A Slippery Slope

by Tanya Gallagher

I turn away from the door and make my way to the table. Jackson’s chair is pushed back ever so slightly, like it’s waiting for him to return. I grab the stack of papers I hid from him, and this time when I sit down again I take his chair. It’s still warm.

  I spread the papers in front of me and lean over them. If I pause here too long this town will grow vines around my legs and try to keep me. Too many people already know about this business. And talking about a business and actually creating one are two very different things. Time to get out of here. I pick up a pen and I start to plan.

  Chapter 10

  A text message pings on my phone while I’m sitting on my couch, combing through online product listings for lube. I’ve been making a list of keywords for when I create my own product listing but the distraction of my phone is a welcome relief. There are only so many times you can read the words “slick” and “arousal” before your eyes start to bleed.

  It’s been a week since I let Jackson in on my secret and I haven’t let myself think about anything other than work and my new business in that time. When I pause, even for a minute, it’s an invitation to start thinking about Matthew and all the ways I miss my old life, and it just sucks. The shittiest thing about this situation is that for all the hurt I’m feeling now, there were good parts about the time I spent with Matthew. He brought order to my life when everything else seemed to be splintering apart, and I loved him for that. Even now, after everything that’s happened, I know how important it was for me to have that stability in my life. If only he hadn’t broken the same stability by breaking my trust.

  I shift my computer off of my lap, my skin hot underneath, and reach for my phone.

  Hey, babe, missing our usual girls’ night! Mandy’s text is accompanied by a photograph of her tiny balcony, glittering with string lights and a bottle of wine sitting in the middle of her patio table.

  The message shoots straight to my chest. Even though it’s not in the picture, I know my old balcony is sandwiched right next to hers, a mirror image. We actually met on the balconies the night I moved in, after I’d gone outside to look at the city lights. We struck up a conversation about waiting tables and she hung over the railing to offer me a glass of Chardonnay.

  Another picture, this time of two glasses of wine. Just gonna have to drink your glass for you, followed by a lewd winking face. I wonder if she’s bumped into Matthew in the building, if now that I’m gone he has Wendy over in my place. The idea of it makes my stomach twist, but I can’t muster up the energy to go into that with Mandy.

  I type, Miss you. Enjoy. Then I stuff the phone deep under the cushions of the couch. As much as it’s nice to hear from Mandy, it’s salt in a wound I didn’t realize was still so raw. She’s part of my old life with Matthew, and the logical part of me knows that just because he and I broke up doesn’t mean Mandy and I can’t be friends. The problem is, my heart can’t compartmentalize. Everything hurts, everything’s a fucking reminder of the sharp line between before and after. Even a well-intentioned text.

  I glance around the guesthouse, my shoulders dropping. Everything in Boston is spinning forward without me. Everything’s going to change and the longer I’m away, the harder it’s going to be to get my old life back. Even here in Swan’s Hollow, where nothing ever changes, things have changed. Yesterday I went to the cheap taco stand off the main drag just to get out of the house. They used to have Mexican Cokes—the kind made with real sugar—and they’d serve bottomless chips straight from the fryer. But the Coke was the standard can, and I had to pay for refills on my chips. If even that can change, Boston’s going to be a whole new world when I get back. Matthew will have had a chance to tell some version of our breakup story to all our friends, and I won’t have had a chance to tell my side. All the more reason to hurry up and get out of here.

  My eyes skim over the rooms that have become my home in these last few weeks. No matter how well I mold the couch to fit my body, no matter how cute Precious looks by the window with the plantation blinds, it’s still a guesthouse—emphasis on guest. The rooms are full of touches that Gayle’s decorator picked—ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like tiny white elephants, a campaign dresser with brass nailheads dotting the front panel. It’s not my apartment in Beacon Hill with the cobblestone path out front, with its high ceilings and framed posters of classic book covers on the walls. It’s missing the vintage desk that I’d haggled for at the Somerville Flea Market, the one with a hidden drawer and a mysterious gauge running down the left-hand side of the surface.

