by Lynsay Sands
“What do you study?” Raffaele asked as she picked up another fry and repeated the dipping and eating.
Jess swallowed and picked up her glass again, but merely held it as she answered, “Well, originally my major was psychology and I planned to be a clinical psychologist. But now I have a double major, psychology and history. I’ve decided to teach history instead.”
“Why the switch?” Raffaele asked with interest. “Didn’t you like psychology?”
“Oh, yes. I enjoyed it a great deal,” Jess assured him, and then admitted with wry amusement, “And I was very good at it. My test scores were always in the top percentile, often even one hundred percent, and I got my master’s.” Pausing, she grimaced slightly and then added, “But books are wholly different than reality, and my part-time jobs helped convince me I might do better in a different field.”
Raffaele raised his eyebrows with curiosity. “And what are your part-time jobs?”
“I work part-time at a counseling center where I . . . well, I counsel,” she said with amusement.
“And the other job?” Zanipolo asked.
“I sling drinks at a local bar . . .” she said wryly, and then lifted her glass and grinned at them before downing the rest of her drink.
“Another?” Raffaele asked attentively when she set the empty glass down.
“Yes, please. But iced tea this time. Two is my limit for alcohol. I get wonky after that.”
Nodding, Raffaele turned to search for their waitress, and found himself staring at the woman’s bosom. She’d apparently approached to see if they needed anything and now stood next to him.
“You want something, sí?” the woman asked brightly as Raffaele jerked his eyes to her face.
“Sí,” he said at once, offering an apologetic smile. Raising his voice a little to be heard over the murmur of the crowd, he added, “My lady friend would like an iced tea, por favor.”
“One Island Iced Tea,” she said with a smile. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s it, gracias.”
She nodded cheerfully and hurried away, and Raffaele turned back to the table as Zanipolo commented. “So, Jess, counseling and bartending. As jobs go, I don’t think you could choose two more polar opposites.”
“Not really,” Jess said with a grin, and assured them, “In truth, bartending is really just more counseling, but with people who are liquored up and more honest and forthcoming with their issues.”
Raffaele smiled faintly, but thought it was a shame they couldn’t do that with Santo—get him liquored up so he’d relax and discuss his issues. A grunt from Santo drew his attention to the fact that his bald cousin was staring at him, narrow-eyed. He’d probably heard his thoughts, Raffaele realized, and grimaced, but quickly turned his attention back to Jess as Zanipolo asked with amusement, “And counseling people, both sober and drunk, convinced you that you shouldn’t counsel people?”
“Basically, yes,” Jess admitted with a crooked smile. “I find it hard to separate myself emotionally from what I’m hearing. From their pain,” she explained, her expression growing solemn. “A clinical psychologist needs to remain objective to help their patient. I couldn’t do that.”
“It must have been hard when you came to that conclusion. I mean, all that time wasted on one degree, only to have to switch to another,” Raffaele said solemnly.
“Not really,” Jess said, her smile returning. “I got a lot out of it.”
Raffaele tilted his head, his confusion, he knew, plain on his face. It made her smile widen.
“In truth, I took psychology mostly so I could figure out how to fix myself,” Jess admitted now, and then said more seriously, “I think that’s probably why most psychologists get into it.”
“Fix what?” Raffaele asked with surprise. “You seem perfectly fine to me.”
“Well, sure. Now.” Jess added the word in a tone as dry as dirt. She then explained, “Counseling is pretty much free on campus, and the professors are happy to muck about in your head if you’re a psych major and they like you. I’ve had loads of counseling over the years. But I went through a nightmare childhood. All the abuses: physical, sexual, and mental.”
Raffaele frowned. “Your parents—”
“No.” Jess shook her head and explained, “My birth father died before I was born, and my birth mom when I was two. After that I was in the foster care system. That’s where the abuse happened. By the time my parents adopted me at age eight, I was one damaged kid,” she admitted, her gaze perusing the other dishes on the table.
“These are good,” Zani said, sliding a plate of breaded something-or-other toward her. “I’m not sure what they are, and they’re a bit spicy, but bursting with flavor.”
