Chapter 52 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I know you care / I know it has always been there / But there’s trouble ahead, I can feel it”
— “I Know You Care” by Ellie Goulding
Five minutes of freedom turns into Kir grabbing his car keys and telling me to put on real shoes.
“Where are we going?” I ask, confused.
“Does it matter?”
I pause, consider the question, and decide that it doesn’t. Besides, what girl in her right mind doesn’t like being swept off her feet and carried unknowingly into a fun day out with the man of her dreams? Kir’s giddiness is infectious, and I find myself smiling for no reason at all.
I swap his sweatpants for my jeans from last night, keep his T-shirt because it smells like him and I’m not giving it back ever ever never you’ll have to kill me first, then shove my feet into my boots.
Cut to ten minutes later, and we’re on the Belt Parkway heading south in his black sedan with the windows cracked and the December air whipping through the car.
Kir drives fast for the sheer hell of it. His left hand is on the wheel. His right is on my thigh.
I tip my head back against the headrest and close my eyes. The wind is pleasantly cold on my face and Kir’s hand is warm and heavy. The radio is burbling happily, the city is peeling away behind us, and I find myself realizing that I’m actually happy, goddammit.
There’s no asterisk or but to mar this happiness. It’s just plain, dumb, ordinary happiness, sans complications of any kind. It boggles me that other people get to be like this all the time without even thinking about it. I didn’t know I still had the capacity.
What if I’m not as broken as I think I am?
“Coney Island,” I say when I spot the sign. My confusion deepens. “Are we aware that it’s the dead of winter?”
Kir’s lips quirk in a half-smile. “Keenly.”
“I’m going to freeze my tits off.”
“And what a loss that would be,” he says. “I’m a big fan of them.”
I scowl over at him. He’s watching the road, but there’s a looseness in his jaw and shoulders that I’ve never seen before. The permanent tension is gone. He looks like a guy driving his girlfriend to the beach on a whim. Nothing more, nothing less.
We park and get out. The boardwalk stretches out in front of us, gray and deserted, the wooden planks dark with salt spray.
Everything is shuttered. The rides are still, the game booths are boarded up, and the only sound is the wind off the Atlantic and the distant cry of a gull circling over nothing.
It’s bleak, cold, and utterly perfect.
Kir gets out first and comes around to open my door, which makes me snort. “Oh, so you’re a gentleman now?”
“Not even a little bit.”
We walk side by side down the boardwalk. There’s not a mask in sight, but I’ve never felt safer or more at ease. I have Kir with me. That’s enough.
He takes my hand. His fingers are cold and his knuckles are still scabbed and swollen from last night. I hold on tight enough that he glances down at me.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I mumble. “Sometimes, I just like to make sure you’re real.”
He leans over and kisses the top of my head, then pulls me in close to his side. I burrow into the warmth and sigh gratefully.
The wind is brutal. It comes off the ocean in sharp, salty gusts that turn my nose red and make my eyes water. The sky is the color of wet concrete and the ocean is dark, choppy, and angry beneath it.
“This is the ugliest beach I’ve ever seen,” I inform him.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Isn’t it great?”
We walk until the wind gets so bad I can’t feel my fingers anymore. My teeth are chattering and I’ve got Kir’s T-shirt pulled up over my nose like a highway bandit, which is doing absolutely nothing to keep me from looking like Rudolph the Reindeer.
“Okay,” I manage through the fabric. “I’m dying. I’m literally dying. You can use my frozen body as a statue.”
Kir looks around, scanning the shuttered rides and empty stalls, and then nods toward the Ferris wheel looming at the end of the boardwalk. It’s enormous and still, the gondolas swaying just barely in the wind, creaking on their hinges.
“Come on,” he says. Before I can ask what he means, he’s hopping the chain-link fence around the base. He lands on the other side and turns around, holding his hands out to me.
“You’re kidding,” I say.
“I don’t kid. Get over here.”
