“I’ll take my shirt off if you take your top off.” She’s sitting in her bed at the hotel, wearing a red camisole. That’s all I can see, but I suspect she’s also wearing a pair of those sinfully skimpy, silk pyjama shorts she loves killing me with.
“Why are you men always so predictable?”
“Are you going to share with me why you’re in a mood, or should I start guessing?”
She suddenly disappears from her phone. In her place is the ceiling of her hotel room. A moment later, she comes back into view sans her red camisole. I’m staring at tits in the middle of the day, wishing like hell I was with her right now.
“Fuck, baby, tell me you’re going to touch yourself.”
“I’m in a mood because the idiots who run this hotel have no idea what they’re doing. Honestly, how fucking hard is it to organise things that a high school student could organise? Also, you’re still wearing that white shirt. That’s beginning to put me in a worse mood. And yes, I’m going to touch myself. But first, I want to know how you are. I have a mind to contact Facebook and rip them a new one for letting assholes post shit about you that isn’t true.”
I frown. “I thought you weren’t reading social media?”
“I wasn’t, but then one of the hotel idiots I just mentioned was talking with one of the other idiots about Jack Kingsley, which caught my attention. She told her you’d started drinking again, but the good news was that you’re single again. They discussed you at length. In the end, I let them know, in no uncertain terms, what I thought of them gossiping over stuff they know absolutely nothing about.” She forces out a long breath like she’s been holding all that air inside for a long time. “I can’t go on with this shit, Jack. Why are people so stupid to believe it?”
“It fucking turns me on when you slay dragons for me, sweetheart.”
“Good, because I’m going to need to see you get that dick out tonight.” She holds up a vibrator. “I came prepared.”
“Fuck,” I rasp, not aware Jessica had packed that.
“Jack,” she says with some urgency, her bossy tone making an appearance, right alongside a trace of worry. “How are you?”
I left her a message after my call with Rodney this morning. I didn’t share much with her in that message, just that I’d been dropped from the film. The fact she hasn’t had a chance to call me back until now tells me just how busy she’s been. The worry I hear in her voice has nothing to do with any fear over me drinking my way through this. Of that, I am certain. After all these years, I know the tone in someone’s voice when they’re concerned about me doing that. This, what I’m hearing from Jessica, is her hating that I’ve lost something that was important to me. This is her loving me.
“Well, your river owns my phone. I created a shit list and put two assholes on it. I told one of those assholes I would fuck his career at some point. And I’m inhaling sugar like it’s whisky today. That’s the extent of how I’m coping with this shit. I may not have a movie to make any time soon, but I’m still sober.”
She stares at me through the phone, her eyes softening in very non-Jessica ways. “I’m so fucking proud of you.”
There are many reasons why I haven’t had a drink today, one of them being Jessica. The biggest reason, though, is myself.
I could have quite easily found my way to a bar and numbed all the thoughts and feelings I have over losing that film. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it. Numbing pain is my default, after all.
Not anymore, though.
There’s a duality to life I never fully acknowledged before. Good and bad. Ugliness and beauty. Before and after. Long and short. Constance has talked at length with me about this.
I numb my pain because I categorise it as bad. I want it gone. I just want to feel good. And I want that all the time.
The problem with that is the good feeling alcohol gives me isn’t what I’m truly searching for. I know that now. I was never getting to the true good because what I felt when I numbed wasn’t real. It was a manufactured high that never stuck around long enough, that always crashed me further down than before. It left me still fucking searching, having to repeat the cycle over and over, spiralling me into a pit of hell I could never escape.
I was searching for the wrong high all this time.
Experiencing life sober has shown me what the true good feels like.
It’s lying in bed with Jessica at the end of a long day, listening to her front runner.
It’s protecting her from spiders.
It’s having Mira look to me for help getting Jessica to a tea party.
It’s searching for giraffes in the sky while a child hangs off my every word.
It’s knowing the woman I love is thinking about me an ocean away, hoping I’m okay after getting bad news.
I haven’t had a drink today because I know that once I move through feeling like shit over losing this movie, I’m going to find my way to the good. I’m going to feel it right down to my bones, and I’m going to have that with Jessica standing by my side.
And as much as I want all of this for her, I want it for myself more.
I have to make myself happy so I can love her like she deserves.
The thing I’ve come to is this: maybe pain isn’t bad. Maybe its purpose is to help us feel the good so deeply it brings us the kind of joy that no manufactured high will ever give us.
“You were right,” I say to her. “Someone was out to get me.”
“Right, so when I said I was proud of you, it wasn’t only because you’re still sober, it was because of everything you just said to me. I like a good shit list. I like that you now have one because honestly, Jack, how you’ve never had one is beyond me. I also like that you’re inhaling sugar. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t inhale enough of that, and if you take it up, I can too.” She takes a breath and wiggles her ass back against the headboard of her bed. “So, who was out to get you? I’m also adding them to my shit list. And, why do you still have that shirt on? Jesus, Jack, show me some skin. I’m dying over here.”
I grin.
I remove my shirt and catch her up on everything she needs to know.
I then spend the next two hours getting my dick out for her, asking her about her front runner, talking with her about my screenplay, and mentally mapping out the rest of our lives. I have no doubt Jessica will take over that map once she knows about it, but I’m getting a head start on it. Right alongside getting a head start on figuring out how to move her faster towards that life I’m mapping.
34
Jessica
Beckett Pearce is an imposing presence and not just because he’s good looking in the kind of way any person who likes dick would sit up and pay attention to.
He arrived for our Monday meeting twenty minutes early. That alone impressed me. He then went on to tell me his assistant had just emailed me a large amount of information regarding the development Ashton is proposing to him and Jameson Fox over the next two days. This email was in response to some information I emailed the two men yesterday. He made it clear he’s more than interested in the development and what he’ll need to sign on for it. He’s not playing his cards close to his chest, which quite frankly is making my day. I’ve had enough headaches over these two days of meetings; I like that Beckett is being so forthright.