Finding Jack, page 16
Whoa. Ranée had a thing for Paul.
Chapter 26
It was the only thing that made sense of her behavior. I considered the facts. Ranée used to call Paul names and say he was the most boring guy in the world. Ranée bumped into him at the volunteer barn and got a different side of him. Ranée automatically gave anyone who knew horses a higher starting grade as a human. Ranée then had to revise her opinion of Paul. Ranée started seeing Paul around the barn regularly and her opinion kept improving. Ergo…
Ranée liked Paul.
How did I feel about that? On the one hand, it was a clear violation of girl code to date the guy she’d spent months convincing me to dump. On the other hand, I hadn’t dumped him because of her. I’d dumped him because it was time. Our relationship had run its natural course. That was all.
When it came right down to it, I wasn’t the jealous type. Never had been, really. It had been forever since I could even remember feeling jealous about a guy. Could I even remember being jealous about a guy?
Oh, wait. There was that one time a couple of weeks ago when I’d been jealous thinking about Jack going on dates with anyone else.
Which was stupid and irrational. He wasn’t mine, yet that flash of envy had nearly turned my stomach inside out when I hadn’t so much as held his hand. But somehow, examining the possibility of Ranée’s interest in Paul only struck me as funny even after I’d made out with him for a few months. I didn’t feel a hint of possessiveness.
It didn’t take a therapy session to figure that out.
The kettle gave a loud but cheerful beep, and I considered how I should approach the subject with Ranée. The grown-up thing to do would be to discuss it like a rational adult.
But I owed Ranée payback. So. Much. Payback.
Ranée didn’t seem to want to do the adult thing either because she stayed hidden in her room. You could hear the kettle anywhere in the apartment, so she knew it was ready.
“Ranée?” I called. “Are you going to make my tea?”
She answered with a muffled, “In a minute.”
At least three more passed without any Ranée. Oh, this was going to be fun. The most fun I’d had since…
Since everything had gone wrong with Jack.
I cleared my throat. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
It was another minute before she emerged from her room, dressed—no surprise—for the barn. Worn T-shirt. Ratty Vans. Guilty expression.
“So you were saying?” I prompted her, as she dug into a box of tea bags.
“I don’t remember. I’m sure it wasn’t important.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Going to the barn again?” She wasn’t getting out of this so easily.
“Yeah. Working with one of my favorite kids tonight.”
“Sounds good. Maybe that’s what I need to do. Volunteer, take my mind off things.”
“Totally. There’s always a ton of places looking for help.”
“No doubt. Will you see Paul at the barn tonight?”
“Probably. Give me a second, and I’ll google some volunteer options for you while the tea steeps. Let me go get my laptop.”
No way was she escaping into her room again. “I can handle the googling. Don’t worry about it. So tell me about Paul. You said he’s doing well?”
“I guess.”
“How often do you guys end up volunteering at the same time?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Guess.”
She shot me a sharp look before her gaze slid away. “I don’t know. Seems like we’re always there at the same time.”
“And you guys always talk when you’re there together?”
“It would be rude not to.”
I snorted. “You’re right. I mean, you were rude right to his face so many times when he was over here, but a barn calls for better manners.”
“I admitted that I was maybe too hard on him.”
“Maybe?”
“I was. Happy now?”
“I think I’d feel happy for sure if I know Paul is happy. So is he?”
Ranée sighed. She picked up the two mugs of tea and set one in front of me before taking the seat across the table. “Is there something you’d like to say to me?”
“I don’t know. Depends on if you have anything you want to tell me. Like about you. And Paul. And these conversations you have.”
She stirred the tea bag around in her cup. “So…uh, I guess maybe I should tell you something.”
I leaned forward. “I can’t wait.”
“So…” She dipped the tea bag a few times. “This is awkward.”
I smiled at her, the most angelic smile I could muster, determined to make her spit out every bit of this without help.
She scowled when she saw it. “You know, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything. But I have some real strong hunches.”
“Paul and I have been talking.” The words burst out of her like she was a shaken can of Coke.
“So you’ve said.”
“This is real talking. Like when we’re putting up the horses at the end of the night, and the conversation wanders. And somehow we’re talking about state policies on adolescent mental health for urban teens. And then we’re talking about how when you move to the city, your country roots always stay with you, and it makes you feel like you have extra wisdom, somehow. Because you understand stuff that city natives don’t. And then we’re talking about how you learn that wisdom, and what you do with it. He’s got layers.”
I’d always known he wasn’t as bad as Ranée had thought he was, but this level of introspection from him surprised even me. “Those sound like good conversations.”
“Yeah.” She stirred her tea some more. Then, without warning, she dropped her head onto the table and buried it beneath her arms. “I don’t know what to do.” The words came out muffled, but her angst was clear.
I allowed myself one big grin before I decided to put her out of her misery. “Ranée? If you wanted to date Paul, I wouldn’t be mad.”
