Rising up out of her seat, Amanda starts to stand, her fingers curled into claws, as if she’s about to go find Jessica and cut a bitch. I push her down gently by the shoulder.
She is a live wire, eyes bulging, her fight response primed.
This is so hot.
“How can you even talk to her now? Anterdec does charity work with her family’s foundation! I see you chatting with her at events. She’s gone after Shannon in such a distorted way, and now you’re telling me she used you to get to Declan?”
I shrug. “She has no actual power.”
“She can ruin someone with one tweet!”
“You consider that to be power?”
“Yes.”
“No. Wrong. Let’s stop right there.” A flash of insight. “Jessica has no intrinsic power.”
“Intrinsic power?”
“The only influence she has comes from other people. It’s basic popularity, which is a mirage on top of an optical illusion.”
“Huh?”
“Popularity comes from getting enough people to say you’re a hot item that others believe it. Critical mass and all that. It’s fleeting, and relies on the masses propping up your influence. That’s all Jessica has. She’s a paper tiger.”
“But she’s so powerful on the social scene.”
“I think you give her way more sway than she really possesses. Stop reacting to her. Stop reinforcing her with others.”
“She made fun of Shannon’s poop.”
“She is just a paper tiger.”
“Was she always like this?”
I have to think about that one. “Yeah. I guess so. I never really got to know her.”
“Didn’t date long enough?”
“No. She just wouldn’t let me in.”
“I didn’t mean sexually.”
“I didn’t either. She was tight as a drum emotionally. Our month of dating was mostly focused on my getting her into big parties at Milton so she could social climb. Then taking her to Harvard to visit Dec. All it took was one Cambridge party and bam—I found her on his lap.”
“Whoa.”
“He was shoving her off it.” I remember it perfectly. ‘These things happen’ was all Jessica said, as if that explained everything.
“Why are we in a private jet, finally truly alone for the first time since the wedding, and we’re talking about Jessica Coffin?”
“You brought her up.”
“Actually, you did, Andrew.”
I restrain myself from replying immediately. In the space of a few breaths, I find a more authentic answer.
“I wanted to give you a piece of me. That means sharing more with you.”
“What do you mean?”
My inner life is a spiral staircase that ascends and descends to infinity. I brace myself and confess, “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Share?”
I shrug.
“How to be in a relationship?”
“Any of it.”
“It’s new to me, too.”
“Not the newness. Being new is the easy part. I get that. I don’t know how to lose myself in you without losing all of myself. How do I let go and trust that you’ll give me the freedom to figure out who I am and at the same time trust that you’ll be right there with me?”
“That’s your idea of a relationship?”
“It’s wrong, isn’t it? Jesus, Amanda, I don’t even know how to describe my own confusion properly.”
“It’s not wrong,” she says slowly. “Just interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
“I never thought of it that way. Guaranteed freedom and guaranteed company. That’s such a paradox.”
“Which means it can’t exist.”
“Can’t it? Why not? Says who?”
I don’t have an answer to that.
“We both know how to manage systems, Andrew. We’re experts at looking at processes and understanding how to make a process work. How to use systems to serve people—with an end goal in mind.”
“So?”
“Isn’t a relationship just a series of emotional processes?”
“You sound like Declan.”
That’s not a compliment, and she knows it.
“I’m not wrong.”
I make a derisive sound that I cut off, because I suddenly sound like my father.
“This is a lot to take in after the insanity of the last week.” She looks at her ring finger.
“That doesn’t make any of this less real.”
“You’re right. We broke all the rules. Took all the steps and shook them up.”
“There’s so much more to relationships and love than a nested list of steps and procedures.”
“Are you sure?”
I grab her, hard, and kiss her, the impulse driven by something that does not appear anywhere on my personal Gantt chart. This kiss holds the world together. My hands on her soft, yielding shoulders are pillars, meant to hold up the next layer of emotion. We are the moon and stars, her eyes are the atmosphere, her breath the air I breathe.
Laws of attraction keep atoms together, electrons and neutrons repelling and migrating closer, forming differentiated objects that serve our purposes.
Feelings shouldn’t follow the same pattern.
And yet they do. The heart may be a muscle, but it’s also a vessel that pumps blood and magic through cells that I’m kissing with yearning, cells that kiss me right back, with heat and warmth and wetness that curves into me, our skin attracted to skin by nothing more than emotion attached to biological processes.