Chapter 20 The End
The End
Three months later
“Green Light back on; Blair Kellermoon’s once and future project secures new funding”
Green Light, Blair Kellermoon’s adaptation of the novel of the same name by the late Angela Laredo, is back from the dead as sources close to Kellermoon report the producer has secured financial backing from Silicon Valley mogul Bjorn Ekberg.
The retelling of The Great Gatsby is set to begin production next summer.
When Jack read that Blair had brought Green Light back from the dead, he performed a literal fist pump in his living room. Had Jack taken to browsing The Hollywood Reporter and Variety? So what if he had? It wasn’t like he had a Google alert set up for her name.
OK, he had a Google alert set up for her name.
Not that he could do anything with the information it gave him.
He had gone over and over it in his head, but he still didn’t really understand what had happened between them that night in LA.
Well, he understood the plot: she’d been freaking out, he had tried to help but had instead called her out in a way she didn’t appreciate.
They’d essentially had sex, which was a scum move on his part. He’d just been so overcome.
He picked up his phone and opened their text chain and read the last several he’d sent her.
Jack: I’ve booked a flight home for tomorrow. I’m going to fuck off and write my book, like you said.
Jack: Which I would not be in a position to do without you, so thank you.
She hadn’t written back. So he’d tried again, a few days later.
Jack: I meant what I said: I’m here if you need me.
Jack: Also, I’m sorry.
He was aware that “I’m sorry” was not great, as apologies went.
It was too vague. The problem was, he stood by everything he’d said that night.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, he could see that he hadn’t helped.
He’d been trying to. It had hurt him to see her like that, struggling and suffering, her life largely made up of coping mechanisms and watching TV with him. He was no prize. That was no life.
But people weren’t always ready to hear the truth.
He knew that. That was why he didn’t review books.
That was why he hadn’t been a very good teacher.
He’d just gotten himself all muddled up because normally, in a situation where someone was being obstinate and unreasonable, he would simply remove himself, and happily so. So why had he pushed Blair so hard?
There was a lot to think about, but he’d been pushing thinking aside in favor of finishing his book. And he had.
He had finished his book.
He had come back to his cold, empty condo and sat down and finished it. As if it were easy. As if he were sitting by a pool with a black bird and a blond woman and the sun shining on him.
He still couldn’t really believe it. He was so tempted to send her a photo of the words The end on the last page.
But all those unanswered texts. He had told her he wouldn’t have gotten the book done without her. He’d already thanked her. He’d already apologized.
He’d already said all the things.
If she wanted to talk to him, she would. To keep texting her when she had communicated, via her silence, that she didn’t want to hear from him, was not the move.
His fingers twitched. No texting Blair.
It turned out Jack didn’t have to text Blair. She texted him. On the sixteenth of March.
Blair: Happy ides of March.
Jack was having drinks and dinner with Teddy Knight, whom he hadn’t seen since last summer, when her text came in, and he nearly choked to death.
Blair: Happy day after the ides of March, I should say. I didn’t want to bother you yesterday in case you were turning in your book at 11:59 p.m.
Jack was not the kind of person who texted at the table.
Except… apparently he was the kind of person who texted at the table when the textee was Blair Kellermoon.
He didn’t know what to say back. Were they just going to pretend that last night in LA hadn’t happened? Revert to their old banter?
That worked for him.
Jack: How do you know I turned it in? Maybe I didn’t make it.
Blair: You made it.
Damn. How did she always—still—have such confidence in him? It was strange, being the recipient of such unstinting belief.
Blair: Didn’t you?
Jack: I did.
He navigated to his photos app and texted the “The end” picture he’d wanted to send yesterday.
Blair: I knew it.
Jack: How? Why?
Blair: I just knew.
Blair: I’m sorry I went radio silent after you left. You didn’t deserve that. I just suddenly felt like I had a lot of work to do, and I wanted to put my head down and do it without any distractions.
He didn’t know how to respond. He was having all kinds of unconnected thoughts he wanted to communicate and questions he wanted to ask.
She didn’t need to apologize to him. What had she meant by “work”?
Her confidence in him—her “I just knew” attitude—had made all the difference for his book.
