19. Jessica
Jessica
The County Agricultural Fair was in eighteen days, and I was running on four hours of sleep and the memory of Hunter's mouth on my neck at two in the morning.
My apartment looked like a war room. Binders on the kitchen counter — livestock, vendors, entertainment, infrastructure, catering, sponsorship, VIP — tabbed and color-coded and cross-referenced with the master spreadsheet on my laptop, which was open on the couch with three tabs running.
Floor plans taped to the living room wall.
Post-it notes in four colors along the baseboards.
My phone was charging on the counter with eleven unread messages, and my second coffee was going cold beside the laptop, and it was five thirty in the morning, and I'd been awake since four.
The four hours of sleep were Hunter's fault…
and mine. Well, mostly mine. He'd come over after he finished at the fairgrounds — sawdust in his hair, grease on his arms, smelling like timber and sweat — and I'd pulled him through the door by his shirt, shoved him up against the wall, and kissed him until we were both breathless.
We'd ended up on the couch with his hands under my shirt and my legs around his waist. By the time we made it to the bed, it was midnight.
Then we laid there in the dark with my head on his chest and his fingers in my hair and I'd told him about the catering hookup problem.
He'd listened like always. But when his thumb had traced circles on my shoulder, my body softened and before I knew it, his mouth found the spot below my ear and the softening turned into something else and we didn't fall sleep until two.
The relationship was six days old, and I was already addicted to the man the way I was addicted to caffeine — physically, chemically, with withdrawal symptoms that started approximately thirty minutes after he left my apartment.
My body wanted him next to me at all times.
My brain wanted him to stay up late in my bed, talking about anything while his hand moved up my thigh.
The combination was catastrophic for my sleep schedule, but I didn't care.
Except I also couldn't afford to not care because there were ten thousand people coming in eighteen days.
Ten thousand people everywhere for three days. The biggest event on the county calendar.
The fairgrounds at seven AM. Dew on the grass. The skeleton of the main pavilion going up — steel frames, canvas rolls, the Austin crew working in pairs. I stood at the center with my clipboard and my headset and my coffee — third of the day — and my brain was running six tracks simultaneously.
Hunter was at the east gate building the loading dock I hadn't asked for.
I could see him from the pavilion — shirtless by eleven, the sun on his back, the muscles in his shoulders shifting as he drove screws into the timber frame.
The delivery trucks had been struggling with the grade all week.
I'd was going to add it to my Thursday list. He'd seen the problem and fixed it without a word.
The trucks rolled up clean the next morning. Not a single reverse.
He caught me looking. Across forty yards of fairground, his eyes found mine and held — steady, warm, the corner of his mouth pulling — and my whole body pulled toward him.
I forced myself to turn back to my clipboard because if I walked across the paddock to him right now I would press my face into his sweaty chest and breathe him in and I wouldn't come back for an hour and I didn't have an hour.
Louisa arrived on Tuesday with a cooler.
"I'm not interfering," she said, setting it on the tailgate of the supply truck. "I'm providing sustenance. There's a difference."
The cooler held sandwiches — thick, wrapped in wax paper, labeled in Louisa's handwriting. Different ones for everyone based on their preferences because that’s just the kind of woman she was.
The bread hit my stomach and my stomach cramped — not hunger, resistance. My body was running on coffee and adrenaline, and the addition of food disrupted the chemistry. I ate it anyway because I knew Louisa would raise hell if I didn’t.
Maggie appeared on Wednesday. She walked the horse demonstration area with me — both of us in boots, both of us arguing about the holding pen configuration the way we'd argued about everything since I came home.
She wanted the mares separated from the yearlings by a double fence.
I wanted a single barrier with a wider lane.
We walked the ground three times. She kicked the dirt.
I measured the lane width. She kicked the dirt again.
"Double fence, wider lane, split the difference on the pen depth," she said.
"That'll cost an extra two hundred feet of railing."
"Hunter can build it in a day."
"Hunter is building half the fairground already."
"Hunter built you a loading dock in one night because he saw the trucks struggling. He'll build the railing because I'll ask him nicely and because the horses need the space." She looked at me. Her eyes were sharp yet warm, and the combination was pure Maggie. "You look tired, Jessica."
"I'm fine."
"Mmhm." She squeezed my arm. Her fingers were strong. The squeeze lasted two seconds longer than it needed to.
Ivy came on Thursday. She didn't argue about anything.
She brought flowers — wildflower arrangements for the gala table centerpieces, hand-tied, each one different.
She set them in the staging area, and then she sat beside me on an overturned crate while I reviewed the seating chart, and she didn't say a word.
She just sat there. Her shoulder near mine.
The quiet company of a woman who understood that sometimes the most useful thing you could offer was your presence without your opinions.
My eyes blurred on the seating chart. I blinked. Pressed my fingers against my eyelids. Ivy's hand found my knee and rested there — light, warm, brief — and then she stood up and went back to the flowers.
The cracks started in week two.
I snapped at a teenage volunteer over a cable gauge — my voice sharp, harder than it needed to be. The kid flinched. His face went red. I apologized immediately. My hands shook on the clipboard.
