by Tara Wimble
“What do you expect me to do?” Jacque crosses an arm over her stomach and opens a palm to Bella with the other. “What do you want me to say? That you did the right thing? That I’m glad to see you? I’m not here for that. You know I’m not here for that.”
She might have been once.
“Always did have a way with words.” Bella’s laugh turns into a cracked sob that rises in the back of her throat. She’s been walking the line of crying for the whole conversation and Jacque thinks she might have pushed her over until Bella rubs her face. Just red eyes.
“Hasn’t always been the case with you.” Jacque figures that honesty meets honesty and if Bella hasn’t figured out the meaning behind everything she said in Germany then she wouldn’t be here. Or maybe Jacque really is that safe place. Maybe she’s ignoring it too because there’s nowhere else she can turn right now.
Bella has made herself small on the couch, clasping her hands together and trapping her arms between her knees. “I thought we always managed.”
A one sided management. Jacque smiles weakly but there’s nothing behind it.
“I couldn’t stay in Vancouver. If you want me to leave I understand but I didn’t want to just- I can’t go home.” Bella rocks forward. “I don’t know where it is anymore.”
It’s been four years since Bella’s lived in the States. Canada is the country she adopted for a means to an end, Jacque was the gatekeeper, and somehow it’s become more than some place. Jacque doesn’t want Bella to call it home because if she does, what does that make her? What does that make her to Bella? And she’s not in the mood to find meaning in her coming here.
It’s a disruption that she can’t deal with right now. She tried not to hold out for hope and yet it’s been delivered to her as surprise alongside a rapidly cooling Chinese take out.
But it still sounds like Bella is saying that her home is here.
As angry as she is, and as angry as she’ll have time for being later, there’s no way, especially not today, that’s she’s going to send Bella away.
Jacque takes the bag of food that Bella brought in with her and leaves for the kitchen. At least there’s a wall between her and Bella now, as she unpacks and dumps things out onto plates for her to reheat. Concentrating on the food means that she’s not concentrating on the crisis.
Except the crisis is pretty fucking huge and sitting on her couch.
She left Jacque, legally. Well, in progress. She left Blake, emotionally, physically and apparently unsatisfied in bed. She left Vancouver, the Whitecaps, Whemb’s place. Before all that she left the US the moment an opportunity arose.
Always leaving. Always running.
The microwave dings and she takes the plates out.
Finally coming back.
Bella is quivering a bit when she gets back and Jacque knows it’s from the enormity of what she’s done and what Jacque’s said than the cold. She’s shaken out of her bubble when Jacque puts a plate down in front of her and sits on the end of the couch before clicking the television on.
“That’s yours.” Jacque states when Bella doesn’t move. Her attention goes back to the TV.
She hears the scraping of cutlery against a plate after a few seconds and, of course she smiles, because she’s not immune. She’s not happy but she’s content that Bella isn’t planning on sticking to a sudden story of woe and refusing to eat in case she offends Jacque again. There’s a lot to confront and there’s no chance they’re starting it tonight.
Her Christmas is definitely not going to turn out the way she’d planned.
Silence is the new game, at least while they eat and for the programs that they watch, and they play it well even when Jacque shows her into the guest room like she’s never slept there before.
She can only see the back of Bella’s head when she walks in but there’s such a subtle change in her shoulders and the straightness of her back when she lays eyes on the completely untouched room. It’s all still there. Blankets, pillows, the alarm clock that Bella unplugged the week she moved in. Jacque didn’t do anything but avoid this room.
Bella doesn’t turn around and Jacque scuffs her foot against the floor. “I’ll get you some towels for tomorrow.”
A stiff nod comes before Bella does meet her eyes again. “Thanks.”
Holiday spirit, Canadian attitude, the will of God- Jacque can’t tell but she shrugs the world off her shoulder. “You know what they say in Canada-”
You’re welcome.
*
Jacque wakes up the next day with a pool of dread in her stomach that smells like toasted bagels.
She buries her face into her pillow. “You have got to be kidding me.” Jacque keeps pressing her face into the pillow until her breath gets too hot against her face.
The headboard of her bed stares back at her, unable to understand her frustration, as she glares at it. She gives herself five seconds to manage it before she gets up. There’s no use being quiet because she has to walk past the kitchen no matter what she does, so Jacque flips the duvet off her bed letting it crumple half on the floor, and walks into her bathroom.
From there she churns the smell coming from the kitchen over in her mind as she focuses on running through her routine. Teeth, face, hair, don’t get pissed off-
Jacque pats her face with a towel and realizes that while there was no chance that she could have refused Bella into the apartment, it doesn’t mean that -she- has to stay here.
She walks back into her room and looks at the weather outside. It’s terrible. It’s cold. It looks like it’s going to snow or rain.
It’s perfect.
Her gym bag is packed under her bed already so there’s not much to find. Jacque brushes her hair into a ponytail and grabs a fleece headband to pull over her ears. She’s dressed to run even before she gets out of her room. That way there’s no confusion to be had when she leaves quickly.
