“Her name was Stacy and we were together for a little over two years. I met her when I was twenty-eight.”
“What happened?” Adrianna asked with genuine interest. She wanted to know what kind of girl would let a guy like Jack get away. Or better yet, she wanted to know what she did to drive him away.
Jack shrugged. “We just didn’t love each other anymore. It ended peacefully; no big fight, no crazy drama. I think that’s what kind of made me realize we were over. There wasn’t any... passion left I guess.”
“Do you still talk to her?”
“We haven’t spoken in over a year. She emails me sometimes but it’s never personal, just garbage she forwards to everyone in her address book. She lives in New York now.”
“Well,” Adrianna said, adjusting herself so that she could look into Jack’s eyes, “since we’re both fairly new at this relationship thing, let’s at least make a deal. I’ll let you know if I ever feel smothered if you let me know when I’m getting to be too much for you to handle.”
Jack rolled his eyes at the last part but agreed. Adrianna leaned up to kiss him and when she went to pull away, he held her to him, deepening the kiss once again. “I know I’m new at this, but I’m pretty sure couples seal deals with sex and not just a kiss.”
When they finished making love and lay sleepily, naked in Adrianna’s bed, Jack asked how her weekend went.
“It was awful,” she sighed. Her finger traced an imaginary pattern on Jack’s chest while her mood dampened with memories of the last two days.
“Why?”
“After I told my parents about not having a job and being dependent on the pills they both flipped out. My mother cried and my father demanded that I move back home. When I refused he didn’t speak to me for the rest of the weekend.”
Adrianna filled Jack in on the rest of her trip, including visiting Rachel’s parents and the details of that disaster and then going to the cemetery. She neglected to tell him about the acorn, though. There are some things a girl just needs to keep to herself.
“I’m sorry,” Jack told her sadly, pressing his lips against her dark hair. “I wish you would have called me.”
Adrianna stopped herself from reminding Jack that she did call him but she didn’t want to rehash the same conversation they’d already had on the street and in her living room. Instead, she shared that she was craving a cigarette and asked Jack to reach into her nightstand where she kept a pack and an ashtray. Usually, when Adrianna smoked inside her apartment, she did it in front of her kitchen window but after great sex, some rules had to be broken.
Jack’s hand reached blindly into Adrianna’s drawer until it felt the cellophane enclosed box of Marlboros. He could have leaned over so that he could see what he was doing but frankly he was too damn comfortable to move. He lit one cigarette with a lighter he found stuffed into the half empty box, took a long drag from it and then passed it to Adrianna. Reaching back into the drawer he pulled out what he thought was an ashtray but was actually a small photograph in a metal frame. Adrianna smiled at the picture while Jack brought it closer to his face to inspect it.
“Is this you?” he questioned, studying the little girl with dark hair dressed in a pumpkin costume. Beside her was a little blonde girl in a witch’s hat and dress. They were both smiling widely at the camera and holding on to pillowcases stuffed with candy. The blonde was missing her two front teeth.
“Yeah, that’s Rachel and me,” Adrianna answered. “Halloween when we were eight.”
“You were adorable.” Jack grinned at the photo showing Adrianna eighteen years younger. Upon concluding that when she was dressing up as a pumpkin at eight years old, he was a teenager egging houses on Halloween, he chuckled.
Adrianna passed the cigarette back to Jack and took the photo from him. She tapped the scrolled edges of the metal frame and struggled to recall memories of the night it was taken. Sadly, she couldn’t come up with one from that specific night.