by Tara Wimble
She finally moves to speak and he leans towards her just the slightest bit and that’s when she knows. That when she’s knows that she’s going to break his heart. Not right now because she’s done enough of that for one lifetime.
But soon.
And she can’t physically handle it anymore. “I have to go.” She grabs a sheet and tucks it against her body and scrambles from the bed, snatching her clothes from the floor and rushing to the bathroom, dropping the sheet right before she enters and slams the door shut.
He knocks and knocks and knocks but she puts on her clothes and slides down the door, burying her head in between her knees. Attempting to drown out the sound of his knocks and pleas.
Because she can’t think about him, not when the only thing that she can think about is Jacque and even thousands of miles away she can’t be unfair to her like that again. So she sits there and thinks about Jacque and about how she just pushed Blake off of her because of Jacque and the many ways in which she can’t even begin to broach what that means.
Can’t conceptualize it but she at least has to try because there’s Blake out there still pleading with her, growing ever the more desperate, and she has to say something to him. At the very least so she can get out of here, not just indefinitely lock herself in his bathroom.
She locks away the more confusing parts of this whole thing and forces Blake to the forefront of her mind because that’s what she has to deal with first.
But not tonight. Tonight she needs to go back home to her tiny apartment and be alone and figure out the mess she’s made of the lives of everyone around her.
So Bella stands up and looks in the mirror and doesn’t even hardly recognize the wreck that stares back at her. She doesn’t even bother to make herself presentable before unlocking the door and opening it to him, manic as she’s seen him, and when he sees her there’s an overwhelming sense of relief that she can see flow through his body.
“Bella--”
“No.” She cuts him off softly and he deflates again. “I can’t do this right now.”
“What does that even mean?” He asks, stuck like a statue in his place. “Tell what I did, I’ll fix it.”
“I just--” She cuts herself off, gathering the aggregate of her thoughts. “I need to be at my place right now.”
He nods dejectedly, still not understanding but respecting that something has gone horribly wrong.
“Will you come back tomorrow?” He mutters, almost like it’s to himself but then he stands up straighter and looks right back at her. “I have the day off, I just--I’d like to see you.”
Bella nods and she knows that she will come back tomorrow even if it’s not for the reasons he wants or needs. She’ll be back and so she gives him a tight smile.
“Of course.” And then she walks out of his room, grabs her stuff off of the end table and starts on her way home.
She keeps her mind purposefully blank the entire journey back.
*
She makes it home alright and texts him when she gets there out of a sense of human decency but she leaves her phone in the kitchen and goes to her bedroom without it. It’s symbolic but she doesn’t want to feel like she’s dragging him around her house with her. She needs to be alone right now. Truly alone.
Sleeps comes as slowly as she expected but it does eventually come and for that, at least, she is grateful.
When Bella wakes up in the morning she feels bleary eyed and exhausted from the inside out. She runs with the first thought that comes to her mind and runs a few quick errands.
She’s no closer to any kind of revelation than she was ten hours ago in Blake’s bed. Except now she has props to her misery.
If sitting in her room with donuts, wrapped in a blanket, and sorting through some of the stuff that she’d brought with her from Toronto counted as props. All that’s spread out on her bed is photographs and reminders of the journey she’s taken in the last four years.
Her thumb rubs over one of her post-surgery shots of her face. It’s an age ago. The face she stares at is swollen wearing eyes painted black rather than sad. Bella knew who she was back then. She remembers the upset she felt and the hard times. The echoes of laughter that followed her. But now, here and how she feels in this moment, she’d trade. She’d trade this pain she’s carrying in her chest, made up from all the things she’s helped to break, for a lifetime of cruel mockery.
Even in her internal monologues she’s dramatic.
Bella tosses the photo down on the pile of similar progress shots that she took. Her eyes slowly get better and her nose does with it.
The pile that she’s gathered is made up of a lot of photographs. Bella shuffles her hands over them and finds candids from the coaching course that she met Jacque at. From Cyprus where she got her first cap for the Canadian National Team. One’s sent to her by Kathryn of them standing with the team in the stadiums in Germany.
Bella in the Canadian jersey, in the maple leafs shirt, in the World Cup jackets-
In a wedding dress.
Jacque’s there with her. Neither of them are looking at the camera, just at the cake that they’re trying to cut. Jacque surrounds her in that photograph, the one Allison took, and Bella is suddenly overwhelmed by tears again.
She was happy. It’s not a case of her being miserable that drove her to push back and away. She didn’t decide to end the business arrangement she had with Jacque because she wanted to hurt her in any way. It was a release. Of course it was for herself, of course she wanted to be with Blake and to start anew with him but it wasn’t altogether unselfish.
Bella isn’t blind to the expression that Jacque wore when she saw them on the couch together. Behind the anger that Kathryn emitted there was a quietness in Jacque. An envy.
Letting her go from this deal was for that as much as it was for Bella. Keeping Jacque bound to this arrangement, stopping her from behind happy with someone else, wasn’t fair to either of them.