Jacque itches to go as soon as she steps into the hall. Bella is in the kitchen and she’s cooking. Like she used to. And there’s two plates.
Jacque unwinds her headphones and puts them in because she’s not sticking around for this. Bella must say something but she pretends to be listening to music when she grabs a water bottle and one of the smoothies that she has pre-prepared from the fridge.
Then she’s gone.
She stands in front of her building drinking the smoothie before she goes.
She’s not being a bad person. She’s really not. She didn’t tell Bella to leave last night and she’s not confronting her before they’ve even gotten their bearings. But Bella just tried to cook them both breakfast like she used to do, which means that Bella is trying to get on her good side as well as trying to settle back into a routine that she disrupted in the first place.
The disposable cup goes in the trash and Jacque turns on all the music and running apps and whatever before she goes. It’s freezing and there’s ice and she shouldn’t be running in this weather at all. Her face burns from the cold sting of the wind.
Yet the pounding of her chest and her feet are preferable to having to wander around her own apartment like a stranger. Yes, she has to talk to Bella. Yes, she should do it soon before making breakfast turns into lunch and dinner and spirals into Bella avoiding what she did to her. What she’s still doing to her.
A few people give her a look that translates to ‘you crazy runner’ when she jogs past at a pace.
Maybe this isn’t a mature way of dealing with it but she’s always the mature one. She’s the one who took the reins on this whole operation. She’s the one that dealt with the majority of the stress while Bella played along with it. She’s the one who-
Misread everything and fell for her straight wife.
Jacque turns a corner. She doesn’t want to go too far from her usual route or burn out too soon. She doesn’t want to go home.
It’s different now. They’re broken in a sense. Their friendship before was based on a mutual agreement of what they were getti
ng into. It blossomed from there. They actually became friends. But it was in a space, a paradigm, of a fake relationship. Their friendship looked like ink being dropped into water. The ink curled out, as the sham of their relationship grew, and overtook the water.
She has to stop for traffic.
They kissed. They shared a bed. They tricked everyone into thinking it was real. Including, she realizes, herself.
Except now that Bella is back here, searching for a home and a way to repair this broken thing, she’s here knowing that Jacque feels differently. Even if she doesn’t know how to put it into words or to what extent Jacque is feeling for her, she knows. And making breakfast and trying to fit the square peg of their relationship into the triangle slot isn’t going to work now that it’s out in the open.
Jacque doesn’t know what to make of that.
She’s here because she left Blake. She left Blake because she felt like she made a mistake. A mistake about Jacque. Jacque who basically told her that she had feelings for her.
Traffic stops and Jacque jogs to the other side of the road. If Bella never brings it up, Jacque isn’t sure she’ll be able to say it to her face again. And that doesn’t solve anything.
Jacque loops around the same route a few more times before she has to walk. It’s getting colder and busier and she knows that she’s going to have to go back with a plan. Ground rules about breakfast and Bella being Bella.
Then she’s staring at her front door at a loss for words. Shit.
*
She doesn’t mean to pry or overstep her bounds but since she’d gotten back Jacque hasn’t actually really let her do anything around the house. She’s tries to be nice in the little ways that she used to but, like the breakfast incident, has mostly gotten shut down.
Jacque had maybe tried to confront her, or at least it looked like she was finally going to say something, but then she just mumbled something about breakfast and locked herself in her room for the night. So there’s been no real progress on that front.
But she doesn’t see the harm in cleaning because it’s mutually beneficial. She’ll clean and Jacque will see how much she wants to repair their friendship. It’s a win/win because then she’ll actually be living in a clean apartment and will stop having to step on the little tiny pieces of broken glass that Jacque swears do not exist.
It’s cathartic. Jacque’s out doing whatever it is that she’s taken to doing during the day to get away from her and Bella’s finally made it to the main bedroom.
She actually had a moment’s hesitation before stepping inside, considering the invisible line that seemed to exist. But then the bed was also unmade and the floor looked like it needed vacuuming so her reservations were outweighed by necessity.
In an unfortunate shimmying incident her iPod manages to fall under the bed while she’s attempting to maneuver the vacuum around it.
And then she finds them.
They’re most definitely not Jacque’s. They’re not hers and she doesn’t even have enough time in the world to try and examine why in the hell that’d even cross her mind in the first place because of fucking course they’re not.
They are, however, tiny and black and lacy and very much in her hand.
And she’s not sure what to do with them.
Like physically.
Bella’s actually not sure at all what her next step is beyond ‘drop the skank lingerie’ and then she has to mentally admonish herself for calling the mystery woman a skank because she’s sure that she’s a nice lady.
Or at least at some point Jacque definitely thought she was a nice lady.
And then she’s back to square one.
Who even forgets their underwear? Like, that’s a pretty basic item of clothing. First on, last off. Oh god, nope, she doesn’t need to go down that train of thought any longer either.
Is she supposed to wash them? These expensive looking tiny black things. Would they need the delicates cycle in the wash?
