The One That Ran Away Read online

To her credit, that was genuine curiosity on her face. A face Jess had to be careful around, otherwise she would go blind from the timeless beauty alone. “Hang on a sec, and I’ll tell you some more. I wanna look something up really fast.”

  Shannon nibbled on one of the macarons while checking to see if the barista was bringing her the tea she ordered.

  “There’s more to your astrological personality than your sun sign,” Jess said while flipping pages and punching something into her phone. “Your rising sign is also as important when it comes to painting a good picture of who you are as a human being. We could also really get into some numerology if we consider the number 10 associated with your birthday.”

  Shannon cupped her hands around her face, elbows digging into the table. “That’s kinda fascinating. I never realized it was so complicated. Then again, I suppose that explains why those birth chart things are so extravagant.”

  Jess wrote some keywords down. As soon as she had a general picture of what the signs meant and a feel for the person sitting with her, she was more likely to construct a narrative that the layman could understand. And, oh boy, was Shannon a novice when it came to understanding things like ascendant.

  “What I’m getting the most from you is that you are the type of person who does not see failure as an option. Aquarius is noted for being stubborn and contrary to a fault, and Taurus is, well, Taurus is a bull, you know? Bullheaded. Together, that’s a powerful motivator. When you see something you really want, you give it your all and thrust yourself headfirst into whatever you deem important. You’re as driven by financial gain as you are by humanitarian efforts.”

  Shannon glanced at Jess’s notes. “You got all that from a few moments of research?”

  You have no idea how much I’ve gleamed from you. “Oh, there’s a lot more.”

  “There… is?”

  “Do you want to hear about relationships or health, first?”

  “Health, I guess.”

  Jess didn’t miss a beat. The gears had clicked in her head. Sometimes all it took was looking up the characteristics for ascendant signs to know how they meshed with sun signs. Taurus and Aquarius were both popular signs.

  “Your trouble organs are the kidneys and liver, although your throat will usually be the first indicator that you’re falling ill. Yet you’re rarely ill, right?”

  Shannon gasped. “I’ve only been sick three times since high school.”

  “You have a naturally strong physique and a body that desires to live a long time. If you take particular care of your health, you can expect to live a long, long time. But the diabetes that runs in your family needs to be monitored.”

  “How did you know about my mother’s diabetes?”

  “You’re still young enough that kicking any unhealthy habits now will behoove you greatly in both the short and long term.” Jess couldn’t help but smirk. “Did you ever stop smoking?”

  Shannon lowered her eyes. “No. I’ve tried, okay? Shit’s hard when you’re stressed.”

  The barista brought Shannon her drink. She happened to glance at Shannon’s chart and said, “Hey! I’m an Aquarius, too! High five, girl.”

  Shannon reluctantly high fived the barista. “Thanks. Apparently, we need to stop smoking.”

  “Oh, I don’t smoke.”

  The barista walked away. Shannon leveled her gaze on Jess and said, “Tell me about my love life.”

  Jess gulped. Yup. There was the no-bullshit Shannon she knew. That was the same gaze she received eight years ago, when this same woman said, “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Relationships, huh?” Jess fingered the edge of one of her books. That was an easy enough question to answer. She knew so much about Aquarians in love that she had literally written articles on the subject. I know more about you guys than I do my own sign. That’s what happened when a woman fell in love with Aquarians. She studied everything she could about their approaches to love, so she could fruitlessly anticipate what they might do – and how to woo them. “Well, you eschew your familial relationships, so that’s something you might want to work on…”

  “I don’t care about my family.” Exactly! That’s what Jess said! “I want to know about the good stuff. My love life.”

  “Oh, well… ah…”

  Shannon sat back, crossing her arms. She had yet to touch her green drink. “Are you usually this reserved with your other clients? I can’t believe it. Not you. Aren’t you the one always in a hurry to tutor a girl on love?”

