Chapter Twenty-six
Jack walked into the house and fought the urge to turn around and go back the way he’d come.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t mingle and make nice.
He didn’t love it, but he had enough skill to do it passably.
And he was genuinely looking forward to seeing a couple of the other queer contractors he’d gotten to know over the course of the project.
The thing he dreaded was ignoring the elephant in the room: the state of things with Ellie.
They’d texted, but he hadn’t seen her in close to two weeks.
She’d claimed busyness, both with a new project Pablo had connected her to and needing to spend time with her mom.
Both were legit. And he’d been plenty busy himself with overseeing the electric for a new residential build and reading up on what it was like to have—or love someone who had—schizophrenia.
On top of that, she’d asked for space, so he wasn’t going to go inserting himself where he wasn’t wanted.
Of course, knowing all that did little to alleviate the fact that he missed the hell out of her.
“Hey.” Ellie sidled up to him, smile firmly in place and glass of wine in hand.
“Hey,” he said back, not wanting to sound sullen but truly unsure of what else to say.
“Looks great, huh?”
“Yep.” He nodded but felt like an ass. “Your murals are spectacular. I hadn’t gotten the chance to see them finished.”
“Thanks.” The smile reached her eyes this time. “I’ve never had the chance to queer a historical work before.”
“Yeah. It’s like new and fresh but also like it’s always been here.” He might not be an art aficionado, but he didn’t have to be to understand what Ellie had accomplished.
“That’s quite the compliment.” Ellie shot him a sideways glance.
“You sound surprised that I’d give you one.”
Her shrug said more than any words could have.
“Ellie, you’re an amazing artist.” He could have let it go at that. Maybe should have let it go. But he didn’t. “You’re an amazing woman, too. The fact that you’re emotionally closed off and stubborn as a mule doesn’t change that.”
Her mouth fell open. Literally. Like a cartoon character, or a smallmouth bass.
Jack figured she was debating whether to walk away or smack him, but Bea didn’t give her the chance. She swept in and slung an arm around each of them. “My two favorite magic-fingered queers.”
He barely resisted a cringe, and even Ellie’s smile faltered. “Everything looks fantastic,” he managed.
“You have some beautiful pieces.” Ellie gestured to a sideboard Logan would have drooled over. “That Chippendale is exquisite.”
Chippendale. Of course it was.
“Thanks.” Bea pulled her arms away and pointed to it. “I never liked it all that much, but my ex did so I insisted on getting it in the divorce.”
Jack stole a glance at Ellie, who chuckled politely but was clearly horrified. It made him wonder if he saw that because it was an opinion he shared or because he knew her so intimately. Not that it mattered, at the rate they were going.
Someone called Bea’s name. She turned to go but stopped and looked squarely at Jack. “We should grab a drink sometime, now that I’ll be around more.”
Jack nodded vaguely, and Bea flashed a flirtatious smile. She walked away without so much as a backward glance at Ellie.
“You can, you know. If you want to.” Ellie’s tone was casual, but sadness shadowed her eyes.
“Of course I don’t want to,” Jack said, more sharply than he’d intended.
“She does seem like she’d be a handful.”
He wanted to poke at how much of a handful she was being, but snark wouldn’t help anything. “She’s obviously not my type, but that’s not even the point. I want to be with you, Ellie. Exclusively.”
Ellie stared at her drink before looking into Jack’s eyes. “I want that, too.”
“But I need you to want it enough to trust me with all of you, not just the neat and tidy and happy parts.”
She opened her mouth but closed it without replying.
“I know it isn’t the time or place to have this conversation, and I’m not going to pressure you. Just know I’m here. And for the foreseeable future at least, I’m not going anywhere.”
Ellie nodded this time. Again, she didn’t say anything, but her eyes were glassy with tears.
“For the record, I mean that metaphorically and not literally. If I stay at this party much longer, I’m going to stab myself with a cheese knife.”
She laughed then. “I’m not sure how much damage that would do.”
“No, no. One of those ones for hard cheese that has two giant prongs on the end.”
“Oh. Well, then.” Ellie tipped her head one way, then the other. “That’s different.”
Did she have to be so fucking easy to talk to?
Did his heart have to thud in his chest like that every time they stood less than two feet apart?
Jack sighed. Yeah, she did. And yeah, it did.
