Judging by the way Jack's brows drew together, he picked up on it. But he let it slide. "Just figured I would get this up here for you."
"That was thoughtful, thanks. And thanks for, ah, boxing everything up for me. You didn't have to do that."
"I was up," he said, shrugging.
It couldn't have gotten more uncomfortable if we tried.
I forced my feet forward toward the car, giving him a smile I hoped looked warmer than it felt. "I still say this is way too much," I said, touching the hood.
"Least I could do, Lyra," he said, not coming closer.
It felt pointed, intentional.
"Why don't you get some food in you?" he suggested, moving toward the front door. "Felix and I will load it up for you."
Right then.
I would be leaving within the hour.
I followed him inside and found Jack's supply of throwaway coffee cups, filling one up. There was no way I could eat with the knots my stomach felt tied in, but if I was going to undertake an eight-hour drive, I needed as much coffee as possible in my system.
I stood there, taking deep breaths and I watched as an energetic Jack and a somewhat unenthusiastic and obviously wholly unused to physical labor Felix grabbed and loaded box after box into the car.
"No!" I almost shrieked as Felix went to reach for the small wooden box Jack had made for me. "No," I added much more calmly, "I'll take that one," I said, walking over to him and taking it from is hands. I didn't want that one relegated to the cargo space or back seat. I wanted it up front with me. I wanted to slip my new wooden Vermont keychain onto my new key for my new-to-me car.
I was pretty sure it would give me a little stab every single time I saw it, especially given our unexpectedly cool, dismissive last morning.
But I wanted it right there with me regardless.
"Well, princess, I know you probably thought I was talking out my ass, but I really will look you up when I get back to the City. We'll have coffee. You can tell me what a genius I am for another couple of hours. You can make me food. Win/win," he said, giving me a kiss to the temple before heading for the stairs. "Drive safe."
He was gone before I could even thank him.
With that and Jack still outside, obviously waiting to see me off, I took a breath, looked around at his idyllic house one last time, and went to meet him.
The car was turned over, warming up. Always good about things like that, damn him. I moved to the passenger side, opening the door and putting the box in and the cup in the holder, before closing the door and moving over to the driver's side.
Jack was standing a few feet away, but with the strangeness between us, it might as well have been miles, I may as well have already been back in New York. I may as well have never existed.
I took a breath, watching it puff up in the air around me. "Again, Jack, thank you so much for all of this. It means the world to me. You really took a shitty situation and made it so much better and I don't know how to thank you." I was rambling. Word vomit, that was my thing when I was nervous or upset.
"Lyra," he said, cutting off another sentence I was just about to jump right into. "Get over here," he said, holding an arm out, inviting me in.
And, well, being the mix of elated I had been the past couple days and the devastated I had been all day, I didn't think. I didn't hesitate. I flew at him.
I hit him full force and while he let out a grunt, his massive form didn't budge an inch as his arms went around me.
And it was tight.
And warm.
And perfect.
And he smelled like him and his heart was under my ear and his lips pressed down into the top of my head.
I closed my eyes tight as my arms held him back just as tight.
"It was really nice getting to know you, Lyra," he told me, voice quieter than usual and still heavy with meaning.
It took me a long second to make sure the emotion wouldn't seep out in my tone before I spoke. "It was really nice getting to know you too, Jack." Then, because it was hurting too much, way, way too much for such a short acquaintance, I added, "And, you know, thanks for not raping and killing me then wearing my skin as a dress. You know, I really appreciate that too."
His chest rumbled deliciously for a second before I forced myself to pull away. "Any fucking time, doll," he said, giving me a warm smile and touching my chin with his thumb and forefinger. "Drive safe, okay?"
I swallowed hard as I gave him another smile. "I will. Thanks."
With that, I forced myself to turn. I forced myself to get in the car, to slam the door, to put it in reverse, to pull away, to drive down the road.
And it was force. Every single inch I moved took work, it took determination, it took a real strength of will to not turn around and fly back into his arms.
But I did it.
I drove down the road, I drove out of town, I drove out of Vermont.
I drove back into my life.
Because, at the end of the day, what felt right and what needed to be done didn't always mean the same thing. Sometimes you had to leave even if it hurt. Sometimes you needed to get back to your old life after a real life fantasy because that was what was done, that was what was logical, that was just the cold hard reality.
I went back to my apartment that I hated a little more than I used to.
I loaded my things in and put them away.
I ate.
I went to sleep.
Eventually, I went back to work.
I tried to forget.
Twelve
Lyra - 11 months
It was unreal.
That was really the only way to describe it.
It didn't matter that I had worked so hard for it, that I had went without sleep for it, that I had sacrificed luxuries like cable and Netflix and takeaway coffee for it. It didn't matter that every single step of the way had taken actual effort on my part.
Now that it was here, it still felt strange, it felt like something that was happening for someone else, to someone else.
But my name was on the sign.