She doesn’t touch the wedding photo and instead pushes another aside to pick it up. The next is a shot taken by Kathryn after a Vancouver Whitecaps game. They’re in the locker room just sitting next to each other but Jacque is laughing. Full on laughing, where her eyes are squeezed shut and her teeth are showing. The kind that brings a smile to Bella’s face even now. She can’t even remember what they were laughing at.
She doesn’t miss the hiding or the having to sneak around with Blake. She doesn’t miss the lying to her friends and teammates. She doesn’t miss a lot of things.
Bella slowly starts to push the photographs into a pile so that they can fit back into the box she keeps them in. Every memory that’s recorded is one that she chose to remember. To document.
To miss.
Bella realizes as she stacks them all on top of each other that if these photographs were to go missing or be destroyed she would miss them. She’d miss the memories they represented, the fun that she had despite the complications, and most of all, she’d miss being able to show them to people and say ‘That’s my best friend’.
She misses Jacque. It’s not a hard thing to figure out when her boyfriend manages to bring her to tears over it. She misses how easy it was to live with her and how they just knew each other.
The box is brought back up and Bella finds the place for the photographs again when they jar against something underneath. Her fingers pull it up by badly glued on string.
There are days when she just blindly wants to go back but she’s not stupid. She heard every word that Jacque said to her when she handed those divorce papers over. Bella misses her best friend but to Jacque, Bella stopped being just that a long time ago.
She pinches the cake topper between her hands. The one she made when she came up with this crazy plan. Complete with Jacque’s stuck on string hair.
Bella stopped being a friend and started actually being a wife to her. Someone that Jacque came home to and bitched about training and paid bills with and stayed in to eat take out with. A p
erson that Jacque shared a bed with, shared a home with and who, for all intents and purposes, cheated on her.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow.
She plays with the cake topper and stands it on top of the box of memories. She finds herself walking the tiny standing man and wife over the top of it while she just takes a moment. There’s no use figuring out anything other than what she can feel right now. The problems she can solve this instant don’t lie across the country in Toronto.
It’s going to take a lot more than that for her to apologise to Jacque for what she did. Even more to scrape back the strings that once held them together.
Bella picks the cake topper up in her hand.
But she knows where to start.
*
Snow coloured flour coats the polo he wears. A work shirt he forgot to wash. When he answers the door, he tries to pat the flour out before she sees it.
“Hello?”
Silence rings out.
Blake’s shoulders fall.
Disappointment sings like chiming bells.
*
A week later Jacque cleans up the glass around the coffee table in case she forgets and walks over it.
She glances down into the box and doesn’t feel her stomach settle anymore than it did the first time. Bile tastes bitter and anger collapses into frustration because there’s no real meaning she can take from this.
A badly glued cake topper and a reminder of a wedding she’ll never forget.
It takes her a second to actually find a broom and dustpan and she takes a second to look at the state of her apartment and finds that the best word to describe it would be bachelor pad.
Or sad. She’d accept that as an answer as well.
She gets a call back that the food she ordered is being brought up by the delivery guy and she ushers the broken shards into the bin. The place is only slightly cleaner but that only emphasizes how empty it is and the state of her pathetic looking Christmas tree.
There’s a knock on her door and her day brightens a bit because that’ll be her feast.
The delivery woman is red cheeked and has a hat pulled over her ears so much that the brim of it almost covers her eyes. She also has duffel bags either side of her feet.
“I know I’m not the present you wanted,” Bella holds onto her take-out bags as if handing them over will instantly cause Jacque to slam the door in her face. “-but you’re all I wanted for Christmas.”
*
“Hello and welcome to this CSA party conference call. Over the course of this call there will be opportunities to ask questions of our panelists today and discuss the future of Canada’s women’s soccer program. At this moment in time we would like to introduce Max Bell, National Team communications manager and John Herdman, newly appointed head coach of the Canadian women’s national team.”
Chapter 7
2012
*
JACQUE doesn’t know how they got here, how Bella got here, sitting on her couch leaving a voicemail for Blake while Jacque pours coffee for two instead of one. In mugs that haven’t been thrown against a wall.
But she’s here and all plans for Jacque to have a quiet Christmas, where she slowly drank until it was New Years, have been dashed.
If you had asked her before she opened that door whether or not she’d be pleased to have Bella back home for Christmas she would have answered that she would have completely welcomed her back. Theoretically at least. They’d been living separate lives for months but the holidays had always been about them. About their families.
Hence the original plan to drink herself into oblivion until that part was all over.
But now that Bella was actually here, and Jacque had worked in touching her subtlety to confirm her corporealness, she wasn’t so sure that it was a good thing.
In fact, it was a really fucking awkward thing. Because who did Bella think she was that at every fucking shift of her whimsy she could just hop back and forth between people.
Jacque wasn’t an option. She’s not a choice to be made or a decision to be deliberated over.
