I felt heady and decadent and not entirely sure I wasn’t in a dream.
Even though the sky was still light with leftover sun, we’d lit the hurricane jars and citronella candles that surrounded the deck in an effort to keep any early mosquitoes away.
“Thank you for sharing your journal pages with me,” I said, broaching a subject I’d been meaning to get to. “What does taking the piss mean? You said the rain there “takes the piss”?”
He chuckled. “It’s a British term for taking the mickey, or teasing. Like it’s not really rain, it’s just insulting you by pretending to be …”
“Hmmm. It sounds like England is a tough place for you to spend time in. You seem … darker there, than how you are with me. Here.”
Jack took a sip of his champagne. The glass looked so delicate in his strong hand. He set it down on the table. “I am, there. But really, I have been like that for a while. I …” he took a breath and looked at me with a strange lopsided grin, his brow furrowing as he tugged on the crown of his hair. “I’m no good at expressing this stuff. I know I seem different with you. I notice it too, but I feel more me than anytime else. Does that make sense?”
I shook my head slowly side to side.
“I guess you just make me believe that there’s a world without bullshit, where I can just be me. I’m so on guard everywhere else, so tense. About everything. In the world I live in, you can never take anything at face value. Every decision I make could be the one that tears down everything I’ve worked for. It could be a movie choice, but worse, it could just be a wrong place wrong time, or one bad word. One minute they love you, the next they hate you. There were times, in the early days, I took stuff, a line of coke, a pill or whatever just to be able to put my face out the door and be ‘on.’ Or a tranq just to fall asleep at night. It changes you.”
My hand itched to touch him, so I rested it on his forearm.
He looked at it a few moments. “I spent a lot of time in England, trying to reconcile things that happened there with my father and who he was and … why he burned me, and all the other …” he winced, “shit he did. I wrote a ton of stuff about it in that journal, nothing you needed to read, believe me. “But … I’ve been turning it into something. Like a screenplay about him, who he was, what he did. I don’t want to honor him or anything, or do anything with it, I just needed to see it laid out as if it were a movie, as if it were a script, so I could process it, you know? See it objectively. And know that without my past I wouldn’t be who I am today.”
“So in a way it was kind of good that you went? Like it was meant to be … I think there were parts of you … you needed to knit together.”
He nodded and stared out toward the water.
“Even though I totally hated that you didn’t tell me what was going on and didn’t come back here, I get it.”
Jack turned to me. “Come here,” he whispered, taking my champagne flute and setting it down next to his. I shifted closer, but he slid an arm around my waist and hauled me astride his lap. My robe was large and tightly belted, but it could hardly survive that move and revealed a lot of thigh. Jack glanced down and swallowed. “Shit, didn’t mean to do that. Now I’ll be distracted.”
I laughed softly and covered my upper thighs as best as I could. When I looked up, Jack was gazing at me seriously.
He reached a hand up and brushed a stray lock of my hair from my face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything when it happened.”
I blinked slowly. Then gave a single nod, accepting his apology, but waiting for more.
“I never left you for her. It wasn’t her,” Jack said softly. “I was in shock for a while, back then when I thought I was about to be a father. I just wasn’t going to let a child of mine grow up without me. And I must have known deep down the kind of person Audrey was, that she’d never let me be fully in her child’s life if I wasn’t with her. I came here right after I found out she lied.” He shook his head. “Remember I mentioned I ended up at that gallery on Hilton Head Island where you had that exhibit?”
“Yes, but you never said how.” Or why you didn’t come see me. It still hurt.
“Dumb luck, I guess. I saw a thing about it on the magazine I was given with the rental car. I drove straight there. Seeing that piece you did … that wave … really affected me. It was so beautiful and so painful to see. I realized how much being with me could hurt you.”
I sat frozen, afraid even my breathing would stop him talking.
“Not just how much I obviously hurt you by what happened, but also that being with me, being seen to be with me could damage you professionally. Which is something I totally understand.”