On Saturday, Steve gathered up his wallet and keys and informed Sophie he was going out. He couldn’t look her in the eye. They had a nasty fight the other night after his return from visiting Jessie. Now the petite blonde stared miserably at him with remorse in her eyes, remorse that their relationship hadn’t weathered this storm any better than HMS Bounty had survived Hurricane Sandy. When Steve returned, it would be to an empty house. No girl could share her man with Jessie Wheeler. There was no coming back from loving Jessie Wheeler.
Steve found Jessie at the grand piano practicing the new song in preparation for her practice with Christian later that day. When she saw Steve at her door, though, she stopped playing and closed the lid. She looked up at him, and he felt her expression soften although she didn’t smile. She had a faraway look in her eyes and wore the artist’s mantle of creativity and expression, the one that, like the thin veil of All Hallow’s Eve, was a perhaps penetrable barrier between this world and the next, a portent of brilliance perchance to come.
Pushing back the piano bench, Jessie lifted her healing body from her musical escape and met him halfway across the room. Smiling, Steve folded Jessie into his arms. She let him, returning the favor by placing her own arms around his waist and holding on tightly. She sighed. They stayed that way for a while, both grateful for the sanctuary each provided from the nasty reality neither wanted to think about, and then he kissed the top of her head and asked if she’d eaten. She hadn’t. Steve made his way over to the fridge and, after a quizzical pause, started pulling out baby spinach, red and green peppers, a Spanish onion, a little bag of slivered almonds, and some leftover mandarin oranges in a small see-through container. He eyed the oranges suspiciously, holding them up at arm’s length, peering through the sides of the receptacle.
Jessie plopped down on a stool by the kitchen island. “They’re fine, I just opened them yesterday.”
As he spread the ingredients out on the countertop and started opening and closing cupboard doors in search of a salad bowl, Jessie pointed her finger. “That one. Can I help?”
He retrieved a bowl and grabbed a knife out of a wooden block on the counter. He started with the onion while Jessie opened the spinach and grabbed a handful to place in the bowl. She looked up at him a few times and, finally, paused with her hand in the air while she took in his shoulder length blonde hair, his laughing eyes, his ever-present grin. He caught her staring at him, but he mistook it for something it wasn’t. He didn’t know she was trying to memorize his features, that she was already feeling the impending loss of him and of them, of all of them, in fact.
They ate side by side while he regaled her with tales of Maggie, Sue-Lyn and Carter. He was careful to avoid any mention of Josh but, finally, when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she brought up the name guaranteed to send confused signals to Steve’s mind.
“Do you think Josh will be coming to the party tomorrow?”
Steve almost choked on his baby spinach. “I’m guessing he won’t, Jessie.” He looked intently at her. “He’d be crazy to show up there. It’d be like putting a chicken in with a pack of wolves.”
Jessie thought for a second. She’d already told Charles to please make sure Josh would be there. She insisted Matt ensure he was well protected, although she knew it would have to be Josh’s own thick skin that would have to keep the ignorant from pummeling him into the ground with their insensitive barbs and remarks. She only asked Steve as a test - a test to see how hard he would be on Josh. To gauge the level of undisguised disgust towards his old friend.
“Stephen,” she said slowly. “Don’t be too hard on him, okay?”
He frowned at her, incredulous.
“He’s still the Josh you knew. Just…some things have gotten out of hand, out of control.”
“I’ll say.” He set down his fork with a small twang. “Either you’re the most forgiving person I know on this planet or perhaps even in this universe, or you’re keeping something from me, Jessie.”
Her expression was deadpan, a look she did not have to reach for in her bag of acting tricks. It was the way she actually felt - devoid of emotion, of energy. She shrugged. “It’s just - Steve, he’s still Josh.”
“Not in my book he isn’t.” She could tell by his even tone that Steve was getting upset. But then, how could she expect him to understand? Maybe Steve should be let in on the small circle of people to whom she’d told a half-truth, whether any of them truly believed her or not. Josh would need his friends around him in the coming months. But there was a danger in letting too many people know. Secrets had a way of getting out. And so far, Deuce had not shown any signs of coming back into Jessie’s life just yet. They all just needed more time. The trap was set and waiting, or so they thought. Little did they know that Jessie had her own plan.
In response, Jessie just nodded and faced her salad bowl. She forked up some spinach and mandarins and forced them into her mouth. She really wasn’t very hungry but she knew she ought to eat something, both to please Steve who could report back to Dee that she ate, and to fuel her brain for this song she would finish writing later that day with Christian.
When the last sliver of almond was consumed, Steve gathered the dishes and washed while she dried. He took the dishtowel from her afterwards and wiped his hands on it. Then he reached out and touched the side of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She closed her eyes and laid a hand gently over his. She swallowed.
