5. Jack
Chapter 5
Jack
I pulled up to the wisteria-covered cottage – though it was far too big to really be considered a cottage – and paused the podcast I’d been listening to, having completely lost the last five minutes or so because I was thinking about the weekend ahead. I saw that I had a message waiting; it was from Chloe to the group chat we had with Phil, Grey, Fatima, and Jared. Our old gaming group chat. I was sure we’d all acknowledged at some point that we should add Morgan, but we mostly used it to chat shit, so no one had pulled the trigger.
Change of plans - bedroom reshuffle because I convinced Morgan to come along this weekend! That means Phil and Jack have to share a twin room. Soz.
I stared down at my phone in my hand. Well, I thought, thinking back to the horoscope Amy had sent me, that’s certainly a shake-up.
I thought back to Monday night, when Chloe had been pestering Morgan like usual to come along to the pub, and she’d looked so trapped and freaked out. I’d tried to give her an out, but I couldn’t come to work with Chloe every day to keep her in check. I was sure Morgan had plenty of better things to do with her weekend, but it seemed my best efforts to keep my golden retriever best friend at bay had failed. I opened the back to get the groceries, and like the cliché I was, I overloaded my arms just to avoid taking a second trip, eight different reusable bags digging into my forearms as I closed the boot with my foot. This posed a problem when I got to the front door and needed to fetch the lockbox code off my phone, and three of the bags ended up on the floor of the stone porch so I could get to it.
I unloaded the groceries in the big, beautiful kitchen and got to work on dinner, which we’d eat as soon as everyone else arrived. I slipped into a bit of a Zen state whilst doing the chopping for a big pot of early summer vegetable soup; Phil was usually the cook, but he was coming with the others, so I’d offered to take one for the team. I decided to explore the house instead of just sitting around stewing along with dinner. I spent a while admiring the way the modern extension, where four of the bedrooms were, blended seamlessly into the no-doubt-listed building. I found the room Chloe had assigned me, wandered through the vast walled garden, and stood on the bank of the river that I knew just forty minutes away flowed through town.
I’d been perplexed when Chloe and Fatima had first suggested the weekend away – sure, they’d had a voucher, but was it worth using it to go less than an hour down the road? But I still got that holiday feeling as I closed my eyes to the breeze and took a deep breath. It was definitely an upgrade from Fatima’s, where we usually hung out. Not that her house wasn’t nice – she and her boyfriend Jared had bought it with the express purpose of having lots of people round – but it was our usual haunt, and it was nice to switch things up.
An alarm sounded on my phone after a while to let me know the soup should be ready, just as I heard the sound of tyres on the gravel drive. The two cars pulled up in a mini caravan, and I put on my best royal wave as I walked around the house to meet them.
I greeted the others casually as they got out of the cars, but my breath caught in my throat when I saw Morgan. She always wore dungarees and jumpers and graphic tees on Monday nights, with her ultra-curly hair piled on top of her head. It was actually quite cute, the slightly dishevelled look she rocked most of the time.
But she didn’t look cute now. She was wearing a green floral summer dress, the sleeves fluttering down over the tops of her arms and the V at the front dipping low enough to create the tiniest bit of cleavage. Her brown hair hung in shiny, perfect ringlets, creating a halo of curls around her.
Why the fuck was I so taken aback? It wasn’t like I’d never seen a beautiful woman before.
Her eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, so I wasn’t sure if she’d clocked me, but then she smiled, and my brain short-circuited, taking me a moment to smile back. She moved around the car towards me, her leg poking through a high slit in her dress, and I might have actually gulped like a cartoon character.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she said, casually enough, but the best I could do in response was jab my thumb back over my shoulder towards the house.
“I made soup.”
She nodded and smiled tightly, as if she were holding back a laugh. “Is that so?”
“Veggie,” I said, nodding and looking out at the surroundings. Anywhere but at her.
Now she didn’t even bother hiding her laugh.
“Okay, well, I look forward to trying it.” She put a hand on my arm as she moved past me, patting it a couple of times, and I felt my face go instantly red.
“Smooth,” Phil said from the boot, and I picked the finger I thought would best express my thanks for his contribution and held it up to him, then tried my best to bury my embarrassment. I had a highly anticipated soup to serve.
* * *
“Fuck me,” Morgan whispered under her breath, and I had to release my breath super slowly to keep my cool. The floral sundress had since been discarded, but her hair still fell over her now-bare shoulders, and the impulse to reach out and tuck it back behind her ears was strong.
