We were sitting on the floor in front of the fire with our backs against the hope chest at the end of the bed. It had been an hour since I’d procured the bourbon from my duffel bag, and Briana was very, very drunk.
We were playing a drinking game with a deck of cards we found in the nightstand. We had to fling one into the fireplace, and if we missed, we had to take a drink. The score was one to four, not in her favor.
She was leaning into my shoulder and I pried the bottle out of her hands. “I think we’re done with this,” I said, putting on the top and setting it next to me.
“I wish we had Cheez-Its.” Her retainer made her lisp.
I chuckled a little and she lolled her head to look up at me. “Don’t laugh at me. With your…your perfectly symmetrical face and your nice teeth and the puppy-dog thing.”
I smiled. I didn’t know what she meant about the puppy-dog thing, but I’d take the teeth and symmetrical face any day.
I had never been so happy to be trapped in a room.
She was wearing my shirt. It would smell like her when I got it back. I couldn’t wait. It was a little short, though, and I kept getting glimpses of things I probably shouldn’t be seeing. I was happy about this too, but also knew she was too buzzed for modesty, so I’d pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped her in it.
She hiccupped.
“Do you need to throw up?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I never throw up. Ever.” “Ever?”
“Nope. Not even norovirus can take me down. I have a cat—a cat iron— a cast-iron stomach—have you ever heard of the two beers and a puppy litmus test?”
I shook my head, smiling at her. “No.”
She rubbed her nose. “You ask yourself would you have two beers with this person and let them watch your puppy for a weekend? Some people are a yes/yes. Some are a no/no. My ex was a yes/no. He was fun to be around, but I couldn’t rely on him.”
“Amy was a no/yes. She was reliable but she wore me out.”
“I’ve been thinking that for me you’re a yes/yes,” she said. It came out “yeth/yeth.”
I smiled at her gently. “You’re a yes/yes for me too.”
“Good. Because I want to tell you something. Because I think you should know what kind of person I am, you know? Like, what I’m capable of?”
“Okay…”
“You might not like me after.”
I gave her an amused look. “I’m sure I will like you.”
She shook her head. “No. This is really bad. Like, it’s so bad. It’s about what I did to Nick. When I found out.”
I peered down at her. She looked so serious I pivoted to face her. “Tell me.”
She looked at me a moment like maybe she was reconsidering. Then she leaned over my lap and grabbed the bourbon, pulled the top off, took a swig, and set it back down.
“Wow, that bad, huh?”
She came back to her side and looked up at me with a sniff. “So when I was in college, I used to work at Starbucks, right? And when I’d get a rude customer, I’d make their drink extra good. Like, I’d use cold-pressed coffee in their Frappuccino instead of the coffee concentrate, that kind of thing? And I wouldn’t tell them what I did so they could never re-create it. That way for the rest of their life their drink would never be as good again and they’d always be chasing that one time and they’d never enjoy it the way they did that day.”
“Okaaaaay…”
“This isn’t the part,” she said. “This is so you can get it, okay? So you can see how diabolical I am.”
I chuckled. “All right…” She looked at me bleakly.
I arched an eyebrow. “What’d you do?”
She drew in a long breath. Then she mumbled something too low for me to hear.
I dipped my head. “What? I couldn’t hear you.” “I said I poured glitter all over the house.”
I choked on my laugh. “What?”
“Five gallons of it. I put it on the blades of the ceiling fans too. For later. I got a ladder and I took so much of it and I poured it up there so when they turned on the fan—”
I descended into a fit of laughter.
“It’s not funny, Jacob! I’m not proud of this, this isn’t how rational people behave!”
“No, you’re right,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “You should be in jail. I’m calling the police.”
“Jacob!”
I had to put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t wake up Alexis and Daniel, I was cracking up so hard.
Part of this was the bourbon making me loopy, part of it was the story, but most of it was the morose, serious way she was telling it. Like she was confessing to a murder.
“That’s not all.” She swallowed hard. “I stole the microwave plate. And the lightbulb out of the fridge. I took the lid for the blender and the oven mitts and the garage door opener and I untuned his guitar and I tore out the last five pages of the book he was reading. I put red Kool-Aid in the shower head and peeled the labels off all the canned food and I put raw shrimp into the curtain rod on the window next to the bed—stop laughing!”
I was practically crying.
