Double Clutch - Реинхардт Лиз (книги полностью бесплатно TXT) 📗
I understand where she’s coming from, but it’s still constricting. And since I wanted to stay with Jake, I limited the time I spent with him, even though my body physically ached with the need to be near him sometimes. Cheesy as it might sound, that’s the best way I can explain it. I thought I had done a pretty good job of disguising just how obsessed I was with him and how deliciously he had taken over my life.
But Mom started watching me, exactly the way I knew she would. She looked for anything that would provide evidence that Jake was breaking my heart, making me sad, keeping me up too late, stopping me from pursuing my interests, hogging me from other friends or any other trumped up charge. In her mind, she filed any shred of evidence away to digest later.
If I woke up with dark circles under my eyes because Jake and I had an amazing conversation on the phone the night before, Mom narrowed her eyes and made a mental check. If I arranged to go out with Kelsie and she cancelled, and I went out with Jake instead, Mom noted it and frowned. Tiny charges, little details grew and compounded until Mom had, in her mind, a real reason to orchestrate a campaign against Jake, or at least against me being so wrapped around him.
Mom was a huge proponent of dating lots of different people, keeping your options open, and focusing on yourself. All sound good in theory. Until you meet someone like Jake Kelly and have to think about living without hearing his sweet laugh or smelling the clean, minty smell of him or feeling his arms tight around you. Thinking about it made my heart skip and surge.
This was love.
And my mom was no fool. She wasn’t about to drive a wedge between us by harping on Jake or voicing her neurotic concerns. My mother was too brilliant for that kind of novice work.
“It’s part of a program with the college, honey.” Mom took out a pamphlet and handed it to me eagerly. “They want to give the professors a chance to scout prospective study abroad locations before they choose them, so we’re allowed to bring any family and check out the museums, local universities…oh, it’s going to be so incredible.” She hugged me again, and I took a deep breath.
“Mom, this sounds so great.” I swallowed hard and prepared for the worst. “So, when do we go?”
“We leave the day after tomorrow! We’ll be gone for a full week, just past your winter break. I’ve already cleared it at your schools if you need some jet-lag recovery time on the way back, so don’t worry about that.” She put an arm around me and squeezed me close.
“Mom?” I dug deep and willed up some courage to argue on Jake‘s behalf. She looked at me, and the look was new-knife sharp. I swallowed back my arguments like the weak coward I sometimes was. “I have to pack right now. What’s Paris like in December?”
“Chilly.” The flinty light was gone from her eyes. She took both my hands in hers. “Go ahead and get packing, honey.”
“Thank you, Mom. So much.” I modulated my voice carefully to keep it happy, and I hugged her again. “This will be amazing.”
And I hoped that by saying it, I would force myself to mean it. Because as I walked quickly to my recently redone room, I felt the itchy pain of tears pricking behind my eyes. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I would miss New Year’s Eve with Jake. It would have been my first ever romantic New Year’s kiss.
In my room, with its robin-egg blue wall and poppy-covered bed, the Chagall and Cassatt on the wall, the paper lamps and the books piled everywhere, I popped my iPod onto its dock and put on some happy packing music, even though I wanted to scroll through my specially made teen angst mix and let it envelope me in something suitably dreary. I started to put piles of clothes here and there and took out my brand new pink leather traveling bag, the one I had unwrapped this morning and hugged Thorsten for. I didn’t feel any ill will towards Fa. He was a puppet in Mom’s very capable hands, no doubt about that.
I didn’t feel any ill will at all, not really. I picked up the picture of me and Mom in front of the big tree in Rockefeller Square. We’re both really pink cheeked and nosed with cute hats on, our arms around each other. I knew what my mom was feeling stemmed from a lot of really deep emotions and events that all proved the one thing I’ve known my entire life -- my mom loves me so fiercely, it’s scary.
Mom had me when she was barely out of high school. The guy, my father, left her high and dry. He was her boyfriend and as far as I can tell, she thought this guy was the love of her life. I knew that she thought what Jake and I had was very similar to what she once imagined she had with my biological father, before he stomped on all of her dreams and left her high and dry. It took her a long time to get her life back on track after him. I know it’s the ghost of that experience that makes her uber protective.
Mom never told me much about the whole thing with my father, but I knew there was a lot of resentment on her part towards my grandparents. She felt like they should have been looking out for her more, making sure she was on the right track, that she had the right back up.
It was what she was doing for me right now, or at least what she thought she was doing for me. So I couldn’t be upset.
But I was.
And I had to do the one thing that I really, really didn’t want to do. Especially on Christmas day, knowing the kinds of Christmases Jake has experienced every year before. But every second that I put off packing and moped, every second that I chickened out about calling him was one second that I took away from our time together, and I couldn’t do that.
I was always a good packer. Thorsten, Mom and I traveled a lot, so I knew how to roll my clothes, how to pick things that will layer well and that will move from casual to fancy easily. I knew how to make a little bag of accessories that would dress everything up. I had a special tiny cross-over purse with a wide zippered strap to keep my passport and anything else important in. First I’d laid out what I wanted to take on my bed, then I pared through and took out what I know I didn’t really want to bring. Once there was a new, smaller pile, I rolled it and put it all in. Only when all that was done did I pick up the phone and turn my music up a little bit. I packed so fast that I had time to call Jake and give him a little bit of a heads up before he got here.
“Merry Christmas, Brenna.” His voice was silky and deep on the phone, and I felt my mouth go dry at the sound of it. I loved that voice.
“Merry Christmas, Jake.” I smiled despite the bad news I was about to deliver.
“Did Santa leave you some good stuff?” Jake asked. He sounded happy, inexplicably.
I had been to his house early on Christmas Eve, before the candlelight service and Christmas caroling at my family’s church. He and his father bought a small, dry turkey and had two wilted vegetable sides and mashed potatoes; a veritable feast as far as the Kellys were concerned. We sat on the couch and ate off of plates that we balanced on our laps and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Jake’s father barely spoke to me. He didn’t seem mean, just socially uncomfortable and eager for me to be gone. When the movie was over, he got up and announced that he was going out bowling. Jake and I had a few hours before I had to go home, so we snuggled in his room and talked and laughed under the blankets. His dad kept the house at sixty eight degrees in the winter, so snuggling was pretty much a necessity.
