Holiday Wine, with You and Me [Chaennie ]

Part 9 : Are We Seeing The Same Thing?

It's. Well.

It's about as bad as Jennie had anticipated it would be, seeing Rosie again.

First, there's coconut cream shake absolutely everywhere; splashed on the saltillo tile floor, splattered up against the sage green kitchen counters, trickling slowly down the tan skin of Rosie's sculpted, downy legs. Jennie is being made to perceive that she's wearing shorts — a well-worn, soft-looking pair that's loosely held around Rosie's hips by a drawstring Jennie's fingers twitch at, even from where she's standing at the stove, twelve feet and three months of silence stretched wide between them.

In a raw, heart-stopping moment, Rosie's eyes catch Jennie's own.

Jennie takes a breath, and watches as Rosie does the same. The top she's wearing is lamentably sleeveless and just tight enough around her chest that Jennie can make out the first set of abs that lies beneath. Jennie is completely normal about it, although it does take her a moment too long to become aware of the chaos that's erupted around them.

Lisa and Lily both got caught in the splash zone, and are having very different reactions to that fact. Lisa is cracking up while her daughter is yelping, slip-sliding on socked feet to the kitchen sink in order to rinse off her cream-covered sneakers. Jisoo is absolutely not having it, take that to the back porch faucet, thank you very much. In between ushering Lily out the patio doors and sending nervous looks between Rosie and Jennie, she is shooting absolute daggers at Lisa — who is, at this point, nearly pissing herself laughing.

Rosie hasn't moved. She's anchored amidst the anarchy, staring at Jennie like a dying man in the desert. Jennie feels like water — dense, and briny, and possessing unusually high surface tension.

"I'm sorry," Rosie stammers, and Jennie has a feeling it's not about the shakes, which she really should be apologizing for. "I didn't realize," Rosie says. "Lisa didn't mention—"

"I bet she didn't," Jisoo snarls from the sink. She lobs a wet mop at her fiancée's head — for the milkshake or the accident Lisa is about to have, Jennie doesn't know — and although it's aimed right at Lisa's obnoxious mug, Lisa manages to catch it as if it had been a lovingly blown kiss. "Love you too, babe," she winks, before bending down to wipe off her sandals.

Jisoo is fuming, an uneasy ally to Jennie's own ire. Rosie is still staring, cheeks almost as pink as Jisoo's toenail polish. Every beat that passes silently between them makes Jennie feel more out of place. Why is she even here? What was she thinking, allowing herself to fall back into the delusion that, within this perfect little biosystem Lisa's created for herself, Jennie could ever be anything other than an outsider, an external object waiting for the foreign body response to kick in and reject her?

"It's fine," Jennie lies, reverting to her usual icy poise. Kims wobble, but they don't fall down. "I wasn't told you would be joining us today, either."

"No kidding," Jisoo says, with a tired roll of her eyes that Jennie doesn't understand.

"We, um." Rosie's remorseful eyes flit from her sister back to Jennie as she pulls at her own fingers, mesmerizing Jennie briefly with the interplay of tendon and bone beneath the skin. "We do yoga, Sunday mornings."

Jennie is achingly aware. And therefore also furious with herself for so feeble-mindedly wandering right into Lisa's trap.

"So," Rosie smiles, a little uneven, a little unsure, still dripping ice cream onto the kitchen floor, "how have you been?"

And no. Jennie is absolutely not doing this. Not with her. Because it's Rosie, and her ludicrous hair, and her eyes, and her— everything else. Jennie doesn't even think that she has it in her — a deeply insulting, thoroughly bewildering realization — to perform one of those stilted, awkwardly polite exchanges with someone she'd believed to be so painfully genuine.