Chapter 16 #2
His eyes spark, and he carefully moves around me toward a slim stand of shelves nearer the counter. “I like this.” Jinx gestures to an oil painting, framed in decorative timber, hanging on the wall. “Don’t ask me why. I just saw it when we walked in, and I can’t stop looking back at it.”
I move closer, startling myself when my elbow catches a vase filled with peacock feathers.
“What do you think is happening in it?” A blue-toned landscape shows undulating ground, haunted by the silhouettes of trees, with a small cabin in the background.
It appears to be some sort of clearing in the woods, a glade, but what makes it mysterious is the blurry figure moving through the center of the image, as though caught in a windstorm, cloaked head tucked down against the onslaught.
“I can’t tell if they move away from the cabin or toward it,” Jinx says. “But there’s a tiny dot of earthy orange there in the lowest pane of that front window, so it makes me think it’s supposed to show someone else is there.”
“Do they venture out, or are they returning home?”
“Exactly.” He shakes his head as though breaking from a trance. “It’s stupid, anyway. I’d probably be better off getting these.” He gestures to a set of branded beer coasters in a timber box.
It’s typically male.
A stereotype that doesn’t fit him.
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” He turns from the painting and steers us back toward where I’d left off browsing.
“Put up this mask of who you think people expect you to be.”
Jinx stares at me for a beat, searching my face for something that he doesn’t appear to find. “Why did you?”
Did. Not do. But did.
“I was a teenage girl, Jinx. Keeping their parents happy is what every teenager aspires to do, isn’t it?”
He snorts. “Every teenager I knew was hell bent on doing exactly the opposite.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t respect their parents enough.”
“And you do?”
I hate the tension that’s swept in, this bristling reminder of how different we are. “You love deflecting when you feel attacked, huh?”
“Who said I feel attacked?” He picks up a re-taped box of stained-glass Christmas ornaments and pops it in the basket. “You’ll need these soon enough.”
“You’re like Jekyll and Hyde.” A part of me regrets the way I snapped the words, but not that I said them.
He stalls, standing rock solid as I move my ass to the next aisle over so I don’t have to look at him.
Thick fingertips edge between glass-encased sand art and a gaudy statue of a parrot clinging to a pineapple. Jinx moves the strange bird aside to create a window, peering through to where I stand.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” It’s easy to apologize to keep the peace, but knowing what for is the true show of character.
“Turning into my father when you call me out on my shit.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a bitch about it.” I look to my feet, the intensity of his crisp gaze unraveling my resolve.
“I know.” Jinx disappears from the makeshift window and appears at the end of the aisle.
“When we’re expected to keep up a certain image,” he explains, glancing at the badges on his chest, “then I guess it becomes habit to fit that bill. Plus, when everyone around me does the same thing, it’s normal. Nobody sees it as wrong.”
“It’s not wrong to mask.” Fuck knows I’ve done it plenty myself to get through awkward social interactions. “But it’s doing yourself a disservice if you hardly ever take it off.”
“I don’t really know what it’s like not to wear it.” He takes a step toward me. “Who I am without it.” Jinx shrugs, and my heart aches at the simple self-doubt in the gesture. “Maybe I shift my mask to the side sometimes, but I don’t think I’m ever really without it.”
“I know what that feels like.” Days spent suppressing my true thoughts and feelings, holding myself just so to the point that my back ached and my feet throbbed.
Nights in my bedroom staring at the wall, undecided on what to do with my time because it didn’t feel right to fully relax and leave myself vulnerable to criticism.
“But you can learn to let yourself be you,” I assure him. “It takes time, is all. It’s something you need to practice; you can’t just decide to do it on a whim.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing all these years?” He’s close enough to smell now. Leathery, like the store, but different. Warmer. More human. “Learning how to let your true face show?”
Comforting.
“I guess.” I tip my head back and dare myself to look into his eyes as I ask, “Do you still like what you see?”
The basket bumps my legs. Jinx stands close enough that his chest brushes mine with each careful breath he takes.
It feels like such a risk to let him in, but at the same time, it feels as though the world doesn’t matter.
As though nothing matters in the cocoon of this cramped store but our own thoughts and feelings on the matter.
And all I can think about is that misunderstood boy who’d act the fool to distract the bullies so that I could slip quietly to class.
He never spoke to me. Didn’t need to. His actions said everything I needed to know back then.
But I need those words now. I need to know this isn’t Jinx scratching an itch. Putting a ten-year question to rest.
That if I complicate my life in this way, it’ll be worth the fallout.
“Kyra girl, I’ve liked what I saw from the moment I first laid eyes on you.
Not because of your mask, or even what lies below.
But because all I ever needed were your eyes and the way you look at me.
I don’t care what face you give the world, as long as you never stop looking at me the way you do now. ”
Holy air ball. There are no words. Nothing I could say would enrich this moment any more than is needed. I set my hands on his chest, let my fingertips slide down to his belt, and hook them in, tugging him closer.
The basket knocks against the shelves beside us, yet I couldn’t care less. I’ll pay for breakages. Hell, I’d pay for the whole damn store if it just means I get to find out what Jinx plans to do next.
“Are you going to kiss me?” I tease. “Or have you had enough of seeing me happy for one day?”
A cross between a chuckle and a growl slips past his lips. “Thought you’d never ask.”