Violet & Jack: Chapter 26 – I’m Very Fragile, Jerry

September 26, 2025 – October 20, 2025

After the conversation about the writing, Violet felt like they had finally gotten somewhere. Not all the way, but somewhere.

Jerry had read what she sent. He had agreed that they would tell each other before sleeping with someone else. He had said he got STI testing every three months. He had acknowledged a little jealousy. He had initiated sex afterward, and the next day he had texted that he appreciated the conversation and looked forward to more of the same.

For Violet, that sounded like continuation. It sounded like the door was open.

Then she did not hear from Jerry. Not that night. Not the next day. Not for several more days.

Once again, the conversation that had felt meaningful did not produce steadier contact. It produced silence.

On October 1, something good happened in Violet’s own life.

“I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!!!!!! 🤩🤩🤩”

She had told Jerry she had interviewed for a new position, and when she found out she got it, she wanted to tell him.

Jerry responded right away. “Yay!!! That’s incredible. Happy for you.”

Violet was thrilled. “Thanks I’m so excited.”

“Take the rest of the week off,” he wrote.

“I wish,” Violet answered. “I’ve been here since 3:30am 🤣”

The exchange was easy at first. It felt good that he was happy for her. After several days of silence, the affection arrived quickly enough that she could almost ignore the gap before it.

Later, she teased him. “You’re such a bad influence.”

“Does that mean that you’re on your way?” Jerry asked.

Violet was not sure if he was serious. That was part of the rhythm with Jerry too. A line could be flirtation, invitation, joke, or actual plan, and she often had to feel her way through it.

“Aren’t you taking me out to celebrate?” she wrote.

“Yep. See you in an hour.”

For a moment, she imagined it becoming real. She could leave work, see him, and let the good news land somewhere outside her own head.

“I can try to leave around 3,” she told him. “I have therapy at 6.”

Then he pulled it back. “No don’t do that. I didn’t sleep at all last night… I’m going to crash early.”

Violet replied with one letter.

“K.”

She was confused. A minute earlier he had asked if she was on her way. Then he had said he would see her in an hour. As soon as she adjusted and tried to make the plan concrete, the plan disappeared.

It was just another moment that had briefly opened and then closed.

After that, she did not hear from him for another week.

The silence was not clean, though. She still had things at his house. Eventually, she texted him about her missing belongings.

He answered the next day and asked her to come over later.

Violet already had something she was trying to go to that night, so she suggested he come with her. At first, Jerry said he could meet her there. Then Violet offered to pick him up, and he agreed. They set a pickup time.

For a moment, there was another plan. Then, later, Jerry changed his mind again and asked for a rain check.

Violet had had enough of the shifting. “Damn make up your mind,” she wrote.

Jerry turned it sexual. “You need your ass spanked.”

“If only I could find someone who wanted to…” Violet said.

It was sarcastic, but it was also pointed. The joke worked because they both knew the thing underneath it. He kept invoking desire. He kept turning the thread sexual. He kept talking like someone who wanted access to her body.

But he was not actually seeing her. The next several days passed without him responding again.

Violet had been out of town over the weekend visiting her son for his birthday. She had hoped she might see Jerry again soon when she got back, but that did not happen. Then her body gave her one more injury to report.

On Monday she texted him. “I’m going for a broken bone record.”

She sent him a picture of her toe, bruised dark from where a jar had fallen on it. Her ribs were still recent. The bite mark was recent. Now her toe was black and blue too.

Before Jerry answered the photo, Violet sent another message.

“You know I do worry about you when I don’t hear from you, right?”

It was not meant as a demand. It was a small truth. When Jerry went quiet, she worried. She knew enough about the instability in his life to worry, and enough about his inconsistency to know that worrying did not always produce an answer.

Hours later, he responded to the injury.

“Ouch. What did you do?”

“I cussed and curled up in a fetal position.”

“I would have cried,” Jerry wrote. “For 48 hours.”

Violet told him her daughter had thrown a jar of salsa at her.

“Accidentally?” he asked.

“Ok it might have fallen out of the fridge after placing it extra precariously on top of something.”

“Sounds intentional.”

Violet sent a wink. “Right, she is trying to get me to take down my Only Fans.”

“Keep on rocking in the free world,” Jerry wrote.

It was funny. It was easy. It was weird. It was also another version of the same contact they kept having: Violet sent him some piece of her actual life, often involving pain or chaos, and Jerry appeared in the thread with jokes, teasing, and just enough attention to keep the connection alive.

The next day, Violet made the injury part of the ongoing Cindy joke.

“Don’t need 10 toes to ride Cindy thankfully. 😊”

Later, she sent something softer. “I miss you and I look forward to finding time to be together soon.”

There was no pressure in it, or at least she tried not to put pressure in it. She missed him. She wanted to see him. She was saying that plainly while still leaving the timing open.

Jerry answered with a heart. “I look forward to kissing that big toe soon!”

“You do need some practice being gentle with me 😉” Violet replied.

“I don’t want to put you in the fetal position.”

Then he added, “Often.”

It was a joke, but it also landed against everything that had recently happened. She had asked him to be gentle when her ribs were broken and had ended up with bite marks on her thigh. She had been hurt again, and his response was affectionate, sexual, funny, and evasive all at once.

Violet answered with: “I’m very fragile.”

She meant it playfully, but she also meant it. Her body had been through a lot in a short period of time. Her ribs had been broken. Her toe was bruised. She had been injured, bitten, sore, and exhausted. She was not fragile in the sense of being weak. She was not mentally or emotionally weak. She was fragile in the literal sense: tender, breakable, and still reaching toward someone who did not always handle her carefully.

