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December 23, 2024 – December 29, 2024
By late December, the shape of things between Violet and Jack had changed.
They were still talking, but not with the same constant rhythm they had fallen into early on. After the DUI disclosure, after the cancelled comedy show, after the night Violet had dropped his things off and hugged him goodbye, the connection had not ended, but it had loosened.
That did not feel strange to Violet at the time. December had already become more intermittent. They were still in contact, but not every day, and not always with the same intensity. It was the holidays. Violet had her own life to manage, and there was a lot of it.
It was only her second Christmas since the separation, and she was still learning how to move through the holiday with her kids in a new home and a new family structure. Her parents’ health had become more complicated, and the effort to move them closer to her was already underway. She was not sitting around waiting for Jack to text. She was trying to hold several pieces of her life together at once.
Jack was still there, though. On December 23, he texted that he was “still breathing.” Work had been busy. He thought he had “just a head cold or allergies.”
“You better not have gotten me sick for Christmas,” Violet told him.
“I may have,” he answered, “but it was worth it.”
The next day, Christmas Eve, they talked about work schedules and she offered him a ride home. The conversation was ordinary, almost practical.
There was no dramatic reckoning. No big conversation about what had happened earlier in the month. No formal decision about what they were doing.
Violet texted him on 12/27 after she travelled once again back to where her parents lived. “Hope your Christmas went well,” she wrote. “I’m missing my portal can you send me a video of yours?”
The portal had started as a small shared thing. Violet had one in her room, a lighted object Jack had loved when he saw it. She had sent him one after the DUI disclosure, during that strange stretch when she was trying to be kind without being pulled too far back in. By late December, asking for the portal was playful, but it was also a way of reaching toward him.
Jack answered first with news of his thirty days. “30 Days! Wahoo!”
Violet congratulated him. Then he turned the portal into an invitation.
“I will send you the portal if you come through it to give me a hug.”
Violet told him she would love to, but she was at the hospital. That was the reality underneath the flirtation. Violet’s mother was still hospitalized. There were no clear answers yet. Violet did not know whether her mother would recover, decline, need a nursing home, or even survive. Only two weeks earlier, her family had signed a lease for a house near Violet so her father, and hopefully both of her parents, could move closer. But now no one knew whether her mother would ever be able to live there. At the same time, they were trying to figure out what to do with her parents’ current house. There were medical decisions, family decisions, financial decisions, logistical decisions. Every answer seemed to create another question.
Violet was the oldest child. She had one sister, but Violet was also the nurse, which meant people looked to her differently. She could understand the medical language. She knew what questions to ask. She could hear what was being said underneath what was being said. That knowledge did not make any of it easier. It made her harder to protect from it.
Jack knew this. He knew her mother was in the hospital. He knew Violet was scared. He knew she was carrying a level of responsibility that was not ordinary holiday stress.
He was dealing with family illness, too. He told Violet his grandmother had been taken to the hospital. She had been expected to visit with his mother and stepfather, but now she was being admitted. He did not have much information yet.
Violet sent him a photo she had taken from the plane, clouds below her like a blanket. “Got some great sunset shots on my flight.”
“It looks like a blanket of snow down below,” Jack wrote.
“Luckily just clouds,” Violet replied.
Later that day, he finally sent the portal. The video was dark and red, strange enough that Violet answered, “Ok this is frightening are you in hell?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve been here,” he wrote. “Colder than I imagined, though.”
Then she asked about his grandmother. “She’s in a room and stable the last update I got,” he told her. “Too afraid to call and ask.”
Violet asked questions. He answered what he knew. His grandmother was waiting on more testing. He had made dinner for his grandmother, his mother, and his stepfather before the hospital changed the day. Now he was sitting with too much food, worried and not hungry.
The exchange could have stayed there: family illness, worry, exhaustion, the hard edges of the holidays.
Instead, it turned. Jack said it sounded like “donkey dicks all around.”
Then he added, “Except how good your ass looks.”