As Raffaele watched her select one of the breaded nuggets, he said, “But things got better for you once you were adopted.” The words were a hopeful suggestion. The thought of this beautiful, vibrant woman being abused as an innocent child was extremely distressing to him, and he wished he’d been in her life earlier, and able to protect her.
Jess paused with the breaded treat in hand to smile wryly and say, “Oh, yes, but for a long time, I couldn’t escape what had happened. It was stuck in my head like a rut in the road. Even when I slept, the abusers visited me in my dreams. So, of course, I became one angry, hurting, and suicidal teen.” She shrugged. “I knew there had to be something better, a happier way to live. So I took psychology hoping to heal myself and find it.”
“And did you?” Santo asked, his voice a deep rumble. “Have you escaped your past? Or do your abusers still visit your dreams?”
Raffaele glanced at his cousin solemnly, knowing it wasn’t idle curiosity that made him ask that. Santo was obviously interested in healing. Perhaps a 3-on-1 could be avoided, after all.
Jess considered his question seriously. “I haven’t escaped it, per se. You just can’t escape the past, or erase it like it was never there. It happened. But I learned to accept it, and even appreciate it.”
“Appreciate it?” Santo asked sharply, his disbelief evident.
Jess smiled wryly. “Yeah, I know. Sounds crazy, right? But I really did luck out with my adoptive parents, and with them came a really awesome family full of wonderful grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Well, not counting Allison,” she added dryly, and then continued. “I might never have had them if my life had taken a different path. And,” she added, “I’ve learned to like myself. To value how strong I am, a strength I gained from surviving so much.”
“And you don’t think you could have been strong without the abuses put upon you in your past?” Santo asked.
Jess shrugged. “Maybe. But probably not.” Tilting her head, she asked, “Have you ever heard the saying ‘Strong winds, strong tree’?”
Santo shook his head.
“Well, my father—the one who adopted me,” she added, “he was a horticulturalist. He worked for the government doing Lord knows what. I know he had to visit a lot of government parks and lands. But anyway, he taught me that strong winds make strong trees, because the winds force the tree to send out a deeper root system to withstand those winds. Of course, having a deeper and larger root system helps the tree in other ways, in getting water in a drought and so on. So that adversity while the tree was young and growing makes it stronger later . . . if you see what I mean?”
Santo nodded.
“Well, I really think that’s true of humans too,” she said solemnly. “I mean, I’ve counseled a lot of people since starting work at the clinic, and what I’ve found is that the ones who had it rough when younger tend to bounce back better when life kicks them in the teeth as an adult, which you know happens to everyone. We lose the people we love, we’re robbed, we find ourselves on a pirate ship full of . . . er . . . bad guys,” she finished in a mutter.
Grimacing, she continued, “Anyway, in my opinion, people who experienced adversity earlier in their life tend to withstand and come back from that kind of stuff better as an adult t
han people who didn’t have adversity while young. In fact, people who were protected and cosseted while young often don’t seem to have learned the coping skills needed to handle stressors as an adult, and they’re the ones more likely to completely fall apart when adversity does hit them.”
Expression turning solemn, she added, “I’d rather be a strong tree than one that will topple over under the first big wind. And I am. I appreciate that.”
“And the dreams that haunted you?” Santo asked, his body tense.
Jess met his gaze, and something about her expression made Raffaele think she knew she was looking at another of the walking wounded, someone with a troubled and painful past that still haunted him.
“Once I accepted my past and decided I probably wouldn’t be me without that past . . . it seemed to lose a lot of its power over me,” she said slowly. “A lot of my anger slipped away, and a lot of . . .” Jess frowned, and then said, “When it’s happening, you start to feel like you must have deserved or caused the abuse . . . which is really just a kind of self-defense mechanism. You think, well, if I just hadn’t angered him, he wouldn’t have hit me. I should walk more quietly, clean better, do whatever better, and he won’t hit me again. Or if I hadn’t worn that skirt he wouldn’t have raped me. Or if I hadn’t walked down that road, or hadn’t gone to that party . . .” She paused and shrugged. “But that’s just your mind trying desperately to figure out why it was you and not someone else, so that it can find a way to prevent it happening again. Because to acknowledge that it was them and not you, and that you could encounter that kind of abuse or torture again no matter what you do . . . well, that’s scary as hell. And, I think, the nightmares are your mind struggling to come to terms, not only with what happened, but with the knowledge it could happen again.” Shrugging mildly, she added, “But that’s just what I think.”