Finally Bella just drops them into the pile of Jacque’s laundry that’s already started to accumulate in the corner of the room because she realizes she’s been asking way too many questions about a strangers underwear.
She’ll deal with it later like the rest of that mess.
*
Jacque makes the first mistake a few days later. As always it’s because she was pushed to it. The pushing being that Bella came back to the apartment with bags and bags of food because she’d apparently taken it upon herself to organise the Christmas dinner that Jacque had planned to ignore.
She bought alcohol. That was the plan.
Except now it’s the 23rd and Jacque still hasn’t said anything to her. It’s getting harder to pick a moment as well because Bella is busy making a cooking schedule for tomorrow and putting things in cupboards. Making noise and being a housewife.
It drives her out.
Bella’s gotten used to her leaving without saying anything even though they’ve managed to have a few small conversations. There’s no one following her when she looks back.
The mistake comes about three hours later after choosing a bar over jogging and meeting number seven. Number seven, or Valerie, holds onto her the whole way back to her apartment because of the insane heels she’s wearing.
Jacque didn’t even think about Bella when they stumbled in. She was busy thinking about belt buckles and zips on skirts and coats falling to the floor. Jacque was thinking about how good it felt to just kiss someone and pin a body to the wall. Skin against her hand and the heat trapped under clothes after a long night and a short walk.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
She wasn’t thinking about Bella.
The minute she does, she stops and that’s her mistake. Not that she brought a girl back, not that Bella saw but that Jacque fucking stopped the minute she walked out into the hallway because Bella had waited up for her. Because she was worried about her.
There’s no amount of donuts or kind gestures that will cover this guilt as Bella looks at her like she’s never seen her in this light.
Val is a third party to their mess and Jacque sighs before she kisses the girl’s cheek. “I’ll call you a cab.”
Val kind of chuckles, thinking this is a case of casual discomfort and touches her waist. “What? Because your roommate has a problem with this?”
Jacque stares at Bella dead in the eye. “No, because my wife has a problem with this.”
Val can’t get away from her fast enough after that. Volunteering to call the cab herself and wait outside for it. Jacque hovers in the hall with Bella until the door is closed behind them.
All those thoughts about confrontation and the sentences she started but never finished? Jacque’s betting that it’s going to come out now.
But she’s certainly not going to start it if she doesn’t have to. And she’s not going to corner herself either because this is her apartment and she won’t feel like a trapped animal inside of it.
So she pushes out of the hallway and moves into the main room, pushes past Bella who’s still stood in the hallway. Shocked? Silent, certainly. Stuck in her place.
It’s only a little after 1am and it doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve when she collapses onto the couch. She shouldn’t drink anymore than she has. It’s not going to help matters.
Though even one more drink would make this so much easier because Bella’s finally snapped out of her haze and is headed her way.
“Friend of yours or should I be concerned about this happening a lot?” Bella stands in the middle of the room. “Or both?”
“I’m not sure how she’d feel about me leaving you for her.” Jacque pauses sarcastically. “Maybe she’s still outside. I could check?”
“Jesus, Jacque.” Bella drops her hands from her hips. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing from my side. I feel great.” Jacque crosses her arms defensively over her chest.
“Yeah, this is completely normal behavior.” Bella advances a few steps.
Jacque tenses at her advance and Bella stops. “Like you would even know anymore.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Look, if you want to have a conversation about this? Then don’t fucking tip toe around it.” Jacque snaps out. “If you really want to know, yes I brought a woman back with me tonight. Yes, we met in a bar. Yes, I planned on having sex with her.”
Bella purses her lips.
“But if you want to have ‘the’ conversation we’ve both been avoiding, then let’s fucking have at it then.”
Bella mimics Jacque’s closed off body language but cuts right to the heart of it. “You’re in love with me.”
“Oh, is that what you’re worried about?” Jacque rolls her eyes, the thoughts already bitter in her mind. “I’m not pining enough for your self-esteem? You thought you’d come back and I’d follow you around like some sort of pathetic person.”
“Jacque, no.” Bella mumbles. “You’re drunk, we should do this--”
“I’m fine.” Jacque cuts in.
“--later. When you’re sober.” Bella finishes.
“You should have told me you were going to avoid this.” Jacque spits out. “Would have introduced you as my roommate and I’d be having fun right now.”
“Come on.”
“Would have been like old times, well, roles reversed I guess.” Jacque laughs but it’s not actually funny. Not to her or to Bella, who looks like Jacque would imagine her to look if someone had just slapped her in the face.
Confronted by that sad face, Jacque realizes that Bella just acknowledged her feelings for her. In words. That reins in her willingness to be that drunk asshole. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” Bella whispers. “I know you are.”
“This, everything, it all sucks.”
“I’m here.” And Bella says it like it’s supposed to mean something. Like those two words are on par with her apologizing for something.
Despite the fact that Bella still looks like Jacque slapped her with her words, it doesn’t mean she just gets a free pass on anything and everything.
“Is that supposed to mean something?” Jacque asks. “Am I supposed to be jumping with joy because you’re not cuddled up with Blake spending Christmas with him?