The One Percent

by Tara Wimble

  The place is nice and the distance from their practices and anything they might need is short and sweet. Kathryn is the only one with a car as well, with Bella choosing to leave hers in Toronto, so they get used to the public transport pretty fast. Plus there’s a sweet bakery just on their route to practice that Bella just can’t get enough of.

  Jacque had felt the need to apologise when she’d gotten the chance because since coming back from camp it had been nonstop for them. But sharing a room with her wasn’t bad. On the nights that Kathryn stays up or brings friends around, Bella stays with Jacque, on the quieter moments in the apartment, she’s able to sneak through to the guest room and sleep there instead with no one the wiser.

  Really though, she’s getting used to sharing a bed with a self-proclaimed cover stealer.

  Cover stealer and wife is the next one that she runs back to even as she yells at Bella to get back up front. “You’re not supposed to be back here.” Jacque protests. “We’re gonna lose-”

  Bella still makes her catch her anyway and it’s not because there are people watching. There’s always someone watching them. But she’s happy and there’s not a lot of people she can share that with. “Shut up.”

  *

  Bella starts whistling in the mornings, after breakfast, on their way to practice and Jacque never fails to look at her like she’s grown three heads. It’s crazy because it’s practice and sure, Jacque loves her some soccer but there is nothing to be excited about in the prospect of two-a-days.

  But there’s Bella with a Danish and a permanent goofy smile affixed to her face and Jacque starts to wonder if her wife is an actual insane person.

  About a month after they get to Vancouver Bella sits her down. It’s already weird because this is more serious than Bella ever gets with her and it makes a knot twist low in Jacque’s stomach.

  She’s seeing someone.

  There’s a bakery about ten minutes from their practice fields. Home of the Danishes that Bella picks up and the cupcakes that she brought home that Jacque instantly took a liking to. There was something about the icing.

  He pursued her through baking. All those times Bella insisted on buying while she waited in the car. Jacque noticed but never questioned that she never came out with a receipt for items bought and or the slip of paper hidden in the bags.

  His name is Blake.

  She dislikes him even before she’s even met him. There’s a crook somewhere in her body reserved for the count of people Bella has slept with or dated and within it there’s the jealousy she tried to deny for so long. This time it seems different because she doesn’t meet him. Bella keeps him to herself and Jacque is too proud to face up to him on her own, for fear of what she might say.

  But he charms her. Jacque soon finds herself stuck with the wrappers while he's getting all the sweet things hidden in the middle that she desperately wants.

  “I’m being careful-”

  “Didn’t need to know you’re having sex with him-” Her voice says it’s a joke but her stomach turns.

  Bella rolls her eyes. “We’re not but thanks for your concern- I meant, what with Kathryn.”

  Their elusive third roommate is at the gym for the morning and planning on dragging them all out for dinner later so Jacque knows that she needs to have her face on before she comes back. Kathryn has a way of seeing through anything less than put together.

  “Right. Just-” Jacque doesn’t want to tell her how to live her life. This is all an arrangement to Bella. She’s completely blind to the possibility, the reality, that it’s become something more to her. And she’s not about to tell her. “-you know he can’t come over here while Kathryn’s here.”

  “No, I know. Too risky.” Bella rubs her hands over her knuckles, hiding them. “And I’m sorry, I know that this just makes everything a little more complicated-”

  She’s heard hundreds of times over the years that Bella hasn’t forgotten what this means to her. Every time it feels less honest. There’s a countdown to Bella becoming an actual Canadian citizen that Jacque can hear ticking in her head. Everything ends sooner or later.

  “Don’t worry about it, just-” Jacque grimaces through a smile. “use your head, remember? You’re smart when you want to be.”

  Oblivious to the tension, Bella stands to give her a hug. Moments like this, usually reserved for public displays or cameras, are different. A little more natural because there’s no lying in what it means when there’s no one watching.

  That leaves her filled with even more disappointment when Bella leaves Jacque to pick at the cupcakes she’d presented on the table.

