Page 29 of Jackie

“I want to hear about Madrid and your new life,” I say.

He’s started a publishing company, he says, that does comic strips and some advertising. But then he says something else.

“So the talk about you and Jack Kennedy?”

My fork stops.

“He’s a gutter fighter, Jackie. You’re a class act.” He proceeds to drench me in tales of Jack’s womanizing, trying to talk me out of what I keep telling myself I’m not yet even in. I just sit there, peeling back the skin on my fish to separate flesh from the bone.

“You don’t want to be married to a politician, Jackie. You don’t even like politics. It’s a brutal world. Not your kind. There’s no poetry in it, no beauty, no art. Is it the money?”

They will say this forever, I realize. Jack Kennedy has money, so it must be the money I’m after. I could tell them he never carries cash. I’m usually the one who pays for movies, taxis, lunch. I could explain I’m never bored with Jack Kennedy. Never bored of listening to him or wondering what’s turning in that bold, intricate mind. I never get tired of how he looks at me or touches me, how his lips graze my cheek, my neck, the quickening of his breath mixed with mine, those more private and intimate moments of heat, skin, fire.

They will never say this.

I remember that day in the little bedroom when I knelt by the bookshelf and those worn spines: Byron, Tennyson, King Arthur and his knights. Jack just sat on the bed, talking about how those were the books that formed him. Stories of war, persistence, and failure, the getting up again and forging on when he was so ill as a child that he could barely make it from bed to bookshelf and back. Books about freedom and faith and the courage it took to fight on the right side of history.

“What makes that kind of courage, Jackie?” he’d asked me that day.

He is more than what they see. More than his father’s son or heir to his dead brother’s legacy. He wants more. Believes in more.

I can’t tell Demi this now. He won’t hear it.

Through the restaurant window, it is dusk, the sky steeped blue, city lights on the wet streets.

The day I told Jack I was going to London and would miss his sister’s wedding, I ignored my mother’s advice. I didn’t call. I met him at Martin’s and told him there. We sat at the table he’d begun to call “our table.”

“I understand,” he said. “You should go.” But he glanced at me, like he was going to say something else. Then he shrugged. “You’ll be missed.”

“You mean you’ll miss me?” I said gently, almost teasing, and he looked away, pushed a hand through his hair, glanced back at me, his eyes nervous for a moment, uncertain. He smiled.

“Yeah,” he said, “that.” I felt a bolt of warmth shoot through me, always, at that smile.

…

He is waiting for me when my plane touches down in Boston.

“You again,” he says.

“And you,” I say.

Silence falls between us, shy, a tide of other passengers streaming quickly past, heading to whatever lives they’ve come home to, or on to wherever else they are going, maybe a connecting flight they’re hoping to catch, all these other people, strangers, bound for other destinations.

For us, though, in that moment, everything feels very still and sharp and new.

“Come on, then, Jackie. Let’s go.”

He picks up my bag, takes my hand, and starts striding through the concourse, drawing me along with him, moving smooth and fast as he does sometimes, like his body just needs to keep up with his mind, which has already crossed into some future I’m not yet aware of, and we are like water, moving through all the other bodies in that airport, disparate faces, voices, lives. We reach the door that leads outside. He pauses and turns to me suddenly, an expression on his face I haven’t seen before—a kind of bewilderment, almost fear, but with a tinge of wonder, like a child’s fear.

“Are you okay with that, Jackie? You are, aren’t you?”

So sweet and unexpected—the vulnerability in his voice.

“Okay with what, Jack?”

“Going with me.”

I smile. “You’re where I want to be.”

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