more like, but believing in yourself doesn’t hurt, I guess,” she muttered, but she didn’t move to leave. Still held herself defensively, but the hard edge left her features.
“Can I tell you an anecdote?” I said. “You can be annoyed at me after and tell me to shut up if you want.”
“Uh… yeah. Why not,” she said.
“I had a friend back in Boston. Her name was Trisha. She was a good friend. Worked as a physician’s assistant. Wicked smart, as they’d say in Boston.”
“Is that actually a real thing?”
“Eh… it depends on what circles you’re in. Some people don’t stop saying it. Trisha was a lot smarter than me, and she could see that Sawyer—my ex-boyfriend—was being a controlling dick long before I could. She got on my case telling me to dump him. She’d get really mad about it.”
“So you’re the wicked-smart Trisha in this situation.”
“Jeez, let me finish. I said you can get annoyed at me after if you want to.”
She put her hands up. I went on.
“I didn’t dump him,” I said. “I dumped her instead.”
“You were cheating with her?”
“Jesus, I dumped her as a friend, I mean. Sawyer told me to, and I believed him that she was just jealous because her relationship didn’t work.
I know now I should have listened to her, but now that I’ve had some time to look back on it and reflect, I think she was wrong.
Not about Sawyer, but in that she was so harsh, so all or nothing about it, that my only options were to either dump Sawyer right away or to defend him.
And nobody who needs to leave a bad situation is ready to just up and leave that same day.
So I defended him. And the thing is that once you start defending someone, you need to keep justifying that to yourself in your head.
I think I ended up giving Sawyer more chances than I would have if she hadn’t done that.
” I shifted closer to the stove, feeling its warmth against the deepening chill as the sun sank lower.
“I don’t think your relationship with Charlie is necessarily bad.
It just sounds like maybe there’s some issues to talk through, just like there are in any relationship, but because someone was coming after you and criticizing the relationship, you had to defend it, and now…
maybe you feel guilty admitting to having issues, because then it feels like agreeing with someone who positioned Charlie as a predator. ”
She sighed, hunching forward, looking down at the ground. After a long silence, picking at a patch of grass, finally, in a low voice, she said, “You know something?”
“Mm?”
“Maybe you’re wicked smart yourself.”
I snorted. “If you want to really sound like the cliché, you have to drop the R. Wicked smaht.”
“Wicked smaht.”
“Flawless.”
“I feel dirty for having said that.”
“I feel dirty for having heard it.”
She pursed her lips into her small, upside-down smile she did, just for a second, before she said, “So you think Jade was wrong.”
“I think Jade probably shouldn’t have come for you like that.
She might be right about the relationship, I don’t know enough about you and Charlie to say, but I don’t think she should have come at you like that.
And I can admit that no matter how much I like her personally.
I’m happy to talk to her about it, even, if you want me to. ”
“Ugh. Don’t. Makes me feel sick.” She shrugged.
“Okay, just don’t tell anyone I said this, but yeah, sometimes I feel like she treats me like a dress-up doll.
She wants me to be clean and polished and I know I should, but I guess I don’t take very well to being clean and polished.
I don’t have any moral high ground to have an issue, but I just…
just feel controlled, I guess.” She slumped, letting out a heavy sigh. “There.”
“Do you want to talk to her about it?”
“Don’t really see that doing anything,” she said, her voice dry.
“She always wins in arguments. And then I feel stupid and I gaslight myself and I try harder to be what she wants me to be, and I end up feeling like shit.” She shook her head.
“I shouldn’t be shit-talking her behind her back, I’m worse than everyone I’m bitching about. ”
“You’re not shit-talking her behind her back. You’re telling me how you feel. I’m not judging your relationship or you or her or anything.”
“Thanks.” She sighed, and she stood up slowly, dusting herself off. “I really need some more food. Coming with, or are you sticking by the fire?”
“God, I’m starving. Again. It’s like I didn’t just eat an hour ago.”
“Hikes take it out of you. C’mon.”
I went with her, grabbing food and rejoining the group, and I spent the rest of the evening bouncing around from one conversation to another.
Daniela stuck with Jade and Cat, and I felt the familiar flush of guilt seeing Daniela together with Jade, all three of them laughing and chatting brightly together.
I knew logically that they were only standing close together side-by-side so that Cat could face them and follow the conversation, but I couldn’t deny the jealousy.
And I couldn’t deny that I had no place getting jealous.
But I threw myself into conversations with everybody, trying to maintain normalcy, and when Abby switched on some music and asked me if I wanted to dance, all I could think about was Jade, but I knew I was trying to put on a show like I wasn’t obsessed with Jade, so I cast one loaded glance across the camp at Jade before I smiled and nodded for Abby.
“Lead the way,” I said.