He’d taken that confidence home with him.
How was Esme doing? Hell, how were Edward and Morticia doing?
“Look who’s turned into an asshole who’s glued to his phone.”
“Sorry.” Jack was having dinner—a celebratory I turned my book in dinner—with Teddy Knight, his rock star friend.
It still boggled the mind—the friend part as much as the rock star part.
They’d met last summer at Camp Wild Arts, where they’d both been artists in residence.
They’d both been professionally stuck, though Teddy had pulled himself out of his own personal rut earlier and seemingly with more ease than had Jack.
“Somone was just texting me to congratulate me on getting the book in. I just need to send one more text, then I’ll stop being an asshole.”
Jack: I’m at dinner with a friend now, more to come…
“Someone was congratulating you?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does if it was Blair Kellermoon.” Teddy smirked.
“What?”
“I hope you at least put her in the acknowledgments.”
He had put her in the acknowledgments—he had done more than that.
Jack looked around for their server. He shouldn’t have told Teddy about his LA interlude. “Let’s order.”
“I thought you wanted to have a round of drinks first.” Indeed, Jack had said exactly that when their server was last here, wanting to prolong his celebratory evening.
“Changed my mind.” Time to get this show on the road.
Later, at home, Jack sent the opening salvo.
Jack: I read that you’re back on with Green Light. Congrats.
She didn’t reply for an hour. He had reconciled himself to the fact that she wasn’t going to.
Perhaps she’d said her piece, issued her apology, and now they were done.
He couldn’t help but think back to his mom’s refrain about people being in your life for a reason or a season.
But then, just as he was getting into bed:
Blair: Thanks. Remember Bjorn the tech bro? He ended up ponying up, we got a great director on board, and the script is significantly improved. And I probably shouldn’t be saying this until it’s a done deal, but casting is going amazingly well. We might get Robert Pattinson, if you can believe it!
Jack: Isn’t he too old? Though I guess he played a teenager in the vampire movies you named your dog after.
Blair: OK, first, I named my dog after the books, not the movie.
He had missed this, bantering with Blair. As he settled back against his headboard, warmth spread through his chest.
Blair: Second, he wasn’t actually a teenager. He was 104 years old. He was just in the body of a seventeen-year-old.
Jack: Because he became a vampire at that age.
Blair: Now you’re getting it.
Blair: Third, he would be playing Becky’s dad. But it’s not a done deal yet. Don’t tell anyone.
Jack: I think there is probably no one in the world with whom your secret is safer.
He meant that as a self-deprecating observation. What was he going to do? Call his contacts at the gossip blogs? Hell, he only knew who Robert Pattinson was because he’d googled “Edward Cullen” after his first meeting with Blair’s dog.
Blair didn’t grasp the self-deprecation in his statement, though; she took it seriously.
Blair: I know. I can tell you anything.
He inhaled sharply. There was something about being that person that sent a dagger through him.
He didn’t know what else to say. He watched the screen, willing the bubbles to appear, the ones that would indicate she was typing.
She often sent several texts in a row, which was something he did not understand.
Why not just group your thoughts into one text?
But right now, he would happily receive a deluge of single-sentence texts.
There were no more texts.
There were no bubbles.
He missed her. Fuck, he missed her.
He didn’t know how to say that, though.
The next night, he tried to, in a roundabout way.
Jack: By the way, I tried to fix your lemon tree.
This time, the answer came right away.
Blair: What?
Jack: I wondered if it would bounce back after the sting operation, once Mrs. Afonso stopped actively harming it. I thought I might help it along. I read up on how to fix woody fruit and did some tinkering.
Blair: What do you mean tinkering? Like pesticides?
Jack: I pruned it in the way the internet told me to—and the trees around it, too, so it could get more light.
Then I applied a phosphorus and potassium fertilizer.
I do realize that perhaps fertilizer wasn’t the answer since surely some of the fertilizer popsicles would have landed under the tree, but I figured it was worth a try.
I don’t know anything about fruit trees, but maybe enough time has passed that you have new fruit?
Blair: I’m kind of speechless.
