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December 30, 2024 – January 6, 2025
In the morning, Jerry made Violet a bagel with fresh blueberries before she left for work.
The night before had been intense: the delayed flight, the shower, the sex, the food, the hours of talking, the family histories, the website, the story draft, the name Jack Stallings. By morning, Violet was exhausted
After that night, she found herself thinking of him more often as Jerry.
Jack Stallings had become more real to her, too. She had seen the website. She had seen the draft. She had heard more about the name, the writing, and the January 6 deadline he had set for himself. Jack was no longer only a name in a text thread or a creative signature. It was attached to work he cared about, a version of himself he was preparing to send into the world.
But what stayed with Violet was Jerry.
The man who had talked with her for hours after midnight. The man who had told her more about his family, his grief, his drinking, his military years, his writing, and the life he was trying to rebuild. The man who had listened while she talked about her mother, her parents, and the decisions no one felt ready to make.
Jack was becoming clearer as a project. Jerry was becoming clearer as a person.
At least, that was how it felt then. The week after the portal night did not become steady.
There was contact. There was warmth. But the rhythm still did not settle into anything clean or predictable. It was not the constant current they had fallen into at the beginning. It was not silence either.
By early January, Violet was not carrying him the way she had in November. She still wanted him, but she was not looking at him as a clear romantic future.
Her life was too full for that. After the new year, her mother moved to rehab. It was progress, but not resolution. Violet was still working, parenting, preparing for another trip, and trying to help her family make decisions no one could fully make yet.
Jerry was there, but her focus was in so many other spaces.
She texted him and wished him a happy New Year, and on New Year’s Day, he texted that he had been asleep before the ball dropped. “Sober and happy,” he told her. “Happy new year!!”
He was newly sober. He was going to meetings. He was talking about recovery as if he knew something in his life had broken open and needed to be rebuilt.
Violet understood alcoholism well enough to recognize some of what he was describing. She still knew he had trouble being fully truthful. She still knew there were things that did not line up. But recovery gave her a familiar way to understand him. She knew the hard road he had in front of him working the steps, which include a fearless moral inventory and making amends. She believed he was serious about the program.
Still, she was not imagining stability with him. She wanted something that did not require a plan. Something fun. Something that did not ask her to be the oldest daughter, the nurse, the coordinator, the competent one.
Violet could not stop thinking about the intensity of their previous encounter. It had been so long since she had connected with someone on the type of levels she had with Jerry. It felt both raw and feral and also so much more. Violet couldn’t help but be curious about exploring their connection. Jerry made her feel like the spiritual and emotional connection was the precise reason they had such physical chemistry. She needed to know more about their physical connection.
This time, she was the instigator. She sent suggestive emojis. She was not waiting for him to create the opening. She was not thinking of it as a major romantic step or a defining moment. She wanted sex and a few quiet hours away from everything she could not solve. She wanted distraction.
Jerry was a good distraction. By then, he was also a familiar one. Familiar enough to want and to touch. Familiar enough that the desire did not feel complicated in the moment, even though almost everything around it was.
She picked him up after work. They went to his house and he made dinner.
They had sex. It was not a long night of passion but a confirmation of what she left feeling the last time. Violet knew Mondays were long work days for him. After dinner and sex, he fell asleep not long after. That was okay with Violet. She had not come over expecting a long emotional night like December 29 and she hadn’t brought an overnight bag. She had wanted a few hours of pleasure and ease, and she had gotten them.
So she tucked him in and left. The next day, Jerry told her he had woken up wondering where she was.
Violet had gone to him looking for something light. She had not treated the night as anything other than distraction.
But he noticed when she was gone.