Chapter Five #2
And it said to Carolyn, Sorry, but he was meant to be
mine.
For Jagger, she’d just announced to two of the most
important people in his life that he was her person.
So yeah.
A massive punch.
Awesome all around.
She returned her wineglass to the table.
When she sat back, Jagger tucked her tighter to his side.
Dutch cleared his throat.
Carolyn was twisting her wineglass back and forth by the
stem.
It was Georgie, who had a flair with laying things out in an
honest but thoughtful way, who stated, “That’s one of the coolest things I’ve
ever heard.”
“I know, right?” Archie replied.
It was then, Carolyn rallied. “Sorry about your mom.”
Archie looked her right in the eye and said from the heart,
“Thanks, sister.”
“I haven’t been to your shop, I heard it was great, but I’m kinda, you know,” her eyes darted to Jagger, then back to
Archie, “on an epic money diet. But maybe the three of us girls could go out
for coffee or something.”
“Hell no.”
That was Dutch.
And everyone looked at him.
He didn’t hesitate to explain.
“You are not instigating a Black Brothers Gossip Club right
under our fuckin’ noses.”
Georgie burst out laughing.
Archie laughed too, but low.
Carolyn finally got some of the Carolyn Jag liked back,
grinned unrepentantly at Dutch, and said, “You can’t stop us.”
“Girl, that was not the response,” Archie chided. “You just
gave it all away. You should have said, ‘This is not all about you,’ when it
would totally be all about them.”
More woman laughter.
Dutch looked at Jagger. “You got anything to say?”
He did.
“I have nothing to hide.”
“Do you have something to hide, darlin’?” Georgie asked her
man.
Dutch made his point.
“If I did, it’d be only you I’d tell.”
“Right,” Georgie replied, giving the other women big eyes.
“Well, Archie’s cool, and obviously Georgie and I are cool,
so can we have your permission to get together and not talk about the
Black Brothers?” Carolyn requested.
“Knock yourselves out,” Dutch granted.
“Thank you, oh master, my master,” Georgie teased.
“That’s for later,” Dutch returned.
Georgie burst out laughing again.
Archie leaned further into him even as she reached for her
wine again.
He couldn’t see her face, but he knew she wasn’t laughing
this time, so he gave her a squeeze.
She glanced up at him.
“Family,” she said softly.
She didn’t have this.
Not with her brother.
He gave her another squeeze and mouthed, “Later.”
She nodded, looked away and took a sip of her wine.
They were on her fire escape.
She had a bunch of pillows on the ground by the window to it
that she tossed out so they could sit on them and lean against them.
It was late September, nights getting darker earlier, but
regardless, it was late, dark, and they were outside, sitting and leaning.
Jagger against the building.
Archie, between his legs and against him.
She had his hand in hers and was fiddling with it, but her
eyes were aimed through the railing, where you could see a sliver of the deep
purple hues of the Rocky Mountains silhouetted against the night sky between
some buildings.
She also had double stamps of approval.
Between then and now, Georgie had texted I’m in love
with her! I want her to be MY girlfriend!
Dutch had texted She’s cool, brother.
He didn’t need the approval, but it was good to have.
Now, they were in a weird zone.
Not a bad weird, but still weird.
Before they went out, she’d got him a beer, made herself a
vodka tonic, they settled in, and again they had a million things to say.
But neither of them was saying anything.
And it was…
Right.
Jag didn’t know if he’d ever been like this with a woman. He
was always up for tying one on, working toward getting it on, then getting it
on.
In other words, having a good time one way or another.
If he’d ever had quiet time with a woman, it definitely
wasn’t on the first date.
Then again, he’d never taken a first date to his brother’s
for dinner.
He took a slug from his beer, set it aside, then gently
pulled away from her fiddling and took control of her wrist.
Evidence was suggesting she hung out there a lot, because
she had a lamp on the floor by the window that she’d switched on and set
outside.
And with that light, he traced the tiny drops inked into her
skin that fell from her shoulder, down her biceps and inner forearm to her
wrist, where there was a slightly less tiny puddle with an extremely tiny
splash coming up from it.
“Probably don’t have to guess with that means,” he murmured
in her ear.
“No,” she agreed.