Jack: I didn’t say anything because I wanted to see if it would work. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I should have told you before I left, though. I don’t know why I didn’t.
Blair: Maybe because we had a fight, then made out, and then I ghosted you?
Jack: Right. But I was the one who…
Why was he trailing off like that? Well, he knew why: because he didn’t know the right words to use. He didn’t like that—the not knowing the right words, but also the imprecision of thought suggested by the use of sentence fragments.
Jack: I was the one who left.
Blair: Because I told you to.
Blair: For the record, I meant more like… fuck off back to the pool house, not all the way to Minnesota. But still, you did what I told you I wanted you to do.
Jack: I guess I just thought it was time to go.
Blair: You were right. Also for the record: I missed you. It was hard not to call you, or text you. But I thought I needed to get my act together on my own, you know?
Jack: Well, regardless, I should have told you about the tree.
Blair: Nah, “I hate you but I fixed your lemon tree” would have sounded too weird.
He barked a laugh. He had forgotten how funny she was.
No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t forgotten at all. It was more that he’d forgotten what it felt like to laugh into an empty room over something Blair Kellermoon texted.
Jack: I don’t hate you. I never hated you.
Blair: I never hated you, either.
The next day, she texted him a picture of a lemon pie. Or at least he assumed it was a lemon pie. It had one of those lattice tops, a perfect golden brown, with a yellow filling peeking through.
Jack: I was expecting meringue.
Blair: Nope, just lemon filling with a pastry crust—all butter with a little cornmeal. Perhaps nontraditional as it relates to lemon pies, except in my family it’s traditional.
Jack: Mimi’s lemon pie.
Blair: Yep. She used eggs from her own chickens.
Blair: Who, by the way, she let me name when I was eleven, so they were called Meg, Jo, and Beth.
He laughed out loud. Again.
Jack: What about Amy?
Blair: There were only three of them, and I didn’t appreciate Amy when I was eleven the same way I do now. Amy had ambition. No one likes an overtly ambitious woman. Except maybe other ambitious women.
Jack had been thinking, since he and Blair had gotten back in touch, about resaying some of the stuff he’d said just after he left, namely: thanks and sorry. He owed her that. He just didn’t know how to say it.
He needed to get over himself. The way to say it was to say it.
Jack: Hey, I wanted to say thanks for putting me up this past winter.
Blair: You’re welcome.
Jack: And for believing in my book. (I cannot believe I just typed that.)
Blair: I can’t wait to read it.
OK, one item done, on to the next. The way to say it was to say it.
Jack: Also, I’m sorry I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong there at the end.
Blair: You were not entirely wrong.
Jack: I rarely am.
He was trying to keep things light, to keep the conversation going.
Blair: Ha.
Blair: Seriously, though, you were right.
Jack: I could have phrased it better.
Blair: I don’t know. Once you pointed out all my… stuff, it was like I couldn’t unsee the pattern.
Jack: You could suddenly see the Matrix?
Blair: Did you just make a pop culture reference?
Jack: My mother made me watch that one with her.
Blair: Well, yeah, I think that sums it up perfectly. I could suddenly see the Matrix.
Blair: I had to ask myself if I was just going to spend the rest of my life as a human battery submerged in goo.
He laughed out loud again. How did she keep doing that to him?
Blair: I got myself a very LA assortment of therapeutic professionals. And diagnoses.
Blair: Do you want to hear them?
Jack: Yes.
He wanted to very badly. He wasn’t sure why.
Blair: Generalized anxiety disorder and OCD.
Blair: I’m working on things. I’m on meds. I’m not going to say everything’s fine, but I’m on an upward trajectory. I was so late texting you back the other day because I was out to dinner with friends. Which is something I can do now.
He was so happy for her. He was so proud of her. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything.
Blair: Anyway, that’s all I really want to say about that.
He laughed. What did the Rolling Stones say? You can’t always get what you want?
Blair: Except I will add: thanks for knocking some sense into me.
Jack: Thanks for believing in me.
Blair: We made a good, if unlikely, team for a while there.
The past tense of that statement made Jack feel wistful. It made him regret, not just in passing, but truly deep in his bones, that he’d passed on Books with Blair.