HEY, Nick/Jess fans! - :oD
I love you! You know why I love you?! Because you love NEW GIRL! And because people like you love New Girl, maybe, hopefully, we'll get years and years more of this fun. :o) But in the meantime, it's enough, MORE than enough, to be getting a fabulous SEASON TWO of our favorite show. :o) And to celebrate this happy event, please consider this story as my gift to you! :o)
Okay...maybe it was a little bit of a gift to myself, too! ;o) After all, a canon-loving girl can only have SO much restraint. ;o) And I felt like the show left us a GREAT BIG HUGE GAPING OPEN DOOR in this episode, so doggone it, I decided to take advantage of it! ;o)
WARNING...to those of you who prefer your endings perfectly easy and happy, you might want to stop reading right after Nick falls asleep on the beach. But for those of you who are up for a wilder ride, some real-life kind of emotions, and some deLIcious angst, read on!
(Oh, you might notice a wink to one of my favorite movies in this story, as well! The title is a big hint. ;o))
"I'm not gonna remember any of this in the morning, am I?!"
Jess laughed, acknowledging Nick's stoned state. No...it was almost guaranteed that he would not. He was a spectacularly forgetful drunk to begin with, but the unprecedented addition of narcotics into the mix had been playing havoc with his mental acuity from time to time throughout the evening.
"We should go home," she said, considering the late hour, and the gravity of the events waiting to unfold the following morning.
"Yes. Let's go home," he agreed.
But they didn't.
Instead, they kept sitting there in the cold dark, watching the black waves splintering and sizzling against the shore, while mentally reviewing the day.
Nick had said it best, an hour or so before: "I woke up today, and I wanted to play a friendly game of touch football, then I hurt my back, and I went to your gynecologist, and now I might have cancer!"
Crazy, huh? But that about summed it up. Oh, except there was also the part about him telling Jess she didn't know how to be real, her turning around and goading him to be more spontaneous, and then him running impulsively into the ocean and immediately regretting it.
Okay, now it's summed up. The absolutely insane day they'd all just lived. And now there they all were, sitting on the beach, in the wee hours of the morning, feeling exhausted from feeling, but somehow unwilling to let the night end.
Because no one knew what the next day would hold.
Schmidt and Cece had fallen asleep next to each other a distance away, after talking about who knew what...those two had developed a weird friendship lately. Winston had gotten cold after giving Nick his jacket, and had gone to sit in his "car" and call Shelby. And Nick...well, Nick had started out sitting in the sand having a grand ol' sulk, soaking wet and miserable in body and soul. But then those three...or four...pain pills that he'd tossed back had started to kick in. And by the time Jess had come to join him the lights of the midway in the distance had been spinning in a slow motion blur, and he'd been feeling no pain.
"Well Jess, I tried it your way. I think I'm just destined to be a wallet-holder." Nick's regretful but resigned words now suddenly broke the long and comfortable silence that had been stretching between them, keeping them connected even as they'd sat there lost in their own thoughts.
"Aw, I don't think so, Nick," she answered, with that unflagging teacher-y optimism of hers. "That's the thing about running into the ocean. Sometimes you don't know what will be waiting there for you. But at least it will always be an adventure, and afterwards, you won't have to wonder what would have happened if you hadn't been too scared to take the plunge."
He was silent for a few more beats before blurting out, seemingly nonsensically, "Anything?"
She squinted at him in indulgent confusion. "Hmmmm?"
"What would I do if I could do anything, without being afraid of what might happen?"
Smiling gently at the slightly goofy mental place the pain meds had him in right now, she wordlessly traveled with him back to a conversation that had taken place much earlier in the evening. "Yeah?"
"Why did you ask me that, Jess?"
She shrugged with careful carelessness. "You told me to be more real. I was being real. I think you let your fears hold you back. I think you should seize the moment more, and stop worrying so much about what could go wrong. If you always focus on that, you'll never take any risks, and nothing in your life will ever change."
"But I'm a screw up, Jess," he argued, only slightly slurring his words. "And when I do things on impulse...when I do things that 'change my life'...it always changes it for the worse."
"That's not true, Nick."
"What do you know, Jess?! You haven't been around very long! It is true, and I don't want..."
He stopped and seemed lost in wandering thought until she prompted, "What?" And then he seemed to start over, in a burst:
"If I have to give up what I really want, in order to keep what I really want, then it's worth it."
"Sweetieeee... I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, as if talking to a small child, and gently rubbing his shoulder.
He concentrated really hard on getting the next words out without messing them up, because they were kinda important: "I'm talking about YOU, Jess."
The hand on his shoulder froze, and her blue eyes went wide and startled and wary like a skittish deer. He turned to look at her, and suddenly their faces were way closer than he thought they would be.
