Chapter 17 #4
Jake scrubs the back of his neck fast enough to start a forest fire. “Ahhh, it’s nothing like that, I swear. I was just wondering, would you maybe wanna go to the ba—”
He flicks up an exaggerated hand. “Okay, I’m gonna throw up, like, extremely soon, so I’ll leave you to do… whatever this is… by yourself.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” Jake says grimly. “So that was it. You ran off, didn’t look back, and I realised not only did you not have a secret crush on me, you thought I was some rugby dickhead wasting your time, and there was no way you’d ever let me take you to the ball.”
My stomach plummets. The school ball. The social highlight of Pukekohe High. The thing I never even vaguely entertained attending, what with being social arsenic. Cece went. She took her nice guy equivalent, Finn, who gave a barf performance worthy of me on the dancefloor.
Rhys offered to go with me, but I was sure we’d be the targets of a Carrie-esque nightmare, so I opted to stay home and cry.
I also wrote the sonata that got me into Juilliard.
I never perform ‘Lost Worlds’ anymore. Not because it’s embarrassing.
Unlike my shitty blog, it’s so thick with sincerity and teenage despair that it sucks the life out of me every time.
“Asking me to the ball was so… big,” I tell Jake. “Why didn’t you just get my number or something?”
His lips curve in a humourless smile. “Because you were right. I am a rugby dickhead.”
“You think asking me to the ball makes you a dickhead?”
“I think putting that much pressure on you made me a dickhead. Expecting you to feel the same way as I did. I should have just found you at lunchtime, tried to get a conversation going, but I dunno… I thought asking you to the ball was…”
“What?”
His massive shoulders creep toward his ears like they’re trying to protect his head. “Romantic.”
“Oh.” I swallow. “I don’t remember talking to you at the party, but I would have thought you were making fun of me.”
Jake lowers his head, and the finality of why we’re here returns to the table, hanging in the air like smog.
“It’s my biggest regret,” he says. “Not following up. Trying harder.”
I think of myself on that hay bale, drunk and desperately alone. “Why didn’t you? I was a weirdo, but I wanted someone to want me. I might have actually believed you were into me if you talked to me during daylight hours. Why didn’t you? Why not?”
He lifts his gaze, and I see the answer in his eyes. The one I already knew way back when he first approached me at Stabbies.
“You were too scared,” I say, dully. “I was still the school freak, and it was too much pressure to ask me out, sober, without knowing I liked you back.”
Jake stares at me for what feels like an eternity, then inclines his head the tiniest possible amount.
I watch a whole future blink out of existence.
A life where Jake and I were high school sweethearts, our twenties spent partying and travelling together, me sitting in the family box at All Blacks games, him front and centre at my concerts.
Laughing and exploring the world before we bought a house by the water and started a family.
Because there was a world in which Ada Renaldo went to the Pukekohe High School Ball with Jake Graves-Holland. Where the bells of first love rang out so loud, they lasted forever. But instead, there’s just the mess he made out of something that could have been so good for both of us.
But those years are gone, and they’re not coming back.
I’ve spent the last decade stumbling around drunk while Jake went pro and slept with about a billion strangers, including Jenny Wallis.
We had a moment in our thirties, but that’s all it’ll ever be.
A cute little signpost pointing to what never was.
“Jake,” I say, in a voice that sounds like it belongs to someone else. “Who’d you end up going to the ball with?”
His face crumples, the colour fading almost as much as when I told my milkshake story. “Stephanie Brooks.”
I laugh. I remember Stephanie Brooks. A tall, impossibly beautiful brunette.
Exactly the kind of girl you imagine someone like Jake attending a ball with.
I picture myself sitting alone in my parents’ kitchen, binge-eating peanut butter and writing ‘Lost Worlds’ as all my classmates danced and drank and got their photo taken.
So close and so far. The popular boy, too scared to test the limits of his power. The ugly duckling, convinced she’ll never be a pigeon, let alone a swan.
A burst of rage flicks through me and I welcome it.
“I would have asked you to the ball, you know,” I spit. “If I’d been popular and you’d been a dork with no mates, I would have asked you to the ball.”
Jake’s eyes start to shine, tears forming in the corners. “Yeah, but you’re braver than everyone else, Ada.”
I blink, determined not to cry just because he is. “Sure.”
“You are. You put your whole heart on the line. Every time. No one else is like that. No one I know, anyway.”
I think of the imaginary conversation I had with the activewear mother playing proxy for the woman who raised me. I do care. I care about everyone.
“Thanks,” I say in a cracked voice. “I’m not being a dick. That means a lot.”
A single tear falls onto his right cheek. “I just wish…”
I wish too. But wishes aren’t real, and the waitress is hovering again, probably annoyed we’re hogging a booth that could seat six.
“I need to go,” I say. “Get back to Cece.”
“Sure.” He hesitates. “Before you go…”
“What?”
His grey eyes blaze through the tears. “I’m in love with you, Ada.”
“Fuck off.”
“I mean it. I love you. I’ve always loved you. It’ll be that way as long as I live.”
I’m crying now, too, but I’m also furious. How dare he say this to me now?
“You can’t be fucking serious?”
He laughs, wiping a scarred fist across his eyes. “Like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.”
“Horseshit,” he says, like he’s arguing with an assistant referee instead of declaring his eternal love for me in a stupid, too-bright cafe.
“Stop it. This is so below the belt, Jake.”