  Jam filled, Jacque sighs, he’s got her sweet thing.

  *

  Hockey is not Bella’s thing. Sure she has a Blackhawks jersey and yeah if they’re making a playoff run she’ll watch like the rest of the city, that’s just Chicagoland sports, but going for fun. No. Jacque can definitely tell this isn’t in her element.

  But it’s adorable that she’s still bundled up in a borrowed Maple Leafs sweatshirt and a stolen Leafs beanie at the game trying to be into it for Jacque’s sake.

  Also for the sake of Kathryn and Jan, who’s visiting, because at the end of the day it’s also about the show that they’re putting on more than anything and even their hangouts have to be good ones.

  Still though any person, even just a best friend, who’d endures the drunken yells of angry Canucks fan, is quite the trooper.

  “How long is intermission?” Bella leans over and asks in her momentary break from her conversation with Kathryn. Jacque notices her leg bouncing and she’s shivering slightly.

  “About fifteen or twenty minutes.” Jacque responds, still focused on Bella’s obvious coldness.

  “Hmm.” She turns back to Kathryn and Jan and they engage again talking about some cute guy Kathryn met on a trip or something. Jacque hasn’t been paying attention because unlike the three people who she brought, inexplicably all non-fans, she’s actually here for the game.

  So she sits back and accepts flatly that it’s just going to be her watching the game with the occasional ‘was that a good thing’ muttered from Bella towards her general direction.

  The middle of the second period and it’s an exciting one, she’s engrossed and while everyone is paying slight attention due to the minor chance that a puck flies their way, it’s not about the hockey.

  Bella’s still shivering and Jacque wants to ask about it. It’d be totally fine in the context of, they’re married and this is something she’d ask her wife, but it seems inappropriate all of sudden.

  No. Not all of a sudden. Since Blake. Since she found out about him anyway because apparently it was blooming right under her very nose.

  Young love. How fucking annoying.

  Because now she can’t even do the thing she’s supposed to do and she doesn’t even mean her awful indecision over whether to offer her obviously cold wife her jacket.

  It’s everything. It stopped feeling right the moment she could tell Bella was serious about this guy. The very moment and then it’s like she’s the other woman. The invisible woman.

  Her place is officially as the ‘other’. She’s the unknown quantity. The part that doesn’t quite fit into the grand scheme of things. No matter how much she desperately wants to.

  And fuck she can’t even enjoy a full hockey game, with her team in Vancouver and that only happens like four times a year, because of this stupid crush she has on her wife.

  “Babe.” Bella turns and she raises an eyebrow at the pet name but Jacque says it because she can say it in the context. It feels good to say it, like she has some semblance of power when it’s feeling more than ever like the ball is in Bella’s court. “You want my jacket?”

  Bella smiles and it’s that patented best friend smile, the one that everyone else thinks is a symbol of their undying puppy love but might as well say ‘you’re the best, bud’. She makes a big show of taking it playing it up for Kathryn and Jan.

&n
bsp; “Damn Jacque, superwife in the house.” Kathryn jokes.

  “Seriously,” Jan interjects. “Bella are you sure you want to keep her? Because if not she could totally come be my wife.” Jan winks and Jacque smiles, it feels like a wince in her chest, but she puts on her full force beam.

  The next time the alcohol concessions guy walks the stairs Jacque orders two beers, one for her and one for ‘Bella’.

  She drinks both.

  *

  With Kathryn out visiting her boyfriend for the weekend Bella had asked if it’d be alright for Blake to come and hang out with her in the apartment. Jacque hadn’t wanted to press on what ‘hanging out’ actually meant or start a fight. The rules really only concerned Bella being careful when Kathryn was around and since she was gone, Jacque didn’t have much to protest about.

  Instead she made the conscious choice to leave before he got there. They hadn’t met, not for lack of Bella trying, and Jacque kind of wanted to keep it that way. It was a lot easier to dislike someone on principle if you never met them. Blake the baker was someone she definitely did not feel like meeting.

