My bottom lip trembled, and I felt my body start to shake as my hands covered my face. “Because this is the part where I cry.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. His hands brushed against mine, and he took them into his hold, lowering them from my face. “And this is the part where I let you.” He moved Tucker from my lap onto another couch cushion. Next, Jackson placed his hands into mine and lifted me up from the couch and wrapped his arms around me. He held me close to him, and he became the one who held me up as I began to fall. I sobbed against his T-shirt, thinking of all the years of struggles, all the years of pain as I tried to create the life that Autumn had stolen straight from under my feet.
Every now and then, Jackson’s hand gently rubbed my back, bringing about an odd sense of comfort.
As I pulled back a little, I thanked him for holding me, for allowing me to fall apart. He brushed his thumb against my cheeks, wiping away my tears that kept falling.
I laughed nervously. “Hot mess,” I said, stating what he’d been calling me for the longest time.
He kept wiping my tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice deep and smooth. “For calling you a hot mess when I met you.”
“Don’t be. It’s true, after all. I am a hot mess.”
“Everyone’s a hot mess,” he insisted. “Some people are just better at hiding it.”
I didn’t know why, but that statement eased my mind a bit.
Jackson rubbed the side of his neck and cleared his throat. “You want water?”
“Yes. Please.”
He hurried into the back of the cabin, toward the kitchen, and I took deep breaths. My fingers lightly touched the Band-Aids against my face, and I walked toward the walls to study the sunsets more closely. They were stunning. So stunning and realistic that they almost looked like photographs. Each one had the initials H.E. in the bottom corner.
“These are beautiful,” I told him as he reentered the room with the glass of water. He handed the glass my way. “Who’s H.E.?” I asked.
“Hannah Emery,” he quietly replied as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. “My mother.”
“She was an amazing artist,” I told him.
He nodded once. “She was more than that.” Before I could ask him anything about his mother, he shifted the conversation back to me. “Are you all right?”
I snickered. “Truth or lie?”
“Truth,” he replied. “Always truth.”
I took a deep breath, and tears fell as I exhaled. I couldn’t even reply.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” he told me.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
He was right, it wasn’t all right, and I wasn’t certain that it would ever be all right.
“You were right about everyone in town. They were just comforting me so they could get more gossip. They didn’t care about my heart or how it beat. They just wanted something to talk about.”
“I’m sorry I was right.”
“It’s okay. I just…I feel like I have no one, you know? I mean, I can talk to my sister and my father, but that’s pretty much it, and I don’t want to burden them. Everyone else in this town just feels like a stranger to me.”
“Even your mom?”
I huffed. “Especially my mom.”
He cleared his throat and rounded his shoulders forward. “I’m Jackson Paul Emery,” he calmly stated, locking his stare with mine. “I can’t whistle, but I can do three backflips in a row. I got my car skills from my dad and my art skills from my mother. Last summer, I ate twenty-five hot dogs in a row like a professional badass. Alex recorded the whole thing. I can make the best shrimp fried rice, and—”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Telling you about myself.”
“Yeah. But…why?”
He brushed his hand against the back of his neck and slightly shrugged. “So I’ll no longer be a stranger and you can talk to me.”
Oh, Jackson…
First, he’s sour, then shockingly sweet.
The gentle monster.
His gesture surprised me, but perhaps he was learning to zoom in like I was learning to see him. Maybe, for the first time, the two of us were truly seeing one another.
“I don’t know how to talk about it,” I confessed. I didn’t have a clue what to say.
“What’s the hardest part?” he asked me. “What hurts the most?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” I lowered my head and wrapped my arms around me. “The betrayal of the situation, and the next hardest part is being alone. I don’t know how to be alone. When Finn and I got married, I believed it was set in stone. You build your whole life around another person, and you think you’ll never be alone again, but then you are. It’s the hardest feeling to deal with. Loneliness hurts. It burns in a way that feels worse than fire.”
“The burning never stops,” he told me. “You just kind of become numb to it.”
“How long have you been lonely?”
He gave me a broken smile, which told me his deepest truths.
“Oh, Jackson,” I whispered, my hand gently brushing against his cheek. “You’re way too young to be this sad.”
He closed his eyes, and I felt his warm breaths falling from his slightly parted lips. “You’re doing that thing that you do, princess.”
“Doing what?”
“Putting others’ hurts before your own.”
I smiled and slightly shrugged. “It’s my gift, my curse.”
“It’s not a selfish thing, you know.” He opened his eyes, and the intensity I felt as he stared my way sent chills down my spine. He leaned in close, whispering against my ear as if he was revealing the biggest secret in the world. “You’re allowed to choose yourself first.”
What a wonderful thought, though the world I grew up in taught me the complete opposite. Where I came from, it was always give yourself to others first and whatever was left was what one used on themselves.
It just turned out that most of the time, nothing ever remained, and my tank for self-love was left on empty.
When it came time for me to leave, he offered to walk me home, and I once again declined. “But thank you for this…for helping me.”
He gave me a halfway smile, or at least I pretended he did. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“That’s fine,” he declared. “You don’t have to be.”
Why did that make me feel a little bit better?
“Jackson?”
“Yes?”
“You’re nothing like your father.”
He frowned and cleared his throat as he looked down at the ground and crossed his arms. “I am when he’s sober.”
16
Grace
As I walked back to Judy’s house, I smiled as I saw a friendly face sitting on my front porch. “Hi, friend,” I said, walking up to Josie who had two extra-large cups from KitKat’s 1950s Diner.
“Hi, friend,” she replied, standing up.
“How long have you been waiting?”
“Long enough to finish two of these drinks and go back to KitKat’s to grab two new ones.” She frowned, studying my face. “What happened?” she asked, nodding toward the bandage.
I touched my cheek. “Just some emotional release.”
“Are you all right?”
“If what’s in that cup of yours is what I think it is, I’ll be better soon enough.”
She smirked, handing a cup my way. “If I remember correctly, you were a Diet Coke girl with a few shots of whiskey.” When we were younger, we always used the extra-large cups from KitKat’s Diner when we wanted to get wasted in town but didn’t want anyone to know that the perfect Harris girl even knew what alcohol was. It was, of course, Josie’s idea. She was pretty great at secretly letting me break free for a small bit of time.
I grabbed the cup and laughed. “Yes.” I took a sip and made a face. “Geez, Josie!”
“I might have been a bit heavy-handed with that whiskey,” she told me.
“This is straight-up whiskey with a splash of Diet Coke, I think.”
“Confession—there’s no Diet Coke in that.” She placed her hand on my shoulder and lightly squeezed. “If anyone deserves straight whiskey, it’s you right now. How are you holding up?”
“I could be better.”
“Want to go egg Autumn’s house? I have a dozen eggs around the corner,” she joked. Well, I thought she was joking until I saw the seriousness in her eyes.