Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
JESS
By the time I turned onto Meghan’s street, my hands had stopped shaking, which would’ve been an improvement if everything from my collarbones down wasn’t so muted. Like somebody had turned the volume down on my body but left my brain blaring on max.
I parked halfway straight in her driveway, stared through the windshield for a few heartbeats, and tried to make my thoughts line up.
You went to his house.
You kissed him.
You ran.
That last part seemed the least surprising. Running was practically my superpower. The first two… My mind kept circling back to them like a tongue poking at a sore tooth.
The porch light was on. I grabbed my purse out of reflex and made myself get out of the car. My legs carried me up the walkway on autopilot. I didn’t even bother to knock—none of us did on nights like these.
I stepped inside and called, quieter than I meant to, “I, um… need nachos. And… minimal judgment.”
From the kitchen came Meghan’s voice. “Get in here, sweetheart.”
Pepper added, “No promises on the judgment.”
Allie chimed in, “But the nachos are sacred. Those are non-negotiable.”
The familiar cadence of them, the stupid little ritual, loosened something tight in my chest. I followed the sound to the kitchen.
Meghan was at the counter with a cutting board and a pile of tomatoes.
Pepper had a giant bag of tortilla chips open and was shaking some onto a sheet pan.
Allie was rummaging in the fridge like she lived there, emerging with cheese and sour cream and one of the fancy salsas Meghan splurged on when she was “having a week.” I’d texted them once I’d hurled myself into my car, and they’d already assembled like my own personal squad of Avengers.
I stopped inside the doorway. The scene was so normal—soft overhead light, the faint scent of dish soap, music low from a speaker on the counter—that for a second I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. Possibly I’d fallen asleep at the truck and dreamt Powell’s kitchen, his hands, his mouth—
“Hey.” Meghan put the knife down and really looked at me. “Come sit.”
I moved to the island like a puppet whose strings had been yanked. The stool was cool against the backs of my knees as I sank onto it. I dropped my bag on the floor and folded my hands on the counter so they wouldn’t shake.
Pepper’s eyes narrowed. “Wow. You look… not fine.”
“Thanks,” I said, but it came out flat.
Allie slid a glass toward me. “Water. Start there.”
I took a sip without arguing. The coolness hit my tongue, my throat, dropped into my stomach, and still I had the sensation of watching myself from two feet outside my body.
Meghan returned to chopping, but slower now, eyes flicking between the knife and my face. “Okay. You have the ‘something big just happened, and I haven’t caught up yet’ look.”
Pepper poured more chips than necessary onto the pan. “Please tell me it’s not your insurance giving you grief. I’ll go down there and burn them to the ground.”
“Okay, maybe let’s not commit a felony,” Allie said mildly.
I let out a breath that might have been a laugh in another life. Right now it was more like air leaving a balloon. I traced a knot in the butcher block with my fingertip, watching the swirls in the wood instead of their faces.
“It’s not insurance,” I said.
“Is it the truck?” Meghan asked gently.
“It’s… kind of adjacent to the truck.” I swallowed. “It’s Powell.”
That stopped everybody. Pepper froze mid-chip scatter. Allie’s head snapped up from the cheese. Meghan’s eyebrows shot up.
“Powell,” Pepper repeated slowly, like she was making sure she’d heard correctly.
“Yeah.” My voice sounded thin even to me. “Ferguson.”
“As opposed to some other Powell you’ve been secretly stockpiling?” Allie muttered.
I lifted one shoulder, the closest I could get to a shrug. “I went to his place.”
Meghan’s knife clinked against the cutting board. “You what now?”
“For planning,” I added quickly. “For the Twelve Stops. He said we needed to test a few of the activities. Time them. Figure out the flow.”
Pepper leaned both elbows on the island, giving me her full attention. “And that required his home kitchen?”
“He has a big island,” I said weakly. “And extra counter space. And he said he’d cook. For efficiency.” My mouth twisted. “It was very… efficient.”
They exchanged a look that practically screamed, Is that what we’re calling it now?
Allie let out a low whistle. “And how did that go?”