He bent down and kissed her softly on the lips, and they stood that way for a while and held each other and just kissed. She cherished being so close to this man, who tasted of the honeyed mandarins he had prepared for her, even though Jessie selfishly knew she was with Steve for the wrong reasons. Love was all fucked up these days - love with romantic partners, love with family, love with crazed stalkers (on the receiving end, that is), love with ex-fiancés whom of course you still adored, and now this - love with a best, best friend. And it was that, indeed; it was love that she was feeling for Steve, the real hard kind that hurt the worst because there were hidden truths in it, or lies, maybe, if you wanted to venture out on a limb and call Jessie’s real feelings that. For whatever name you had in mind for what Jessie’s heart knew when it came to Steve, it didn’t matter, for no matter how society and the universe might disapprove, it was still a true and certain love that was being shared between them. It just happened to be the hurting, painful kind. But then, in Jessie’s experience, so were they all.
She ached to go lie down with him on her big bed but since that awful night with Deuce, her bedroom was tainted. Besides, Josh had slept there many times. Jessie spent her nights there, usually not sleeping much, but instead hugging the pillow where Josh had laid his head, and rocking back and forth while she cried.
Now, she took Steve’s hand and laid it on her breast, and then she pulled him towards the guest room, which wasn’t lost on him - her choice of room - but he misunderstood that too, as easily as he had the faraway looks on her face earlier, at the piano and then over the salad bowl. They laid down together and held and kissed and touched, but that was as far as things got that day and that was okay, because it was beautiful again - this new kind of love with a friend that was going too far.
Jessie Wheeler was not a perfect soul, as much as the world had made her out to be. She was angry beyond reason about many things, these days mostly about who she had become - a rock star, a singer-songwriter, an Oscar winning actor. She first felt her life careening out of control the day of her twelfth birthday, the day her father died. She’d thought the universe was balancing her out again, after the hell of loving Josh while being engaged to Charlie. She had been with a man she loved beyond reason, her career was moving along well, and she and Dee were giving back in so many ways, not the least by opening women’s shelters. But after having to let Josh go in exchange for his safety, at the mercy of a misguided man who thought he deeply loved her, Jessie had come to realize something. She hated who she had become - a woman who could
not have what she wanted most because of the fame and success she had achieved. A woman who lived at the mercy of a deluded, deranged stalker.
She also realized one thing. She, as Deuce told her, was indeed in control. Maybe not fully, but partially. Enough to end this thing.
And so, as she knew an ending was upon her, she threw away her conscience and pushed the petite, pretty Sophie far from her mind for at least a little while. She loved every second of being with Stephen, and she was grateful to him for loving her that day, the day before the universe and her path in it would take another sharp turn the way a good script writer changes the beat of a film. She cherished her time with him, and it felt good to be touched for reciprocal, consensual love again. Yeah, she was selfish, Jessie Wheeler was. She was not perfect. She had a dark side. She told herself that day and the others before and beyond it that she no longer cared who she hurt. She was dead inside, and she took what she needed in order to keep herself alive.
Without having intercourse, Stephen gave Jessie an exquisite orgasm. His fingers were experienced and delightful. She held him in turn, and then they slept in each other’s arms until Christian’s knock at the door awoke them. She called out to her accompanist that she’d be out in a second, and then she tenderly kissed Stephen and told him to go home to Sophie. That was the worst of it, for him, that he couldn’t stay with Jessie, that he would have to tell Sophie that he had always loved Jessie. He didn’t think he cared about hurting Josh. After all, the two been apart for more than three months now, since Drifters wrapped. But on some intuitive level, deep down, he knew he’d be hurting him too.
He heard Jessie talking quietly to Christian in the living room, and then she was playing some chords for her pianist. As Christian picked up the appealing melody, Stephen fastened the button on his jeans before wandering sleepily out to watch. He leaned against the hall door and listened for a moment as she gazed at him, contemplating his presence in her messed up life. Then she lifted herself up off the bench, took him by the hand, and pulled him into a last intimate embrace. One final sweet, lingering kiss, and she whispered fervently one more time, “Go home to Sophie.”
His heart ached and he decided that after the party tomorrow he would talk to her about having some kind of commitment between them. Then he would come clean to Sophie, even though he knew she likely already sensed that he and Jessie had become more than just friends. What he was about to find out, though, was that Sophie was one step ahead of him.
“Okay, okay,” he murmured adoringly to Jessie. “Going now. Watch me go.” He had his jacket, a soft brown blazer, hanging from his fingertips as he sleepily wandered across the room while looking back at her and grinning. She waved lightly, and Jessie felt her breath catch. She wanted to scream out to him not to go, but she had to let him go; they all had to go, she had to go.
Jessie’s mood instantly sank, and so she threw herself into work mode. Tousled salt and pepper haired Christian made it easy on her. A laidback yoga fanatic, he wore Oxford shirts unbuttoned at the collar and wrists, lived in an overpriced loft in Vancouver’s trendy Yaletown district, and knew Jessie well enough to discern that she needed to alleviate her stress through music. Within the hour, the two hardworking musicians had a full version of the new song ready for Jonathon’s party.
Outside the door, in the foyer, Ulysses was on security duty. As he listened to the lyrics over and over again, he could feel his heart start to pound. Was this just any song, or was Jessie trying to say something specific to the people at the party? Oh well. What did he know about music? She was just a pop singer, albeit a greatly loved one, and this was just a pop song.
