Chapter Seven #2
“I think the assumption is generally that I don’t have any that need sparing,” he said, all matter-of-fact about it.
While her stomach just about sank into her chunky little red ankle boots.
She had to stifle the sound of horror that immediately rose in her throat.
After all, she didn’t want him to feel more weird about it.
“Wow, okay. That is not cool of people,” she said instead.
While he did his best to brush it off as nothing.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m fine about it.”
“Well, I’m not. I don’t like it at all. In fact it makes me feel a little sick.”
“It does ? How sick? Sick like you need to lay down? Sick like you need some ginger ale and one of those sticks in your mouth? Sick like I need to call an ambulance? How far is the sickness along, is it close to your brain? Or your heart? Which is the most important again? I don’t remember.
Lemme just grab my guide to medical problems with human bodies,” he said.
Or, rather, he rambled it in an increasingly agitated manner.
He even started to head inside his bedroom to retrieve whatever weird-sounding book he was talking about until she touched his arm and waved in his face. “Jack, stop, stop, for goodness’ sake, stop. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant it in the, you know, I’m sad that people are awful way.”
“Okay, but you being sad isn’t any better. How in the fried ham bone do I get you out of sadness? I have no books for that.”
“You don’t have to have any books for that.
Honestly, you shouldn’t even be trying to soothe me.
I don’t need any soothing. You do,” she insisted—much to his amusement.
He scoffed, and his scoff then turned into a chuckle, and the chuckle gradually slowed and sank until finally he seemed to realize:
She wasn’t chuckling with him.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Why on earth not?”
“Because… I mean, well… look at me. I don’t need something like that.
I’m a slab of meat, a granite rock face.
Nothing gets by this wall enough to need whatever it is you’re suggesting here.
” He gestured at the ideas he clearly imagined she was having.
Shook his head, like they were the most absurd things in the world.
Though even as he did, she could see his bluster fading.
She could make out the considering look, slowly taking over his face.
Then he glanced at her, his gaze just a little bit anxious.
“Just for the sake of argument, though, what is it that you’re suggesting here? ”
And now she had to shrug and act casual while her heart tried to punch out of her body and smother him in love.
“I don’t know, to be honest. Depends what the wall would be okay with tolerating,” she said, then watched that anxiety drop, too.
All in one go, right down into what could only be described as hunger.
“Anything you would be willing to give,” he burst out with, like a man finally being offered a drink after a thousand years lost in the desert. He even half reached out a hand, as if expecting that to be the soothing thing. A businesslike shake, or maybe a gentle squeeze.
Though he couldn’t even seem to keep anticipating that.
He pulled the hand back after no more than second.
Made a fist, and then cupped his other one around it.
Like he needed to hide what he’d been going for.
Like even that was too much to hope for.
And it tore at her so brutally that for a moment she couldn’t remember how careful she was supposed to be about these things.
She somehow forgot a lifetime of curbing her effervescent affection, her too much manner, her need to help and comfort and be kind.
She just shoved her arms around him.
And only afterward realized what she had done.
Somehow her leg had ended up between his.
Her entire chest was crushed against what felt like his stomach—maybe even lower than his stomach, if she was being honest. Plus she’d somehow let her face make contact with his chest. She’d pressed her cheek there, like couples did in movies while in bed together.
All of which was mortifying on its own.
But then there was who she had done it to.
A man so gruff and closed off that saying hello was often a step too far for him, familiarity wise.
He rarely ever called anyone by their actual name; she’d never seen him shake a single person’s hand; if someone sat one row down in the theatre he’d move to the other side of the place.
One time she’d seen him leave in the middle of a movie because his seat wasn’t far enough away from someone else. The Sixth Sense , it had been. She’d wondered forever afterward if he still thought Bruce Willis was alive in it. And now here she was, superglued to his body.
She wasn’t surprised when he immediately went rigid.
Or that he seemed to jerk back—not so hard that he managed to get free of her, but enough that it was really obvious.
She almost pulled away then and there, and only stopped when she realized what he was doing with his arms. He had flung them up when she barged into him, far away from her body.
And at first they hung there, stiffly, like he’d been turned to stone.
But then they started to tremble a little.
Like it was a monumental effort to keep them up and away from her.
Until finally he seemed to break. “Uhhhhh, hey, hey, hello, I don’t know what I’m doing, kid.
I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know where to put my arms or my hands, help me.
Help me, please, I’m losing it, tell me what to do before I do something hideous,” he suddenly burst out in a voice that got more frantic with every word he spoke.
By the time he got to the end he sounded almost incoherent.
Which was a relief, in one way.
She hadn’t done something he was repulsed by.
But in another, it was horrible, it was a nightmare. All she could think about was how he must have gotten this way. So unsure and so unable to do something so simple. So nervous about getting it wrong. Surely his parents must have hugged him at least , she found herself thinking.
However, it made her heart sink to do it.
Because of course the answer had to be no.
No, they never had. Yes, they must have been that cold, or cruel, or absent.
Maybe he’d even raised himself, mostly. She couldn’t remember him ever having any family, or even seeming like a young person, despite the fact that she’d seen him around town since what had to have been his early twenties.
And all that helped her prioritize his wounded vulnerability over her own fear.
“You’re not going to do anything hideous, Jack.
In fact you already almost did this. You picked me up, remember?
And you didn’t do anything wrong or bad.
So just do that, except without the lifting me and carrying me part,” she said while staying exactly where she was.
Even though every point of contact was now near unbearable.
Her leg was starting to ache from holding it so carefully right where it was, rather than accidentally touch any more of his inner thigh than she already had.
And god, the heat against the side of her face.
It was like being pressed against an engine just as it revved past the point it could handle.
She even thought she could hear his heart hammering hard inside, until she realized just how loud that sound was.
It seemed far too large and far too strange to be anything like that.
It was probably something else—like a generator out back, or thunder in the distance, or maybe him clearing his throat before he answered.
“But picking you up was easy. Knowing I had to do it took my mind off making contact,” he said, his voice now so tense and desperate it only made her want to work harder at getting him through this.
And she knew how, too.
“Imagine the same thing again, then. I need your help. And the only way you can give it to me is by lowering your arms and curling them around my shoulders, and then just holding me like that for a little while,” she said, and heard him let out an amazed breath somewhere above her head.
“Darn it, that’s so good, that’s so tricksy.”
“Got you, did it?”
“I’m already halfway there, despite my terror of hugging wrong.”
She let herself look at his right arm, and sure enough, it was now significantly closer to her body.
Not quite there, and trembling with tension, but almost, almost. In fact, it was so almost that she found herself trembling a little, too.
But she carried on. “Honestly, I don’t even know how wrong a hug could ever really be,” she said, and he answered way too fast.
Like his many mistakes were always loaded in the barrel of an emotional gun, inside him.
“My hands go in the wrong place, accidentally. Only you think it’s not an accident.
You think I did it on purpose, like that time I tried to get a bee out of Humphrey Holliwell’s hair and misjudged the size of my hand and the shape of his head and the distance between us and somehow stuck my finger in his ear.
He thought it was a deviant thing, and reported me to the Committee for a Clean Town,” he said all in a big, jumbled rush.
Much to her horror.
“Oh my god, Jack.”
“Exactly. So now do you get it?”
“Of course not, that is ridiculous and Humphrey is awful.”
She pictured him when she said it. That perpetually red face, those dead little eyes, the way he constantly barged everywhere like everything should make way for him.
He’d once almost broken her door coming into the bookstore.
Twice he’d come in to complain about books in her window, and ended up knocking something over.