27. Jessica #2
"I got a call from my firm. The Whitfield Gala — the biggest event on the New York calendar. They're offering it to me." My voice was steady like I'd practiced. "But I have to go back. Now."
He went still.
"The contract here — I'll work with the county to find a replacement. The calendar is built through the end of the year." The words were smooth, professional. Each one tasted like ash. "It's once a in a career opportunity, Hunt."
He put the wrench down. Slowly. Wiped his hands on the rag, and turned it in his fingers. His jaw tight. His eyes on mine. His face went still. Then blank. Then steady.
"What about our trip?” The quietness of his voice nearly killed me.
My throat closed. Venice. The Dutch pancakes. The Dolomites. The apartment in Paris with the lemon tree. His handwriting and mine on the same page. The Post-it notes — pink, yellow, green.
"I don't know." My voice cracked, the rehearsal failed. "Hunt, I don't —"
He shook his head, silencing me. ”You worked for this." His voice rough. Low. His eyes held mine. His hands still on the rag. “You need to go take it."
The words hit my chest like a fist. He'd said them when I was eighteen. Standing in this same workshop. The same words. The same voice. The same man who let me walk away.
Except this time it felt like ripping my heart out of my chest.
My eyes burned. My chin trembled. I pressed my lips together so hard they went white.
He didn't move. He didn't cross the workshop. He didn't take my face in his hands and ask me to stay. He stood at his bench with the rag in his hands and his jaw tight and his eyes wet, and he gave me the same thing he'd always given me — the room to choose. Even when the choice was leaving him.
"Hunt —"
"Go, Jess."
I turned, and walked to my car. One heartbreaking step after the other.
The gravel crunched under my boots. My eyes blurred at the main house to my right.
I didn’t have it in me to say goodbye to them, so I got in my car, closed the door, and sat with my hands on the wheel.
My face crumpled, but I held down the sobs pressing up through my chest. I held them down until I was off the property.
Until the gate was behind me. Until Blackwood Ranch was in my rear-view mirror.
Then I pulled onto the shoulder, and my hands came off the wheel to cover my face and I broke.
I called Bobbie from my apartment. Boxes half-packed. Hunter's coffee mug still on my counter. I hadn't touched it.
"No." His voice flat. "No, Jessica. Absolutely not."
"It's the Whitfield Gala, Bobbie. It's —"
"It's a fucking escape hatch, and you know it." His voice cracked. "You told me you were in love with him, and now you're packing boxes and telling me about a fucking gala?"
"I have to —"
"You don't have to do anything except stop running." He was crying. I could hear it — the thick catch in his throat. "You're doing the thing, Jessica. The thing you always do. Something gets real, and your body says go, and you listen to the go because the go is easier than the stay."
My hand was over my mouth. My eyes streaming. His coffee mug on my counter. The Australia book on the nightstand — my copy, the Post-it notes bristling. Pink. Yellow. Green.
"You're making a mistake," Bobbie said. Quiet now. "The biggest one of your life."
“You’re probably right,” I sighed. But I couldn’t undo the damage I’d caused.
Silence. Long. His breathing and mine.
I made it through the airport on autopilot.
I held myself together through the gate and the boarding and the safety briefing.
My hands stayed folded in my lap. My back was ramrod straight, and my face stayed arranged into the professional composure mask I forced on.
I was Jessica Williams heading back to New York for a career-defining opportunity, not Jessica Williams breaking her own heart, because that was the story I had told the everyone and everyone didn't need to know another one.
The wheels left Texas.
The ground fell away beneath the wing — brown and green and gold, the patchwork of ranches and county roads and fence lines stitched across it the way they had been stitched across it for decades upon decades.
Somewhere down there in a workshop in the middle of one of those squares was a man standing at a bench with a rag in his hands and my name still in his mouth.
The ground kept falling, and the details disappeared. The fence lines blurred into the fields and the fields blurred into the horizon, and Texas became a shape and then a color and then nothing at all.
I pressed my forehead against the window.
The glass was cold against my skin. The sky outside was the kind of dark that has neither stars nor ground in it — only the empty distance between where I was and where I should have been, and somewhere in the middle of the empty distance the dam in my chest gave out.
It came up the way grief comes up when there is nothing left to brace it.
It started in my gut and broke through my chest and came out of me in the kind of crying that does’t have any words attached to it.
My shoulders heaved and my hands gripped the armrest. My forehead pressed harder and harder against the cold glass as if the cold of it could cool the heat of the rest of me.
The woman in the seat beside me turned her face away politely to give me some semblance of privacy.
I let it come — all of it, every part I had been holding for the eight hours since I had walked out of his apartment, every part I hadn't let myself feel in his kitchen or in his arms or at the gate — and the sobs tore out of me in waves I had no power to slow.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Three words sat behind my teeth and pressed against my lips and heat at the back of my throat.
Three words I had never said to him. Three words I had carried from his kitchen to his bed to his workshop doorway and now to this seat at thirty thousand feet without ever once letting them out into the air between us, and they were still in my chest now, hot and unfinished and pressing, and I couldn't put them down.
The plane flew on. New York was ahead. They came with me.