Emergency Medical Dad

LXXII: late november, present

a whole 23.5 hours late I apologize 

JORGEN

Jessie's fingers find mine, the shower water heating up against my back, going from warm where I like it to hot where she set it. I just look down at her, the little red pock marks on her chest that I left, her bright hair turning brown as she gets it wet, one hand, not the one in my hand, lifting to push it back away from her face.

"You're staring at me," she blinks away the water, looking up at me. "Are you alright?"

"Hm? Yeah," I shake my head, snapping back to attention, pushing my head back into the water, soaking my hair. "Just tired."

"You don't have to lie," she twists our hands and sets her chin on my chest, looking up at me. "You seem a little off."

"I'm," I breathe, looking up at the ceiling. "I'm just a little irritated with myself, that's all."

"What about?"

"I backed out of that," I tip my head back toward my door, indicating what I'm talking about. "You wanted it and I sort of got nervous."

"Hey, woah," she pulls away from me, a little alarmed. "You're allowed to not be ready for something, just because I wanted it doesn't mean anything. It just means that I was okay with going forward. That's not a need you have to cater to. You shouldn't be forced to do something just because I was alright with it."

"Jess, I just," I puff out my cheeks. "I didn't want to ruin that, that was our first time back at it and I... I backed out when I was feeling just iffy, not anything else. I just didn't know."

"Jay," she squeezes my hip, catching my attention down on her. "Consent is consent. You'd've backed off immediately if it was me saying no. You just, somewhere in you, feel like you have to be okay with everything because you're the guy and that's what you're supposed to be feeling."

I wince, taking my balance hand off the rail in the shower to push her hair back away from her eyes, "I wanted it to be perfect, Jess, and-"

"You said yourself that you were glad we weren't doing it smoothly."

"Being smooth and being perfect aren't the same things. I liked the weird of all of it because that's just us, but I..."

"You think you ruined that by not..." she's frowning. "Not going all the way?"
"It's not-"

"Shh," she presses her hand against my mouth. "Shush. Please. I love you. I adore that you want to make everything just right all the time and it's saved me and Conn, okay? You're amazing, you're better than that, you're so much, Jorgen, but perfect in that situation was what we're okay with going into this. I'm not nearly as good at explaining stuff like this as you are, but it would've been worse if we'd done something that crossed one of our boundaries, or done something that made one of us uncomfortable. Perfect right there was supposed to be gentle and soft and just what we wanted in the moment, no more, no less, nothing. And what we wanted was to stop there. You because you didn't want to go further and me because I want what you want. Perfect..." she takes a deep breath. "Perfect is bullshit."

"Jessie," I start to talk again but she grabs my cheeks and makes me stop.

"Shut up, please," her lips tweak into a supportive little smile but I know she's about to rip into me. "You can't do this to yourself. You can't tell me all summer, over and over again from the very first day you knew me it's okay to say no. Over and over and over and over again. You made me okay with saying no to people in the first place. You forced me to accept that my opinion on whether or not I wanted to do something was something that people were going to listen to in the first place after years of my refusals going unheard. Then you spent the last six weeks slowly making me okay with saying yes. Asking for what I want. Asking for things from people, accepting that sometimes I need to be the one that stands up for myself. Sometimes I need to ask for what I want, ask people for help, ask for anything. You can't be that guy, teaching me everything I know about speaking for myself somehow, despite years of trying to force myself to learn, you can't be him and then turn around and the very first time you need to say no to me, right there, you, you-" she squeezes her eyes shut. "You can't immediately fold on yourself and regret it the second it goes against what you thought I wanted. Listen to yourself, Jay, you have to."