Chapter 55
JUSTINE TOOK A run with Rocky, even going an extra lap along the grassy median on Burton. But the three-mile jog didn’t calm her down, not at all. She was mad at Jack, hurt by Jack, and freaking furious at herself.
At home again, Justine let Rocky into the fenced-in backyard, went to her laundry room and stripped off her clothes, threw them into the washer.
She pictured Jinx Poole: the hair, the body, the ads for her constellation of hotels with their five-diamond ratings. She could easily see Jinx and Jack together, an excruciating image that made total sense. Unlike the dumb arrangement she’d worked out with Jack so that she could be with him and still keep her options open for her own protection.
And you know what? He had every right to do the same.
She was an idiot. Correction: she was an idiot with a broken heart.
Justine went to her bathroom, stood naked in front of the mirror behind the door. She sucked her stomach in, turned to each side, then got into the shower and sat on the floor. She pulled up her knees, laid her head down on her crossed arms, and let the dual pulsating showerheads beat a three-quarter time on her body.
What was wrong with her? What was wrong with them?
She thought about meeting Jack five years before.
Back then, she’d been working in a mental hospital three days a week and saw private patients on the other two days in a high-rise in Santa Monica.
One day, going to work at her private practice, she got into the elevator, and Jack got in right after her. She pushed the button for her floor, shot a sideways glance at this gorgeous, confident sandy-blond-haired man. Then she watched him lose his cool when he rode with her to the tenth floor before realizing he hadn’t pressed his floor number and completely missed his stop.
Both of them had laughed.
The next time she saw Jack, it was in the same elevator. He told her his name and asked her to dinner. Justine could do a quick read on anyone, a survival mechanism in her line of work. She didn’t get a whiff of anything crazy off Jack Morgan.
She introduced herself, said okay to dinner, and three days later, he picked her up at home and took her to a small, very hip, quite intimate Italian restaurant.
After they ordered, Jack had fiddled with the cutlery, then told her that he’d been a captain in the Marine Corps, a pilot, and that he’d served for three years in Afghanistan. He said that the war had changed him and that he was seeing a shrink in the building where she worked, hoping to get a grip on his memories and dreams.
It was unusual conversation for a first date, but Justine went with it. It was as if Jack wanted her to know every hairy thing about him so that she could make an informed decision about whether to go forward or not.
He said to her, “Justine, when you said you’d have dinner with me, it was as if you’d cupped your hands around my heart.”
She’d touched his hand. He said, “Who are you?”
She told him, and from this first date, Justine determined that Jack Morgan was open and that he wanted to grow. That was one side of him.
Months later, she said, “Jack, you’re like a clam. With a rubber band around your shell.” That was the other side.
He had said, “I can’t tell you everything, Justine. I’ve seen too much. I’ve lived through too much. I have thoughts I want to keep even from myself. I keep ninety-five percent of my interior life locked up. You see the five percent that gets over the wall.”
Justine had to adjust her first take on Jack as an open, emotionally expressive man, but by then, it was too late. First impressions no longer mattered.
Justine was hooked. She loved him entirely.
He loved her too. He hired her at Private, made her a partner. They bought a house and lived together. They fought about the ninety-five percent that he kept behind the wall, because walls went against everything she believed in. They went against everything she was about. Jack’s lies and evasions undercut her integrity.
They fought, broke up, reconciled. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Justine wanted their relationship to work, but it couldn’t. Jack was who he was. As much as Justine loved him, it hurt her to be with Jack.
Maybe this time she would learn.