  She takes the afternoon to just catch up on city life again. Vancouver has always been one of her favorite places in the world to be. There’s no end to the shops that catch her attention. She buys way too many shirts considering she doesn’t need them, but justifies it since Bella has taken to forgetting which ones belong to her and which don’t. Meaning Jacque usually has less in her wardrobe than she imagines she has.

  Granville keeps her busy and her pockets lighter. She’s caught off guard a few times when friends she hasn’t seen in a while stop her to say hello. She catches up with a few of them as they stroll in the same direction with promises to meet up again later on. Most of them do notice the ring and coo as she coyly tells them about the wedding and Bella. Day by day her performance improves.

  Kathryn checks in with her later on, once her bags are heavier and Jacque trades shopping in for sitting and eating. Kathryn’s boyfriend is a nice guy and it’s probably because he’s such a nice guy that Bella had moped around so much before the opportunity to invite Blake around had arisen. Either way, Jacque isn’t getting in the middle of all that. It’s bad enough that she’s having to deal with the irrational jealous flashes that come on when Bella talks about him. She didn’t mean for them to emerge so suddenly like this but things were good before.

  Jacque isn’t fooling herself. Bella is still a straight girl that teases way more than she realizes and there’s no which or way that Jacque ever sees something happening. Their friendship though feels heavier. They’re not friends in the sense that she is with Kathryn or Allison, but there’s no definition to it. You don’t marry your friend, you don’t do what she’s done for Bella and still get to call it normal. It’s not normal.

  She watches her bag when getting up to the bar. They’ve started serving alcohol and Jacque isn’t ready to go back before Bella let’s her know he’s left.

  This means that she’s sitting in a booth with three other people about two hours later having made new friends through realizing a mutual connection. She’s pretty sure one of them mentioned the national team a few topics back and her buzz goes further when the next round comes and goes. It’s nice just not worrying about putting on an act, and although the guy who recognized her asks for a photo just before she leaves, there’s not a mention of anything else.

  She has a missed call from Bella which didn’t go through to voicemail meaning that Blake has left. While she waits for a cab she presses a quick call to Sadie to see how she’s doing. It’s not a long call, considering Sadie has company, but it fills the silence that the cab driver meets her with and she feels better when she stumbles up towards her apartment.

  The only bump in her plan is getting her bags through the door. Jacque stares at them as if she can’t remember buying that much and sighs. Getting them down the hall is easy enough but it’s late and she doesn’t want to drag them into her room and risk waking Bella up in the guest room.

  Jacque sorts through the bags in the living room and instantly regrets some of her decisions. Mostly because they look similar to some shirts she already has and one is suspiciously a different size to when she bought it. Unlike Bella she doesn’t have a complex for buying things a size down. She likes her clothes to fit.

  They’re left folded on the coffee table for her to put in her room tomorrow morning.

  Jacque heads for the kitchen for a glass of water ready for tomorrow morning before stopping as Bella’s room is decidedly empty with the light on. Huffing, because they’ve had a talk about bills before, she walks in to switch off the lamp by the bed. As soon as she switches it off she knows.

  It doesn’t stop her from opening the door to the shared bathroom, to the light above the mirror there, which she switches off as well. And it doesn’t stop her from peering through the gap in through to the master bedroom.

  Of course that’s where Bella is, riding atop Blake with her head thrown back, while his hands help his hips’ effort to thrust inside of her. They can’t see her, the lack of light in the bathroom makes sure of that, but Jacque can see them, or more specifically, Bella.

  And she’s never going to get the image of Bella’s taut, arching body, or the sounds she makes when he grunts inside of her, out of her mind.

  Jacque doesn’t know how long she stands there, no more than a few seconds, but it’s enough to turn her stomach. She doesn’t close the door to the bedroom but shuts the connecting one in the guest room. Fleeing into the living room doesn’t help because now it’s all too real. She can actually hear them out here now, while she couldn’t before.