“And why do you think that?” Santo asked.
“Because when I decided I liked myself, and accepted my past as a part of me, that made me the way I am, and acknowledged that bad things probably would happen again no matter my choices, but that I would survive them as I had everything else . . .” She shrugged. “The nightmares stopped coming. It wasn’t overnight, but it didn’t take ages either.”
She waved the breaded treat around briefly, and added with a wry smile, “At least those nightmares about my childhood. I still have nightmares on occasion, but they’re just your standard type nightmare: being lost or trapped, falling or drowning, being naked in public, flunking a test, that sort of thing. And that’s how it went for me. Doesn’t guarantee it will go that way for others.”
Raffaele watched Santo consider that for a moment, and then glanced to Jess and said, “You said you didn’t think you were a good counselor, and yet you still counsel?”
“Well, perhaps it’s not so much that I’m not a good counselor, as that counseling wasn’t necessarily healthy for me since I empathized too much with my clients.”
“And yet you still do it,” Raffaele said quietly.
“I need to eat,” she said with a shrug. “And working at the clinic pays well. Besides, I don’t really counsel anymore. Mostly I’m on intake. I interview new clients, and decide which of our counselors would best suit them. Apparently, I have a knack for that. So, I’ll probably do it until I finish my history degree, and then teacher’s college.”
Sitting back, she shook her head. “Boy, I sure turned into a Chatty Kathy, didn’t I?” she said almost apologetically, and then shook her head again and admitted, “Wine tends to loosen my tongue. I should probably eat more to soak it up.” With that, she finally popped the breaded treat into her mouth and began to chew.
The change in her was almost immediate and somewhat alarming. Her eyes widened with dismay, her mouth stopped moving, and then she flushed bright red and began to search the table almost desperately for something. Raffaele wasn’t sure what was happening, or what she was looking for. He was about to ask when the waitress arrived with her iced tea. Jess didn’t even wait for the woman to set it down, but snatched it from her hand with a gasped “Gracias” as she raised it to her mouth. She gulped down the contents of that glass like there was a fire in her stomach she needed to douse.
Or a fire in her mouth, Raffaele corrected when Zani offered an apologetic, “I did warn you it was spicy.”
Jess lowered her nearly empty glass to glare at the man.
“Sí, spicy,” their waitress said brightly. “There are ghost peppers in the . . . how you say? Breading?” She didn’t wait for a response, but moved a bowl of creamy dip toward Jess. “The sour cream, she helps, sí? Try.”
Jess didn’t hesitate. She pulled the bowl toward herself, grabbed a spoon, and began to scoop up the thick dip and transfer it to her mouth like it was soup. After a couple of spoonfuls and much swishing it around in her mouth, she sighed and sagged in her seat. Apparently, the fire was out. Or at least the worst of it was, he guessed when she then reached for her iced tea.
“Better, sí?” the waitress asked with a sympathetic smile as she watched her gulp down the last of her drink.
Jess started to nod as she took the glass away from her mouth, but then paused and moved her tongue around the inside of her mouth as she now stared at her empty glass, a frown slowly claiming her lips.
“What’s wrong?” Raffaele asked with concern.
“This isn’t iced tea,” she said with dismay, glancing from him to the waitress.
“It should be. I ordered you iced tea,” he assured her, and glanced to the waitress in question.
“Sí. Is the iced tea. The Island Iced Tea,” the woman said brightly.
“Island Iced Tea?” Jess asked slowly, and then her eyes narrowed. “Long Island Iced Tea?”