Two days later, she got a new phone and sent him a selfie with the sunset behind her.

“First selfie with my new phone.”

Jerry noticed the sunset more than the phone. “Never met anyone with as many sunset photos as I do.”

Then he asked, “How is your toe?”

“It’s a lot better,” Violet answered. “I’m sure you don’t have near as many sunset pics as I do.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Did your daughter give kisses”

He reacted with a heart, then she sent a video of the sun setting over water.

“Can you believe we’re going 68k mph in a circle”

This was not a random turn in the conversation. Jerry had been mildly obsessed with the multiverse for as long as Violet had known him. Time, parallel realities, the motion of the earth, the possibility that reality was stranger than it looked — those subjects had come up between them many times. Violet liked that about him. It was part of the odd intellectual intimacy that made him feel different from other men she had known.

Their conversations could move from a bruised toe to pets to sunsets to the speed of the earth without feeling forced.

Violet answered. “Time is moving backwards.”

“Impossible,” Jerry wrote. “I already lost too much.”

That line shifted the mood. He did that sometimes. He would place something dark or wounded into a playful exchange, enough to make him feel unreachable and tender without fully opening the door to what he meant.

Violet stayed with the thread. “Time is a construct.”

“So I’ve heard,” Jerry replied. “I can never seem to catch it.”

“Time is just the multiverse you can only ever be where you are,” Violet wrote. “It’s just an illusion.”

Jerry turned it again. “So we shouldn’t sleep.”

Then, “Can you help me awake”

Violet thought he meant help him stay awake. Or maybe help him wake up. With Jerry, those meanings could overlap quickly, and there was already a sexual history between them around mornings. Morning sex had become one of the things they both frequently enjoyed.

“I’ve never had any luck trying to keep you awake lol,” she answered. “But I can definitely help you wake up 😊”

Jerry responded with a sweating emoji and a kissing face.

Then he changed the subject, or maybe kept the same intimacy in a different form. “I’m cleaning my room now.”

“I needed a change.”

That detail stayed with her. His room had become one of the central locations of their connection: his bed, his chair, his ropes, his cat, his computer, the place where she had done therapy, the place where he had finally read the writing because she was there. Now he was cleaning it. She could not be sure whether this was an invite or not.

Later that night, her own evening turned strange. “Sammy is trying to kill me again,” she texted.

“What did you do this time?” Jerry asked.

Then, before she answered, he added, “Glad your toe is healing.”

“She made me take her to the spooky woods.”

“I can’t do it,” Jerry wrote. “I’m still a lil chicken shit.”

“I can’t either,” Violet answered. “I have PTSD already.”

“Too many crazy stories — Enjoy.”

“That’s not the word I would use.”

“Chainsaws are the worst,” Jerry wrote.

“A little kid literally rushed me with a chainsaw. I think I blacked out.”

“My toe is throbbing.”

The exchange had a ridiculousness to it, fear turned into banter. None of it required him to make a plan, keep a plan, or show up in person.

She did not hear from him again that night. The next evening, Violet sent him a picture from her own room. “I rearranged my room so I can see the sunset sky from my bed.”

The sunset had always been part of the language between them, but this one belonged to her room, her bed, her window, her evening. She still wanted to share it with him, so she sent it. Later that night, she sent him a song video she thought he would like.

He did not respond.

The next day at work, something happened that caught Violet off guard.

She had a terrible encounter with her boss. Violet was usually good at regulating herself. She knew how to steady her own nervous system, call a friend, breathe, get through a hard workday, and keep someone else’s behavior from swallowing the whole day. She had been through enough in life to know how to take care of herself when she was upset.

But this hit differently.

It was sudden and destabilizing, and she was extremely upset. She reached out to friends, and they offered moral support. They listened. They were kind.

Still, what Violet wanted was not only advice or reassurance.

She wanted a hug from Jerry.

It had been weeks since she had seen him. She had wanted him many times before, but this was different. Up to this point, she had never needed him. She had wanted his body, his attention, his conversation, his tenderness, and his time, but she had not depended on him in any real way.

That day, she wanted a hug. She wanted to be able to go somewhere and be held by the person who had kept telling her, in one form or another, that he wanted her close.

So she reached for him. He responded immediately with apparent concern.

At first, the conversation was open. There was the possibility of dinner. The possibility of seeing him. The possibility that he understood she was not asking for anything complicated.

She did not need a grand rescue. She did not need him to fix her job or solve the situation with her boss. She needed comfort.

Then the opening narrowed. Jerry could not see her that night. The reasons were vague. He sounded sad to disappoint her, or at least he sounded like he wanted to seem sad to disappoint her, but he still did not come through.

At the time, Violet knew he had his own grief in the background. Several weeks earlier, he had told her that a good friend from the military had gone missing and was later found dead by apparent suicide. She knew that had hit him hard. She knew there was a memorial planned for that week that required travel. She knew he was carrying another loss.

That was part of why she tried, even then, to leave room for him.

But she also knew what had happened in the actual moment. She had asked for very little. She had asked for a hug, and even that seemed to be too much.

Whatever else was happening, the result was simple.

She needed him, and he was not there.

Then he did not check on her again. Not later that night. Not the next morning. Not for weeks. After all the texts, all the rope, all the talk about honesty and transparency, all the “more of the same,” all the concern about her toe and her body and whether she was fragile, he did not even ask if she was okay.

That told her more than she wanted to know.

Violet had wanted comfort. What she got was absence.

By the end of that conversation, she was hurt, frustrated, and furious. She had asked so little of him, and somehow even that had felt like too much.

When he did not even check in on her after that, she knew something had shifted. For the first time, she thought this might really be the end.