State of Grace

Grace isn’t expecting visitors. She’s lying on her big hotel bed, which after a few nights has now started to feel just as comfortable as the one she has left at home, and she’s wearing an old giant-sized rugby shirt of her brothers that he handed down to her after growing out of it, and a pair of grey sweatpants. Her head is hanging slightly off the end of the bed as she lies upside down, balancing a hot water bottle on her stomach and letting the blood rush to her head in an effort to distract herself from the brewing storm in her stomach.

She’s been dealing with period pain since she was a pimple-faced fifteen year old high school student, but it’s not really the culprit of her current problem. It’s the way that the pain is mixing with the uneasiness already swirling the pit of her stomach, uneasiness that she woke up to this morning, went to bed with last night and has pretty much been carrying around since she left Sid’s house last night.

Already today, she has spent two hours lying in bed with a pillow over her face, alternating between cursing nature’s monthly cycle and its torture, and cursing herself. Because the reality of feeling like this over somebody who you’ve known for only a couple of days, isn’t at all lost on her. She knows it’s crazy to feel like there are butterflies in her stomach when she looks at him, to get overly excited when the phone rings –and accordingly throw her heart off a cliff plunging into despair and disappointment when it turns out to only be the hotel desk ringing about the Maid Service.

It’s not normal. And it’s not usually Grace. She’s had….boyfriends…since the tragic break up with Rusty, but they’ve all been either guys she was friends with in high school and agreed to go on a date or two with. It’s like not her to fall hard like this, to step in to a situation and already feel so….no, not attached, but….connected. They might have only spent a bit of time together, but she trusts that she knows him, and whether that’s because from following the team as a fan for so long that she’s learnt little things about him that have all collected up and been added to by spending time with him, well, it doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is how she feels, and how she’s trying really hard not to feel it, but drowning in the feeling anyway because you just can’t stop them when they get like this. One drop of rain, then suddenly it’s pouring down, hailing. And it’s beautiful, it’s magical and it feels great and you’re out there dancing in it, letting in sink into your skin, but all rain eventually clears, and the easiest time to forget that is while it’s pouring.

Focused on all of that, and pairing it with the fact that Sid said he’d call, Grace has treated herself to a stay-home-and-wallow day, which her Mom is currently letting her cash in. Sarah is out collecting various types of American candy that they have only ever seen in movies, as per request from Jacob who said, “If I am going to be studying instead of going, I want every type of candy possible brought back so I can taste test them all.” Grace isn’t even sure that they are going to be able to get it all through Airport Customs back in New Zealand but Sarah seems to determined to try it and she’s been out on her mission for at least a couple of hours now.

Grace, meanwhile, hasn’t moved much today besides a shower this morning and a poor attempt at styling her hair by throwing it up into a bun on the top of her head. So when she hears a knock at the hotel room door, she presumes it’s her Mom having forgotten her key card.

“Ugh, Mom. Period Pain is torture. Why couldn’t I have been a boy like Jacob? I hope you have chocolate with you because if I’m going to die from this then I want to die happily-” and instead of an expected witty remark from her Mother, she opens the door to find Sid standing there, looking unfairly handsome in a black button down shirt and a pair of jeans. There are raindrops glistening in his hair and Grace doesn’t think she’s ever seen a more beautiful sight.

“Sorry,” Sid shrugs, genuinely apologetic, but also biting a smile. “No chocolate, just me.”

It takes Grace a moment to compute, and Sid waits dutifully.

“Hey,” she says when she’s finally got herself together, passed the initial embarrassment and surprise.

How can it be so nice and reliving just to see someone’s face? Grace doesn’t know, but her stomach soothes a little, like it’s in the eye of the storm in there.

“Hey,” he replies.

Finally, she remembers to invite him inside and they head through the room to Grace’s bedroom where she takes back up her spot on the comfortable bed, but sits up nicely instead of lying across it. Sid toes off his shoes and sits on the bed beside her.

His eyes look warm and pleased to see her, but tired and crinkled around the edges. It was obviously a late night. Filled with what, Grace doesn’t know, and doesn’t thinks she wants to know, thinks she is totally fine with not knowing.

However, Sid seems keen to fill her in without her asking.

“I don’t have to worry about a story being printed anymore,” he says. “I sat with Sierra and we talked for a really long time –just talking though, Grace, I swear-” He pauses to look at her honestly and back up his promise, at which point Grace cuts him off.

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Sid.” She sits up and curls her legs up underneath her, sitting sideways on the bed now to face him. “You two were, at one point, engaged you know. So.”

In the small stretch of space between them, Sid’s left hand snakes out and rests on her leg. “You were right,” he tells her. “I told her why I didn’t go through it, how I couldn’t, and it took a while, but she told me that she was glad I told her rather than just faked it.”

Grace feels her throat fill with cotton wool. “What happens now?” she asks, her own voice sounding foreign to her.