  And my books. God, my books. There were too many of them to pack in my escape; they were too heavy to fit in the boxes I stuffed in the back of my Camry. So I left without most of them. Gone is the copy of White Oleander that I picked up in the Trident Bookstore on Charles Street, polishing off my favorite lemon ricotta French toast afterward. Gone is the copy of Practical Magic from the huge Barnes & Nobel in the Prudential Center, the Dubliners from the tiny gift shop in Harvard Square.

  I did bring a few signed copies to Swan’s Hollow with me, but the little collection that’s still boxed up next to my fig tree doesn’t feel like a library. It doesn’t smell like coffee shops and paper and hope. It doesn’t make me feel like I can breathe deeply enough to fill my lungs.

  I’m sure I can go back for the rest of my books, but I’m not ready to face my old life just yet. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Suddenly I’m homesick—for Boston, for Matthew, for Mandy. For a time when I was happy. I might have been blind and stupid, but I didn’t have ragged edges and empty dreams. I didn’t feel like a ghost in my own life.

  I can’t remember the last time I laughed and meant it.

  Actually, that’s not true. With Jackson at the coffee shop the other week, some door inside me had eased open, but I slammed it shut again just as soon as it happened.

  I pull a shaky gulp of air and eye the boxes next to my tree again. Just a sideways glance, fast and noncommittal. I don’t want to give them my full attention, make them real. But, argh.

  I grab a kitchen knife and sink to my knees next to the cardboard tower. I left Boston quickly enough that I hadn’t labeled a single box, but if I tap the sides I can make a guess as to what’s inside of them.

  The box on top of the stack is light and it makes a hollow thud when I hit it. This one. Just the flap. Opening it doesn’t mean I’m unpacking.

  I slice the packing tape quickly and efficiently before I can second-guess myself. Inside I spot my fleecy winter blanket, red and black buffalo plaid, squares as big as my hand. I bought it in Copley Place one winter and even though Matthew hated it at first, it was the warmest, coziest thing either of us owned. Soon enough he was the one to reach for it on movie nights. We brought it with us the summer we camped in the Berkshires and it cushioned us when we had sex under the stars.

  I pull the plaid blanket from the box and wrap it around my shoulders. It smells like Matthew, and I get this feeling again that my life exists somewhere outside of this house and this town. This feeling like I’m waiting for something to start, or resume, or something.

  It’s too hot with the blanket draped around my shoulders, so I open the window near Precious to let in some air. Voices float in on the breeze, my dad’s and Gayle’s and someone that sounds remarkably like Jackson.

  Wait. I pull down the blinds. It is Jackson, standing there, shooting the breeze with my parents. I pinch the bridge of my nose and stare with horror at the scene. This is not what I need tonight.

  Not at all.

  Chapter 11

  Dammit, Jackson. I stalk toward the front door and shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops. Who knows what he’s already said to my dad and Gayle. What secrets has he already spilled? I need to stop him before he incriminates me, before he tells the whole world something he shouldn’t.

  I hurry down the path toward the main house, still clutching the plaid blanket around my shoulders. The floodlights trip when I approach my dad’s porch, despite the s
ky’s show-offy display of pink and orange sunset overhead, and the light catches the three of them in the face. Gayle’s mouth twitches into a straight line and then smooths out again. Jackson eyes me like I’m a feral cat. Like he doesn’t know yet if I’ll accept a back rub or if I’ll bite.

  To be honest, it could go either way.

  “Just who I was looking for,” Jackson says, confirming that this isn’t a social visit to bask in my stepmom’s charming personality. My shoulders tense and I narrow my eyes at him. How can he just show up at my door when I don’t even know where he lives? It’s just like Jackson, too—he decides to do something and he just does it. Without a reason. Just because he wants to. It’s probably why he slept with so many people in college. Act first, think about the repercussions later.

  I shake my head. I want to leave him standing on Gayle’s porch, but now that I’ve acknowledged him, I can’t pretend I’m not here. “Come on,” I tell him, turning back toward the guesthouse.