With our bodies just inches away from one another on the floor, I reached out towards her, my hand trembling slightly, and plucked away the middle of the three cards in her hand. She let out a small sigh of relief once I’d chosen, and when I didn’t immediately lay down a pair, she cheered.
“You’re going down, Evans,” she said, taunting me. And sure enough, on her turn, she lay down a pair of twos, proceeding to stand up and do a victory dance in the middle of the circle – one that involved an awful lot of “stanky leg”, as Chloe proclaimed. In fact, it was probably a good thing she’d ditched the dress for her pyjamas given the moves she was busting. She still looked great, too, though closer to her usual cute than the bowl-me-over moment from earlier, which was a relief. One could only endure so much humiliation.
It had only been a few hours since we had eaten what had turned out to be a very mediocre soup, but since then Morgan had really seemed to come out of her shell. She’d never exactly been shy – she’d always gone along with the jokes and bits on Monday nights – but this was different. No one was watching the clock. She wasn’t hiding behind a character. She was just … here. Sure, she’d had a few drinks, but she seemed mostly herself, just more . And as she transitioned from stanky leg to Soulja Boy, I couldn’t help but smile at how at ease she seemed.
The game continued post-dance break, until I found myself the last person with a card: the Old Goat. We were playing Old Maid, but Fatima had insisted we subvert the gender – apparently Goat was the opposite of Maid; who knew? – and now I was staring down at the lecherous lone King in my hand. And it was a good thing I wasn’t at all competitive, because I was getting aggressively (and poorly) trash talked by the group.
“Honestly mate, my nan has a better poker face than you do,” Phil said.
“Your nan literally taught us to play poker,” Chloe retorted, and I laughed. I still remembered that night, shortly after we’d met Phil, playing Hold ’Em in Ethel’s dining room, wagering loose smarties and lemon sherbets.
After that we all dispersed, and I went back into the kitchen to get the ice cream out of the freezer to go with the crumble Phil had made. I started when I turned around and saw that Morgan had followed me in.
“Sorry,” she said, noticing the way I jumped slightly at seeing her.
“It’s okay. Help me dish up?” I held the ice cream tub out to her. She nodded and reached for it. We dished up portions into coffee mugs – me scooping the apple crumble, then her adding ice cream to the top – which she carried into the lounge for the others. But when she came back in for hers, she sat down on a barstool instead of going back in, leaning back against the island as if a wave of exhaustion had suddenly hit her. I sat on the stool next to her and swivelled in her direction.
“Having fun?” I asked, thankful to have my dessert to focus on, but I couldn’t help but glance over at her as she perched on her seat, her legs crossed, her foot less than a centimetre from my calf. I didn’t dare move, even as she pulsed her foot up and down. Naturally, she took a bite at exactly the same moment I asked her the question. “Sorry if Chloe was a bit intense,” I carried on, trying to give her time to get it down. “She’s like a dog with a bone.”
“She’s great,” she said, her mouth still full of crumble despite my best efforts. “And I’m glad I came, actually. I’m really enjoying myself.”
“Well, we’re glad you’re here.”
“So, what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”
I shrugged. “Grey’s in charge of tomorrow. Knowing them, it could be anything from a video game tournament to a ten-hour hike.”
Morgan tilted her head to the side and pouted in consideration. “A hike could be fun.”
My interest was piqued. “Yeah? You like hiking?”
She scoffed at me. “You don’t have to sound so scandalised. Do I not look like I like hiking?”
I rolled my eyes and smiled slightly. “I was asking a question, not challenging you. Promise.”
“Well, in that case…” she trailed off, pressing her mouth into a thin line. “I’ve never actually been hiking before. Or walking, or whatever. Other than just, like, around town, obviously.”
“Really? Even when you were a kid?”
Morgan shook her head. “Never. I know it’s weird, but my mum was never super outdoorsy when I was growing up, and by the time she started being a bit more adventurous, I was already at uni.” She shrugged. “I take it you’ve been then?”
“All the time,” I said. “I love it.”
“Why?” She didn’t sound critical, or disbelieving, just curious.
I debated how honest to be, but there was something about the tired-yet-interested look on her face that made me want to match her, so I angled for earnest. “Honestly, for a long time, it was the only time I got to feel like I was having the kinds of experiences I wanted for myself.”
She paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth and put it back into the mug, a puzzled look on her face. “That felt loaded in a few places. Care to unburden?”