  Jess didn’t know if that meant what she thought it did. How much was the dark side of Shannon Parker toying with her?

  “You’re naturally seductive and passionate. About everything. Mostly romantic relationships.”

  Shannon snorted, as if that answer satisfied her. “How long have you been keeping that one in your head?”

  Jess shrugged. “Since you first asked me to give you a reading.”

  “That stuff about being allergic to failure… that’s rooted in how much passion I have?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “I see. So, what’s so wrong about being passionate and seductive?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m assuming there’s some shadow to that in one’s relationships. If I were nothing but perfect at love, then I would be married to my high school sweetheart by now. I’m not. So what’s that mean?”

  Do you not have a boyfriend after all? That didn’t make much sense based on what she said about moving here with a man a few months ago. “You want to know the downside to how you are in love?”

  “Doesn’t everyone? We can’t improve who we are unless we know our faults.”

  That was a very… Aquarius sun Taurus rising thing to say. Someone always striving to be more successful at every facet of life. “All right. You’re intimidating as fuck.”

  Shannon sucked her drink through a bright purple straw. “Go on.”

  “No matter how much someone loves you, the moment you throw open the door and approach them, you’re like an overbearing monster come to fuck them up.” Jess continued before Shannon could question this assessment. “It’s because you don’t know how to express yourself. Your perfectionism, your need to succeed, and your inability to curate a lasting relationship with your parents means you’re always in your own head and searching for examples of healthy love. When you’re single, you’re flailing like a fish out of water. You want to be in relationships, but as soon as you are in one, you inadvertently sabotage it with your nature. You’re too cold, too distant, and intimidating to the point your partner is never sure if their love is reciprocated. So they leave you before you can leave them.”

  “That…” Shannon went from enjoying her beverage to choking on the last drop. “Isn’t how it always works out.”

  “When you are the one doing the dumping, it’s because the other person threatens to destroy the order you’ve established for yourself. You are the seducer. You are the one who struts around with your aura on fire, enticing everyone within a ten-mile radius to come into your gravitational field and have their lives changed. They’re the ones who change for you. The moment you realize you might be changing for someone else, you panic. That’s assuming your relationship lasts that long.”

  Shannon stirred her straw around in her drink. Both she and Jess glanced up to see the male biology student look away. He was definitely eavesdropping on their conversation. “Perhaps you’re not wrong. Although…” she put her cup down. “I’d love to know what your issues with love are.”

  “Huh?” Jess shook her head. “You wanted to know about you, so I told you. If you want to improve your relationships, you need to learn to accept change gracefully. It can’t always be about you bringing change.”

  “No, no, I get that. But I want to know about your issues.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you spent ten minutes getting your anger with me off your chest. Now I want to know how you share the burden for why we never worked out.”
r />   Jess slowly sat up, nostrils flared and cheeks so red that she began to sweat. “You’re the one who dumped me,” she muttered.

  “You said that the reason I dump someone first is because they threatened my order. Well? Did you?”

  “Only you could tell me that.”

  Shannon cocked her head. Soft hair obscured half her face. Just as well, because Jess was not in the mood to indulge this woman’s beauty any longer. It’s so true. She seduces everyone around her. Like Jess, who was instantly seduced – and ruined – with one glance on a sunny autumn morning.

  I remember. I spent the whole morning thinking about you. The way Shannon’s hair bounced when she walked. The way she smiled, even when no one else was around. Flowers may have sprouted where she stepped, but they were not the kind of flowers that lived for long. That was the kind of destruction left in her wake.

  A destruction made of fragile beauty and the hopes of an upcoming spring.

  “I was young and scared,” Shannon said. “I had no idea what to make of you and how you disrupted my carefully crafted plan.”

  “How did I disrupt that?”

  Shannon stood. She left two macarons behind, but took her drink with her out the door. “I wasn’t supposed to fall for a girl,” she said, before shutting the teashop door behind her.

  Jess dropped her pen. The biology student bent down and picked it up.

