Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (ebook offline reader .TXT) 📕

There’s no such thing as a Jack McBride, I remind myself.

But!

I open my mouth, a bag of wind popping inside it to let out a deflated Eeeeeeeeeeeeehhh. He frowns, which I can’t blame him for. The expression on my face right now must be a trip. I want to do a thing people only do in movies and wipe off my glasses on my shirt, then put them back on to see if I’ve been looking at an illusion.

“My goodness, you’re shocked,” Ruth remarks. “I know you weren’t expecting anyone. I’m sorry to spring this on both of you.”

Jack—no, Wesley—turns sharply to face her. “Spring what?”

Ruth casts around the room for something to distract her. She centers a teacup on a coaster with life-and-death precision. “Hm?”

“Spring what?” he repeats, now with an edge. He’s even taller than I imagined, so solid and intimidating. I’m struck by the shadow he throws upon the wall, spanning from floor to ceiling, hard jaw in black profile. I’m struck by gentle modifications to the image that appears in my head whenever I pull up his name: His hair’s a couple inches longer than it was in his pictures, and messier. There are four tiny acne scars scattered along the right side of his face, and the lamplight traces his features in a way that changes the shape of his mouth, the line of his nose. It’s wrong. And lovely. And strange. There’s a freckle an inch to the left of his Adam’s apple. The fact that I am now privy to this knowledge, that he is a real man and I am in a room with him and I know about a freckle I could not have previously fathomed . . .

My brain is so thrown by these deviations from that memorized image that I keep shutting down every other second. It’s not him, but it’s him, but it isn’t, and yet it is. The image is crumbling, being replaced with real-time observations. The Matrix glitches, vertical strands of green code raining down on either side of him. I’m dying, maybe?

“Ruth.”

I flinch. His voice is lower, the rumble of gravel crunching under a heavy boot, prickling all the microscopic hairs in my inner ear. I am dying, definitely.

Ruth presses her lips together. Fiddles with her watch until it displays Pacific Standard Time.

“What is going on?” I finally cry. “How are you here?” I’m losing it. That face. My god, that face, I’ve visualized it a thousand times. At one point I thought I was maybe falling in love with that face. Now I have a voice to match it. Throughout our brief relationship, we never spoke over the phone. We messaged back and forth on a dating app until I hinted that I was ready to delete it and take the next step with him, at which point we started emailing. Service was spotty in Costa Rica, where he was supposedly volunteering to help rebuild after a hurricane. He said phone calls were impossible right then but that he couldn’t wait to get back to the States and meet me in person.

I ate it all up. I thought the emails were so romantic, like old-fashioned love letters with a modern twist, but then I grew frustrated because the emails weren’t long enough, frequent enough. Not enough in general. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted physical touch. Every night when I climb in bed I thank the gods my fake relationship with Jack never advanced to a sexual stage. Whenever I came close to skirting suggestive topics, Jack shied away, which at the time made me worry about a lack of chemistry. In retrospect, I’m glad Gemma couldn’t cross that line. I don’t know how I would have survived it if I’d unknowingly sent my colleague nudes.

I’m an idiot. It’s never quite dawned on me before that even though the persona Gemma created was fiction, the pictures she sourced for Jack were of course real, and it stood to reason that somewhere out there, a facsimile of my fake ex-boyfriend would be walking the earth, up until this very moment oblivious to my existence. Now he knows I exist, but he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me like “Jack” did, and he’s observing me in a cold, harsh way that makes me cringe right down to my bones. There’s no affection, no recognition, in that gaze.

“What do you mean, how am I here?” he replies shortly. “I live here.”

“What the hell do you mean?” I retort. “I live here.” This is too much. “Where did you come from?”

He’s bewildered. “Excuse me?”

Ruth’s hand touches my shoulder, but I barely register it. She asks if I’m all right (obviously, I am not) at the same time Wesley throws his hands up and announces he doesn’t know what anybody’s talking about. The only thing I can think to do is to pull out my phone. Two texts from Gemma pop up on my screen: Hey you’re late followed a couple hours later by Are you okay? One from Christine: You didn’t clock out before leaving and didn’t receive permission to leave early. Expect to be written up. A missed call and voicemail from Paul, my boss, that I am never going to listen to.

As I scroll through my emails to hunt for the pictures Gemma sent from Jack’s fake email (I used to have the pictures saved on my phone but deleted them months ago), I consider that maybe I’m wrong. I’ve heard about this sort of thing happening: you get hyper-focused on a person and start seeing them everywhere. Wesley might look nothing at all like Jack, but my overworked brain has been wrung out like a sponge after the long day I’ve had, so now I’m hallucinating him into being. The power lines between my eyes and neural pathways have been sawed in half by feral attic raccoons.

Or not.

“Aha!” I thrust my phone at them, triumphant. There he