Chapter 12 #2
“I don’t know. Until we find Maggie, I guess.
” I’ve been taking things one day at a time.
I thought finding Maggie would make everything right again, balance the scale I’d accidentally tipped.
But it’s entirely possible that Maggie’s just waiting to see my father in person before breaking up with him.
And maybe that’s the right decision. Maybe she recognized something true in what I said and leaving my father would be the right choice for her, but I don’t know—part of me feels like I need to be there. Like I need to talk to her. Like I need to see all of this through.
A soft knock sounds at my door, and I stand up quickly, the towel on my head tipping over and unraveling onto the floor.
“Someone’s here,” I say. “Can I call you back later?”
I walk and tell my mom “goodbye” and “I love you” before I hang up and peek through the peephole.
It’s Jacob.
He’s wearing the same T-shirt he’s had on all day, and the same jeans. His hair is wet—freshly showered, like me—and his glasses are lower than usual, sliding down the bridge of his nose.
I watch as he pushes them back into place, the gesture so stereotypically nerdy, so “Brains,” that it almost makes me laugh, but I sober up quickly.
Why is he here? Did something happen to Dad?
I open the door. “Is everything okay?” I ask.
“What? Yes, why—”
“With my dad? He’s fine?”
Jacob blinks. “Yes,” he says slowly. “He’s okay. I checked in on him before he went to bed. He’s tired, but he’s fine.”
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry, I just figured…” I trail off, unsure how to tell him I have no other idea why he’d be here. “Umm, you can come in if you want?” I pull the door open wider, but Jacob doesn’t move. He stares at me, his eyes flitting down, then up quickly.
“You’re—you’re wearing a towel.”
“Right. Sorry.” My face burns, and my hands fly to the top of my towel, holding it tighter against me.
His gaze follows the movement, and his eyes spark. There’s something familiar in his expression. It’s the way he looked at me when we were standing in a different hotel bedroom. When I was wearing even less than this.
Only he doesn’t act anything like he did that night. He backs away from me, stepping into the hallway. “I’ll let you change,” he says. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”
The door swings shut between us, and I raise my hand to my forehead, flushed, my skin as warm as when I stepped out of the shower.
I can see the alternative way this scene could have gone, the way I would have tried to produce it.
A PA would have already placed some candles in the room, so it would be lit in a soft glow.
In the final cut there would be music playing, something soft when he first sees me in the towel, then building as he steps forward, his lips finding mine, unable to resist the pull between us.
“We said we wouldn’t,” one of us would say, even as my towel comes undone, as he lifts me, placing me on the bed…
Okay, maybe this isn’t something I’d produce, necessarily. This scene’s a little less reality television and more soft-core adult entertainment, but I got carried away.
I remember Jacob’s still waiting for me outside and quickly change, throwing on the jeans I picked up in Inverness. I finger-comb my wet hair and arrange my bangs as best I can. Then I open the door.
He’s facing the other way, as if he might catch me in some indecent state of undress again. As if he hasn’t seen everything already.
“Hey,” I say, and he turns around, his eyes bouncing to a few places—the wall behind me, the ground—and then finally landing on me.
“Hi,” he says. He tucks one hand in his back pocket, adopting a casual stance, and I wonder if it feels as unnatural for him as it looks.
“So,” I say, when he doesn’t add anything else. “Did you want to talk about something?”
“Yes.” He straightens slightly, but his hand is still in his pocket, making his body contort at an odd angle. “I wanted to see if you’d want to go on a walk?”
“A walk?”
“It’s still bright outside, and after being in the car for most of the day, I felt kind of cooped up in the room, and I thought maybe you might feel the same way, so I came to ask you if you wanted to join me on a walk.”
“Um, sure,” I say, my voice lifting slightly at the end, making my answer more of a question. Because what is happening? Jacob’s actually volunteering to spend time with me?
“Great,” he says, and we walk downstairs together, leaving the small inn. “I thought we’d just walk down the high street?” He gestures to the main road, and I nod, the two of us falling in step.
We’re both quiet as we walk, and I don’t rush to fill the silence.
Jacob’s been a mystery since I met him, and every new fact I learn just makes the picture of him fuzzier.