A shrug is Sid’s initial answer because he thinks she means right now, between them, and he doesn’t know. He knows waking up this morning, going about his gym session work out and his day, feeling like Grace was missing. He knows watching Sierra walk out the door last night and feeling relived, feeling okay, feeling like it was final and good, and he knows watching Grace leave yesterday and wanting to run out after her, wanting to look away so he wouldn’t have to watch her go. He knows she leaves in a few more days and he knows this whole thing is crazy, except he doesn’t know how to tell her, that regardless of the crazy, it feels like the realest thing he’s ever known.

So instead he answers it from a Sierra point of view, filling Grace in on the information Sierra had given him.

“Her parents own a chain of bars and there’s one near where she went to College. They’ve offered her Manager and she took it. Peter is going to release a statement in a couple more weeks to say that the engagement was ended mutually due to the long-distance.”

“Engagement?”

“Yeah, Peter said that the wedding date being decided was speculation so while the journalists will be disbelieving, they can’t prove otherwise. And apparently a broken engagement sounds better than a cancelled wedding,” he answers, the last sentence being from Peter, verbatim.

Sid had made good on his promise of notifying Peter if Sierra got in contact, and though her random appearance in the middle of him making out with Grace hadn’t been a specified call, text, Facebook message, fax or Pigeon delivered note, Sid was more than ready to put the whole thing behind him. Finish it with a full stop so he can get the whole thing off his back.

And, okay, maybe so he can open a new chapter. Maybe with Grace. Maybe if she wants that, maybe even if all she is willing to give is the last three days she has here. He knows he’ll take that over nothing, even if it’s not what he really thinks he wants most.

Grace hugs the water bottle tight against her stomach, grimacing a little.

“What do you think?” he asks, gentle and probing. It’s intended as an opening, like a ‘what are you feeling, what are your thoughts on this, please say something’ type prompt.

Still clutching her water bottle to her like it’s a part of her, Grace shifts to lie down on her back again. Sid follows and they find themselves against each other, looking up at the ceiling and stealing looks at each other like last night, only this time they let themselves stare longer, let their eyes linger on the other, watching them and drinking them in instead of quickly averting their gaze and fighting hotness in their cheeks.

Grace releases one hand from her torso and places it between them, palm up and open. It’s an offering. Sid smiles at her, watching her eyes twinkle, and slips his fingers through hers.

“What do you think is the more important question,” Grace alters it, speaking hushed and slow. “You were with her for a long time. Despite the fact that you didn’t go through with it, when you offered it to her, you really did want it.”

Her eyes seem to dim, her voice drops and Sid can just tell that he’s not going to like what she asks next, and she’s not going to like asking it.

“Do you feel sad that things couldn’t have worked out, or….or like you needed more time?”

His large brown eyes look back at her tenderly, blinking only a few times. They are intense, like they are looking right into her mind via her eyes to read her thoughts and watch her reaction to how he’s about to answer.

“You can tell me,” she adds for good measure. “It’s okay.”

Sid lets go of a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding for so long.

“Honestly,” he starts, earning a nod from Grace as she traps her bottom lip between her teeth and nibbles absentmindedly, thinking it’s a question. “I’m glad it’s over. It felt unfinished before. Talking about it though, getting through it all and having an open conversation about it has made it feel finished now. I feel bad for Sierra that we didn’t both want the same thing, but that’s all I feel. I care about her, I mean, we were together –she lived with me and….I care. But I don’t love her enough to want to make her happy, evidently, so I’m not sure that that’s love at all.”

Grace’s hand squeezes his, strong and reassuring. They let the quiet envelop them for a little while, more interested in smiling at and watching each other. Grace watches Sid’s face for so long that she feels like she could draw a perfect picture of it, accurate lines, curves, rises and all, with her eyes closed. Sid gazes back all the while, a little mesmerized by the exact shade of blue that Grace’s eyes change to when his eyes slip out of focus, and wanting very badly to run his fingers over her lips, feel them soft against his skin and then on his own, where he can lick over them with his tongue and slip it inside her mouth to taste her again.

She gives up on trying to restrain herself, using her other hand to cup his face loosely, stroke her thumb back and forth across the malleable skin of his cheek. His hand still sits in hers, while the other holds on her waist when she moves up on to her side, slipping under her t-shirt and feeling her warm skin.

Their lips meet somewhere in the middle of it all and they share a kiss, just like last night’s, slow and careful, but it means more this time. They can both feel it, feel the rain Grace was thinking of, pouring down on them and soaking into their skin, helping them to forget that it can never rain forever, because right now, right now it feels like it can. It feels like the smooth jut of her hip was made for his hand and it feels like tomorrow won’t ever come and neither will the next day, so Grace will never have to leave. It feels like they have the rest of their lives for this.

When they break apart to breathe, leaning their foreheads together and sharing breaths, Grace says, “It’s got to be about 4 o’clock now and I haven’t eaten all day.”

Sid smiles, tipping his head up to press his lips to her forehead and hiding his grin there.