“My ex.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
“We used to travel together full-time. We took what was supposed to be a gap year after our second year of uni, and she started posting online about our trips. She got a bit of a following, and within a couple of years she was a full-time content creator.” I couldn’t help but sneer when I talked about Aria’s work; it had been the bane of my existence for years. “She always wanted to get the perfect picture in these hard-to-reach places, but she never wanted to do the work to get there. Like when we went to Macchu Picchu, I did the hike, and she stayed in Cusco a couple extra nights before taking the train. In Japan, I hiked to the top of Mount Fuji whilst she took the bus. Hell, she even took the train to the top of Snowdon. And that was just a day trip.”
She cocked her head to one side and squinted. “I mean, did she just not like hiking? Because I’m a girl’s girl, Jack, and we don’t shame other girls for not being ‘one of the guys’.”
“No, not at all, it’s not like that,” I said, my face burning red as I looked away. I was not explaining this well. “She’d pretend online like she’d done the big hikes, but it was all a lie. It felt like she just didn’t want to do it with me . But really we had a lot of problems, and her lack of interest in hiking with me was small potatoes compared to the rest.”
I looked up at Morgan to find her eyes glued on my face, her mouth turned down and forehead creased in a look I knew all too well from talking about my ex: sympathy.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “It was a while ago now.”
“How long?”
“Four years.”
She shrugged. “That’s not that long. Not if it was a bad breakup.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. “It was over a long time before we actually ended it.”
“What’s her name?” Morgan asked suddenly.
“What? Why?”
Morgan shrugged. “You said she’s a content creator. I consume a lot of content. Maybe I know who she is.”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Oh come on,” Morgan said, clasping her hands together in front of her as if she were praying to me, jutting her lower lip out in a pout. “Pleeeease?”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine, but I’m telling you, you’ve not heard of her. Her name’s Aria. Aria Mar?—”
“You dated Aria Markham?!” Morgan asked, gasping. Ah, fuck.
“Yes I did.” Play it cool, play it cool.
Morgan punched me playfully on the arm. “You said I wouldn’t know who she is, but she has like five million followers. Including me.”
“Does she?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but that was impressive. It hadn’t even been half a million when we’d split up.
“Uh, yeah,” Morgan said. “She’s basically a celebrity. I’m pretty sure she was at the Grammys last year with her boyf—” Morgan must have seen how glazed over I’d gone, because she had the sense to stop. She actually clamped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she said through it. “You probably don’t want to know about that.”
“It’s fine,” I lied. I really didn’t want to hear about her, but I didn’t want Morgan to know that. “Like I said, it was a long time ago.”
“That sucks,” she said. “She really does act like she’s the queen of the outdoors. She even used to post those hiking guides.”
That made me laugh, which startled Morgan. “Yeah, well, she’s not. I wrote most of those.”
“Sorry she was a dick to you.” Her face went soft, and she offered a sympathetic smile.
“I was a dick sometimes, too,” I said, but for some reason, having Morgan take my side meant something. Not that it should have.
“More drinks!” Chloe called from the dining room, rescuing me from my little stumble down memory lane.
“Coming!” Morgan called, but as she stood up to leave, she looked over at me and gave me that sympathetic look again. But I made myself meet and hold her gaze this time, and I could tell that there was no pity there.
“I know we don’t know each other that well,” Morgan said, “but you seem like a good guy, Jack. I’m sorry things haven’t always been great for you.”
I just muttered a quiet “thanks”. But then she smiled and leaned in, stepping slightly between my legs to wrap her arms around my shoulders, and I went stock still. Her chest was pressed against mine in a way that made my breath hitch. And as she nocked her chin over my shoulder, her cascade of curls was directly in my face, smelling of citrus and bergamot. I wasn’t sure I’d ever touched her before, and certainly not like this. It was paralysingly novel.
I knew what a normal person would do: accept the hug, wrap their arms around her, and then move on. But I just froze. She was clearly tipsy, and I doubted she would have gone from zero to hugging on a normal day. But even if she would, why did that freak me out so much?
I wasn’t super touchy-feely, but I was fine with hugs, and I didn’t shy away from affection when it felt right. Hell, I’d only known Fatima for a week before we’d walked down her street arm-in-arm belting “Rest in Peace” from the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . So why were Morgan’s arms around me, and her words about me being a good guy, making me clam all the way up?
By the time I mustered the wherewithal to respond appropriately, she was already stepping back, and all I could do was watch her walk away as I kicked myself internally.