“Sí.” She nodded happily. “Té helado Long Island. I’ll get you another.”
“No! I didn’t want the first,” Jess cried at once, but the waitress was already bustling away to fetch another drink. Shaking her head, Jess set the empty glass down with a groan. “Oh, God.”
“What’s wrong?” Raffaele repeated, frowning now as well.
“What’s wrong?” she echoed with disbelief. “I already had two glasses of wine. That’s why I asked for iced tea. I didn’t want to get pickled.”
“But she says it was iced tea,” Raffaele pointed out with confusion.
When Jess scowled at him, Zani put in, “I told you we don’t drink. But Raff and Santo don’t even hang around with people who drink. He has no idea what a Long Island Iced Tea is.”
Jess nodded grimly, and then turned to Raffaele to explain. “A Long Island Iced Tea is pretty much pure alcohol. Vodka, rum, gin, tequila, triple sec, and a bit of sour mix over ice with literally a splash of cola for color. In the States, it’s pretty much like two, or three or sometimes even four, drinks in one. But from the size of the glass, the skimpy use of ice in it, and the way they’re so liberal with the booze here at the resort, this one was probably more like five or six drinks in one.” Closing her eyes, she shook her head and sighed. “I should have recognized at once that it wasn’t iced tea, but my taste buds were traumatized at first. It was only after the dip soothed them a bit that I even realized there was something off about the tea.”
“Oh.” Raffaele glanced at the empty glass and then back to her face. Her color was still high, but now he wasn’t sure if that was from the heat of the ghost peppers in the breading, or from the alcohol.
Sighing, Jess pushed her chair back from the table, saying, “Guess I’d better go see about that new room key and find my bed before the alcohol reaches my system. Thank you for the company, guys. And for all your help,” she added as she got to her feet. Pausing then, she glanced to Santo and smiled. “Especially the loan of your shirt. I’ll bring it down here to you as soon as I can get into my room and change.”
Raffaele had got up when she did and now took her arm to steady her when she swayed. “I’ll walk you up to the lobby,” he announced solemnly, and wasn’t surpr
ised when Santo and Zanipolo decided to accompany them.
“I can’t believe I messed up with that drink order,” Raffaele said grimly several minutes later as he watched Jess talk to the man at the resort’s registration desk. It was a long walk from the beach restaurant to the lobby in the main building and her gait had grown more and more unsteady as they’d traversed the distance. Her speech had also started to be affected, so that she was slurring the occasional word.
“You didn’t mess up, the waitress did,” Zanipolo said soothingly. “Although, to be fair to her, it was loud in the restaurant, and most people probably don’t drink alcohol-free drinks at night here.”
Still feeling responsible, Raffaele grunted at that, and then muttered, “I can’t believe one drink could be this effective so quickly.”
“Well, she had two glasses of wine before the iced tea, and as she said, that one Long Island Iced Tea is probably the equivalent of five or six drinks the way they mix their drinks here,” Zanipolo said wryly. “I’ve noticed the bartenders are all pretty liberal with the booze. They seem to think drunk guests are happy guests.” He pursed his lips then and added, “It is a shame, though. She was really opening up and revealing a lot about herself before that happened. But the Long Island Iced Tea thing kind of brought a quick end to all that.”
“Hmm,” Raffaele muttered, and then heaved a sigh that released a good deal of his tension. Zanipolo was right. Jess had revealed a lot about herself in the restaurant, and all of it had just made him like her more. She’d obviously had a very tough childhood, and yet didn’t lay some sob story on them. Instead, she saw it as a positive, a strength even, and used it as such. He admired her for that. It kind of made him look at some experiences in his own past a little differently, as shaping tools rather than just bad experiences. It made him wonder what Santo had come away with from the conversation, and he glanced to his cousin and friend. But Santo’s face was often hard to read, and it was now as well.
Thinking he’d talk with Santo a little later and do a little probing to see how he was doing then, Raffaele turned his thoughts back to Jess and suddenly asked what he’d been wondering about since the dance they’d shared. “What did she see when we were on the dance floor?”