And once he'd blinked his eyes a few times to bring her blurry face into focus, he suddenly found that he couldn't stop starting at her mouth.
"For instance," he huskily almost-whispered, "I want more than anything, right now, right this minute, to kiss you."
"That's the pills talking, Nick," she quickly interrupted.
"NO, it's not," he replied, half angrily...
"It's the beer talking..."
"Jess..."
"Ok, it's the pills AND the beer..."
"Stop it, Jess..."
"Ok, its the CANCER talking," she offered a little frantically...
"NO, Jess," he interrupted her with final firmness, "it's really not. I've wanted to kiss you for so long that I don't even remember when I started wanting to kiss you. But do you know what I want more than kissing you?"
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, so he continued. "I want you in my life. I don't want to lose you. I...I need you too much. I need you around giving me dirty looks when I drink too much. And telling me that I need to stop just existing, and really LIVE. And...making me laugh on days when there's no one else on earth who could make me laugh. I'm a better person when I'm with you. I need to be the person you want me to be. And I've barely even gotten started on that. And I'm afraid that if I give in, and do what I want to do, and kiss you, that I'm going to screw things up, AGAIN, and you'll leave. And then I'd be back to...to where I was before. And that terrifies me."
Although there was no way he would ever have said any of that stuff if he'd been sober, he was also speaking with a strange clarity of thought that contradicted his blurry speech, and couldn't be ignored. Jess had been searching his eyes for...something...the whole time he was talking, and maybe she found it, because now hers were bright with unshed tears.
She didn't respond for several seconds, and when she finally did, it was in a hesitant whisper. "Nick...do you want to know the truth? About why I asked you...what you would do...if you could do anything?"
She paused and gulped, and he did the same, his gaze on her face fixed and unblinking as he waited for her to continue.
"I asked you that because..." she smiled a wobbly, teary smile that wavered on humiliation, but she kept going, "I think that's secretly what I wanted to hear. Or at least what I wanted to make you think about. I mean...I've wanted you to...to want to...to kiss me. But I didn't think that you'd ever actually say it," she ended quickly, with a watery laugh.
"What are you saying Jess?" he asked, a little fuzzily. He desperately hoped that she was saying what he thought she was saying, but hey, he was hopped up on some really powerful opiates which he'd inadvisedly been washing down with alcohol all night, so he had to be sure.
"I'm saying..." she continued, her dusky voice a little stronger now, "I've wanted to kiss you, too. But I've been scared too. Because I don't want to lose you, either."
For moments on end his only movement in response was his slow blinking, and the sea breeze ruffling his curls in the moonlight, as he processed her words through an increasingly foggy brain.
"Jess..." he finally said in a slow, wondering voice, as if realizing that the answer to what he'd thought was a unravelable riddle was really quite simple, "If we're not going to remember any of this tomorrow anyway...then what's stopping us now?"
Her eyes went all crinkled around the edges with affectionate amusement, as she laughed in the silent, open-mouthed way she had, before taking a breath to begin to contradict him. But then...then...a different look dawned on her face...simultaneously bemused and thoughtful...and she cocked her head softly, squinted at him curiously, and slowly closed her mouth again.
Yes, thanks to the unregulated cocktail of booze and pain killers that Nick had been pounding back all night, he'd drifted in and out of lucidity at unpredictable intervals. So he smugly congratulated himself on the fact that now, when it really mattered, his mind was razor sharp. Hell, even Jess, who let's face it, could argue the bark off a stump, was unable to come up with a response to the kind of iron clad logic that he'd just presented her with. And he heard himself saying again, more quietly, but more confidently, "What's stopping us, Jess?"
"N...nothing...that I can...that I can think of..." she answered softly, slowly, in the kind of voice you would use in trying not to frighten away a small woodland creature that was finally, bravely, approaching the hand you were trying to feed it with.
"Well...okay then," he answered. Eh. Not his smoothest line ever, but her lips didn't even so much as quirk with the desire to smile at his lameness. On the contrary, her whole face had gone utterly still, and serious.
And expectant.
And for a few long seconds they both seemed to be holding their breaths. Then he was falling into her eyes, drawn irresistibly to the possibilities he saw there, possibilities edged with something sweet and sad and secret. And when his lips first bumped against hers, he jumped in surprise, because he didn't even realize their mouths were that close yet. Her eyes were still open, and people were supposed to shut their eyes when they kissed, weren't they? So how was he supposed to know he was getting that close?
"Shut your eyes," he rasped. And she did. She closed her eyes to everything around them, and to everything that could go wrong, and just surrendered to his lips as they took hers again, still just the softest of brushes, but with purpose this time.
