45 - Jack

45

Jack

I stood on my porch, paralyzed by what Melissa had said.

She had to go. She had to leave Crested Butte. Today .

It had been a few minutes since she ran back to her cabin, but I couldn’t get my legs to respond. When it came to the fight-or-flight response, I was usually a fighter. I got angry, I argued, I slammed hatchets into trees. But that was a false-dichotomy, because there was a third option: freeze.

That’s what came over me now. I was frozen in place. I didn’t fight, and I didn’t run, because to do either of those things meant accepting the decision Melissa had just made. And I wasn’t ready to do that, yet.

Eventually, a car came rolling into camp. I was afraid it was a customer that I would need to see to, but it was a yellow cab, and it stopped in front of the Indigo Cabin.

Melissa emerged from inside. She moved quickly, like she was afraid of being here a moment longer than necessary. That hurt to see. She caught sight of me, and dropped off her bag and took a few steps in my direction.

“Jack…”

Her voice knocked me out of my paralysis. It also knocked something loose from my heart, like snow sliding off a mountainside. Tears welled in my eyes, and I sure as fuck didn’t want her to see them, so I mumbled something to her and went inside.

I hadn’t cried since my dad died ten years ago. I didn’t even cry when Sam left—I was more numb than anything. Yet here I was, moved to tears by this woman I’d only known for a week.

Was that a measure of how weak I had become, or of how powerfully I felt about Melissa?

I watched from the window as she climbed into the cab and closed the door. Gravel crunched under rubber tires as it drove away. Even then, part of me wondered if she was actually leaving. I half expected her to tell the driver to wait, to see her jump out and sprint toward my cabin and throw herself into my arms like I was Ryan Fucking Gosling from The Notebook.

But this wasn’t a goddamn fairy tale, at least not the kind with a happy ending. The taxi never stopped, and soon it—and Melissa—were gone.

I sat down at my desk and allowed grief to wash over me. It was the same grief I’d felt for Sam. Yeah, it was insane to compare the two situations. Sam and I had been together for a full year. We’d built a business and a life together when she left. Melissa was just a fling. A woman I’d only known a few days, and who I’d been romantically involved with even less.

Yet I couldn’t deny my pain any more than I could deny the sunlight streaming through my window. The stabbing feeling in my chest was real, more real than anything else I had felt in this world.

I held my head in my hands. Tears fell onto the wood floor of the cabin, thick enough to splatter like heavy raindrops. I wallowed in self-pity. Then I felt angry at myself for asking her to stay, for putting that kind of pressure on a woman. I grieved for the life I had lost with Sam, for the life I had right now, for the life I had briefly allowed myself to picture with Melissa, the stubborn but beautiful woman.

And then, when I had run through every possible emotion, something shifted inside my heart.

I wasn’t the kind of man who froze. I sure as hell wasn’t someone who fled from his problems and mistakes.

I was a fighter.

Fuck this.

I picked up the phone and dialed one of only two numbers that mattered. “Whatever you’re doing, drop it and meet me out front. I’ll pick you up. Don’t worry: Marlene owes me a favor.”

I still didn’t believe in the idea of the one . After Sam, I probably never would believe it again.

But I was certain of one thing: Melissa was someone special. Someone I shouldn’t let walk away like this.

At least not without a fight.