52. Jack
Chapter 52
Jack
M organ was nowhere to be found.
Chloe had woken up to a text from her that she would meet us at the Ren Faire, but I knew I’d scared her off. Not least because, when I knocked on her door to see if she was okay, the door swung open to reveal an empty room. Well, empty except for the dress hanging on the back of the wardrobe door.
“Where do you think she’s gone?” Grey asked, chomping the end off a strip of streaky bacon.
“Maybe the pharmacy?” Fatima offered. “If she wasn’t feeling well, I guess. There was one just past the neighbourhood entrance I think.”
But I knew they were wrong. Wherever she’d gone, she was avoiding me. Or, at least, avoiding us . And I didn’t blame her. But if she didn’t want to be with us, I’d have to learn how to be without her. I’d have to learn how to be happy. So I might as well start now.
I sat down at the sofa, where I seemed to have left my tablet the night before, to continue my sketch. I decided it didn’t matter that I’d started it with Morgan in mind; I deserved to finish it either way.
But when I swiped to unlock the tablet, I realised from the photo of Pablo as the background that it wasn’t actually mine but Morgan’s. Why was it here? Why was it out of her case? Why didn’t she have a password on it? Now that she was doing work on it, she should really have been paying more attention to that kind of thing.
I knew I should have put it straight back down. But I hadn’t seen any of her art in weeks, and I wanted to see what she’d been drawing. To feel connected to that part of her. So I opened the app she’d taught me to use, and as I scrolled through her projects, my mouth fell open.
The first thing I saw was me, in the outfit I had laid out downstairs. She’d been a bit generous with the cut of my jaw, but it was amazing to see myself through her eyes. I checked the edit history: it had only been a few hours since she’d worked on this one.
When I scrolled through her recent projects, skimming past the freelance work and gala illustrations, I found dozens of illustrations of me from over the last few months: in my suit for the gala, holding the book she’d given me in Hay-on-Wye, paddling a kayak up a river lined with rhododendron and balsam, on the floor in her lounge with my head leaned back against the sofa… I scrolled all the way back to the beginning of the year, and there was even one of me from then, sat at Fatima’s dining table, a D20 die falling from my hand, a huge smile on my face.
I’d known Morgan was in love with me. I never would have had the courage to say it to her otherwise. But seeing all of this – knowing that when she was her best, most creative self, she was thinking of me – I felt that chasm crack open like never before. We were both still literally drawing one another into our lives, so why couldn’t we make it work?
But it wasn’t real life. It was just a drawing. And if Morgan had wanted to work things out with me, she would have done so last night when we’d made love. She would have changed her mind when I’d told her what I’d been doing to try to make things right for myself. And she would be here now.
But she wasn’t. And I supposed that told me everything I needed to know.
* * *
After breakfast, I pulled on my newly mended trousers and my jerkin, relying on Chloe to fix the loose tie on the shoulder and help me angle the crown I’d bought just right. She had to pause in the middle of buzzing Grey’s head; now that they’d worn their Gorlag outfit, they wanted a clean slate of their natural brown for today’s look.
Once we were dressed, we all, sans Morgan, left for the faire. As we went, I looked over my shoulder and could have sworn I saw her standing in the upstairs window, but then the clouds shifted, and it turned out to just be a glare on the window.
We walked over to the festival entrance, admiring again the costumes others had put together. We were all dressed more traditionally “Ren Faire chic” today, as Chloe had called it; she and Fatima wore flowy dresses with corsets over them, Grey wore a lace-up waistcoat over ballooning trousers and shirt, and Phil wore a brocade jerkin not unlike the one the groom had been wearing at the joust yesterday.
At the festival gate, there was a huge group of gender-bent Disney royalty – a bearded hulk of a human dressed as Ariel, paired with a dainty walking ponytail in a Prince Eric costume, and so on – and another group clearly dressed as the Fellowship from The Lord of the Rings . I snapped a picture of them to send to Morgan, my thumb hovering over the send button whilst I debated whether or not I should be texting her, before I decided to say “fuck it” and send it anyway. If she didn’t want to hear from me, she wouldn’t respond.
Inside, the place looked identical to the day before, and it felt like déjà vu to hear the same jokes and lewd comments yelled by the callers and performers. It was fun, but my heart wasn’t in it; not without Morgan there. At least yesterday, I’d been able to watch her have fun and know that it was all worth it. But today, everything reminded me of her, and not in a fun way.
After another round of coffee – all iced this time, as it was already warmer than it had been yesterday afternoon – we found some seats at a belly dancing show. I settled down next to Fatima on the end of the row. I hadn’t properly spoken to her since everything that had happened with Jared other than to tell her about my course. She seemed to be in pretty good spirits, so I risked bringing the vibe down if it meant maybe getting to commiserate a bit.
“So how are you doing?” I asked Fatima, trying not to sound like I was starting a therapy session, but she clearly got the gist.
“I’m okay,” she said, putting on a smile one might describe as “brave”. “I mean, better than I thought I’d be. It was a pretty clean break, all things considered.”
“That’s true,” I said, somewhat envious of that. “But you know you don’t have to be okay, right?”
Fatima caught my eye, and her smile faltered for a moment. “I know,” she said, nodding. “But really, Grey’s hardly left my side, and Morgan and Chloe have been great, too.”
I must have winced slightly at the mention of Morgan, or maybe Fatima’s teacher/DM intuition was at an all-time high, because she narrowed her eyes.