My name was on the sign at an art gallery and my pictures were lining the walls.
Granted, it was a modest art gallery that may have actually been just a couple feet larger than my bathroom at my apartment, but it didn't matter. It was a brick and mortar business. It had a staff and a clientele and they had art shows.
Like mine.
I was having my first, very own, freaking art show.
I pulled my cell out and took a picture of the sign, then me squatting down next to the sign so my face was in the shot. Then I took a picture of the building. It was a sweet little red brick thing with giant glass windows and carefully chosen lighting. The walls were an off-white and the floors were a sleek dark wood. There was a small, understated dark desk to one side so people could purchase pieces and have them scheduled for shipment or pick-up.
But three of the walls were all mine.
The canvases varied in size- some as tall as I was, some no bigger than a sheet of paper. The subjects and styles varied as well. I had a couple abstracts and several pieces that were considered expressionism. But the majority, my pride and joys, were my hyperrealism pieces, the ones that, if you looked at them, you'd swear were photographs.
But my blood, sweat, and tears were in those.
Mostly, tears.
I swear there were some smudges from where there was quite literally some of my saltwater on them.
See, when I got home, I slowly but surely fell into a funk.
The girls and guys at work, they just called it the 'post holiday blues'. They told me it was normal. They said it was from all the excitement and preparation followed by the zenith, then inevitably, the slow fall downward. The higher you soared, the further you had to fall.
I accepted that at first.
Especially seeing as it was my first real Christmas and it was the epitome of perfection.
But I kept falling and falling and
falling.
Eventually, all I did was work and sleep.
And that was right about the time I heard a knock on my door, dragging me out of three layers of blankets in sweatclothes I hadn't changed all weekend, my hair in a knot and unwashed, what was left of my makeup from work on Friday still on my face because I hadn't bothered to wash it off.
I didn't get a lot of knocks, but my neighbor wasn't a stranger when she ran out of stuff to cook, so I wasn't overly suspicious as I slid the locks.
"Maddie, I haven't been to the store in three weeks, I am bare cabinets," I called as I opened the door. "Oh," I said, my mouth falling open.
Because it wasn't Maddie.
Oh, no. Not even close.
"Princess, what the fuck?" Felix asked, face falling from a happy smile to a concerned shock in the space of a blink. He had a shopping bag hanging from his wrist, a pile of paper under his arm, and a tray of coffee in his hand.
"Felix?" I asked, blinking twice, maybe a little bit concerned that my funk that turned to depression might have taken a turn to outright psychosis. Because I had to be seeing things.
"I brought coffee and a manuscript and a grocery bag full of shit for you to make me chicken parm."
"Chicken parm?" I parroted, shaking my head.
"Because I said we would hang out and you would cook for me and give me notes."
I slow blinked at him again, willing my brain to work through the tar it had been covered in for weeks. "How do you know where I live?"
"Funny thing," he said, pushing inward, making me go back a step so he could let himself into my apartment, "when you're a writer who only writes two or three books a year, you tend to have a lot of downtime. I knew your name and I knew you worked at a hospital. I stalked around online until I found a picture of you on one of your coworkers' profiles. Then I contacted them. Luckily for me, he was a fan and all too happily gave up your address."
"Gary," I supplied shaking my head. I had to have a talk with him about boundaries. He should have asked. But, then again, I hadn't checked my phone all week and Gary and I were working alternating schedules. Maybe he had texted or left a message.
"Nice guy," he agreed, walking over to my small kitchen and putting his bag down with the manuscript beside it. "What is this?" he asked when I walked over, motioning to my body as a whole.
"What is what?"
"This homeless look you have going on."
I shook my head, going over to the coffee machine and starting to make a fresh pot, somehow already forgetting that he had brought a tray with him. "Post-holiday funk."
"Lyra, it's February," he said, words heavy with meaning. "You're not in a post-holiday funk; you're depressed."
"Alright," I acknowledged, turning back to him. "I'm depressed. So what?"
His head cocked to the side at that. "Alright. Go take a shower. Get into something less sad. Then come cook me dinner and while you do that, we're going to talk."
Then we did. Well, he did most of the talking. He told me about his own battles with ups and downs, how on his downs, he needed to take off to Coral Cabins and write it out, that I needed to find my outlet too. That was when he motioned to the art stuff I had stacked beside the window that overlooked the street that I had unpacked and had been gathering dust since.
"So put it onto canvas, princess. You have to get it out. If you don't, it'll eat you up from the inside out."
I made him dinner.
He left.
I read his book.
He came back the next day for notes and to drag me to the art supply store where he paid for an obnoxious amount of canvases and paints and pastels and pencils. He told me it was his payment for the notes on his novel, that his editor charged thousands for what I had done for him, but was nowhere near as kind about it.
Then I did what he said- I got it on canvas. I got it out of me.
