Turn 5 of 15

While traveling you feel something new… Jealousy?

The highway hums beneath the tires, and Jack is telling you something about the venue, something about a garden and a gazebo, but the words are thinning out, going gauzy. You're staring at the road and not seeing it. There's a feeling building in your chest, and it doesn't belong to you, not the you from an hour ago. It's green and sharp, like biting into something unripe, and it takes you a long, disorienting moment to recognize it for what it is.

You're jealous.

Not of Jack. Of Lauren. The thought arrives with the force of a slap, and you press your fingertips into the smooth leather of the clutch on your lap. Jealous of a woman you've never met, a woman Jack loved for two years, a woman who apparently saw your best friend as insufficient and walked away. Six months ago she was the center of his world, and now you're sitting in her old seat, literally, in a dress he picked out, wearing a face he imagined, and the necklace is warm against your skin and something inside you is whispering that you could be better. That you already are.

"You okay?" Jack asks. He's glanced over, and his brow is furrowed, and you realize you've gone very still.

"Fine," you say, too quickly. "Just thinking about the plan. What's the story? How did we meet?"

Jack shifts in his seat, and you catch the way he rolls his shoulder, the fabric of his shirt pulling tight, and your stomach does something slow and warm that you aggressively ignore. He's quiet for a moment, composing.

"We met at a coffee shop," he says. "You were reading, and I spilled my drink on your book. Classic meet-cute stuff. We've been dating three months. You work in marketing. You're from Seattle."

"Seattle."

"You like hiking and you're terrible at cooking but you try anyway."

He says the last part with a small, almost shy smile, and the jealousy twists in your chest because these details feel specific. These aren't random. These are things he's thought about, maybe more than once, maybe about someone he wished existed. And now you're wearing that someone's body, and the necklace is humming, and your hands are curled around the clutch so tightly your knuckles ache.

"Hiking," you repeat, and your voice comes out softer than you intended. "I hate hiking."

"You love hiking now," Jack says, and grins, and the grin is so familiar and so newly devastating that you have to look away, out the window, at the blur of trees and strip malls rolling past. The venue is twenty minutes away. Lauren is there already, in her white dress, about to marry a man with a private-equity jawline. And you, whoever you are right now, are going to walk in on Jack's arm and make her sorry.