“Tough.” His grey eyes, still wet with tears, bore into mine. “I’ve been in love with you half my fuckin’ life, and now you’re here, and it’s so close, please… Can’t you just let it happen?”
I think of Jenny’s face as she handed me my milkshake.
Of Thrasher shoving me to the ground. Of Colin Wintergreen pushing gum into my hair.
Of the million other offences, big and small, and how the whole time, Jake was there, wanting me, but letting me walk through hell alone because he was too scared to say ‘I like you’ to the loner flute player from Melbourne.
“I’ve made up my mind,” I tell him. “I won’t ever be able to get past what’s happened to me at school.
I’ve been alone my whole life, and that’s not your fault, but I could really have used someone like you in my corner back then.
You had the power to do something, and you didn’t.
Not when it mattered. And I’ll always resent you for being too scared to help me. ”
“I know,” he says, so quiet I can barely hear them. “I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is. But as much as you might see me as some advanced human being, I’m too bitter to let it go.”
A tear falls onto Jake’s cheek. “Right.”
I’m still crying as well, tears trailing onto my cheeks and down my chest. I push the jersey toward him. “At least you get this back.”
He nudges it toward me. “Keep it. You’ve gotta know I didn’t actually want it.”
A tear splashes onto my chin. This is so stupid.
Jake and I barely know each other, and here we are crying like one of us is dying.
It’s pathetic. But even as I think it, I know it’s not true.
It’s okay for us to want each other, love each other, feel it the rest of our lives.
It’s just not going to close the distance between us.
“I’ll miss you,” I say. “I really will.”
Jake looks across the cafe, his mouth trembling. “Your eyes go a bit wider when you lie. I figured I’d tell you on our twentieth wedding anniversary or something. When you finally worked out you don’t need to lie to me.”
I bury my face in my palms.
“Baby…” Jake whispers. “I just—”
“I know. But I can’t. So please just let me go.”
“I will. You know I will.”
My brain jolts a warning. A technical detail I’d planned to lay out when I came to this cafe.
“One last thing,” I say through my fingers. “I know it’s tacky to bring this up now, but please delete the stuff I sent you. Especially that video.”
I look up in time to see his handsome face contort. “Please… If I can’t be with you, it’s the last thing I have. It’s the only thing I’ll ever watch.”
I snort, swiping my eyes with my sleeve. “You’re gonna keep wanking to my cam-girl vid when you’re married to someone else?”
He shakes his head. “I never got married because I never met anyone who made me feel the way you do. That was the rule. As soon as I like someone as much as I liked Ada Renaldo when I was sixteen, I’ll marry them.”
I stare at him, lost for words.
“That card I gave you? The woman by the river playing the flute? I bought it ten years ago. I saw it in some arty shop I was in with my girlfriend and realised it’s the closest thing to a picture of how you looked that afternoon in the music wing.
I bought it. I had to.” He huffs out a laugh.
“I broke up with my girlfriend the next day, but I kept the card. Had it in my bedside drawer right until I gave it to you.”
“Jake…”
“I’m thirty-three,” he says. “If it’s not you, it’s not anyone.”
My chest is cratering in on itself, collapsing into nothingness. But I have to stay strong. I owe it to teenage Ada. The girl who knew, somewhere deep down, that she deserved better.
“Then it might not be anyone,” I say, my voice quavering like a broken note. “But you can’t keep a naked recording of me. You could get hacked, and I’ll lose any chance of joining an orchestra once this godforsaken reunion is over.”
His head jerks back. “You’re still coming to the reunion?”
“Too late to back out now.”
“What… What’ll happen when I see you?”
“Nothing. We’ll drink shitty wine, and we won’t talk, but it’ll be okay. And when it’s over, Cece will be with Will Sharpe—”
“But he’s a fuckwit.”
“—And he’s Cece’s choice. She’ll fall into Will’s arms and move home and have her happy ending, and then I’ll leave. Go back to New York or London or Vienna and make music. Try to feel like myself again.”
“And then?”
I can read so many things in the mosaic of his face. Pain. Pride. Regret. I always liked that about him. How easy he was to read.
“And then you’ll stay with the All Blacks and be amazing at what you do and make Pukekohe proud. You’ll be happy, and I will be too. And eventually, I’ll fall in love with someone else, and so will you.”
He shakes his head, and I realise I’ve just implied I’m in love with him. I don’t take it back. It’s too late for that.
“You’ll have your own family,” I continue. “And so will I. And maybe someday I’ll be able to look back on this whole thing with a tiny crumb of happiness.”
He bows his head, and I know we’re done. I fumble for my tote bag, wanting to leave cash on the table for my drinks, but I know Jake will insist on paying, and I can’t have that conversation.
I get to my feet, the gravity of him so heavy I feel like I’m being sucked into outer space. I let my hair fall into my eyes, turning my gaze toward it so I don’t have to look at him. “Keep the video of me. I trust you.”
I exit the booth, and I’m about to get away clean, when...
“Ada?”
My feet halt, as though by magnetic force. “Yeah?”
Jake lifts his gaze, and if I live for another eighty years, I don’t think I’ll ever see anyone so desperately afraid of what he’s about to say. “If I’d really asked you out during the day at school, would you have said yes?”
I know better than to lie to Jake Graves-Holland. I pick up his jersey and pull it to my chest. “Of course I would have, you fucking coward.”
I turn and walk away, his jersey pressed tight to my aching heart.