Because he was head over heels in love with this woman even though it was entirely possible they wouldn’t make it through the next month, much less a lifetime.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked.
“Like, now?”
“I mean, it would probably look bad to leave less than an hour after arriving, but, I don’t know, I’d love to talk.”
The thudding in his chest took on a fight-or-flight edge, but no way in hell was he giving up a chance to maybe, finally, get somewhere. “Sure.”
She smiled with a look of relief that said she hadn’t been sure he’d say yes. “Sneak out the back with me?”
He gave a little salute. “I’m right behind you.”
They emerged into the parking area behind the house. Like the big circular drive at the front, it had been finished with pristine edges and pea gravel. No doubt it would be a bitch to maintain, but it looked good.
“Garden?” she asked.
The daffodils were up, and the forsythia had burst with a riot of yellow. He liked both—for their symbolism that spring was springing but also their low-maintenance, perennial vibes. “Sure.”
The moment they started on the small path that wound through the partially planted garden beds, Ellie folded her arms. Since the air still had a chill, Jack tried not to read into it. She continued walking, so Jack did, too.
Ellie took a deep breath. “My mother had her first nervous breakdown when I was seven. Well, not first. First I remembered. She had her first when she was a teenager, several throughout her early twenties, and one right after I was born because she’d had to go off all her meds when she was pregnant and that combined with the hormones was just too much. ”
He floundered for the right response to acknowledge the magnitude of what she was sharing—what she’d been through—without overreacting. Since he didn’t know what that was, even after doing his homework, he settled for Clover’s tried and true, “That sounds really hard.”
“It was.” Ellie nodded. “Is. But I got used to it, you know? My dad was around when I was little. And even after he left, he kept an eye on things and helped when she had an episode and needed to be hospitalized. I was fifteen when he passed away, so I was old enough to help around the house and, eventually, navigate her care.”
It killed him that she spoke about it so casually, but he knew she needed to. At least for now. “And you always lived with her? Until recently?”
“I lived on campus in college, shared an apartment with friends after I graduated. Home was still my home base, though. It was nice. I got to live my life but be close to her, too. I was really lucky that we had the financial resources to make that work.”
It still sounded like a huge burden—or at the very least a huge responsibility—to him. “I’m glad it felt balanced.”
“It really was. And my friends were cool. I didn’t get too into the weeds about it, but they knew her health was delicate, that she needed me. They never made me feel bad about having to go back and forth.”
Not giving her a hard time wasn’t the same as being supportive, but Jack did his best to reserve judgment for the time being.
“Anyway. I made it work. And it was easier to keep my worlds separate, you know? Everyone jokes about having crazy parents, but mine actually was. Trying to explain that, trying to educate people without being the heavy? It just felt like more trouble than it was worth.” She sighed. “I know that makes me a coward.”
“It absolutely does not.” He couldn’t even fathom trying to navigate it, especially now that he understood what a psychotic episode could look like.
“It feels that way sometimes.”
He took her hand, not sure it was the right thing to do but utterly certain he needed to be touching her. “You had to be an adult from a very young age. That requires immense bravery.”
She shrugged. “It didn’t feel brave. It just felt necessary.”
“Sounds lonely.”
Ellie nodded, finally ready to own that’s exactly what it was.
And once she started talking, she couldn’t seem to stop.
She talked about the time in church when her mom got dizzy and panicked, convinced she was dying.
She confessed the shame and embarrassment she felt in middle school and high school about not having a normal mom, and the resulting guilt because her mom loved her and was doing her best. She shared Donna’s most recent hospitalization and the new worries about early onset dementia that often happened with people with severe mental illness.
Jack listened with patience and compassion.
And with just enough nuance in his replies to make it clear he had tried to educate himself.
He didn’t ask for a pat on the back. He never looked bored or bothered.
He never looked so overwhelmed with pity that she felt compelled to backpedal and minimize. He was just there.
Eventually, she ran out of words. Or maybe more accurately, she ran out of steam. She lifted her shoulders and let them fall, not sure what to do next.
“How do you feel right now?” Jack asked.
What did it say about her that the last thing in the world she expected was that? “Um, drained. But good. Lighter?”
“That’s a lot to carry around all by yourself for so long.”