After playing through the piece one last time Christian, well satisfied with their work, beamed through his Armani glasses at Jessie on the piano bench next to him, leaned an arm on her shoulder and asked her what the song was about.
“What I’ve learned about love these last few months. Rainbows,” she said complacently.
That struck him funny since there were no rainbows mentioned in the song, or anything about color or rainclouds or anything that seemed to him to have any relevance at all when it came to rainbows.
She expanded on the notion of rainbows in her lyrics. “Think of rainbows as representing the different kinds of love. Each bow nests in the other, at least in a child’s drawing it does, and if you want to look at it more scientifically then rainbows maybe meld into each other, each color onto the other. I think one color is romantic love, one is family love, one is the love you have for your friends, that kind of thing. They’re all there together, they fit into each other. At the top of the bow each is brighter in intensity, but on the way up and on the way back down they are usually lighter in color, as if they need to build up to the brightest kinds of love, and on the way down they are maybe losing steam, although you can still see them.”
She shifted on the bench and hammered out a chord as she pondered her thoughts. Caressing the ivory keys, almost forgetting that she was talking to another human being, she said, “There is one kind of love that still belongs in the rainbow, although it’s a dark, dark color, and that’s the kind that is only one-sided. It can be just as intense as the others, so it’s as brutal and unforgiving and painful and all those things for both the person who doesn’t want to accept that love, and to the beholder. It’s every bit as real as all the rest of the loves in the bow.”
She plunked out a few more soft notes of her new melody and spoke so softly that Christian had to lean in to hear her. “It made it more bearable to be with bad love once I realized it was still love. I also realized that once it was reversed and I was the one painfully in love, whether it be for romantic love or family love or friend love or even future love-like having my own family, children-that I could understand the agony of the person from what I call the darkest color of the rainbow. Because I felt the same pain. I feel the same pain. Still.”
She looked up at him intently. Christian seemed like a safe place right now. The countdown was on, and it was unlikely her accompanist was close enough to anyone to rat out any thoughts he might discern as dangerous or foreboding. Besides, he was an artist like Jessie. He would understand abstract thoughts.
“Christian,” she said. “The other thing about rainbows is that they don’t last. They are a sign, but they go away. They are sacrificed for the greater good, for sunny skies and happy days. They fade away into the sky…”
She had underestimated Christian. Sudden fear crossed his gentle face. He spoke carefully in response. “Rainbows are also a promise, Jessie. They are a covenant given by God. His way of saying that He will not flood the world again.”
“Yes, once given never forgotten, I understand that. His promise will always be there in spirit, floating on the wind. And the rainbows will be remembered. But they come and go, don’t they? Some brighter than others, depending on the storm that preceded them.”
He paused, serious now. He jumped up, sidled over to the coffee table with a frown thrown back over his shoulder at Jessie, and opened her MacBook. A minute later he lifted it, rested it on his forearm, faced her, and read, “A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection of light in water droplets in the Earth’s atmosphere, Jessie.”
“Yes,” she said, swinging her legs around to the side of the piano bench so that she faced him as well. “It’s that too.” And she remembered her father’s prisms in the grass the day he died.
She looked earnestly up at Christian, begging him to understand. Inside she thought, and oh rainbows are so much more.
She went to sleep that night under her comforting cherry blossom duvet and dreamed of promises, of covenants made and broken by lovers and loves of all the different kinds. She hoped Deuce would be breaking the last one he’d made to her, the one where he swore he would kill Josh once and for all. But she was tired of the fear and the worry and she longed for tomorrow, but dreaded it just as equally.
As she woke with the first rays of a p
ink dawn, Jessie thought hard about the covenant she recently made unto herself. She knew it was one she absolutely had to keep, even though she also understood that it would tear her apart.
***
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sunday dawned bright and clear. On this perfect sunny September Vancouver day, the Fraser Valley was alight with promise, its populace expectant, optimistic, hopeful. Jessie joined Charles and Dee for church, and was happy when Charlie slid into the pew beside her, taking her hand and holding it for the entire service, occasionally whispering little jokes, trying to make her laugh but not quite succeeding. She glanced down at his fingers, intertwined with hers, and then she brought the fingers of her broken wrist over and ran them over his knuckles. One more boy I must memorize, she thought, at the same time he was thinking maybe this is my chance to win her back.
The four of them ordered hearty brunch entrees at Jethro’s, causing quite a stir for the gossip rags as patrons indiscreetly filmed cell phone videos and uploaded them to YouTube before their omelets and gourmet pancakes even arrived. But Jessie no longer cared. As far as she was concerned, this crazy roller-coaster life as she’d come to know it would end today.
She asked Charlie to take her home to prepare for Jonathon’s party. In the bathroom she discreetly sent a text to Arnie. She had been down to see him earlier in the week on the pretense that she was simply visiting her old Downtown Eastside friends. Matt, with his high tech surveillance equipment, picked up the text and took a screen shot to send to Charles, but neither thought anything out of the ordinary. It read happy Sunday off to a birthday party now.
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