He swept the pad of his thumb across the puddle of tears.
She turned her head and pressed her temple into his
collarbone.
Jag went after her hand.
On the side middle joint of each finger, there were
miniscule words, one for each finger, from index to pinkie: Live, Love,
Laugh, Rock.
Fuck.
He was into this girl.
He ran his thumbnail under each like he was underlining
them.
Jag then turned her arm, and on the outside he saw the
diminutive but decorative arrows pointing every which way in what seemed like a
random pattern.
When he touched one, she said, “I wanna
go everywhere. I wanna do everything. I want to
skateboard in Iceland like Walter Mitty. I want to spend the night in an
elephant hide in Zambia. I want to do a wine and cheese tour of Paris. I want
always to remember I shouldn’t be going only in one direction. I need to head
out in all of them.”
“What directions have you gone?” he asked.
“This year’s big one, I stayed in a Rajasthani tent in
Portugal. Went to the beach, took surfing lessons, sucked at it, but it was
fun. Mostly, I walked around the lake where the tent was, hiked in the wood
there, and hung with the other people staying at the site or chilled outside my
tent by myself and read.”
“Hang on a second, you went alone to stay in a tent in
Portugal?”
“Yeah,” she said, not like it was an answer to his question,
but like she was talking to herself. This would be explained when she finished,
“Dad is gonna dig you.”
She wasn’t fifteen.
He had to chill.
Still.
She took over his hand, pressed her thumb in the center of
his palm and remarked, “They rent Harleys pretty much everywhere, you know.”
He had his other arm resting on her midriff, but when she
said that, he moved it to wrap it around her upper chest and then used it to
tuck her closer.
She pressed harder into his palm and said, “I want you to
spend the night, but I don’t wanna fuck. I just want
you beside me. And I want to wake up next to you. Will you stay?”
“Fuck yes.”
She curled her fingers around his hand and held on.
“What you said about me being your person—” he started.
She cut him off.
“It just is, Jagger, no pressure. Seriously. It just is and
you can just let it be that. It’s cool.”
“No, it’s that…I think you’re my person too.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Being yours feels good. And I know it’s fucked, because it
doesn’t make sense, but I think you being mine freaks me.”
“I get that.”
He was surprised, because he did not.
“You do?”
She adjusted, letting his hand go but wrapping the fingers
of both of hers around his forearm at her chest and tipping her head way back
to catch his eyes.
He helped by tucking his chin in to catch hers.
“Our disconnect, seeing you around, but you didn’t come to
me, and you were mine, you know? That hurt. It hurt a lot. And I didn’t get it
at first. I mean, I didn’t even know you. Why did it hurt so much? But it did.
And that freaked me too.”
Fuck.
He slid his free hand up her cheekbone, gliding his fingers
over her hair at the side of her head.
“Okay, maybe I was being a baby,” he admitted.
“We both were,” she replied. “This is big, and we know it.
It makes it scary, and we understand that. You can’t have this and lose it. You
can’t get it and then fuck it up. So our response was to back away from it at
every opportunity.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, because they for sure did that.
He felt the big breath she took.
And then she said, “I’m glad you quit backing away.”
“I’m sorry it took so long.”
“You shouldn’t apologize. I didn’t take that step, you did.
So, I’ll amend. I’m glad you quit backing away and I’m glad you made me quit
doing it too.”
In response, he swept his thumb along her cheekbone.
“Do you want to go to Iceland?” she asked.
“Sure,” he answered.
“Zambia?”
“Definitely.”
She smiled up at him, twisted and fit herself to him so she
was lying sideways on his chest, her arms around him, cheek to his shirt,
cuddled in.
“It feels better, being freaked with you here,” she
whispered. “Rather than freaked and not knowing where you were and who you were
with.”
He again agreed, “Yeah,” because that was the God’s honest
truth.
“I like your brother, he’s protective of you and it’s
sweet.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And Georgie is rad.”
“She really is.”
“And I don’t know what Carolyn’s gig was, but she’s
obviously pulling it together and she loves her sister, and cares enough about
you to change where you guys are.”
That had become apparent as the night wore on.
“I think we’ll get there,” he said.
“Yeah. That says a lot about you, you know, that you’d be
willing to get past that for her and for your family.”
