Chapter 139 WHATEVER THE HELL
Chapter 139 WHATEVER THE HELL
POV: TEDDY
He was still holding the bag of frozen peas when Vickey finally stopped talking.
The room had gone quiet in the specific way rooms went quiet when something large had just been put into it. He could hear the storm outside moving closer, the low roll of thunder over the campus. The art on Vickey's walls seemed louder than before, the twisted wire figures and the bleeding canvases and the confessional quality of every surface.
He looked at Jordan.
She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at her own hands in her lap, the way she looked at things she was trying to process without showing the processing.
He had just heard the whole story.
He was still working through what he'd done with pieces of it before he knew the whole shape. Months of sitting next to her at practice and at Tony's Pizza and at the country club dinner where his father had done his assessment and Teddy had held his breath waiting for the verdict. Months of the unnamed thing in his chest that he had been filing carefully and not examining.
He had kissed her.
He had said the thing about Jack.
He had said I don't know what that makes me. Bi, or pan, or whatever the hell. I don't care.
He sat with what it had felt like to say that.
He had not planned to say it. He had not planned any of what happened in the last twenty minutes. He had rounded a corner in the wrong corridor and found Vickey practically carrying Jordan down the hallway and something in him had moved before his brain caught up, the same way it always moved around her, without asking permission or running the calculation first.
He thought about the scars on his own arm.
He had not shown those to anyone at Thornfield. Not one person, not in three years of being here. He had built the version of himself that Thornfield understood and he had lived inside that version so completely that sometimes he forgot the scars existed until something touched the inside of his forearm and the skin sent him back to eighth grade in an instant.
He had shown them to Jordan.
He had not decided to do that either. She had said you don't know and he had just done it, like the thing he'd been carrying had found the first person it recognized and handed itself over.
He thought about Jack Porter.
Jack was warm and easy in his own skin in a way that Teddy had been watching all year with the specific attention of someone who was trying to understand something about himself by understanding someone else. He had filed it. He had filed it seventeen times. He was filing it right now and the filing was harder than it had ever been because Jordan had said what about Jack and he had answered the question honestly, which he had never done with himself.
I don't know what that makes me.
He looked at that sentence from the inside.
It didn't feel like confusion.
It felt like the beginning of something. Like the first sentence of something true.
From her perch on the desk, Vickey was watching him with the specific look she used when she was drawing something in her head, all sharp observation and no judgment.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what," she said.
"Like you're already painting this."
"I've been painting this since October," she said simply, and went back to examining her own fingernails.
He looked back at Jordan.
She had looked up now. She was watching him with those eyes, the specific blue of them, and there was something in them that was less guarded than it had been twenty minutes ago. Not unguarded. Just less. The smallest reduction in the distance she kept between herself and everything.
He still had her hand.
He had not let go of it during any of the telling. He had held it through the Marshals and the courtroom and James Blake built from fear and the photo and the seven-day ultimatum, his thumb moving in slow circles without him deciding to do that either.
He looked at their hands.
Whatever the word was, whatever the category, whatever his father would say about it or the team would say about it or Thornfield's machinery of reputation and legacy would do with it — none of that was what he was feeling right now.
What he was feeling right now was that her hand was in his and that was exactly where it was supposed to be.
He didn't examine it beyond that.
For the first time in his life, he didn't feel like he needed to.
Author's Note: Teddy showed her the scars he hasn't shown anyone at Thornfield. Jordan said what about Jack and he answered it honestly. He doesn't know what the word is. It doesn't feel like confusion anymore. It feels like the first honest thing he's said about himself in years.