15. Jessika
FIFTEEN
JESSIKA
I find him outside the community center on Cedar Street, eleven at night, in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of his truck.
I shouldn't be here. I was driving past on my way back from the pharmacy, my father's prescription, and I saw Grant's truck, and I stopped without making a decision to stop, the way you stop when something pulls at you that you haven't learned yet to ignore.
The NA meeting lets out while I'm walking across the parking lot, a small stream of people, some talking, some quiet. Grant stays on the hood of his truck until they're gone.
I stop a few feet away.
He's still in the same clothes from this afternoon. He's been here for the meeting which is two hours, plus whatever time before. He's been here for a while.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Surprised.
"I was driving past."
He almost smiles.
I lean against the truck beside him, not on the hood, he’s up there and I'm against the side panel, and we're close enough to talk but facing slightly different directions, which feels right somehow, which feels like a way of saying things without them having to be directly confrontational.
"How was the meeting?" I ask.
"Good. I talked tonight." He pauses. "I don't always talk. But tonight I talked."
"About today?"
"About Eli. About the specific feeling of proximity. Being near someone like Hale and what it opens up." He's quiet. "About the math thing Derek told me about. How the wiring stays."
I think about what he said in the park. About knowing exactly what came next.
"You've never used since you got out?” I say carefully. "You've been clean the whole time?”
"Yes."
"Not once."
"Couple of close calls." His voice is flat, factual.
"First year out was bad. Adjustment." He pauses.
"Prison is, traumatic isn't the right word.
It's more like it reshapes your nervous system and then the world outside has a different texture than you remember and you don't have the—you're raw. You're really raw."
"And nobody's particularly patient with that rawness."
"No."
I look up at the parking lot lights making cones in the cool air.
"I wasn't patient with it," I say quietly. "In general. With Morgan. He'd come out of treatment and I'd be watchful. Waiting for him to fail. Which, I thought I was being realistic but I think he could feel it."
"People in recovery can always feel it," Grant says. "The way someone's watching for you to slip. It becomes part of the weight you're carrying."
"I didn't understand that."
"You do now."
I look at him. He's looking out at the parking lot, a specific quality of stillness.
"Everybody waits for addicts to become disappointments again," he says quietly. "Even the people who love them. Even the people who are trying their hardest not to." He pauses. "That's not an accusation. It's just what it is."
"It's still wrong," I say.
"Yeah." A pause. "But knowing something's wrong doesn't always make it not happen."
I look at him for a long moment.
At the particular exhaustion in his profile.
At the years he's carrying that are not the weight of the past so much as the daily effort of the present, of staying clean, of sponsoring, of being the person in Briar County that everyone has decided is a specific kind of problem, and continuing anyway.
"Grant." Very quiet.
He turns.
And I close the eight inches between us and I press my mouth to his.
It's—
He goes very still for the first half second, the complete stillness of someone who didn't expect this and is making sure it's real. Then his hands come up to my face, both of them, careful and deliberate, and he kisses me back.
It's not rushed. It's not anything like I would have expected in the parking lot of a community center at eleven PM. It’s slow and certain and very honest.
When we break, his hands are still at my jaw.
He looks at me.
"Jessika," he says. His voice is different. Lower. The particular texture of someone who's been very careful and has just stopped being careful, for one moment.
"I know," I say.
"This is?—"
"Complicated. Yes." I don't step back. "I know."
He looks at me for a long time. His thumbs at the edge of my jaw, the warmth of his hands in the cold night.
"I don't know how to do this in a way that doesn't hurt someone," he says.
"We're already both hurt," I say. "We have been for a long time."
He breathes.
"Nova," he says.
"I know."
"Your father."
"I know."
"My own particular—" he pauses. "I'm not easy, Jessika. I'm not someone who does things simply."
"I'm an attorney who returned to her hometown to save a horse ranch while investigating her missing brother and facing possible county-level corruption," I say. "I'm not doing anything simple either."
That almost breaks something in his face.
He kisses me again, briefly, softer.
And then we stand in the parking lot and figure out what we are.