  She… fell for me? Jess spent the rest of her evening staring at her own natal chart, suddenly unable to make sense of it for the first time in ten years. Because if there was one thing she had learned in her short life, it was that her heart was often the one left broken – not the other way around.

  So how had she noticed the Aquarius necklace she gave Shannon all those years ago? And why was she wearing it?

  Chapter 6

  Shannon

  “A little more to the left, Stephen.” Shannon lowered her camera and, still crouched in the grass, approached the man in the collared shirt and dress pants. “That’s it. Put your hand here on her arm. It softens your knuckles.”

  The woman in Stephen’s grasp giggled. “That’s right, Steve. Soften those knuckles.”

  “I work on a computer all day,” he said through a forced smile for Shannon’s camera. “How could they possibly get any softer?”

  “Take more Lush baths with me, for one.”

  Shannon ignored their prattle and instead focused on taking the most opportunistic shots while the sun filtered through the evergreen trees. Couch Park wasn’t the easiest place to take engagement photos, but the couple claimed that this was where they first kissed, and she had to make it work. Look at them. Forcing so much happiness. Stephen was a known issue, since he made it clear from the beginning that he was only doing this for his fiancée. But that woman hardly looked comfortable herself. Every time Stephen touched her, she stiffened until Shannon had to share some natural breathing techniques to make her body ease.

  Yet a paying gig was a paying gig, and if there was anything learned Shannon learned from her astrology reading the other night, it was that failure was not an option. She would make this photoshoot work. She would also touch them up until not a single friend or family member on Facebook could see the fear behind Stephen’s eyes or the misgivings pulling at the edges of his fiancée’s mouth.

  She would get paid her hundreds of dollars and live to pay her rent another day. Barely. She needed more work, and that meant more hustling. Good thing she had a date down at the copier’s as soon as this was over. Shannon planned to canvas the Nob Hill neighborhood with fliers advertising her business. The one she refused to see fail.

  Too bad her brain was constantly filled with mush. It had been three days since she last saw Jess at the teashop, but since then, she had thought of nothing but the news that she was her own worst enemy. Shannon put little stock in something like astrology, but in a way, Jess had been right. Of course she was right. That was all generic, wasn’t it? But the crap about her hating change she didn’t seek, or refusing to give up when everything else in her life was on the line, sounded like every bad decision she had ever made. No wonder she had been an insomniac for the past few days. All that tossing and turning, thinking about every mistake she ever made and how she could have fixed it!

  I don’t know what I was doing. Giving her another chance, I guess. Shannon never felt better after seeing Jess. How could she, when Jess was the embodiment of the most embarrassing mistake of her life?

  As if on cue, the one person good at making her see her mistakes phoned her to rant about a hold up with the MAX.

  “Some fucker got his bike tire stuck in the downtown tracks!” Kelsey’s exasperated sigh was heard across town with or without Shannon’s phone to amplify it. “How did he do that? Seriously! What kind of dumbass do you have to be to get your bike tire stuck in light rail tracks? Light rail!”

  Shannon, who sat cross-legged on the damp grass, continued to fill out her field report book while juggling her phone between her ear and her shoulder. Can’t you text like a normal person, Kels? No. That would’ve been helpful. Kelsey wasn’t exactly known for being convenient when she was on a tear. “No idea. Can’t say I ever got my bike stuck in train tracks. I just mow people over like I’m a bat out of hell.”

  “You can’t seriously still be thinking about that weirdo, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Mowing people over with your bike. Like that girl. What was her name? Jessica?”

  I think so. That was Jess’s real name, right? Had to be. What else was Jess short for? Shannon was on a roll at feeling like a real relationship pro. “I guess. I was making a joke because I’ve hit more than one person with my bike. Why do you think I don’t do much of it anymore?” She said that while keeping an eye on her bike chained to a post by the sidewalk. Only reason she used it that day was because her professional photography equipment was too heavy to lug a few blocks. Easier to stick it in her basket and be off to her appointment.