“You wanna get Room Service?” she offers, resting against his chest. To entertain herself she grabs handfuls of Sid’s shirt and then releases the strained fabric, then does it again, if only because she can now, it feels like.

“Sounds great,” he answers. “Sounds perfect.”

They share another kiss before they leave Grace’s room, headed for the lounge. She handles the Room Service order and then curls up on the space of the couch beside Sid that he gestures to and opens his arm to fit her underneath it. He channel surfs for a while between a mix of shows that Grace has never heard of in her life, before settling on a movie channel.

And that’s what they do for the rest of the afternoon, spending it curled up on the couch watching movies, eating room service and enjoying the sound of rain falling down outside, shown in the large double window of the room.

Eventually, at the point the movie finishes, Grace gets up to go toilet and returns minutes later to take up residency on the floor, lying down in the middle of it like last night. Sid shakes his head fondly and joins her, arranged much like they were on the bed.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, looking at her thoughtfully but waiting for her nod before laying out his next question. “Do you like working on your parent’s farm?”

Grace draws in a weighted breath. The obvious answer here is yes, otherwise she wouldn’t be. But it’s all been in aid of this trip, with it being the light at the end of the tunnel. And now the trip is almost over, which leaves her to consider some provocative questions. What exactly will she be going back to, and what is she leaving behind? It all seems complicated, maybe too complicated for right now, for the fleeting moments she and Sid have left, so Grace answers with what she knows –facts.

“I, I guess,” she says, sounding unsure. Sounding like it’s just a part time one day a week thing and not something that she has stopped her whole life for, keeping herself grounded in that small town. “I knew the farm wasn’t doing too well and after Jacob got that scholarship I couldn’t let him stay behind. It had to be someone and it’s not like I had that many dreams for myself.” She takes a moment to pause and reflection on that briefly and then adds in a much quieter voice, “not as many as everyone else had for me anyway.”

“What do you dream of, Grace?”

The question catches her off guard. She chokes a little on some fluid in her mouth and is patting herself on the chest to settle her throat as she asks, “What?”

Sid doesn’t back down. He rolls up on to one arm, using it to hover him slightly over her, push up style. “You said you were School Captain,” he references, “You clearly have smarts and ambitions, so, what did you dream of? Before the farm needed you, before reality set in, what did you see yourself doing?”

For a brief second, Grace cocks her head at him, trying to gain a reading. She can’t tell if he’s truly serious in asking this or not. His eyes glow back at her, looking right down into her own and softly showing that he really cares, he honestly wants to know.

The thing is that no one has ever asked Grace that question before though. Maybe when she was five and it was at school and the teacher sat the class in a circle and everyone rattled off their childish aspirations for the future, but that was so long ago. Her classmates had said Astronauts and Circus Performers. They said millionaires, Rocket Scientists and actors –hell, one kid even said a Grizzly Bear and Grace herself opted for choice of a Princess.

Those were naive, rashly made decisions though, so they don’t count right? Not when you stop being little enough for your parents to smile at you and tell you that you can be anything you want. Not when you grow up and get hit with the reality that it’s not that easy.

“Grace?” Sid prompts gently.

Grace stays quiet, still immersed in her thoughts and surprise at his line of questioning.

Her father never asked, Grace just told him, “I’ll be here helping you,” and that was that. Career Counsellor’s at High School made recommendations and attempted to help her narrow down choices by process of elimination, but they only gave their own personal insight. No one sat Grace down and asked what she wanted. Not even Jacob. Though Grace will never hold that against him, guiltily knowing her actions probably would have been exactly the same if the situations were reversed.

She closes her eyes and squeezes them tight, trying to picture herself if there were no farm obligations, no limits on what she could be. She doesn’t know. She hasn’t really thought beyond this point, hasn’t really seen what the world has to offer her.

So she opens her eyes, right into Sid’s and chuckles animatedly like a little child.

“A Princess,” she says, going with the original; however naïve it may seem now. At one point it was what she wanted, and that’s more than she knows right now. And besides, the draw card of a Princess for her was never the big heavy elaborate dresses they wore, the lavish towers and castles they lived in or the beauty and royalty they had. It was always the Prince they spent their time looking for and always finally found, getting that one person they wanted – getting them for the rest of their life.

Right now the world is starting to open up for Grace, and she is learning that it’s out there, big and wide and full of possibilities beyond the farm.

“A Princess,” Sid repeats, sounding it out on his tongue, working his mouth around the word and his mind around the idea.

“Are you going to laugh?” Grace asks, still grinning.

Sid shakes his head and lowers it dangerously close to hers. “No,” he answers, lips almost against hers, resounding seriousness in his voice. “I’d think you’d make a great Princess.”

Grace lifts her head to kiss him, briefly pressing her lips to his before pulling back to ask, “Would you rescue me from the highest room in the tallest tower guarded by a fire breathing dragon?”

“Any day,” he whispers, ducking his head to meet her lips again. “I would gladly be your Prince any day.”