Rachel pulls back at his inference. “Sorry?” she says, looking at him, confused.
Jack laughs to himself, but makes Rachel feel as if it’s aimed at her. “Do you not think I can see straight through you?” he says.
She shakes her head as if to awaken the part of her brain that will make sense of what he’s saying. “I’m not with you,” she says.
“Do you think I didn’t see what happened today?”
“What are you talking about?” she says. “Where? When?”
“On the beach,” he says tersely. “With Noah.”
She can’t help but feel wrong-footed. This isn’t the way she’d anticipated this conversation going. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady.
“I could see the utter fear in your eyes,” he says. “I could feel you trembling in my arms.”
“That’s because it was absolutely terrifying,” she says.
“Any more terrifying than if it happened to me?” He stares at her unwaveringly, as if expecting an answer.
She tuts. “Why are you being so stupid? You were there—you saw what happened. I would hope you felt just as scared as I did. If you didn’t, then there’s something wrong with you.”
“Don’t turn this on me,” he says. Hadn’t he just done exactly that himself? “My gut reaction was one of guilt; that I was somehow responsible for what happened.”
She narrows her eyes. “And were you?”
“No!” he exclaims. “I told Noah not to go any further into the impact zone, but he ignored me, so I had to go out there myself to bring him back. His selfish actions put us both at risk.” He looks at Rachel. “But you didn’t seem too fazed by that. All you were concerned with was making sure he was all right.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, will you just listen to yourself?” she says, exasperated. “In case it escaped your notice, Noah had been knocked unconscious and if it hadn’t have been for the quick actions of those around him, he might not have made it out alive.”
“I’d taken a battering myself,” he says. “But all you seemed to care about was him.”
Rachel is taken back to the intensity of that moment and instantly feels tears spring to her eyes. Like Paige, she would have given anything to know that Noah was going to be okay—but to the detriment of her own marriage? Yes, probably.
“You’re behaving like a child,” she says, uncomfortable with the realization that she’d put Noah before Jack. If not physically, then certainly mentally. She would rather have God strike her, Jack, or any of them down, than take away her first love. The shock of what she was prepared to sacrifice lodges in her throat.
“What really went on between you two?” he asks, not for the first time. “Because you can tell me that you were just friends until you’re blue in the face, but seeing you today suggests it was so much more.”
Should she tell him that they’d crossed the line just once, but that it had been the singular most defining moment of her life? That barely a day had gone past when she hadn’t transported herself back there, if only for a split second?
“Absolutely nothing,” she says, sticking to the agreement she and Noah had made shortly after he’d met Paige. They both knew that if they were to remain friends, in the way they wanted—in the only way they knew how, because after four years of living in each other’s pockets, they didn’t know how to be any different—they’d have to renounce any notion of something more ever having happened. Because neither Jack nor Paige would allow their friendship to continue if they thought there had ever been an iota of sexual chemistry between them.
“But do you not see the way he looks at you?”
Rachel shakes her head. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Oh, come on, Rach, you can’t possibly be that naive,” he says loudly. “It’s so obvious, it’s staring you right in the face, and if you can’t see it, then you’re blind, unless you’re choosing to pretend it’s not going on.”
“I don’t even have the words,” she says, going to get her gold wedges from the top of the open suitcase that’s still sitting on the floor.
“I should be used to it,” Jack goes on, “but it’s hard, seeing him look at you the way he does. You don’t have to be Einstein to work out what he’s thinking about.”