Chapter 11 #4
“So you left my hotel room pissed off because you have to work with me? That doesn’t make sense. We’d had a really good training session together. We’d had dinner, and I’d apologized about my mom. Things were improving between us, and then suddenly they weren’t.”
Her cheeks flush and I know I’m onto something. But she doesn’t reply.
“What happened that made things worse?”
She looks down at the floor. I wait patiently while she decides what she wants to say.
“I got some bad news, that’s all.”
I reach out and tilt her chin up so she’s looking at me. “What happened?” Her eyes are glassy with unshed tears, but she doesn’t respond. And then suddenly, I know. “Your mom?”
She blinks and the tears run down her cheeks. Without even stopping to think about it, I wrap both arms around her and pull her to me. “I’m so sorry, Jackson,” I murmur against the top of her head.
I feel her arms move against my stomach and then they’re wrapped around my waist, squeezing tightly as her chest heaves.
I hold her while she clings to me, her shoulders shaking as she cries.
She tucks her head against my neck, and I rest my cheek against the bun at the top of her head.
I should know exactly what’s happening with her mom.
I should have been there for her through this.
I should have let her be there for me when my mom died.
My younger self was a damn fool, too full of pride to make good decisions and I’ll spend forever making things right if that’s what it takes.
After a few minutes she starts to pull away, but I put my hands on her hips. “Here, hop up,” I say as I lift her onto the countertop of the large island.
She wipes her wet face with the sleeve of her sweater. “I should go,” she says, but makes no move to leave.
“I have something for you,” I tell her. “It may help a little.”
She raises one eyebrow, her curiosity obviously piqued.
“But first,” I say, “can you put this on my back?” I hold up the heat pack I’d set on the counter before she fell off the barstool.
She takes it from me, tearing it open and peeling the backing off to reveal the sticky side.
I slide my shirt up and she positions it along the lower left side of my back right where it’s still sore.
When she’s done, I turn back toward the enormous restaurant-style standing freezer.
Sitting all by itself on a shelf inside is a small pint of ice cream with a note that reads “Vegan—Don’t Eat” rubber-banded around it.
I turn toward her with the pint in my hand and I can see her lips turn up at the corners when she recognizes her favorite brand of ice cream.
“Wait, why do you have ice cream?” she asks, the accusation clear. She honestly can’t wrap her mind around me being vegan.
“Just keep an open mind.”
“Oh God, it’s not ice cream, is it? It’s going to be some nasty nondairy concoction that’s going to make me wish I’d never tried it.” It’s worth letting her give me shit to see the playfulness in her tearstained face.
“Don’t rush to judgment. You haven’t even tasted it yet.” I grab two spoons from the drawer near my hip and step up next to her. I set the carton and spoons on the counter next to her. “Let’s give it a few to soften up.”
She eyes the pint warily, but then her eyebrows raise. “Caramel almond brittle,” she says, and I can see that she’s hopeful. Caramel is her favorite food group.
“Do you want to talk about what’s going on with your mom?”
“Not really.” She looks away, over my head, instead of making eye contact. I can read her face easily if I can just see her eyes, and she knows it.
“Do you need to go home? Should you be there instead of going to Finland?”
“No.” She shakes her head lightly. “She just started chemo. They’re doing the treatments at Dartmouth-Hitchcock,” she says, referencing the hospital near Blackstone where my mom received periodic dialysis treatments during the winters while we were up there skiing in high school.
“She just has to go back to Dana-Farber in Boston once a month for her regular checkups. Besides, I’ll be home in less than two weeks for Thanksgiving. ”
“So, the cancer is spreading again?” It’s so hard to know how to word the question in a way that will keep her talking instead of shutting her down.
She nods.
“Fuck, Jackson, I’m so sorry.” I put my hand on the back of her neck and she doesn’t flinch at all. “What can I do?”
“There’s nothing to do. We just wait.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me if you need anything? Or if you need to go home to spend time with your parents?”
“Sure.” She shrugs. “Is that fake ice cream ready to try yet?”
“We’ll see,” I say, pulling my hand back from her neck and removing the lid from the container. The spoon slices through it and I dig out a bit with caramel and a big chunk of almond brittle for her.
She takes the spoon, eyes the ice cream suspiciously, and slides the spoon into her mouth, closing her lips around it. She slides the spoon back out, then swirls the ice cream around her mouth, her face thoughtful like she’s judging a fine wine.