He doesn’t fit in the neat box I tried to place him in.
He definitely is a “Brains,” but there’s more to him.
He doesn’t seem to want to share any of that with me, but still, there are times when I get glimpses of how he was before he learned my name.
He was honest and open, transparent in a way few people are. And even when he stopped behaving like that around me, he remained that same person with Maggie. With my father. He clearly cares about them, and it’s hard to feel bitter toward him when I see that.
“Earlier you asked about your dad,” Jacob says, and I look at him sideways.
The sun sets much later this far north, so his face is clear in the light. His jaw sharp, his chin lifted. He’s not looking my way, or at anything around us.
Not that there is much around us. It’s quiet here, and there aren’t many cars passing through. Only a few shops line this street. We’ve already passed most of them, having traveled through the center of this town pretty quickly. We’ll have to turn around soon.
“I did,” I say.
He nods, the movement crisp. “I wanted to…I was thinking a lot about your question before, about your dad’s surgery. I know you weren’t here for any of it—”
I go still. “If you’re seriously about to bring this up again—”
“No,” he says. “No. I mean, I am, but only because you asked about it. Earlier. And I wanted to tell you that if you have questions about it, I’m happy to share anything you want.
If it was my—” He stops abruptly, clearing his throat.
“If it was my dad, and I couldn’t be there while he was going through something like that, I’d want to know everything about what had happened, so if you want to talk about it at all, we can. ”
Oh. I blink. “Thanks,” I say, and I can feel a shift beside me as the tension in his posture, in the space between us, relaxes a bit.
I turn his offer over in my mind as we walk. There’s so much I want to know, so much my father hasn’t told me, and I’m curious. These are the missing pieces of information I’ve been craving, but now that I’m presented with the opportunity to know them, I don’t know where to begin.
So I decide to start by saying just that, by sharing something true with him.
“I do want to talk about it. I want to know everything. I just don’t even know what to ask first,” I say.
“Maybe I could tell you how he was at the beginning? At least, when I met him?” Jacob says.
A breeze travels over my wet hair, and goosebumps rise on my skin. “Yes.” I swallow, my throat feeling thick for some reason. “That would be great.”
In the silence before he speaks, a bird calls, a short trill that fills the air, then disappears.
“Maggie and I had been going to the hospital regularly for months,” he says.
“I can’t remember exactly how long it had been, but James had been doing chemo for a while.
Enough that he’d fully lost his hair.” He pauses.
“James was the kind of person who never met a stranger, no matter where he went. He traveled all the time, like you, and he seemed to know someone in every city. He’d tell all these stories and casually mention a friend in Berlin or in Seville or Brisbane.
So we shouldn’t have been surprised that he became friends with so many of the other patients getting treatment too. And one of them was your father.
“He was in good shape then, your dad. They’d caught it early and they thought everything would be fine, but he had some other issues besides the cancer.
Things related to his heart—nothing too horrible, honestly, they said it was all pretty normal for his age, but they had to monitor that too and put him on statins and blood pressure medicine.
And chemo really takes a lot out of people, so he was having a hard time with all of it.
Plus, he was handling everything by himself.
He always came to his appointments alone. ”
I miss a twig in the middle of the path and almost trip over it, but catch myself in time.
“James and Maggie, they both have—had—this special talent for spotting people who were by themselves, for drawing them out. I’ve never really understood it, but—”
“You do it too,” I say without thinking about it. You did it with me.
“Oh,” he says. His head turns, and I can feel his gaze on the side of my face. “That’s—Thank you.”
I don’t return his look. I focus on the road, trying not to trip again, and force any words climbing up my throat back down. Because I don’t know why I said that, why I seem to have no filter around this man.
“You’re also that way,” he says, and surprise jolts through me.
“Is that a compliment?”
“I…well, yes. But you said it first.”
“Oh. So you’re just returning the favor?” I immediately cringe. What am I doing right now? Am I actually fishing for some kind of praise from Jacob?
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “That was supposed to be…I was kidding.”
“No,” he says. “I meant it. You’re easy to talk to. I felt that immediately the first time we met.”
My breath catches, because he’s doing it again, casually referencing the night he wanted us both to forget.