Thirty-Three
AFTER THE NIGHT I got, um, shot in the head, Glenn made Taylor cover the first two weeks of my Korea assignment so my million-dollar injury could heal completely. He offered to have Taylor take the whole thing, but I declined. “No more giving Taylor my assignments,” I said.
“Good point,” Glenn said.
Jack waited a respectful length of time for my emotionally-alarming-but-not-all-that-lethal-or-even-painful injury to heal … and then he talked me into trying our date again.
He said, “Can we just have a do-over?”
“On what?”
“The date.”
“The date?” I asked. “The one that almost got me killed?”
Jack nodded, like Yup.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”
“I just need a do-over,” Jack said. “And so do you.” Then he leaned in closer, marshaled all his handsomeness, and said, “I promise you won’t regret it.”
Did I want to walk up Jack’s driveway in ridiculous footwear and nervously ring his doorbell again, even knowing for certain that WilburHatesYou321 was in custody?
Not a chance.
“Let’s just do something else,” I said. “Mini golf. Bowling. Karaoke.”
But Jack shook his head. “I had some very specific intentions for what I was going to do to you in that moment, and I really need to see them through.”
“You mean the moment when I showed up at your door all nervous and you flat-out rejected me?”
“Let’s note for the record that I was saving your life.”
“But I got shot anyway.”
“Grazed,” Jack corrected.
I thought about it. Could I bear to try again? I studied him. “You’re trying to re-create the date?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Jack said. “I need a version of that story that does not have Wilbur in it.”
I could see the value of that. “Fine,” I said.
“Tonight,” Jack said.
“Fine.”
“And wear that red dress.”
I sighed. “The one I bled all over?”
“You washed it, right?”
“I mean … yes.”
“So it’s all good.”
“The shoes are in the trash, though,” I said.
“I don’t care about the shoes. Come barefoot if you want.”
I shook my head. Then I pointed at Jack and said, “I’ll wear my cowboy boots.” And as he nodded, like Cool, I said, “I’m never wearing stupid shoes again.”
THIS TIME, WHEN I rang the bell, Jack swung the door wide open right away.
He was dressed, he was clean-shaven, he was blindingly good-looking … and as soon as he saw me, he let his eyes sweep down to my boots and back up in a slow nod of appreciation. Then he reached out, hooked his fingers into the fabric tie around my waist, and pulled me into his entranceway—swinging the door closed behind us.
He had a look on his face like he was about to kiss me into oblivion.
But that’s when I lifted a finger and said, “Can I just check something with you?”
Jack had a certain momentum. But he paused. “Sure.”
“The last time we did this,” I said. “You stopped me at the door and told me that you never liked me. That you’d been faking everything the entire time.”
“I remember.”
“So, as long as we’re having a do-over,” I said. “Can I just get you to confirm that you were lying about faking?”
Jack frowned. “Don’t you know that already?”
“I mean, yes. I do. But that moment really kind of firebombed the quadrant of my brain that we’ll just call ‘my worst fears about myself.’ So. As long as we’re rewriting the story … can we fix that part?”
Jack nodded, like Of course.
He met my eyes. “I was really nervous about the date. Did I tell you that? We’d been living together for weeks, so I shouldn’t have been. But I was. I’d ordered takeout for delivery, so when the doorbell rang, I just answered it. But it wasn’t the food. It was Wilbur. With a gun. And he was a lot more terrifying than anybody named Wilbur should ever be.”
Agreed.
“He was wild-eyed,” Jack went on. “Breathing fast and manic-seeming, like anything could happen at any second. I thought he might well be on drugs. I knew for sure he was pointing a pistol at my chest. I remember having a hard time letting the idea of the date go. I remember thinking, Now’s really not a good time. I tried to talk him into giving me the gun. He asked me a thousand questions without ever explaining anything. And just as I was thinking, What would Hannah do right now? and trying to remember exactly how you’d flipped me that time, you rang the bell.”
Jack sighed.
He went on. “Wilbur went on high alert. He wanted to know who it was, and then he looked through the peephole and saw you, and he said, ‘It’s a woman in a slinky dress.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Okay. Who’s it gonna be?’
“I asked what that meant, and he said, ‘Who should I kill? You? Or her?’
“So I said, ‘Me. Of course. Obviously.’
“‘You didn’t even think about it,’ Wilbur said, like he was disappointed.
“So I said, ‘There’s nothing to think about.’
“‘You want to die?’ Wilbur asked.
“‘No,’ I said. ‘But between the two of us, it’s no contest.’
“‘I can’t believe you’re picking yourself,’ Wilbur said.
“‘Well I’m sure as shit not picking her.’
“‘Okay, then,’ Wilbur said. ‘Get her out of here.’