I look left, then right. Not a soul in sight. “If I get arrested and I have a drippy nose in my mugshot, I want you to know I will never forgive you.”
“Noted. Up you go.”
I climb. Gracelessly, but upward nonetheless.
My boot snags on the top and Kir has to catch me on the other side, which he does with zero effort and a smirk that I want to slap off his face.
Sometimes, I forget just how much stronger than me he is.
It would be annoying if it wasn’t so hot to be manhandled.
He sets me down, grabs the door of the nearest gondola, and pries it open. The hinges scream in protest.
“After you,” he says, bowing like a Victorian footservant.
I duck inside. It’s not warm, per se, but the second the door closes behind us, the wind drops to almost nothing.
The gondola rocks gently under our weight.
There’s a bench on each side, the paint peeling, the safety bar rusted in the up position.
I drop onto one bench and Kir drops onto the one across from me.
For a second, we just sit there, knees touching, catching our breath.
“Better?” he asks.
“Marginally.” I tuck my hands between my thighs. “My fingers might be permanently done for.”
“I can fix that.” Kir reaches over, takes both my hands, and sandwiches them between his. I let him hold them there, rubbing slowly, until feeling starts to prickle back into my fingertips.
Through the scratched plexiglass window, I can see the whole beach laid out below us.
The dark sand, the white churn of the surf, the deserted lifeguard stands.
A woman in a parka is walking near the waterline with a little girl in a red jacket.
The girl is holding a balloon. It’s brightly red against a world that’s otherwise devoid of all color.
Kir sees them, too. We both watch as the girl lifts her arm high, maybe showing her mom, maybe just testing gravity, and the balloon rips free.
It shoots upward, fast, tumbling and spinning, and the girl screams in delight as she jumps up and down pointing at it.
The balloon rises past the boardwalk, past the shuttered concession stands, past us.
Wind buffets its path until it zooms right outside our window.
I get one last glimpse of bright red against gray sky, and then the clouds devour it.
Kir watches it disappear. His thumbs have stopped moving on my hands.
“You know, I was never one of those people who assumed they’d have kids one day,” he murmurs out of nowhere.
I look at him in surprise. He’s still staring out the window, at the space where the balloon was. This conversation came out of left field, but the way he says it, it’s obvious that this is something that has kept him up on many sleepless nights.
“Didn’t trust myself with it,” he continues. “Given my role model, you know.” A pause. “It’s hard to picture yourself raising a kid when the only example you had threw your mom’s body in an unmarked grave.”
I don’t say anything. I just let him talk, because he so rarely does this: opens up without being crowbarred.
“Being with you has changed something, though.” He finally looks at me. His gray eyes are quiet and clear. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“Maybe,” I tease weakly. My throat feels dry.
“You’d be a good mother, Jillian.”
I thought I was cold before, but I was wrong.
Now, I feel cold, cold, cold. Colder than any December day could ever make me.
I turn my head toward the ocean. The woman and the girl are walking away now, getting smaller, their shapes blurring together against the wet sand.
I focus on them because I cannot bear to focus on Kir right now.
I can’t let him see what’s happening on my face, because what’s happening on my face would raise questions I am not equipped to answer.
Not today.
Probably not ever.
Not as long as there’s a folder of photos on my phone with a hospital bracelet wrapped around a pink, chubby little wrist.
“Hey.” His hand tightens on mine. “What did I say wrong?”
I shake my head. Then I keep shaking it while I blink hard, twice, three times, until my eyes are clear and my mouth can do what I need it to do.
Then I turn back to him, grab the front of his jacket with both fists, and kiss him. It’s floundering and desperate in a way that I hope he reads as passion and not as the thing it actually is, which is a dam holding back a flood that will destroy everything we both hold dear.
When I pull back, his forehead is against mine.
“Nothing,” I promise him. “You said everything right.”
He smiles. He believes me.
I smile back and pray he can’t feel me shaking.