  She bites down on her hand because she can’t find the words to calm herself down. In the midst of the twinge she felt, burning, at the sight of Bella like that, there’s anger because that’s her room and her bed, no matter what they put in there to fool people otherwise.

  The closed door is a personal affront. She’s going to have to burn those sheets.

  The jealousy doesn’t hit her until later when she’s had to retreat to the guest room. By then she’s just replaying it in her head and trying to stop. It’s unfair to Bella for her to be thinking of her like this. It’s unfair to Jacque as well because she didn’t ask for this. These unintended feelings came as a consequence of Bella’s close friendship and the guilt that follows is her own doing.

  Jacque can’t hear anything in the minutes she waits before falling into a fitful sleep.

  He may have finished by the time she’s dead to the world but there’s no such luck for the visuals in her dreams. The first ones are tortuous reels of the scene she walked into. Of him mostly and of Bella’s face. Her mind soon turns and then it’s her. It’s her that Bella hovers above and grinds down on. With her strong thighs trapping Jacque underneath her and a hand pressing on her stomach. Jacque almost-

  She’s shaken out of her sleep and into a cold sweat. Her shirt is slick against her body and the back of her neck is soaked. It’s not the first time she’s had a dream like this but somehow last night has only made it so much worse. Now she doesn’t have to imagine what Bella looks like rolling her hips down onto something hard. She’s got a permanent front seat memory.

  The door to her room is still closed when she gets up to make coffee to battle the oncoming headache. It won’t solve the sudden upswing that her sexual frustration has taken in the last seven hours but it gives her something to busy her hands with in the meantime.

  Her busy hands start on making a hot breakfast and sipping more coffee when the disruption comes.

  “I’m a terrible wife.”

  “Holy shi-” Jacque’s little jump at Bella’s voice tips scalding liquid onto her hand and she quickly drops it back down to wash it off. “Don’t sneak up on people like that.”

  Jacque tries not to linger too much on Bella. Her mind is still pulling at all that she saw last night and even though the large shirt and sweats Bella wears almost drown her figur
e, Jacque can imagine well enough.

  Instead she turns back to the pancake mix that she’s gotten ready and starts to heat up the pan for them. Suddenly she’s unsure as to how many she’s making for.

  “Just two.” Bella answers her hesitation and accepts that Jacque knew about her little sleepover.

  Jacque asks because she’s polite if nothing else. “How was your night?”

  “It was good.” Good not great. Always a plus. “Kind of want to apologise.”

  Jacque picks up her cup and urges Bella with a ‘stop’ motion from her other hand. “Let’s not.”

  Bella trains her eyes on Jacque’s hands as she pours out the mix. “I tried to get through to you but your phone was off and- I thought he’d be out before you got back.”

  Honestly, all Jacque wants to be able to say is that she’s not happy with it. But that opens so many other cans of worms that she falls back on what she’s good at. Humor. “I suppose he was still ‘in’ then when I got home.”

  It takes Bella a second. “Oh-”

  Jacque takes a victorious sip of coffee. Pancake number one starts to cook.

  “-jeez Jacque.” She flushes bright red and that’s a reaction that Jacque didn’t expect to see again so soon and splutters. Luckily, Bella’s embarrassment covers her own. “Oh man,”

  Every word is a twist to her gut but Jacque can’t do more than hide her own tracks and the growing knot in her stomach. “And in, and out, and in-”

  Bella groans but Jacque can see the hint of a laugh in the corner of her mouth. “You perv.”

  She snorts at that. “Tell that to our neighbors when they complain about the surround sound you put on-”

  “I did not!”

  “Well, I find that hard to believe.” Flipping number one, Jacque seals her indifferent mask by adopting a higher pitched voice and sighing loudly in pleasure.

  “I do not sound like that!”

  “You don’t?” Jacque laughs. “Because that’s what I heard and I know these walls aren’t that thick-”

  She points to the cupboard before Bella can protest and Bella stomps to get out some plates. “I can’t believe you.”