It was 9:30 by the time I made it to Bond Street, the sushi restaurant where Jesse had wanted me to meet him and his mom. I was breathless after leaving the cab stuck in traffic and running the last two blocks, shoving my way through crowds of people and throngs of bridge-and-tunnel tourists, and when I got inside the restaurant, I completely ignored the maître d’ and stormed into the elevator to take me to the second floor.
It was dark and moody upstairs, the air heavy with the sound of silverware clinking and clattering against plates, the snap of chopsticks echoing right behind. “I’m meeting someone,” I said to the second maître d’ (seriously, how many do they need?) and went into the dining room.
Jesse was sitting at the table alone, a coffee cup in front of him. The plates had been cleared, a little soy sauce stain on the tablecloth the only evidence that dinner had been eaten, and I came to stand next to him. “Hi,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.”
He looked up at me with angry, hurt eyes. “You missed her. She left to catch her train ten minutes ago.”
I sank down into the chair across from him, adrenaline leaving my body with such a whoosh! that it felt like it had taken my bones with it. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. “I got stuck, I couldn’t call. I’m so sorry. Did you have a nice time?”
“No, I didn’t have a nice time!” he exploded, and the table next to us glanced over. “You were supposed to meet me here ninety minutes ago! You didn’t return any of my texts! I didn’t know if you just didn’t care or if you were working—!”
“Of course I was working!” I shot back. “Why else would I have missed this? I didn’t have a choice, Jess! You think I didn’t want to be sitting here with you and your mom instead of being trapped in some guy’s house?” I bit my lip, stopping myself from saying too much.
Too late.
“Wait, you went into someone’s house while they were still there?” Jesse said. “Do you know how dangerous that can be? You’re not invincible, Mags! People could really hurt you!”
“You,” I pointed at him, “do not get to tell me about danger, okay? I know. I’m all too aware of how dangerous this is. That’s why I can’t tell you anything!”
“Your eyes are huge, do you know that? You look like you’ve been dropping E all night.”
“It’s just adrenaline,” I told him, wondering how disheveled I looked next to all of the other classy diners. “It’s fine, it’ll go away.”
“So you couldn’t answer just one text?” he asked, ignoring my response. “Not even one? I even called your parents and they had no idea where you were!”
“You called my parents?” I screeched, and now diners really were paying attention to us. “You know what? We need to go outside. I can’t have this conversation in here.”
“Fine by me,” Jesse said. “I was just getting ready to leave anyway.”
We both stormed downstairs, my boots very loud and heavy on the floor compared to all of the high heels, and I was all too aware of my T-shirt and messy hair. I’ve never been embarrassed by how I looked before, but now I stood out for all the wrong reasons.
The minute we got out on the street, our fight resumed.
“You can’t just call my parents!” I yelled. “They don’t know about this, either! Oh my God, they’re probably freaking out right now.”
“What do you mean, they don’t know?” Jesse said. “Shouldn’t you tell them, Maggie? I thought that was your deal with them! The last time you tried to do something on your own, you almost got all of us killed!”
The air left my lungs. If Jesse had punched me in the stomach, I don’t think it would have felt worse than what he just said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his face immediately apologetic. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “You don’t just say something like that and not mean it!” I felt hot tears pricking at the backs of my eyes, but I ignored them. I was too angry to cry. “And I can’t tell my parents because this involves them, okay? If they knew what I was doing, they would try and stop me and if they stop me, then we’re done.”
“So you’re willing to risk your life and their lives just to be right?”
I took a deep breath, steeling my nerves. “If memory serves,” I told him, “you were just fine with me risking my life when I was saving your dad’s ass. And now that I’m trying to save my parents, you suddenly have a problem with it? Wow, thanks, Jess. Thanks for being such a supportive boyfriend.”
I spun on my heel and started to walk away, but Jesse caught up with me in three steps and took my arm to turn me around to face him. “That is not fair—” he started to say, but I cut him off again.
“This isn’t about fair!” I yelled. “If this was about fair, then I would be a seventeen-year-old girl having dinner with her boyfriend and his mom, not spending my Friday night squeezed into a crawl space on the Upper West Side, okay? You don’t get to talk to me about fair! All you have to do is be normal! I’m the one who has to do all the work here!”
“And you think it’s fun to just sit around and wonder if your girlfriend’s going to wind up dead or missing?” Jesse yelled back. “You think that’s fair? Because it’s not, Maggie! It’s hell. You’re out there doing God knows what and I’m just hanging out. I can’t even help you and it makes me crazy!”
I pressed my fingers against my eyes, so mad that I wanted to punch something. “This is how it is,” I told him, and my voice was so cold that it scared me a little. “You’ve known this from the very beginning. This is who I am. I can’t change and I won’t change, especially not right now.
“And if you can’t handle it, then you need to go.”
I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth.
Jesse’s eyes widened in surprise, and then his face smoothed out into something I had never seen before. “That’s the thing, Mags,” he said, his voice strained and sounding nothing like him. “I can’t go. I’m always going to worry about you. Even if we break up tomorrow—”
“You want to break up?”
“No, I’m just saying! Even if we did, I’d still worry about you. I’m going to worry about you for the rest of my life because of this insane job of yours. I can’t stand that you’re out there risking your life and I can’t protect you!”
“Why? Because I’m a girl?”
“No, because I love you!” Jesse suddenly covered his mouth with his hand and turned away from me. His shoulders were bunched together, the tension running down his spine. When he turned back, there were tears in his eyes.
“That’s what people do when they love each other, Mags. They protect each other. You looked out for me and Roux, and now you won’t let us do the same for you and it makes me crazy.”
Now the tears were starting to fall and I was too exhausted to try and stop them. “Jesse, wait,” I said. “We’re both tired. We’re both angry. Let’s just talk about this tomorrow, okay?”
“When? Can you make time in your busy, world-saving schedule for me? Or do you want to leave me hanging and making excuses to my mom for ninety minutes while you risk your life around town?”
“You didn’t tell your mom, did you?” I asked. “Oh, my God, Jesse.”
“Of course I didn’t!” he cried. “That’s what I’m talking about! You can’t even trust me and all I’ve ever done is trust you and worry about you and—”
“I can’t tell you because it’s dangerous!” I exploded. “It’s really, really dangerous, Jesse! I shouldn’t have even told you and Roux about any of this in the first place, but I did and it was my stupid mistake and now I have to protect you because if I don’t …” The words stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get them out for a few seconds. “If I don’t and something happens to you …” They were stuck again, not going anywhere this time.
“You don’t have to protect me this time,” Jesse said, stepping toward me.
“Yes, I do!” I cried. “If you don’t have any information, then no one can get it from you. That’s what I keep trying to tell you!”
Jesse went quiet for almost a minute as we stood across from each other, both of us trying to catch our breath. He was the first to speak.
“So if you can’t trust me and I can’t protect you, then how the hell are we going to make this work?”
It’s a special sort of pain when someone voices your exact fears, when someone tells you that all the dark thoughts you have about yourself are not only real, but that everyone else can see them, too. It’s the sort of pain that drives the tears out of your eyes and shuts down your heart and drops a steel wall in front of it and makes you realize that yes, being alone is terrible, but it will never be as painful as this.
“Maybe we don’t,” I said, the tears stuck in my throat. “Maybe this is how it ends.”
Jesse just blinked. “You seriously want to break up?”
“I don’t want to,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! No matter what I do, I’m going to hurt you!”
Jesse bit the inside of his cheek, his jaw tightening. “Nothing hurts worse than this,” he said, echoing my own thoughts.
“Maybe we just need to take a break,” I said. “Not break up, but just figure things out.”
If a nod could be sarcastic, then that’s what Jesse did. “Cool. Fine. Okay.” He put his arm up to signal a cab turning the corner, then pulled open the door when it glided to the curb. “Get in,” he told me.
“I can hail my own—”
“Just.” Jesse took another deep breath and I saw his chin quiver a little. “Just let me do this for you,” he said. “In case this doesn’t work, let me do one last nice thing for you.”
My hands were shaking as I climbed in. We had shared a cab together last Halloween, hauling a very drunk Roux back to her apartment and then heading back downtown after sharing a kiss on an Upper East Side brownstone stoop. It had been our first kiss, and I remembered feeling the cracked pleather seats on the cab ride home, the smell of Jesse’s cologne, and the buzzing feeling that I had from kissing someone for the very first time. I had been in love with him then, but now it was deeper. Now I loved him.
And I had to let him go.
He shut the door after I got in and I pressed my palm against the window, wondering if I could feel his touch through the glass. He looked away, and I felt my heart sink, but then he wiped at his eyes before pressing his hand up against mine. There was only cold between us, no contact, and when the cab driver pulled away, Jesse’s fingers slipped along the glass, leaving tearstains on the window, sending me home alone.