She hid beneath her arms for another minute. I sipped my tea and enjoyed the moment.
“Really?” The word finally floated out from her arm cave.
“Really.”
She picked up her head. “I’m not saying I want to date him.”
“Okay. Then talk to him. Ponder the mysteries of the universe together. It still won’t bother me.”
“I don’t want to just talk.”
“You don’t want to date him. But you don’t want to talk to him. What do you want?”
She picked at the edge of the table, not meeting my eyes. “Suddenly I have stuff you’ve said about him on replay in my head.”
“Like what?”
“Um, I think you mentioned he’s a good kisser? And now I can’t stop thinking about that.”
I spit out my tea. “Oh, man. That is so much better than anything I thought you were going to say.”
“It’s not funny,” she said, handing me a napkin so I could mop up the tea on my shirt.
“I’m living for this.” I switched to Sandra Bullock’s singsong taunt from Miss Congeniality. “You like him, you want to kiss him.”
She disappeared into her arm cave again.
“You want him to corner you in a stable and smooch your face off.”
Her head shot up. “No, I want him to ask me politely if I’m okay with him kissing me.”
“All right, fair enough. Yay, consent.”
“But then I want to drag him into the corner of the stable and kiss him.”
I burst out laughing. “Not to make it weird or anything, but it’s definitely worth it.”
“You really don’t mind?”
“No. You know I don’t dwell on exes. When I move on, it’s for a reason, so I’m fine with letting the past go. This one was even easier because you distracted me with Jack.” I gasped. “Was this all a plot to steal Paul away from me?”
“Yes. Em. I somehow knew that Paul would show up at the barn where I volunteer and suddenly act and talk like a totally different person, so I plotted against you in the most genius romantic sabotage ever.”
“You’d be smart enough to do something like that. And to, oh, say, put into motion a complicated plan involving a cheesy romance cover hero and a handsome Photoshop expert with a man bun.”
“Fine. You caught me.”
“I knew it.”
She took a sip of her tea and glared at me over the cup rim before she banged it down again. “Two months ago, I really did think Paul was the personification of paint drying.”
“I know. That’s what makes this so fun. So, you’re going to kiss him.”
“Nooo,” she wailed. “There’s no way. He’ll never do it. He’s not the kind of guy who would ever jump from one girl to her roommate. He has this code of honor, I think.”
I knew that. But I didn’t point it out. “It means you have to make the first move, let him know you’re okay with it.”
“No, because then I’ll look like the girl who would move in on her best friend’s boyfriend.”
“Ex-boyfriend.”
“That’s like the smallest possible improvement. And I’m not that girl. Except I am that girl.”
“No, you’d be that girl if I cared, which I one thousand percent do not. So you should make the first move.”
“Except you know that, and I know that, but he doesn’t know that, so it’s still going to look bad no matter what.”
A new thought struck me, but I hesitated to express it. I didn’t want to ruin the stirrings of this new thing—whatever it was—that she was feeling, but I also didn’t want her going any further down the wrong road if it was going to dead end. “I guess I should ask you…do you think that’s something Paul wants? Do you get a vibe from him?”
“I do. That’s what makes this so hard. Like I’ll catch him watching me, but then he looks away. And if we’re slipping past each other to hang the tack or get a brush, I swear there’s that heightened thing going on between us. You know that thing where the air kind of tingles?”
I held up my hands. “I don’t want to hear about your tingling.”
“You know what I mean!”
I did. “I can honestly say it was never like that between me and Paul. So your gut says he’s feeling it?”
She hesitated then nodded. “Yeah. He is. I’d bet on it. That’s why this is killing me. There’s as much unsaid stuff floating in the air of that barn as there is stable dust.”
“That’s a super romantic image.”
“And yet it doesn’t change the fact that sometimes that stable is so full of electricity, it feels like the hay is going to catch on fire.”
“Because of rolling in it?”
“Shut up.”
“Look, suffer in silence if you want. Kiss Paul if you want. I support you.”
She rose from the table and rinsed her mug. “I’m going to go get my jacket.”
When she disappeared down the hall, I whipped out my cell phone. My revenge was almost complete. Almost.
Chapter 27
There’s no delicate way to put this: you should kiss Ranée.
I pushed “send” on the text to Paul, and waited, curious to see what would happen.
It took a few minutes that I spent entertaining myself by imagining Paul’s reaction to the text. Confusion? Relief? Curiosity? Embarrassment? That really cute mortification like high school kids get when word of their crush leaks out?
Is it possible that when my phone went off I was wearing an expression of impish glee?
YES. Yes, it was.
But honestly, how could I not be grinning like a fool? Ranée deserved a good guy, and Paul and I may have brought out the most boring parts of each other, but it sounded like he and Ranée were a potential fit. I wanted them to find out if it was a great fit.
I slid my messages open, but it wasn’t a text from Paul. It was from Jack. Can we talk? Maybe Facetime or something?