“They call it Pulling a Briana Ortiz at work,” she said miserably. “It’s so embarrassing. I think the nurses tell it to their boyfriends to scare them straight or—”
I had to pull her in and kiss the top of her head. I couldn’t help it. She looked so despondent.
“They had to replace the carpet,” she whispered. “They couldn’t get the sparkles out.”
“Well, in your defense, I think he deserved it,” I said, chuckling into her hair.
She nodded into my chest. “He did. He really did.” “Where do you get five gallons of glitter?”
“Amazon.” Sniff. “Prime.” “Of course. Do you regret it?” “No.”
I let a laugh out through my nose.
She stayed there for a second, sniffling against my shirt. Then she sat up and wiped her hair off her face. “Tell me something nobody knows about you.”
“What?”
“I told you this. It’s my most embarrassing thing. So you tell me something now.”
I sat back against the hope chest and gave it some thought.
“Okay,” I looked back at her. “When I came into Benny’s hospital room, I froze up because you were so beautiful.”
Her jaw dropped. “What?” “I couldn’t even talk.”
She giggled. “Stop!” She pushed my knee. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better about the glitter.”
I looked at her steadily. “I’m serious.” She gawked and I smiled.
“Well, I can’t stop staring at your collarbone,” she said. I looked at her amused. “My collarbone?”
“I think it’s so sexy.” She lisped on sexy. “And your forearms. I love them.”
Well. I was never wearing long sleeves again. Winter was going to be rough.
“When I was sitting at the restaurant talking to you that day, it rained,” I said. “I was on the patio. I got drenched.”
Her mouth fell open. “You sat in the rain just to talk to me?”
I looked at my lap for a long moment before looking back up at her. “I’d do a lot more than that for you.”
She raised her eyes to mine and we peered at each other in the silence.
The fire crackled and warmed the side of my face and the flames danced across her irises and I wanted to kiss her so badly every inch of my body screamed.
And that was the moment.
The first time my brain consciously registered what my heart had been telling me for the last few weeks.
I wasn’t falling in love with her. I already was.
It’s funny how similar longing feels to grief. Even though she was right here, all I could think about was the part that was missing. The part I’d never get.
I was destined to love her up close and then eventually from a distance, and she’d never know it or love me back.
It stole the air from my lungs. It stole the strength in my arms and legs. It made me weak with disappointment and hopelessness, and I knew I would always carry the ache I felt in this moment.
Briana was a catastrophic life event. A thing that changed everything. And I wouldn’t be the same after this. All the women I’d ever met and all the women I ever would fell away beneath her.
She had me.
And it wasn’t because I was slightly buzzed, or feeling sentimental, or because of the way the fire lit her face, or how my shirt clung to her body. She had me. And I suspected she always would. No matter how this ended.
Nothing could have prepared me for her.
I reached out and put a hand to her cheek. A rule, broken. A boundary crossed. I had no reason to touch her like this. Nobody was watching.
But she didn’t move away. She just closed her eyes and leaned into it and I tried to pour all the love I felt into this tiny contact. Like maybe it would
help me reach her. Maybe she could feel it and it would change something that likely wasn’t ever going to change.
“What does this one mean?” she whispered. “This one what?” I said softly.
She opened her beautiful eyes and looked at me. “This quiet,” she said dreamily. “I know all of your quiets. I know when you’re alone with me and you’re quiet, it’s because your brain is still. And when you’re in public and you’re quiet, it’s because your brain is loud. But I don’t know this one. What’s this one?”
I held her gaze. “This one’s you.”
She smiled and then scooted over and curled up against me and I got to put an arm around her. She snuggled into me and it was everything. My entire universe condensed to a single place and time.
“Jacob?” she whispered.
I put my nose to her hair. “What?” A long pause.
“I love you.”
I breathed out into her hair and closed my eyes.
She was drunk. Everyone loves everyone when they’re drunk. But even though she didn’t mean it the way I did, I almost said it back. But her breath had gone steady and I knew she was asleep.
It didn’t matter.
Nothing we talked about tonight would feel real tomorrow anyway. At least not for her. But I got to hold her. That was real. That was at least something.
The fire burned down to embers and I stayed there until my back hurt from leaning on a hope chest. Then I picked her up and carried her to bed.
And while she was cradled in my arms, she muttered something about teleporting.