I stared at my hands for a long beat. The urge to minimize all of it, to wave it off as nothing, clawed up my throat. But lying to them wouldn’t change the way my heart had tried to beat out of my chest when his lips touched mine.
“He’s a really good cook,” I said instead.
Meghan’s lips quirked. “Okay. But I’m guessing the food is not what sent you over here in need of emotional triage.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Pepper slid the sheet pan into the oven and set the timer before turning to cross her arms. “Spit it out. The thing that’s making you look like you got hit with one of those cartoon anvils.”
I took another sip of water to buy time. My pulse ticked in my throat. The words were both huge and fragile all at once, like saying them aloud might make them more real.
“He kissed me,” I said quietly. “In his kitchen. During the cookie challenge.”
Silence fell, thick and immediate.
Allie reached blindly for the chunk of cheese she’d been shredding and missed it by a good three inches.
Meghan’s eyes widened. “Oh.”
Pepper’s mouth dropped open. “For real kissed? Or like… mistletoe-cheek-peck kissed?”
“For real.” Heat crept up my neck. “Mouth. Hands. The whole thing.”
“And you…?” Allie prompted, gentle.
I let my shoulders slump, the fight to hold myself upright suddenly too much. “I kissed him back.”
There it was. The truth of it lay between us like a dropped plate, shards of it catching the light.
No one said anything for a long moment. I listened to the hum of the fridge, the soft tick of the oven, the distant whoosh of a car driving past outside.
Finally, Meghan moved. She rounded the island and perched on the stool beside me, hip bumped against mine, not crowding but close enough that I could’ve leaned if I needed to.
“What did it feel like?” Her voice was low, but not teasing. Merely curious in that careful way she had when she was aware pushing would make me shut down.
I stared at the opposite wall, at the calendar with little notes scribbled in the squares. I shouldn’t have known the answer as clearly as I did. I shouldn’t have been able to conjure it up with one breath.
“Like someone had been holding my shoulders tense for ten years and suddenly… let go,” I said slowly. “Like… heat. Everywhere. And like I’d been wrong about gravity. In a good way.” I huffed out a breath. “And about thirty seconds later, in a very bad way.”
Pepper’s voice softened. “Bad how?”
“Bad like my brain finally caught up and started screaming, ‘You hate him, remember? You hate him, you idiot.’” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “Except I didn’t. Not right second. I didn’t hate him at all.”
Allie rested her forearms on the island, chin propped on her hands. “So you ran.”
“Of course I ran.” I laughed, a small, humorless huff. “I’m very consistent that way.”
Meghan bumped my shoulder with hers. “Did he do anything… wrong? During? After?”
“No,” I said immediately. That much, at least, was solid. “He was slow. Gave me time. When I freaked, he backed off. He didn’t chase me or say anything manipulative or—” My throat tightened again. “He looked… confused. Worried. Like he thought he’d messed something up.”
Pepper blew out a long breath. “Okay. So your nervous system had a meltdown, not because of him, but because the narrative in your head didn’t match the reality in your mouth.”
“That’s a horrifying way to put it,” I muttered. “But yes.”
Allie drummed her fingers lightly on the counter. “Jess… we love you. You know that.”
“That sounds like the preamble to an intervention.”
“It kind of is,” Meghan said gently.
I braced myself.
“All this time,” Pepper said, “you’ve had Powell filed under ‘irredeemable jackass’ because of what happened senior year. The locker thing. The hallway. Whatever that was. You built a whole story about him out of that one day.”
“It wasn’t just one day,” I argued automatically, even though if I tried to list other specific offenses, they mostly blurred into general teenage irritation. “He was—he is—always infuriating. Cocky. Loud. Charming when he wants to be.”
“Okay,” Pepper allowed. “And he did something that hurt you. I’m not minimizing that. But you’ve never actually talked to him about it.”
I looked down, finding a tiny fleck of dried something on the counter and picking at it like my life depended on it. “He knew what he did.”
“Did he?” Allie asked quietly. “Or did he know you walked away pissed and never spoke to him again?”
My jaw clenched. “Same thing.”
“Those are not the same thing,” Meghan said.
I wanted to argue. I really did. But the memory that rose up wasn’t actually of the Incident itself—it was of the next day.