The shift was abrupt, but it did not feel unwelcome. Violet joked back. The portal became flirtation again. Jack told her he had used it. She sent him a photo in her pajamas. “Got my jammies on!”
“Omg,” he wrote. “Now I’m hungry.”
Then: “Come here to me.”
The texting changed after that. It became direct, sexual, and mutually charged. Violet was not passive in it. She was tired and stressed and away from home, but she wanted him. More than that, she wanted what sex with him had begun to give her: release, pleasure, and a way back into her own body.
She had gone more than a year after leaving her husband without being intimate with anyone. She had forgotten how much she missed touch. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed being wanted. She had forgotten how much sex could loosen something in her that stress had tightened.
Jack was complicated. Everything with him was complicated. But the sex was not abstract. It was physical. Immediate and consuming.
Violet told him she had not stopped thinking about waking up with him pressed against her. “I wouldn’t mind adding to the list of thoughts you think about me,” he answered.
He told her he would love to release some tension just by holding her that night, then waking her before sunrise.
Violet told him she was full of ideas about what she wanted to do to him.
“We should compare notes when you get back,” he wrote.
The messages kept building. She told him she wanted to taste him.
“I would love that,” he answered. “I wanted to rip that dress off of you the other night and bend you over the couch.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked. He told her she was going to turn him into an animal if she kept it up. He called her naughty. He told her she might need a spanking. She told him to bend her over his lap. He told her she wanted to ride him. He told her he needed to be inside her.
They were both escalating. They were both participating. Violet wanted him, and she said so. By the next day, December 29, she was supposed to be coming home.
Her flight was delayed. Jack texted her while she waited.
“Sunday Funday would be more fun if you were here,” he wrote. Violet was stuck at the airport. She was tired, warm, sweaty, and ready to be back.
“If you were here I’d give you a shower,” he told her.
“Promise?” she asked.
“Absolutely. I need one, too! And showers are better together.”
As her travel dragged on, the shower became the next version of the portal. Something waiting for her. Something warm and physical. A threshold.
“I’ll warm the towels when you land,” he wrote. She told him when she expected to get in.
“My ass is so ready to be there,” she wrote.
“My ass is so ready for a shower,” he answered. “And to feel your soapy ass pressed against me.”
She landed late. “Wahoo!” he wrote. “Welcome home.”
He told her he was still writing, the way he had been all day. Writing had been his escape from worrying about his grandmother.
Violet asked how she was. He told her she was okay for now, still waiting on tests. Then Violet made it back from the airport. Not home to her own house. Back to the city.
“Made it home,” she texted.
“come inside!” Jack answered.
She went directly to his house. She went straight to him. The portal had started as a joke, a light in a room, a video sent across distance.
By December 29, Violet had gone through it. The night began physically. They showered together. They had sex. Then more sex. And more. The long pause of December gave way to the intensity that had been building in the messages while she was away. It was a night of physical intimacy unlike any other Violet had had in a very long time, one that did not fit into any ordinary description. It was sweet, intense, raw, and cathartic.
But the night was not only sexual. Afterward, Jack fed her. He had food and snacks for her. The house felt simple and comfortable. There was an ease to it that mattered more than drama would have. Food, a shower, snuggling in bed. Conversation. The ordinary intimacy of being cared for when she was exhausted.
Violet was still carrying her mother’s hospitalization. She still did not know what would happen next. She was still carrying the lease her family had signed, the uncertainty about whether her mother would ever live in that house, the questions about selling her parents’ home, and the pressure of being the oldest daughter and the nurse in the family.
Jack knew all of this because she told him. That night, after the shower and the sex and the food, they talked for hours. Not only about desire. Not only about his writing. They talked about their families, their histories, the places they came from, and the weight both of them carried.
Violet already knew Jack did not have an easy relationship with his mother. He had told her that many times. She knew there was pain there. She knew family was complicated for him, too. She was learning enough to understand that Jack’s past had its own sharp edges.