“I reached for the door, but then Wilbur added: ‘And do it right. If she figures out something’s up and calls the cops, I guarantee you I’ll kill us all.’
“‘I believe you,’ I said. And I did. So I opened the door and I did the only thing I could think of to make you leave and not come back.”
I looked into Jack’s eyes. “You acted like you didn’t like me.”
Jack nodded. “Didn’t take all those improv classes for nothing.”
“Why didn’t you use the code word?”
Jack gave me a look. “Um. Because I didn’t want my last words to be ‘ladybug’?”
“Seriously, though.”
“Seriously? Why would I have done that?”
“So I’d know something was up.”
“The point was for you not to know.”
“You realize I do this for a living? I was way more qualified than you to handle Wilbur321. There were ten different ways I could have disarmed him.”
“I didn’t think about that.”
“Obviously.”
“I just wanted you not to die. I really, really,” Jack said, stepping closer, “didn’t want you to die.”
I appreciated that. I did. “Thank you.”
“So I acted my heart out.”
“You really got me,” I said.
“Well,” Jack said, “I do this for a living.”
I peered into his eyes. “Just to confirm: You didn’t not like me.”
“I didn’t not like you,” Jack said.
“You liked me,” I said again. “For real. Actively.”
“For real. Actively,” Jack confirmed. “More than anyone else ever in my whole, dumb life.”
I studied him.
“I didn’t care if he shot me,” Jack went on. “The only thing I cared about was tricking you into leaving—and doing it so well that you didn’t come back.”
“Well. You crushed it.”
“But then you came back. Like a dummy.”
“I think you mean like a heroically courageous badass.”
“You weren’t supposed to save me. I was saving you.”
“I guess we saved each other.”
“That’s one way of spinning it.”
“Aren’t you a little bit glad that I saved your life?”
“Wilbur says he was never going to kill me, after all.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
“As soon as I picked you to save, he decided I was a good guy. It was a test. And I passed.”
“But why test you if he wasn’t going to kill you, anyway?”
“It was a friendship test.”
I studied Jack’s face. “So it wasn’t that heroic when you saved me, after all.”
But Jack just gave me a look. “It was pretty damn heroic.”
Jack sighed. “I am honored that you came back,” he said. And even as he was talking, he was stepping closer, cupping both hands behind my head, looking into my eyes like they were a place he wanted to go. “But,” he said then, “don’t ever fucking do it again.”
Then he brought his mouth to mine, and pressed us back up against the door, and kissed me like he might never get another chance.
Yep.
Heck of a do-over.
Apologies to everyone in the world who is not me … but the truth is—as good as Jack is at screen kissing, he’s a thousand times better at the real thing.
I mean, he makes it easy.
You don’t overthink it.
You don’t think at all, in fact.
You just let yourself get lost, and your body takes over, and before you know it, your arms crook up around his neck, and you’re pressed against that washboard stomach, and you’re melting against him and dissolving into a moment that’s so mind-numbing it’s as if he hijacked every single one of your senses.
In the best possible way.
He kisses you like it’s destiny. Like that’s what always happened. Like there’s no other conceivable version of the story.
And you kiss him back the same way.
And your whole body feels like fireworks.
And so does your soul.
And it’s like you’re in your life and flying above it at the same time. Like you are both on earth and in the heavens. Like you are all heartbeat and rushing pulse and warmth and softness—but you are also the wind and the clouds. You’re just everything, all at once.
It’s as if loving somebody—really, bravely, just all-in loving somebody—is a doorway to something divine.
And later—many hours later—after he’s taken you to bed, and your red boots are forgotten on the floor, and you’re both exhausted and tangled and half asleep, and you have helped him do whatever crazy thing he always does to his sheets, Jack, all casual, yawns and stretches out that famous torso, and says: “I wonder if anybody’s monitoring the surveillance footage.”
“What surveillance footage?” you ask.
“In the front hallway.”
Of course, Robby is. Since he’s still the primary agent on Jack’s detail.
You lift up on your elbows to read Jack’s face. “Did you kiss me in the front hall like that to show up Robby?”
“I kissed you in the front hall because I’ve been desperate to do that exact thing for weeks and weeks,” Jack says, clamping his arm around you and pulling you to him tight.
Then he adds: “Showing up our old pal Bobby was just a bonus.”
AND, IN THE end, do you ever truly know for sure if you’re lovable?
What a question.
You don’t. You can’t. Of course not.
Life never hands out the answers like that.
But maybe that’s not even the right question.
Maybe love isn’t a judgment you render—but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do—over and over.
For yourself. And everyone else.
Because love isn’t like fame. It’s not something other people bestow on you. It’s not something that comes from outside.
Love is something you do.
Love is something you generate.
And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself.