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Goddammit, he’s never going to let me live this down.
Freya laughs but does me a solid and tells me all the things I’m good at, which consists of making Kraft Dinner, making stuff glittery (getting that glitter out of my house is going to be harder than getting all the bodily fluids out), and darts. Oh, and smoothies.
Thanks, kid.
Unable to sleep later that night, I go back down to the pool. It’s peaceful out here. I sit on the edge, letting my feet hang in the cool water.
I’m stuck. I’ve been existing in this limbo where I’m retired and without purpose. Even if Mina hadn’t left, sooner or later, I’d have to face myself and figure out who I am now that I can’t be who I was.
The problem is my life has been going in one direction since I could get into trouble—so since I could walk—and that brought me here, to stunt work. There was never any other option, which is why when I look back, there’s no other path. No other way forward.
Maybe I’m not the only one who’s stuck. Maybe Mina wasn’t lying when she said she loved all of me. That stupid game of The Floor is Lava pushed her right back into being too scared to be with me.
That’s ridiculous. A cartwheel won’t kill me and she has to know that.
I stare at my feet and how the rippling water distorts them. Unless, to her, every cartwheel is potentially fatal.
Huh. Hadn’t thought of it like that.
I guess, a simple cartwheel kind of…couldkill me if I slipped and hit my head just right. I can’t and won’t live in Bubble Wrap, but I can see her point.
But again. I’m doing easy, low-risk stuff. She’s overreacting.
I switch our places. Not with stunts, because my brain can’t picture Mina doing anything like that. Instead, I imagine her boxing. Taking a blow to the head causing the kind of injury I had.
My heart kicks painfully and I go cold, my breath sticking in my lungs until I force it out. When I picture her in a hospital bed…no. I can’t do this.
To almost lose her and have her want to get back in the ring, even though she’s not a professional, and she’s careful, would break my heart. It would terrify me.
I’ve put her through that fear. She’s been living with it since the accident, dialed up to an eleven. No wonder she snapped over The Floor is Lava.
If I want a snowball’s chance of getting her back, even as a friend, I need to fix this. And maybe I need to for myself, as well. It can’t be healthy basing so much of who I am on what I can do. But how do I walk away when everyone expects me to jump?
I wish Nic was still here—this is a perfect whiskey-by-the-pool conversation. Waking Danny isn’t an option. Might as well talk to a lounge chair since he’d be asleep in it after five minutes of listening to my problems.
I pull my phone out of my pocket and for a long moment my thumb hovers over her name. She’s going to kill me.
Nah, she loves me.
I press the button and the phone rings. And rings. And rings.
The moment she answers, before she can hang up on me, I blurt out, “How did you give up painting?”
There’s a long pause, followed by my twin’s voice, thick with sleep. “Timothy?”
“It was your favorite thing, it was how you coped with the world, and you walked away. How?”
“You called me at…” She groans. “It’s 5 a.m. My alarm goes off in an hour and you woke me up to talk about painting?” Her voice is wide awake and angry now. “Are you high?”
“I need a purpose, and I need to know how to walk away from something I love. You were drifting around aimlessly for a while and you stopped painting. How did you get your shit together?”
There’s another long pause, but this time I think she’s debating whether it would be worth it to fly out and murder me. “You wouldn’t let me day drink and watch The Bachelor,” she says dryly. “Don’t recall you giving me a choice.”
I might have got her a job, but she kept it. She stayed standing after I picked her up. “Want to come to LA and sort my life out?”
“No.”
“Jessie,” I whine. “I kinda need some wisdom from my sister.”