He wasn’t sure what to say about that except, “Well, it’s
family.”
They got quiet again.
Archie broke it.
“I felt, like, locked.”
Jag didn’t know what that meant, so he asked, “Sorry, baby?”
“In my grief. Like, I was with Dad, and he was lost. And
Elijah was a mess, but he was there physically. They were going through the
same thing I was. But I was locked in my grief. I had all these people around
me, but I felt totally alone. And I couldn’t get out of that feeling, because I
didn’t think anyone would get it, where I was at. Not even Dad and Elijah.”
He curved both arms around her and held her tight.
She continued.
“And then I was at the funeral. I looked across the cemetery
and you were sitting there with your dad, and this opening started forming.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“And you came in,” she went on.
“Honey,” he murmured.
“And I wasn’t alone in there anymore.”
Jag turned his head and put his cheek to her hair.
“I haven’t made up my mind about fate and destiny, what god
there is, if there is one,” she stated. “I just know that day, however it
happened, you were put there for me. And that might not be true in someone
else’s reality. But it is in mine.”
“It’s true,” he confirmed.
“Okay.”
“I’ve never sat quiet and talked with a woman like this
before,” he told her.
“It’s good to be quiet,” she replied.
“Maybe for some. I don’t think so. I live loud.”
It was cautious when she said, “All right.”
And he knew this was cautious because it seemed from what
she was saying that Archie lived wide, not loud.
But Jagger felt that was a match.
“But for this, you and me,” he carried on, “I think it’s
okay, it works for me, because we have time and it doesn’t seem like…there’s no
race to…”
He couldn’t figure out how to finish that.
“Get it all in before it all ends?” she suggested.
He closed his eyes.
She cuddled closer.
“We have time, Jagger,” she assured.
His voice was thick when he said, “Yeah.”
“That’s the difference, you know, for us?”
“Uh…” he said, because he didn’t know.
She tipped her head back and he lifted his.
“My arrows, your race. That’s how we are. That’s what we
learned to be. They taught us the biggest lesson we’ll probably ever learn, and
it’s a lesson they would never have wanted to teach. We now have no choice but
to live like that. But with each other, we can have quiet. With each other, we
can slow down. With each other, we can be right where we are. That’s the
difference. That’s me for you and you for me. Do you feel that?”
Oh he felt it, all right.
He nodded.
“That’s why I don’t wanna fuck.
Because I really do wanna fuck. But that’s
not us. It’s not for now. We have time for that. We need to wait for that time.
Yeah?”
He could not believe he was doing it, but he nodded again,
and he meant it.
“We’ll know when it’s right,” she said.
“Totally didn’t agree with not making out with you, though,”
he pointed out.
She smiled up at him.
Then she slid up him.
He took her mouth.
It was slow and warm and wet, and it lasted a long time.
And he couldn’t believe it was him who did it, but it was
him who eventually ended it and said, “Ready for bed?”
“Yeah, baby.”
They grabbed the drinks they didn’t fully drink, the pillows
and the lamp.
They took turns in the bathroom, her last, and he was in her
bed, which was a mattress and box spring on the floor with some kind of carving
on the wall at the head, a fitted sheet, no top sheet, and a ton of pillows and
blankets. The nightstands were wooden trays on the ground on each side.
He was in his boxer briefs.
She came out in a tank and panties.
He’d turned out all the lights but the one on a tray by the
bed.
She left it on when she slid into him, so he pulled her
close, rolled into her, reached and switched it off.
You could hear the traffic on Colfax, city lights were
coming in the windows, but Archie pulled the covers up over their heads and
suddenly, they were alone in the world.
“Locked here, with me,” she whispered.
With her words, it felt like his entire chest was banded
iron tight.
But the second he had that feeling, it released.
So Jag tangled up with her, kissed her shoulder and settled
in.
“Sleep, Archie.”
“Okay, baby.”
She shoved her face in his throat.
And as she drifted off to sleep, Jagger wondered.
He wondered if his dad laid awake with his mom pressed close
and he thought, being just like that with her, that the world was completely
right.
And he really hoped his dad had that.
Even just once.
He hoped his dad had that at least once.
Before he died.