Him catching my eye at my locker, starting to say something, me pivoting on my heel and walking away so hard and so fast my shoulder slammed into a locker.
I hadn’t given him a chance then. Not even a little one.
“And now,” Pepper said, softer still, “he’s pulled you out of a burning truck. He’s helping rebuild your entire business. He’s standing in barns and kitchens with you and actually showing up. That has to count for something.”
“It does,” I whispered. “That’s the problem.”
The oven timer beeped, making all of us jump. Meghan slid off the stool to pull the tray of nachos out, the kitchen briefly filling with the scent of melted cheese and toasted chips. It was so stupidly comforting my eyes stung.
“So what’s actually scaring you right now?” she asked as she set the pan down and started scattering jalapenos and salsa on top. “That you want him? Or that you might have been wrong about him?”
“Both.” The word scraped its way out of my chest. “If I was wrong, then I spent ten years hating someone who didn’t deserve it.
I built this whole story about myself—about being the girl who doesn’t take crap, who knows when someone shows you who they are—and what if I misread it?
What does that make me? What else have I misjudged? ”
Allie’s expression softened. “It makes you human. And under extreme stress. You were seventeen, not a fully formed oracle of truth.”
“And if you weren’t wrong?” Pepper added. “If he really was a jerk back then, if he did exactly what you think he did on purpose? Then you get to tell him that now, as the woman you are, and see how he handles it. But either way, you living in limbo helps exactly no one.”
Meghan set a plate in front of me before leaning her elbows on the counter, meeting my gaze head-on. “You can’t build anything here—friendship, forgiveness, romance, whatever this wants to be—on a story you’ve never checked with the other character.”
My teeth caught my bottom lip. “What if I ask and he acts like it was nothing? Like I’m overreacting?”
“Then,” Allie said, “you’ll know that, too. And you can decide if that’s a man you want kissing you in kitchens.”
Pepper nudged the plate closer. “Eat. Then text him. Or call him. Or corner him at the barn. You don’t have to get all the answers tonight, but you need to start.”
I picked up a chip more to have something to do with my hands than out of any real hunger. Cheese stretched in a long string before snapping. I stared at it like it might contain wisdom.
“I have no idea how to open that conversation,” I admitted. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, remember that thing from ten years ago that I never mentioned and have quietly resented you for ever since?’”
“Yes,” Meghan said simply. “Exactly that. Maybe with fewer daggers in your tone. But honesty is the only way this doesn’t eat you alive.”
“And if he shuts down?” I asked.
“Then you’ve learned something important about who he is now,” Allie said. “Not who he was then. Right now, all you’ve got is a half-finished picture—teenage hurt on one side, grown-up actions on the other, and nothing in between.”
I took a bite of nacho, mostly so I didn’t have to answer right away. The heat of the jalapeno hit the back of my throat; the crunch gave me something to focus on that wasn’t my own spiraling thoughts. The food grounded me enough that when I swallowed, the next breath didn’t hurt quite as much.
“Do you think I’m being ridiculous?” I asked, voice small.
“Not even a little,” Meghan said. “You’re doing what people do when old wounds meet new possibilities. You’re panicking.”
Pepper’s mouth curved. “If you weren’t freaking out at least a little, that would be suspicious.”
Allie smiled gently. “We just don’t want you to let fear decide for you. That’s all.”
I set the chip down and wiped my fingers on a napkin, suddenly feeling very, very tired.
“Okay.” Why did the word seem like stepping up to the edge of a diving board? “I’ll talk to him. I don’t know when, and I definitely don’t know how, but… I’ll do it.”
Pepper held up her glass of sparkling water. “That’s all we’re asking. Clarity as a Christmas present.”
Meghan clinked her own glass against it. “To asking the hard questions.”
Allie raised hers last. “And to the possibility that the jackass might actually be a donkey with a good heart.”
I rolled my eyes, but the corner of my mouth tugged up a fraction. “You’re all terrible.”
“You love us,” Allie said.
I looked at the three of them—Pepper with her sharp edges and big heart, Meghan with her steady calm, Allie with her quiet insight—and the thickness in my chest eased half a notch.
“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”