24
Linden
I frowned at my reflection in the mirror, adjusting my bow tie again. God, I hated these things. Ties in general but the ones that accompanied tuxedoes were such a pain in the ass. My parents just had to make this anniversary party black tie. As if the event would somehow increase in value because everyone was straitjacketed in fancy clothes.
I called through the bathroom door to Jasper, "You're sure you don't want to spend the night in Dartmouth? Ash and Zelda got a room and Magnolia and Rob are going back to my parents' house."
"We don't need to do that," came her muffled response.
I wandered through the kitchen to keep myself busy, straightening a few stray pieces of mail, placing a runaway lemon back in the fruit basket, pushing in the chairs. Jasper's notebook sat open on the table, her tidy writing calling to me from the page. On the bottom half, she'd jotted a grocery list of avocado, bread for toasting, bread for Lin's sandwiches, hand soap, cinnamon.
I didn't know why that made me smile but it did. A big, sloppy smile that felt hysterical. It was completely hysterical to read this little list and feel an enormous ball of heat in my chest, like the sun now lived inside me, and it was even more hysterical when I heard myself think, You love her.
The bathroom door opened then, while I was fool-grinning at her notebook and burning up from the sun I'd swallowed and thinking outrageous thoughts, and Jasper stepped out looking like that same sun trapped behind my ribs.
"You," she breathed, giving me a thorough once-over. "You clean up quite nicely."
I didn't know when I started moving but I stopped in front of her, still blinded and sloppy and maybe very much in love with her. I trailed my knuckles over the fabric covering her collarbones. "What color is this?"
"It's a very pale yellow," she said as she watched my hand. "In certain lights, it almost looks white. In others, it's buttery yellow. Chiffon is like that, it plays with the light."
"Is that what this is? Chiffon?" It seemed to swirl and billow around her, from her shoulders to her wrists and around her ankles. "It looks good on you."
She made the most adorably indifferent face in the world, saying, "This old thing?"
I traced my knuckles down her arm and back up again. I couldn't stop touching her, though I was also terrified to grab her and hold her the way I wanted because it seemed as though this dress was liable to disintegrate in my hands. There were times for ripping clothes and there were times for waiting until after the big party to do that.
"Did you get this with Magnolia and Zelda? That day when you went shopping?"
She shook her head and the wisps of hair that had slipped over her ears brushed her cheeks. I tucked them back into place, as careful as I could not to ruin the intricate bun at the back of her neck.
"I've had this," she said. "I actually found it at a secondhand shop in D.C. a couple of years ago. I bought it as wishful thinking that I'd wear it to the next inauguration ball."
"Get real. A fortieth anniversary party at a country club on the South Coast of Massachusetts beats an inauguration ball any day," I teased.
"It might." She ran a finger down the front of my shirt, saying, "I like this look on you. Not more than your everyday look but I like it. Where do you even hide your Swiss Army knife?"
I patted my side pocket. "Right here."
"Ah. Very good. Never know when we'll need the aid of the Swiss Army."
"Isn't that the truth," I murmured. "And you're sure you don't want to spend the night down there?"
A thoughtful wrinkle in her brow, she glanced up at me. "You said it's only an hour from here?"
"Yeah, about that."
"No, I'd rather come home at the end of the night. I like it here. And I have a few calls in the morning, on the early side. Preston has a list of people he wants to put me in contact with but he wants to prime me on all of them first which is great, really, it is, but I'd be fine with just the list."
I stared at Jasper for a moment, waiting for her to realize she'd called this home. I didn't even care about the ex-husband who couldn't decide between hounding and abandonment. I'd care about that later but right now, I needed her to acknowledge she wasn't staying at my place or Midge's place, she was at home.
"If that's what you want," I said. "To come back home after the party."
She rubbed her thumb over the shiny buttons running down the front of my shirt. They weren't called buttons but that didn't matter. The sun was inside my chest and my grin was too big, much too big, and it was slightly, potentially, completely possible that I loved her. Nothing else mattered. "Yeah, that sounds good. We don't have time to pack up for the night anyway."
"Peach. How many times have I told you that pajamas are unnecessary?"
"They might not be but I'm not interested in walking out of a hotel in the morning wearing a dress from the night before," she said. "I'm finished with the scandal life, you know."
I nodded because I didn't know what else to do. "Then we'll come home."
I spent the next hour listening and murmuring at all the right moments while Jasper told a seven-part story about the people she worked with on the senator's first reelection campaign. She'd spoken to one of them recently and caught up on old times.
Contrary to Jasper's belief that all her allies had deleted her number, there were plenty of people who reached out to her with frequency. It wasn't that she was dismissive of those people but it was that she expected people to walk away from her. The ones who didn't were the anomalies, not the rule.
I didn't follow her story, not all the way, but I noticed how Jasper talked about her work with the senator. It wasn't tinged with bitterness or resentment, or even the wistful fondness I'd picked up on certain occasions. It was remarkably past tense, much in the way people talked about the good old days of high school or college. It was over for her.
And that meant she could stay. Not simply because Midge's cottage was uninhabitable and my house was home but because she didn't have to return to that world. She didn't have to leave. She could stay here and we could—god, I didn't even know what came after that. Anything could come next, anything.
"It was like a family," she said, her words warm with nostalgia. "Some people have theater production families, some people—like Zelda—have summer camp families. I had campaign families."
Had.
"That's really cool," I said as I turned down the country club's driveway. A tight line of excessively pruned hydrangeas gleamed woody and leafless in the headlights and I was reminded of my sister and the partnership she wanted to form with me. Not tonight though. We'd get to that another time.
"Speaking of which." Jasper flipped down the visor and studied her reflection in the tiny mirror. "What are the chances we'll have a repeat of that awkward moment at your parents' house?"
"Which one?"
"You know what I'm talking about," she chided. "When I was that woman from the television."