“And how are you ?”
We’d never actually, officially burst the bubble to Fatima and Grey. We’d been about to when Fatima and Jared had broken up, and Morgan insisted it would have been insensitive to bring it up. But they’d found out; of course they had. I suspected Fatima had known since that day she caught me on my way down the stairs. She’d always been able to see right through people.
Today, I didn’t feel like just smiling along, fading into the background. So I decided to be honest.
“Not great,” I said, feeling my voice break. “Which seems really stupid to say, given that we were together for what, less than one percent of the time you and Jared were together?”
She shook her head. “It’s not about how long you were together,” she said, then shrugged as she reconsidered. “Okay, obviously duration plays a part. But with Jared and me, as impossible as it feels, even now, to imagine life without him, we’d at least got to see it through. Our relationship ran its course, apparently. But with you and Morgan…”
“We never got to see what life would be like together,” I finished. And that was the killer, wasn’t it? All the what-ifs. All the unknowns, which had been the thing to threaten our relationship to begin with, and which were haunting us now. Or, haunting me at least. Was it selfish to hope she was at least slightly haunted, too?
“I guess we’ll all have to get used to the unknowns,” I said. “She might not even be here a month from now.”
Fatima’s sympathetic pout sharpened into a confused squint. “Wait, what?”
“She’s been looking at jobs in other parts of the country,” I said, hoping Fatima didn’t find that too triggering. But she didn’t look shocked when I told her. Just more confused.
“I did know that,” she said, “but?—”
Before she could continue, ear-splitting feedback came from the speaker a foot to my left; I actually lifted my hands to my ears in response. A man shouting and whooping came barrelling onto the stage, five elegant belly dancers in a line behind him. The music kicked in, and I could barely hear it through the ringing in my ears. I was almost certain this volume was historically inaccurate.
I tried to catch Fatima’s eye, but she’d given up on the conversation. I only half-paid attention; I had one eye on my phone, staring at the message I’d sent Morgan, desperate for the little ticks to turn blue so I knew she’d read it. But with the entire morning gone, I was losing hope.
Just before the show finished, Fatima got up to go to the toilets and said she’d meet us at the joust, so I didn’t get to finish our conversation, which I’d of course made all about me. By the time we walked into the arena early to get seats, Morgan was still nowhere to be seen, and I came to terms with the fact that she’d never planned to meet us.
“I feel like I should ring Morgan,” Chloe said, echoing my thoughts, pulling her phone out as we settled into the stands, even closer to the middle than we’d been yesterday. But I held out a hand to stop her.
“She’s not coming,” I said. “Don’t bother.”
Chloe looked at me and narrowed her eyes. “What makes you think that?”
I shrugged. “A hunch?”
“Bullshit,” she said, scowling. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” I said, in a way that I knew she’d understand to mean “everything”.
“Fuck’s sake, Jack,” Chloe said, smacking me on the arm hard enough that I felt the sting through my jerkin. “Why did you screw this up?”
I levelled my gaze at her, and I must have looked pitiful enough, because her ire quickly melted into pity.
“You really did screw this up, didn’t you?” she asked, reaching her arms out to hug me from the side.
“I mean, it was pretty mutually destructive,” I said. “But yeah, I wasn’t exactly the paragon of good boyfriends.”
“It’s okay,” she said, suddenly very tender, refusing to move her face from my shoulder or her arms from my torso. “You’ll be fine. Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on, anyway.”
“Why are we getting all huggy?” Phil asked, climbing over Chloe and me and sitting down right between us, forcing us to scoot apart. He handed me a tub of kettle corn as Fatima and Grey settled in behind us.
“Because Jack’s a bad boyfriend,” Chloe said, and Phil nodded.
“Yeah, could have told you that,” he said.
“From all the time we spent dating?” I asked.
“You couldn’t pull me.”
“How about we save this little friends-to-enemies-to-lovers arc for after the joust?” Chloe asked, just as Maximus and his opponent came riding out.
As they performed their feats of strength and agility, we all seemed to remember where the huzzahs and boos were meant to go, and it was fun to feel like we were now in on the joke. But I found myself looking over my shoulder subconsciously for Morgan, as if she would appear behind me where she’d been yesterday.
She should be here for this , I thought. This is all meant to be for her.
“Did you text Morgan?” I asked Chloe as the trumpeters finished their awful noise and the Queen appeared on the platform.
“Yeah, like, seven times,” Chloe said dismissively, looking up at the Queen.
“Welcome to today’s joust,” she was saying. “Normally we would have a happy pair of newlyweds to preside…”
“Maybe you should text her again,” I said quietly.
“Shhhh,” Chloe said, swatting at me, looking past me.
“I just don’t want her to feel alone,” I said.
“Jack—”
“I don’t want her to think we’re just having fun without her. That we don’t miss her.”
“Jack?”
“Because it’s not the same without her, and it never could be.”
“Jack!” Chloe slapped me this time, and as she pointed past me, I realised she wasn’t just telling me to shut up. The whole crowd was whispering in confusion, actually. I turned around and followed Chloe’s finger, looking at the knights and the host, who were staring up at the platform. Then I followed their gazes to the Queen, who was looking down at someone next to her. Someone shorter than her. Someone in a long blue dress, with ornamental chain mail around her neck.
My kettle corn fell onto the bleachers and my mouth fell open. It was Morgan.