Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,122

drain from my face. Shame made my heart pound, and I felt as if I might be sick. Given his frat-boy everything’s-a-party personality, I had always assumed he’d been a communications major who’d fallen ass backward into working for the ACC. I knew he’d begun his career in community outreach, organizing events and such, until his crazy hot-wing challenge had gone viral, and then suddenly he’d had an office down the hall from mine. I had no idea he’d suffered such a horrific personal loss.

He’d had a twin? He’d lost her to cancer? And all this time I had thought he was one of those lucky people who’d never had so much as a drop of rain fall in his perfect life. I was such a jerk.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was, for more than he knew. Without hesitation, I pushed off the ground and put my arms around him in a hug. He stiffened at first, obviously caught off guard, or maybe he wasn’t a hugger. Either way, I didn’t let go until I felt him relax and move to hug me in return.

“Is this awkward yet?” I teased.

He chuckled. “I think we moved through awkward to friendly, but it could turn into something else really fast.”

I pulled back just enough to see his face. His smile was a bit lopsided, his lips curving up higher on one side, as if he knew that the flip side to happy was sad, and this knowledge made it impossible for him to smile fully, knowing that there was a grim truth to every joke. How had I never noticed that before? I handed him back his phone.

“Tell me about her,” I said. It wasn’t that I wanted to poke at his sorrow. It was just that I sensed he wanted to talk about his sister.

“She was my first best friend,” he said. He shifted and leaned back against the trunk of a tree. “We were always together. In fact, we were so inseparable that our names merged into one. The entire family called us JasonJess, sort of a Jason-and-Jess mashup. She was always Jess, not Jessica or Jessie, just Jess.”

He glanced at me, and his voice was thick with memories. “She was born five minutes before me, and she never let me forget it. We grew up in Charlton, a small town in Massachusetts, and we ran wild. Jess could climb our favorite tree higher than me, catch fish bigger than mine, and there was no hill she was afraid to sled down. She lived life large and in charge.”

I felt my throat get tight. Jason’s love for his sister was evident in every word he said, and the sadness that shadowed his eyes made his grief palpable. It was as much a part of who he was as his quick wit or the strong line of his jaw.

“When we were ten, she broke her arm when she fell out of our tree because we were having a Nerf gun battle with the Davidson boys across the street. They were total buttheads. Looking back, I think Pete Davidson may have been crushing on Jess. She’d gotten his attention by punching him in the mouth when he took her skateboard without asking.”

He grinned at the memory and I did, too.

“It was love at first knuckle sandwich?” I asked. “I take it she was not crushing on him in return.”

“Yeah, no, Jess was full-on tomboy with no interest in kissing and all that gross junk. Poor Pete, he didn’t stand a chance.”

Jason lifted up his phone and studied the picture. I glanced at it, too. Now that I knew, the boy was clearly a younger version of Jason. I studied Jess. She looked to be a scamp. I could only imagine the chicanery these two had gotten into as kids.

“My mom has that picture framed and on the wall of the living room. It was taken a few weeks before Jess’s fall,” he said. The image went dark, and he tucked his phone into his pocket. “We didn’t know anything was wrong with her. She was always so rough-and-tumble, she never slowed down, but then her arm wouldn’t mend.”

His voice caught, and he took a steadying breath. I knew he was reliving the exact moment when the bottom had fallen out of his life. I wanted to reach out to him, but I waited, not wanting to interrupt.

“When the doctors ran tests, they discovered she had leukemia,” he said. “I didn’t