  At least it’s halfway amusing that this is our new pattern—me leading Jackson somewhere, expecting that he’ll follow if he wants to. I’m not the girl who used to trail him around town, waiting for him to offer rides, wanting him to be the one to ask.

  He follows.

  I kick off my flip-flops just inside my front door. “I didn’t know we were all friends,” I tell Jackson, keeping my blanket wrapped firmly around my shoulders.

  “Of course we’re all friends.” He waves his hand non-specifically. “I’m the handsome and charming bartender who’s a little over-generous when it comes to their wine pours and Gayle lets me use the porch to stash layers when I go on long runs.”

  “Wine pours? At Hooligans?”

  He look at me like come on, catch up.

  I’m not sure which piece of this news is harder to process—my parents at the damp, dark bar, or Gayle allowing her immaculate porch to be used as a drop station for running clothes, or, once again, Jackson running. Even seeing it in action it’s hard to believe.

  Before I can say anything else Jackson steps out of his shoes and glances around the room, his eyes touching on the stack of boxes. His eyebrows acknowledge them, drawing together for a second, before he looks back at my face.

  “So, hey,” he says brightly, as if this whole meeting had been my idea instead of his. “I’ve been thinking.” He walks across the room to retrieve a beer from my fridge as if he has some right to be here. As if no time has passed at all.

  Jackson holds up two beers, questioning, and I nod before sinking into a kitchen chair. Might as well.

  He hands me the second bottle, his fingers brushing mine all warm and calloused. The bottle is so cold it feels wet, and it shocks me out of making a snappy comeback.

  Jackson sits across from me at the little table and his long legs bracket mine. Heat radiates through his jeans and I shift. He’s so close.

  “Do you need a partner?” Jackson asks.

  My mind flies to the bottles of lube on my kitchen counter, the way Jackson’s shirt lifted when he leaned into the refrigerator, revealing a hint of skin just above his jeans.

  “Don’t look so horrified, Natalie. I just had some ideas for how to get traffic for your product launch.”

  Oh my god. He means a business partner. Of course.

  I don’t even know where to start with this, or how to explain my strange disappointment that Jackson’s here for business. Instead I ask the question that’s been weighing on me since I saw him sliding drinks to thirsty customers at the bar. “Aren’t you working at the store?”

  Wirth & Sons General Store is the reason his family moved to Swan’s Hollow to begin with. Jackson’s dad inherited the wide green barn from his own father the summer before Jackson’s sophomore year, and he moved the whole family East to carry on the Wirth & Sons tradition.

  Long before either of us was born, Jackson’s grandfather had converted the building into a store as famous for its contents as for the fact that one winter fifteen cars slid down the road in front of it and smashed into the low brick wall protecting the property. He’d stuffed the store with everything from overpriced Christmas ornaments and colored pencils hand-carved from foraged branches, to lollipops in a rainbow of colors and the requisite Greetings from Swan’s Hollow postcards. The store had always felt dusty and dry, but when Jackson’s dad took it over from his grandfather, he got rid of the dust and stocked it with a few other items, too. Milk and boxed mac and cheese, wine from a few local vineyards. Things you’d run out for in the middle of the night.

  If Jackson felt upset about being displaced from the Golden State to move to the Massachusetts gloom, he didn’t show it. When I asked about it he just shrugged his shoulders and said something like, “All the world’s an oyster and I know how to dive for pearls.” It wasn’t that he was relentlessly optimistic or cheerful or anything; I just don’t know if things got to him. And since I felt everything so sharply, it was at once a sticking point for me and a balm.

  Jackson takes a long swallow of his beer. “No.” Something sad flits across his face, something I might not have noticed if I didn’t know him so well. “I’m not working there at the moment.” His lips press into a line.

  I assumed Jackson had taken over when his dad passed away last year. His brother Conor had never expressed interest in the store and Jackson had always sort of known he was going to run the place one day. Still, he’d wanted something to do in the in-between. In the stretch of years he’d thought he’d have before he had to head back to Swan’s Hollow.

  Marine Biology, he decided one year. Being a professional hackey sack player, he told me another.