  “I’m saying that you’ve bumped into her again recently, so for all I know, she’s on your mind.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  Kelsey grunted in resignation. The unfortunate tell-tale wail of a homeless person with dire needs echoed in the background. Yup. Downtown. Pioneer Square? What a helluva place to be stranded for God knew how long. “I know how you used to get around her! You just broke up with Andrew. Now’s not the time to be vulnerable to…”

  “To who, Kels?”

  “To weirdos, that’s who!”

  “I don’t know why you find her so weird.” What kind of witchcraft and sorcery was this? Every time Shannon started to think it was best to keep interactions with Jess to a minimum, Kelsey swept in like a cynical fairy godmother employing reverse psychology. This bullshit made Shannon want to track Jess down in Trader Joe’s and demand her number. “We’re going to the movies, Jess. We’re getting drinks. Get on my fucking seat before the streets ice over again!”

  It was the worst reason to want to see Jess. Because, as Kelsey implied, Shannon’s guards were lowered, and her heart and soul were vulnerable to manipulation. The kind Jess needled in every time they interacted. Did she know she did it? Or was that more of Shannon’s paranoia?

  ***

  Memory #6

  “Who’s that chick who keeps staring at you?” Kelsey asked during lunch one day. “The one in the purple plaid?”

  I didn’t have to look up to know who she meant. “That’s Jess. She lives a floor above us. You never noticed her? She’s been coming to our dorm council parties with her friends.”

  “Huh. She always stares at you like that?”

  My boyfriend at the time, a guy named Nick, looked up from his math homework and searched for Jess’s face in the lunch line. “Who? Her? You know her, Shan?”

  “She was the girl sitting with me the other day. Remember?”

  “Sitting with you?” Kelsey tilted her head. “So you do know her?”

  “What is with
you?” I searched for Jess. She was in line, but head pointed forward, earbuds in her ears. If she had noticed me, it was only with passing interest. We may not have been friends, but we bumped into each other all over campus. What was wrong with acknowledging an acquaintance? “She’s someone I know. You can’t be my only friend!”

  “You know she’s a big ol’ lez, right?”

  I dropped my pen into my leftover fries. “Excuse me?”

  “She’s in the GSA. Been seeing her at their events recently. Always volunteering at booths and stuff.”

  “Uh, so?”

  “Soooo, she’s totally checking you out.”

  I sat back in my chair, pretending to be as far from shocked as possible. Jess was a lesbian? So what? Wasn’t half of our generation gay? Just because I wasn’t, didn’t mean I wasn’t constantly surrounded by people of same-sex persuasions. It was 2007. Who gave a fuck? Kelsey sounded like someone I used to go to high school with – paranoid that every lesbian in the country lived to hit on her. Showering in the gym? Forget about it.

  The concept didn’t bother me. I was a woman, after all, and that was something I had in common with a lesbian. We both knew what it was like to be leered at by men. Even if Jess were gay, she seemed the type to understand first-hand what harassment, assault, and “creepy weirdos,” as Kelsey put it, can do to our psyches. She hadn’t openly flirted with or made a pass at me. As far as I knew, Jess was a giggly sophomore trying to pass her classes and have some fun on the side. Like us all!

  “So what if she’s checking me out?” I said.

  Nick grinned like an idiot. Of course, he was into the idea of me lezzing out in college, especially if he got to watch through my webcam. That grin extended to Jess, who had made it to the front of the line and ordered a hamburger. Then? The grin got bigger. Pig.

  “You gotta nip that in the bud,” Kelsey said with a shake of her head. “Put out that fire before it burns you.”

  At the time, I assumed she meant I needed to gently let Jess down before she got it so bad for me that I ended up breaking her heart simply by being a heterosexual woman. I wish I could say that it’s only now that I realize what she truly meant. But no. I figured it out a long time ago, and I let it get to me.