“That doesn’t suck,” she says. “At all.”
“See?” I say, using the other spoon to scoop some out for myself. But she grabs it from my hand and shoves it in her mouth. She laughs when I lunge for the spoon and she leans back to keep it out of my reach.
She’s lying back on the granite countertop, holding my spoon over her head and laughing with a mouth full of ice cream as I lean over her, my hands planted on either side of her head. My voice is a low growl when I tell her, “That was a mistake.”
“That ice cream is mine. All of it,” she insists through a mouth full of ice cream, unable to control the giggle that bubbles up out of her. There’s ice cream on her lips and there’s nothing I want more in this moment than to lick it off.
“Oh, yeah?” I challenge, leaning down close to her ear. I’m about to say something completely inappropriate, but warranted, when movement at the entrance to the kitchen catches my eye.
“Oh, shit,” Jeff mumbles as he freezes in place, eyeing Jackson lying back on the countertop and me leaning over her, and clearly drawing conclusions about what’s happening here. Or what was about to happen here.
“This is not what it looks like,” I tell him.
Jackson closes her eyes for a second while swallowing her mouthful of dessert.
“I stole his ice cream.” She laughs, but it sounds forced, as she waves the spoon in the air. She sits up and looks over her shoulder. “And apparently he’s very protective of it.”
“Was it that vegan shit with the note on it in the freezer?” Jeff asks, taking a tentative step into the kitchen.
“It’s disgusting,” Jackson says, “don’t ever try it.” She looks over at me and gives me a little wink and it’s ridiculous how good it feels to be her co-conspirator, even over something so trivial. She turns back to Jeff. “I think I’m going to go throw up now.”
Good, now I’ll never have to worry about Jeff stealing my ice cream—just Jackson.
She hops off the counter and walks out of the kitchen without saying anything to either one of us.
“Ice cream, huh?” Jeff says as he takes his water bottle to the refrigerator to fill it.
If he hadn’t already thought he was interrupting something when he walked into the training room two days ago, he might have believed that I was leaning over her on that counter with my face inches from hers because I was trying to get my ice cream back.
But two close encounters in a row . . . there’s no way he doesn’t think something’s going on.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find decent vegan ice cream?”
“Mmm hmm. Sure, Romeo,” he says as he stands there letting the filtered water flow into his bottle.
“Don’t be a dick. She’s my physical therapist.”
“Dude, you used to bang that chick on the regular—”
I step toward him so quick he stumbles back and water goes everywhere.
“You will not talk about her like that.”
Jeff gives me a half smile. “And now I know for sure you still have feelings for her. Congrats, you’re exactly as predictable as I thought you were.”
“I hate you right now,” I mumble as I reach for the spoon Jackson left sitting on the counter.
“Nah, you’re secretly hoping that, now that I know the truth, you’ve got a friend you can divulge your master plan to.”
“Master plan?”
“You do have a plan, right?” Jeff is barely masking a horrified reaction, like I’d told him I regularly eat my own vomit.
“What the hell is happening right now?” I ask as I scoop out a spoonful of ice cream and shove it into my mouth. It’s delicious in an overly sweet, send you into a sugar coma kind of way.
“Uh, I’m being the cool ‘you can talk to me, bro’ friend, and you’re being weird about it,” he tells me as he walks over to grab a dish towel off the counter and wipe up the mess of water down the front of the fridge.
“It’s not like it isn’t obvious that you still have feelings for her.
And it’s not like we don’t all hate her boyfriend. So, what’s the plan?”
I stop chewing and look at him. “You’re being serious right now?”
“Totally.”
I put the lid back on the ice cream. “This isn’t really something I’m prepared to talk about.”
“You sound like a fucking lawyer. Is your plan classified?” He sounds like a twelve-year-old giving his friend crap.
“Right now it is,” I tell him, swinging open the door to the freezer and dropping my ice cream on the shelf. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’ve got a long flight. I’m headed to bed.”
Jeff coughs out “pussy” under his breath as I walk past him out of the kitchen.
I don’t bother responding. I’ve been surrounded by people who work for me—whether making my ski videos or building my real estate business—for the last few years.
It’s refreshing to have this banter with someone who’s not on my payroll.