He talked about grief arriving early. About seeing his grandfather die when he was still young. About losing his father when he was barely into adulthood. He hinted that drinking had started young, long before his life became what it was now, and that his mother had not known what to do with him.
He talked about coming from a small town and the path that led him into the military for a few years at a very young age. Violet already knew that part of his life still mattered to him. He still wore his dog tags every day. That night, he talked more about what those years had meant, the friendships he had made, and the people from that time he was still close to.
Violet told him more about her own history, too. She told him about the death of her biological father three years earlier and how much it had changed her life. She talked about her mother still being in the hospital, her parents’ uncertain future, and the decisions ahead that no one felt ready to make.
It was not romantic intimacy exactly. It was more personal than that. They were learning more of each other’s backstories. The griefs and family fractures. The places where responsibility had landed too early or too heavily. After the shower, after the sex, after the food, they stayed up late talking as if the night had opened a private room neither of them was ready to leave.
The more Jack talked, the more his life began to make a little more sense to Violet. Not all the way. Not cleanly. But enough that some of the earlier confusion started to find a shape.
He was sober now, or trying to be. He was going to meetings. He talked about recovery as if he understood that something in his life had broken open and needed to be rebuilt. Violet knew enough about alcoholism to recognize the chaos that could come with it. She knew how dishonesty, avoidance, shame, and emotional volatility could cluster around the disease.
She did not consciously excuse everything that had happened. She still had questions. She still knew he had not been truthful with her. She still knew there were things about him that did not quite line up.
But sitting there with him after midnight, after hearing more about his family, his losses, his drinking, and the years that had shaped him, Violet began to see some of his earlier behavior through the lens of alcoholism more than through the lens of character.
That made a difference. It made him seem wounded instead of simply unreliable. It made the contradictions feel less like danger and more like damage. It made his recovery feel relevant to whether he might become someone different.
And Violet believed in people becoming different. Jack had spent the day writing, and now he showed Violet more of that world. He showed her the website he was building: www.jackstallings.com. He showed her a draft of a story he had been working on. He talked about the project, about what he was trying to create, and about the January 6 (Epiphany) deadline he had given himself to launch the site.
Violet asked more about the name. She had known him as Jack by then, but “Jack Stallings” was not new. The website made the question more concrete. It was not only a name attached to a text thread or a story. It was the name on the work. The name on the project. The name attached to the version of himself he was preparing to put into the world.
He told her he had started using it more than a year ago. He explained that it was more than just a pen name, though Violet did not remember him describing it exactly as an alter ego. At the time, she was not suspicious of that. She was trying to understand him. She had been trying to understand him since the beginning.
And this felt like understanding. The writing mattered to him. The name mattered to the writing. The website mattered to the name. Even his Alexa called him Jack.
That detail stayed with her, though not as a warning. Not then. At the time, it felt intimate, almost tender in its strangeness. It seemed like evidence that he was letting her see more of the private machinery behind his work and the life he was trying to build.
They talked for hours. They stayed up too late. Violet was tired, but the night had the quality of closeness she had been drawn to from the beginning: sex, conversation, vulnerability, creativity, and the sense that Jack was letting her into something few people could see.
By morning, nothing had been resolved. They had not gone back and repaired the uncertainty from earlier in December. They had not clarified what his recovery meant for dating. They had not talked through the deeper questions Violet still had about honesty, other partners, or what kind of relationship this was supposed to be.
But the unresolved questions had been displaced by something much easier to feel. Comfort, desire, food, warm towels. A long conversation, a website, a story, and a name.
Violet had gone to him exhausted and frightened, carrying the weight of her family and the strange ache of a holiday season that still did not feel fully settled after her separation. Sex with Jack was becoming an anchor. Not love. Not romance. Not certainty.
An anchor. A place where her body could stop bracing for a while. A place where she could be wanted instead of needed. A place where she could put down the responsibility for a few hours and feel something other than fear.
And that night, after she stepped through the portal, Jack showed her Jack Stallings. She felt like she had met Jerry for the first time.