Three days in a row, my body sent the hunger signals, and I overrode them.
Stomach cramping at noon. Hands trembling at one.
Vision blurring at two. On the third day, I stood up from the staging blueprints and the room swung hard to the left, and I grabbed the table and held on until the floor came back.
I drove to a site visit and sat in the car for ten minutes before going in. My hands were on the steering wheel, knuckles white, the shaking visible in my forearms. I pressed my palms together between my knees. Squeezed. Held. The tremor dampened enough to hide.
Every night, Hunter was at my apartment by nine. Every night, I pulled him through the door and kissed him until we ended up tangled on the bed or the couch or the kitchen counter.
His hands on my body were the only thing that turned the adrenaline off. His mouth on my throat. His weight on top of me. The steady pressure of his body against mine and my muscles unclenching and my breathing slowing, and for twenty minutes, thirty, an hour, I was still.
Then he'd fall asleep with his arm around me, and I'd lie there in the dark with my heart rate dropping and the to-do list scrolling behind my eyes with the exhaustion pressing down. I’d think, Just close your eyes, just sleep, you need to sleep.
And then I'd think about the gala tent power draw.
And I'd ease out from under his arm and pad to the kitchen and open the laptop and work until four.
Four hours of sleep. Then three. Then two and a half.
My phone rang on a Friday afternoon. I was on a ladder checking a cable run and I nearly dropped it fishing the phone out of my back pocket. The screen said Bobbie.
"Hey, Bobbie, I can't really —"
"Jessica Lee Williams, I have sent you nine text messages in three days, and you have not responded to a single one.
I am calling you because the last time you went radio silent on me, you were face down on your bathroom floor after the Harrington gala.
So you are going to talk to me right now, or I am getting on a plane. "
I climbed down the ladder. Sat on an equipment case. The crew was working around me — hammers, drills, voices on radios. My hand tightened on the phone.
"I've been busy. The fair is in eleven days. I'm not face down on a bathroom floor."
"Are you eating?"
"Louisa is force-feeding the entire fairground."
"Are you sleeping?"
"Enough."
"Mmhm." The weapon. Deployed at full power. "And your hands? Are they shaking?"
My hand was shaking. Right now. Holding the phone. I pressed it harder against my ear to stop the tremor from reaching my voice.
"I'm fine. I've got this. The event is coming together, the logistics are clean, the team is solid, and I'm —"
"You're burning the candle at both ends. Both ends being Hunter and your career, and I love that for you, I truly do. But sweetheart, you are a human woman and not a generator. Eventually, the fuel runs out."
My jaw clenched. My eyes stung. But I shoved the mounting emotion down — there wasn’t time for it.
"I've got it, Bobbie. I'm not going to hit the wall. Not this time."
"Jessica —"
"I can’t —“ My eyes drifted shut. “I can't be the woman who can't handle it. Not here. Not in front of these people. They gave me this contract, and they trusted me. If I fall apart —"
"Nobody is asking you to fall apart. I'm asking you to take care of yourself.”
My jaw tightened to stop the quiver in my chin. ”I have to go. The cable run isn't going to check itself."
"Jessica."
"I love you, Bobbie. I'll text you back tonight. I promise."
I hung up. My hand was shaking. I shoved the phone in my pocket and climbed back up the ladder and my arms were heavy and my eyes were gritty and the cable run blurred when I leaned in to check the connections.
My apartment. Midnight. The binders open on the counter. The floor plans on the wall. The laptop glowing on the couch.
I was on the kitchen floor. My back against the cabinet. My legs on the cold tile. The chair was three feet away and the three feet was too far.
Hunter had left an hour ago. He'd kissed my forehead and said get some sleep, Jess and I'd said I will and I hadn't. I'd gone straight to the laptop. Then the binders. Then the floor.
My hands were in my lap. They were shaking. The fine tremor that started in my fingertips and ran up through my wrists. My breathing was shallow and clipped. The tile was cold and the apartment was dark and the streetlight put a stripe across the ceiling.
My phone buzzed. A text from Hunter. No words. A photo.
The fairground at sunset. The marquee frames silhouetted against the sky — the ones he'd built that afternoon, the steel and timber dark against the gold. The light stretching across the land. The paddocks. The oaks. The road curving toward the creek.
I stared at it. The gold light. The frames his hands had built. My eyes blurred. My throat closed. My fingers tightened on the phone.
I texted back a cowboy emoji and a flexed bicep.
He didn't text again. He knew.
I put the phone down. Picked up the vendor file. The words blurred. I blinked. Read the first line again. Blurred again.
Bobbie's voice was stuck in my head: Eventually the fuel runs out.
The fuel was running low — I could feel it in the tremor in my fingers and the weight behind my eyes and the way the floor felt more like home than the bed where Hunter's pillow still smelled like his shampoo.
But I didn't get up. I didn't go to bed. I turned the page and kept reading because I didn't hit the wall. I ran through it.
The wall was getting closer, though. My hands could feel it.