What? Why now? I’d been putting him out of my thoughts for days. I had a cabinet of plasticware chaos behind me to prove it. But it’s not like I was going to say no to that.
Sure, I typed. I didn’t even hesitate to press send.
When? His response was just as fast.
Ranée walked past me, zipping up her hoodie. “I’m off to the barn.”
“I want every detail when you get back.”
She gave me a strange look. “There’s not going to be anything to tell. There’s never anything to tell.” And she shut the front door behind her.
Now is good, I texted Jack. And I refuse to put on makeup for this.
Fair. This is a come-as-you-are kind of call.
Thirty seconds later the FaceTime ring sounded. I barely had time to feel anything but confusion. “Hi,” I said. Then I burst out laughing at the sight of Jack’s T-shirt. It was white with a kid’s marker drawing of a stick figure with longish hair. It said, “Dr. Jack” in kid scrawl, the J backwards, and Jack’s stick figure wore a pink cape. “Nice shirt.”
He glanced down at it and gave me a tight smile. “I did promise a come-as-you-are call. This is one of my favorite shirts.”
My own laughter fizzled away. Was it a good sign that he’d worn something in front of me referencing his doctor life? Or a bad sign that every part of him from his tired eyes to his forced smile spoke of stress? His hair was down again, but it looked like it hadn’t seen a comb for a day or two.
“It looks comfortable,” I said. But that felt awkward to leave hanging there, so I dove in. “Why did you want to talk?”
“Because not talking seems stupid?”
“Is that a question?”
He sighed. “No. Or if it is, I know the answer. It’s pretty stupid that we haven’t talked for a few days.”
That wasn’t on me, so I raised my eyebrows at him.
“We’re not in a relationship, are we?” he asked.
That was a question I hadn’t expected. “I don’t know. No? No, we’re not in a relationship.”
“Because a relationship is where you date each other. But only each other, right? And don’t see other people. And you make that decision because you’ve spent time together and you both agree you don’t want to date anyone else. So you don’t. And you hang out with each other and do couple stuff, like go to each other’s boring work parties, or take bike rides, or fight over the remote.”
“I don’t fight over the remote. I don’t care about the remote. That’s why Ranée and I get along so well. She would marry the remote if she could.” I threw out the joke because I didn’t know how to process everything else he was saying. It sounded like he was working out something aloud, so I’d sit here and let him, to see where he went.
“See? I would know that if we were in a relationship. But we can’t be. Because you’re in San Francisco.”
A faintly acid ripple burned through my stomach. I was having the exact conversation I’d played out in my mind a week ago and filed under, “Conversations Never to Have.”
“You’re on an Oregon mountain. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“It is. It’s just as much of a problem. But I don’t plan to change that any time soon. Do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so, either. So why keep talking? All it does is make me want to come down off the mountain. Or talk you out of the city. I want to be sitting right across from you when you make me laugh. I want to make you laugh, and hear it myself. It kills me to hear it filtered through a screen. I want to…”
He trailed off. He wanted to…? Whatever he wasn’t saying, I wanted it too.
He shoved his hands through his hair. I was learning this was a sign of his frustration. “It gets worse every time we talk, not better, so it made sense not to talk anymore. There is literally no point, is there?”
It was a hopeless question, but I felt a smile tickling the corners of my lips anyway, because…
He wanted to sit across from me and watch me laugh.
“There’s no point,” I agreed. “Not if the goal is for us to be in a relationship.”
“And we can’t be, right?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense.” But it was even harder to fight my smile. It felt so good to know I wasn’t the only one who’d been driving myself crazy with this.
“It’s not funny,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.
“No.” But I realized the smile had won anyway.
“The thing is, it’s kind of sucked for a few days without your texts. Everything is boring and stupid.”
“Wow, Dr. Jack. I had no idea doctors were so articulate.”
“Stop making fun of me.” He leaned in until I got an extreme close up of his glare. “We should still talk.”
“Okay.”
He leaned back to a normal distance. “Okay?”
“Okay. But.”
“But…?”
“I’m tired of off-limits topics. It’s like trying to do the tango on eggshells except if the eggshells break, everything blows up. I’m over it.”
“I’m tired of off-limit topics too. I get it. But we still need ground rules.”
“Oh, yay. Ground rules.” A text alert came in at the top of my screen. I didn’t know who it was from, but suddenly I wanted to check that much more than I wanted to keep having this conversation.
“I think we both have to stay honest about what this is. That’s my only ground rule.”
The twitch to check the text disappeared. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Explain that some more. Like, can we bring up whatever we want? I can ask you doctor questions?”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe don’t ask me about any growths you have. But yeah, we can talk about whatever it feels normal to talk about. But since this isn’t ever going to be a relationship, I think we should quit flirting. Just talk like friends.”
“Friends.” I considered the way the word felt in my mouth. How the idea felt in my chest. “Maybe I should feel bummed about that, but this doesn’t feel like a downgrade.”