  We both agreed that leaving town was the only way to follow our dreams and grow. But Mr. Wirth is gone, now, and Jackson is here. So why isn’t he working at the store with his own damn name on it? And if he’s not working there, then why the hell is he still in Swan’s Hollow?

  I close my eyes against the sting of it. It’s not my business where Jackson works, but part of me feels bratty about it. He’s not doing what he said he would do. What’s going to happen if I let him into my business and he does the same thing? It’s not like I want a partner either way. I spent too much time relying on Matthew to keep the wheels on my life, and look where that got me. I’m starting this business for myself, by myself. Miss Independent, and all that.

  “Why do you even want to do this?” I ask.

  Jackson gives a little lift of his shoulders and with that subtle move, all the muscles ripple just below the thin material of his shirt. “Did I ever tell you I changed my major in school?”

  After that first year of college, the year I stopped talking to him, I assumed he was still following through with the latest plan: radio broadcasting so one day he could work at a sports network.

  I shake my head.

  “I switched over to business.” Jackson lets out a low laugh. “Ironic, since I’m not currently running a business.” I think about my expensive, unfinished degree. He’s not the only one doing something other than planned. “It would be nice to use my brain a little,” Jackson continues.

  “Right.” I snort. “I would think coming up with creative pickup lines to use on bar patrons is a good mental workout.”

  He looks a little wounded at that one, but quickly slides on a grin. “Don’t let me fool you. The pretty face does all the work. Anyway, I was top of my graduating class, Nat. I bring a lot to the table.”

  Top of the class, huh? Jackson’s younger brother had always been more into schoolwork while Jackson slid by on everyone’s good graces. So what changed? Was Jackson trying to prove something?

  I trail a finger through the condensation on my bottle of beer. “I need to sleep on it.” I don’t want to need anyone. Especially him.

  Jackson’s face doesn’t fall but he doesn’t break into the wide grin I expect. “Take as much time as you need” is all he says as he walks to the door.

  I never thought I’d call Jackson vulnerable, but something so
ft and needy slips over his broad shoulders, presses a crease between his eyes. I can’t get the picture of him out of my mind, even later, after he’s gone. Jackson Wirth, stopped halfway between here and there. He rests his hand on the doorframe, looking over his shoulder at me before he steps out into the night.

  Chapter 12

  Dammit.” I grit my teeth and toss the bottle of lube into my kitchen trash. It lands at the bottom with a thunk and I sink my face into my hands. How was I supposed to know that the lube was going to be crappy? Maybe the sleazy label should have been a clue, but I would have been willing to overlook that if the product itself was good.

  I stare in dismay at the pile of bottles on my kitchen table. I need to find the best possible lube from my competitors, so I can see if that manufacturer will make me my own version. So far, though, each version has sucked.

  My heart lurches as the next lube makes my hands tingle, but not in a good way. More like a slow, uncomfortable burn. Do people really put this on their junk?

  I lift the offending bottle and heave it in the trash as well. So much money, down the drain. Trying to find a quality product is starting to feel like an exercise in frustration, but there’s no way I’m going to start a business and put out a terrible lube.

  The third bottle in the trash adds insult to injury, and I lean back in my chair. If I don’t take a break I’m going to go crazy. Or, crazier.

  Five minutes later I knock on my dad’s front door and step back to wait for an answer. It feels funny to stand on the porch when we’re practically living together, but I’ve been away too long to just barge in. I miss the standing dates we used to have in Boston, the way I could look forward to each Thursday knowing that we’d meet in the dining hall on Boston University’s campus to grab lunch between my dad’s classes. The food wasn’t that great and being on campus after I’d dropped out still made my chest prickle, but hearing my dad talk about the latest exhibit at the Boston Public Library or explain String Theory or whatever more than made up for it. In some ways, it feels like I’ve seen him even less since I’ve been home. I wonder if he’s disappointed in the fact that I’m here at all. After all, he’s the parent here to witness the disaster that is my life. While my mom is sympathetic to my breakup and return to Swan’s Hollow, she also lives in Florida. She doesn’t have a daily reminder of how much I’ve screwed up.