And she’s certainly not the person who's just fucking thrilled that Bella decided to grace her with her presence after walking out not even six months ago.
Or at least she didn’t think she was but she’s still filling the mugs with coffee and she hasn’t gone through with her wish fulfillment and thrown Bella’s bags back out onto the porch, Bella along with them.
So it’s really just a strange middle ground they’re treading.
Basically business as usual then.
“You got a tree.”
Jacque stops mid pour because it’s really the first significant thing that Bella’s said since declaring herself a Christmas present. So it’s worth stopping and taking note.
“It’s tiny.” She looks over at the sorry looking artificial thing, tilted to the side, a few cheap ornaments haphazardly hung on some branches. Her family's ornately decorated tree it was not. “It’s whatever, I wanted to liven up the spirit in this place.”
A quick look up at Bella’s expression says all that she needs to know, and really already did know, about her rate of success on the spirit of the apartment.
“It’s nice.” It’s not. “It feels like Christmas in here.” It doesn’t. Jacque wants to draw attention to that out loud but Bella’s attempting to be civil so she should at least try the same.
“So are you gonna tell me why you’re here?” Jacque warms her hands around her cup. All she wants to do is to look down into the swirling coffee but she’s bigger than that. She looks at Bella. “Or am I gonna have to guess?”
Bella’s first reaction is to turn a shade of white then pink. Her attempt to hold Jacque’s gaze is shot when she tries to get something out.
“I left. I’ve left.” Bella mumbles out. Once she has Jacque’s full attention she coughs and clears her throat. “Him.”
Jacque grips her mug tighter. “Why?” Why when the whole reason this mess started to spiral out of control was because Bella wanted to be with him. Her fickleness is whiplash.
“He, uh,” Bella puts her mug down and laces her hands behind her neck. Nervous habit. “He did something.”
“What did he do?”
“It’s not bad.”
“Bella, what did he do?”
Bella covers her mouth and shakes her head. She gets redder. “He tried something.” At Jacque’s sudden flaring expression Bella bites her lip. “New.”
Jacque’s grip goes lax and a horrible relief wiggles down her spine. “Oh.”
To be honest Jacque doesn’t really get what Bella is trying to insinuate but it’s not her worst case scenario, he didn’t lay a hand on her, so she’s willing to go along with this game for a little bit longer.
“It’s embarrassing.” Bella mumbles from behind her hands.
“I got that impression by the whole, you know,” She pauses and gestures generally towards Bella’s bright red face. “tomato act.”
Bella nods, keeps nodding along as Jacque just stares at her, and finally she just bursts. “He went down on me.” She covers her face.
Jacque freezes. First she makes a conscious effort to set her mug down gently because if she keeps breaking all of her housewares she won’t have any left. And then she sits down on the couch, feeling like a zombie.
Because it sounds like Bella just said she left her boyfriend, the one that she left her for, flew all of the way across the country, showed up at her door a few days before Christmas and all that trouble because he went down on her.
So she’s going to need just a little bit of clarification.
“Excuse me?”
Bella’s hands are completely covering her face now. “You heard me.”
“This is one you’re gonna have to explain to me in a little more than five words.” She stands firm because she wants to understand, no, she needs to understand the whole story before she can start to feel one way or the other about this.
An
d so Bella explains it the best that she can while Jacque just listens. She listens to Bella explain her life with Blake for the past six months in further detail than she ever wanted to be able to imagine. Mentally she runs through the contents of her kitchen, already deciding this coffee might have to become an Irish one.
“--and then he tried that and I realized that he wasn’t where I needed to be. That I’d made a huge mistake.”
Bella stops and looks up at Jacque expectantly, like that was where she was supposed to jump in with the understanding words and the warm welcome and a pat on the head for Bella having a basic understanding of her selfishness.
But as much as Jacque wants to do any of those thing she can’t. Because this isn’t Bella choosing her, this isn’t Bella growing and changing. She’s still bouncing back and forth and Jacque just happens to be her safe place to land at the moment.
Who knows where it’d be six months from now?
Six months ago she’d thought that was Blake. Not that Jacque had ever wanted a reason to sympathize with the guy but Bella had just walked out on him in a similar manner so now they had more than one thing in common.
This isn’t some special moment. Jacque didn’t open the door to her future waiting for her. She opened it to a scared woman who’d been desperately searching for her place for years and decided that Jacque was a safe spot to do that in the interim.
Bella takes her silence for what it is and somehow makes herself smaller in the space she occupies. “Say something.”
Jacque looks up, wry smile on her face. “I don’t think that you want me to do that.”
“I want you to do something more than just sit there now that I’ve just-”
“What? Bared your soul?” Jacque trails off. She’s trying to keep the hurt and offense out of her voice. “Congratulations on making a decision about your life and facing up to the fact that you’ve done a lot of shitty things over the last six months, most of which were to me, but to the team, to him even?”
She can’t say his name without imagining the hurt look on his face when Bella told him to stop.