Jessie Ch. 03

"That's good. She seems to be doing better."

"She looks half dead, but she's getting there. She's not throwing up every time she tries to eat."

"Awesome."

Jessie was silent a while longer. "I want to let them stay after this week. After Sienna is better."

If I hadn't been exhausted from furious sex, I might've felt more shock and apprehension, but all I could feel to offer up was a bemused "Hmmm?"

"I keep thinking about where they're gonna go. They've got nobody but us. I've been talking to her about her plans for after... This... She's pretty determined not to go anywhere official cuz she thinks this Morgan guy will find her. That means underground. That means...ugly."

"Ok. So you want to let them live here."

"Yeah. Jane sure doesn't deserve living in a shelter or on the street or in whatever shithole Sienna is gonna be able to find working cash jobs. And I don't think Sienna deserves it either. For all the mistakes she's made...I think she's paid enough. We've got the room, we've got the means...fuck, I talked to Ashley when I walked down there for lunch, she's willing to offer her a part-time job. I... I just want to make sure they're not abandoned. They don't get lost."

"Like you were."

Jessie sat up on the edge of the bed, looked at me guiltily. She'd escaped her mother's abusive household at age eighteen and lived in what was practically a hovel until moving into this house when I moved to Milwaukee. "Detoxing from antidepressants is completely different than oxy. I can't pretend to know what these last few days have been like for her, or what it feels like to worry about all this shit while taking care of a kid, but...yeah. I can see in her eyes where this goes next and it's not pretty."

"Ok."

"Are you ok with that? I mean, you two were lovers for a year. She was your sub. Outside of that whole 'love' thing, your relationship with her wasn't that much different than ours."

I sighed, rubbed my eyes with balled-up fists. "I'm just surprised. I wouldn't think you'd be that tolerant of her."

"It's weird, but... Look at us. I prefer a collar and leash to a wedding ring, and I invited my best friend into our bed recently. We've got weird covered, at least compared to the rest of America."

"Yeah, but - "

"I don't want any other girl to go through what I did," she said firmly. "If that means I've gotta adjust to my man's former sub living under my roof for a couple of months or a year or whatever...so be it."

I chuckled as her words echoed those I'd heard years ago.

"What?"

"Tori said something very similar, wishing those Somali terrorists would find us. She said if we had to die to kill them, to keep another girl from getting raped and tortured like she had been, like our friend Nina was, it was worth it. She said dying to stop them was a 'good trade.'"

"And then you quote-unquote died to save her."

"Yeah." I didn't like talking about my former lover. Fuck former. I still loved Tori. Still missed her small golden-brown body curled up next to me every night, the smell of her glossy hair in my face when I woke up every morning. I loved Jessie desperately, would stay with her for the rest of my life if possible, but there was a Tori-sized hole in my heart that the slim gothic beauty simply couldn't fill.

It was what it was.

Jessie thought for a while, shook her head like she was clearing out cobwebs. "I don't think I could do that. Like...I can picture dying in a fight, but CHOOSING it? I don't think I have it in me."

I struggled to put my thoughts into words, to make sense of how I felt, of the actions I'd taken. To try to explain and give voice to what I'd done and why.

"I actually went to counseling during my recovery. Read a lot of books from soldiers, mostly. Trying to interrogate and make sense of it all. They said a lot of what I was feeling. Sometimes you just know, a person, a goal is worth it. You know that it's worth more than whatever life you have left, and failing seems worse than not seeing tomorrow. And sometimes, it's a decision you have to make right then, cuz all the time ran out, and it just seems natural..." It was my turn to shake my head, to try to toss free the memories of gunfire and pain and my shredded arm drizzling my life down a country road, the decision to take our one tourniquet off and wrap it around Tori's leg. Dying had seemed preferable to watching her death. I pulled Jessie down and snuggled up against her nude, warm body. "Let's not talk about it, ok? I don't like thinking about that day."

She rolled to face me, the rustle of sheets loud in the still room. We studied each other's faces, and once more I was struck by how unique she looked. Strong bone structure under milk-white skin dusted with freckles, lips that pulled all the way back to her eye-teeth when she laughed, flint-gray eyes that could go from playful to serious fuck-me to deadly-serious fuck you like flipping a switch, shoulder-length black hair now growing out from a buzz cut on the right side of her head... She was so... Different. So beautiful. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

I wondered what she saw in me.

"Can I ask one more question?" Her voice was quiet.

"Yeah."

"How did you do it? I mean, after...like, I saw some of your reports, you lost like a catastrophic amount of blood, and you had to be in agony... how did you make it so far?"

I thought back to the day that defined my life. The few hours that had defined it. The moments that had severed everything that came before in the existence of Gary Galloway from everything that had come after. I didn't like recalling any of it. It made my arm ache under the scars.

"I walked," I said simply. "I counted the steps."

Jessie looked at me expectantly. Softly. Intensely curious despite the pain she knew she was causing. Trying to imagine herself in my place.

"I knew there was a finite number of steps I could take before I died, and I thought it would be a fucking travesty if I didn't take all of them. I walked until I couldn't. And then I took another step. Added another one onto the total. And another. Step, step, step. I was gonna steal as many steps as I could. For Tori. For myself, because I couldn't bear the thought of not taking another step when I could. And I just kept doing that until I couldn't anymore. Until I ran out of steps. And then I was ok with it."

My gothic lover stared at my face for a long time. And then she leaned in and kissed my forehead. "I love you, Gary."

"I love you too. I'm glad I'm with you."

Her slim, strong arms encircled my neck, and we pulled each other close. "Me too."