As such, many of the pieces I ended up with varied greatly from the jubilant highs to devastating lows. There were two pictures of Jack's house side by side on one wall- one from when I arrived, one from when I left, the feelings of each clear in the colors used, in the softness of the first and the hard lines of the second. There was my Christmas tree, lying on the ground after being chopped. There was a man standing behind a woman- his arm across her breasts, his hand covering the juncture between her thighs, all soft, smudged graphite. No faces. There didn't need to be. Anyone could relate to the feeling there.
"Princess, you did it," Felix said, coming up beside me and handing me a champagne flute. He clinked his glass to mine. "We have ten minutes before you officially open. Drink to yourself. You've earned it."
Felix and I, we had gotten close.
Reclusive by nature, I didn't see him every day or every weekend or even every month. But he always showed up, always unexpectedly, and always with a bag of groceries and a dinner request.
In eleven months, he had brought me two more books. I had given him notes on each. He had helped me find an art venue and pick the canvases to display out of the four or five dozen I had scattered around my apartment.
And because he brought me two books, I knew he had been to Coral Cabins. I knew he had seen Jack.
I couldn't bring myself to ask and he never offered anything either.
But I knew.
So whenever I saw pages, there was a stabbing sensation in my chest and stomach.
It didn't lessen with the months in between.
It was always acute, fresh as ever.
"This is my favorite," Felix said, walking over to the one that had felt like the biggest weight off when I finally finished it. It was my box, the one Jack had made me, done in a hyper-realistic style and wrapped with chains, the lock in the center with a heart shape where the keyhole should have been, the detail so small that it was hard to make out unless you were looking for it.
I didn't want it to be there.
I didn't want to sell it.
It was too raw, too real, too honest.
It was everything I wouldn't allow myself to think, let alone say.
But I figured maybe getting rid of it would be cathartic.
Standing there looking at it, though, with a line of people starting to stand outside the gallery doors, waiting to possibly buy it, my heart and throat felt constricted at the idea of it being gone.
"You're on," Felix said a moment later as we stood there silently. He took my flute and walked toward the desk as the doors opened and people came in.
Two hours later, the show was over. The last few stragglers filed out. Felix was nowhere to be found. And I was left to walk around and see which paintings had sold stickers and which did not. A third were sold. Which was fair for a first time artist, a no name. And the rest had a chance as they would be on display for six more days to the general public.
I walked over to my box picture, feeling my stomach plummet at seeing the little sold sign in the corner.
It was going.
It was finding a new home.
And still I felt no relief.
I went home and made coffee. I paced my apartment, a mix of pride and disappointment flooding my system. The low after the high, I tried to convince myself.
But I knew it wasn't that.
I knew exactly what it was, in fact.
Because there were things I had learned through my adolescence and adulthood- coffee burned after an hour and a half; buying new underwear because I didn't want to do laundry did not, in fact, alleviate the original problem; books were a fantastic escape from real life; and crushes faded.
But nothing about the elation I felt with Jack had faded.
It was all fresh.
The highs, the lows, the everything in between.
He wasn't a memory, something easily relegated to the back of the mind.
Because it wasn't a crush.
Somehow, between the crash, snowball fights, hot chocolate drinking, cookie baking, tree trimming, snowman making, tree decorating, present exchanging, passio
nate sex, and the inevitable departure, I had fallen in love with him.
And it hurt.
It hurt in a visceral way.
It wasn't the same every day.
Some days, it was a burning thing.
Other days, it was a churning that made me sick.
Others still, it was a crushing sensation in my chest.
But no matter what I did, regardless of how busy I made myself, of how hard I tried to work the feelings out, they were always there.
I didn't get over them; I got better at living with them.
And I was determined to continue to get better and better.
So on the morning of December twenty-third, I unboxed an artificial Christmas tree. I dragged out my decorations.
I fought the tears as I did the lights.
I fought them as I put on the ornaments.
And I fought them some more as I got out my goddamn dining room chair and put up the star all by myself, like any self-respecting, independent, single woman would.
But when I finally did the unthinkable, when I finally opened that box and I pulled out the mountain-shaped ornament with the previous years' date on it and tried to hang it, I finally lost the battle I had been fighting for a year.
And the pressure of that fell on me all at once, literally brought me to my knees in front of that tree.
About twenty minutes of clutching that ornament to my chest later, I made a decision.
Then I got my ass off that floor, I packed a bag, I plugged an address into my GPS, and I got in the freaking car.
Because I figured that if you met someone who in the course of a few short days could still affect you so deeply a full year of no contact later, that that was something rare, precious, worth making yourself vulnerable over.
Maybe I would be making a fool of myself.
Maybe my heart was slamming and my stomach was in knots the entire drive.
Maybe he didn't feel the same way.
Maybe he had even moved on to someone else.
But I owed it to myself, to the feelings that had been drowning me since I left, to see for sure.
The not knowing was not, as the Tindersticks song that I had been playing on repeat said, easy.
Unwrapped Page 9