“I wasn’t trying to keep it secret, you know.”
“No?” He seemed curious more than incredulous.
“I guess my point is that I wasn’t trying to shut you out.
Or not you specifically. I just don’t have a lot of practice letting the messy parts of myself show.
Other than Rhett, I’ve never been around anyone where there was room for it, so it’s easier to be what other people want.
Or at least what makes them comfortable.
” Ellie stopped walking. Jack did, too. He turned to face her and took both her hands in his.
She legit thought her heart might pound right out of her chest and land on the pea gravel path, leaving a mess some poor gardener would have to come and clean up.
“I don’t need you to make me comfortable,” he said.
She frowned. It wasn’t as simple as that, but she didn’t have it in her to say so.
“Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that what I want, what would make me comfortable, is knowing you felt like you could be your whole self around me.”
“I think sometimes I’m not even my whole self around me.” It was a weird thing to admit.
“What do you mean?”
She might not have resolved it, but she’d had enough therapy that she could explain it.
“I’m really good at compartmentalizing my feelings, especially when they’re bad or even just inconvenient.
And like, I’m not bottling them up and biting my tongue, in danger of exploding.
I tuck them away, and it’s like they’re not even there. ”
“Oh.” Jack nodded slowly, like he was having an epiphany.
“Yeah. So, that’s me. I’m working on it, but obviously I’m a work in progress.”
He chuckled. “Aren’t we all?”
“I don’t know. You seem to have yourself pretty figured out.” A fact that felt both ironic and yet deeply true.
“I like to get most of my dysfunction out in the open from the get-go. I’m cranky, occasionally antisocial, and set enough in my ways to give the average eighty-year-old a run for his money.”
Ellie laughed. And then she laughed harder. As in, doubled over, tears running down her cheeks hard. Probably all those pent-up endorphins. “It’s true,” she finally managed.
Jack gave a small bow. “Surely you didn’t think you had a monopoly on emotional baggage.”
The laughter stopped, and she studied him. “Do you have emotional baggage? I figured that was just your personality.”
He tipped his head one way, then the other. “Some of it is. Some of it comes from being the middle sibling, being trans. From having a super supportive family, but still feeling like the black sheep sometimes.”
She put a hand on his chest. “For what it’s worth, you seem remarkably well adjusted.”
“Thanks.” He smiled. “I had to have a letter from a therapist to get top surgery. I decided to make use of the time instead of just going through the motions. Turns out we’re all a little fucked up, one way or another.”
“So comforting.”
“And here’s the thing. If you let some of your mess hang out, it makes it easier for me to do the same.”
She hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but it echoed Rhett’s words with almost eerie verisimilitude. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is. Well, saying it is. Doing it?” Jack shrugged. “Not always so much.”
Not simple, but maybe not impossible. “I want to try.”
“Yeah?” Jack seemed pleased if not entirely confident.
“I’m not saying I won’t fuck it up on the regular, but yes. And I want you to poke at me when I don’t.” Practice made perfect, after all.
“I do feel like you’re due for some after all the poking you did in the beginning.”
She laughed again. Not borderline hysterical this time, but it felt authentic. Real. “I’ll take that.”
“Does that mean you’ll come home with me tonight?”
“For the record, I never didn’t want to go home with you. Or have you come home with me. You know what I mean.” It felt so good to admit that, to own that she never stopped wanting him. Wanting to be with him.
He nodded. “I’m sorry if it felt like I was digging my heels in.”
She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. You did because it mattered so much. I see that now.”
“I hope you’ll dig your heels in too, when you have things that matter.”
“I’m going to remind you that you said that next time you give me a hard time about being stubborn.”
He lifted both hands. “Okay, I meant when it comes to matters of the heart, not like whether or not we should go to some social function.”
A little part of her wanted to joke about social functions being near and dear to her heart, but the rest of her was so grateful and relieved to be where they’d managed to get, she didn’t want to fall back on teasing. “Noted.”
“Good. So, should we go back to the party?”
She made a face. “I think we should bail.”
He raised a brow. “Not worried about disappointing Bea?”
“I think she has enough minions and acolytes around to keep her busy for the evening. Besides, if she’s going to miss anyone, it’s you.”
Jack pressed a hand to his chest. “And I, in true curmudgeon form, couldn’t care less.”