And he had to try really hard not to groan at the first touch of her berry-red lips, because none of his fantasies could ever have prepared him for just how soft and precious she really was. Because maybe it was the heady high he was on, but when he kissed her he felt, for the first time ever, that he wasn't kissing just a physical body, but a soul.
And her lips were sweet...unbearably, unbearably sweet...but her soul was the sweetest thing he had ever known in his life.
And all he knew was that he wanted more, more than this gentle fumbling at her lips like a bee to a blossom. He wanted to taste more deeply of her very essence...to attempt to reach the place where he knew...had always known...that his soul and hers could unite.
And at that moment nothing could have stopped him from trying.
So he leaned in more determinedly, and tilted his head, and when he nuzzled her lips apart they fell unquestioningly open beneath his, and this time he was unable to suppress a low growl as he tested her with his tongue. But in the next second the growl hitched and froze in his throat, because she was kissing him back, greeting him with eager little inner licks that said she'd been wanting to know what he tasted like too, and that she wasn't disappointed.
When he heard a whimper he wasn't sure who it came from, him or her, and in truth, it didn't matter, because he was leaning over her now, lightly pressing her back into the sand, and one of her hands was trembling against the back of his neck, trying to get up the nerve to touch him like she really meant it.
And then she was stretched out beside him, and he was being careful to hold the weight of his body away from her, as he rose up on one elbow to drink in the image of her face in the moonlight. Her lips were slightly parted, conquered, waiting and wanting, and glistening with his own saliva. And that observation primed a deep well of possessiveness within him, and turned him on more than he could ever remember anything doing, because she was Jess...JESS.
And right then she was HIS Jess.
But as always it was her eyes that he couldn't look away from, once he met her unblinking gaze, and he searched them for the answers he was needing.
They were round and all-trusting, with an infinite softness that he recognized, but didn't dare let himself define. He chose, instead, to try to focus on the new and intriguing passion he now saw flickering darkly in their depths. But when even that was ultimately shadowed by an overwhelming sadness, he frowned in confusion.
"Jess..." he asked, slightly breathlessly, "do you want me to stop?" please say no please say no please say no
A tear was escaping one eye now, but she shook her head violently against the sand.
He reached out with one hand to thumb away the tear, before cupping her face the way one would an object of reverence, and asked simply, "Then what's wrong?"
She sniffed the tiniest of sniffs, and said in the tiniest of voices, almost embarrassed, "You're not going to remember this."
"I find that really hard to believe, right now," he husked deeply, primally, ignoring the fact that the very promise of forgetfulness was the only reason he'd ever gotten brave enough to do this to begin with.
But she was reaching up and touching his face in return now, and as a tear fell from her other eye, she whimpered, "Please don't stop." And she pulled his head down to her again.
And whether it was the crashing of the waves, or the wild rush of his own heartbeat pulsing in his ears, he didn't even pause to wonder, because now he was plunging into her mouth with the same abandon and thirst for life that he'd originally dived into the ocean with-but this time without the immediate shock and regret. Far from it, he felt like he'd never been in such a warm and safe and good and right place in his life, and he was pretty sure that kissing Jess was the smartest thing he'd ever done.
When he finally felt like he'd fully tasted of the riches her mouth had to offer, he pulled away again, and if his own breath was breaking in jagged edges into the dark, his masculinity was gratified to hear hers joining his in irregular little pants. He pushed back her heavy bangs to assess her eyes again, and found them hazy and unfocused in the spiraling starlight.
And it would be easy...so easy...to slip a silent hand inside her coat...to take advantage of her limp willingness, and her absolute trust...and to touch her in places that would make her gasp, and maybe call out his name.
But he didn't. Even in his drugged state he knew that that would be breaching frontiers that mere forgetfulness would not justify. The same logic kept him from whispering all the things he wanted to tell her right now: all the crass and carnal things he was feeling, but also all the secret sweetnesses she'd been inspiring in him since the day she'd walked into his life. So he just leaned there above her and let it all, ALL of it, shine through his eyes as he looked down at her with hot tenderness.
And her eyes were pools that eagerly soaked it all up, accepting and mirroring his various unspoken passions, as she gripped the front of his shirt like she never wanted to let go.
When she finally asked, "Are you okay? Are you cold?", he realized that he was shaking, convulsively, uncontrollably, with emotions stronger than he know how to process. "No," he sniffed and shook his head. "No, I'm ...happy." And he said again, "I'm..." -fully expecting to hear himself repeat, "I'm happy". But this time he was surprised to hear himself say instead, "I'm...not afraid. " He half laughed and shook his head with the wonder of it. "For the first time that I can remember in a long time...I'm not afraid."
And as he said it, he felt a deep calm settle over and through him, with a warm rush rivaling and surpassing the fabulous wizardry of Sadie's magic uterus beans. Then he felt his shivering suddenly, perfectly, still and stop as Jess pulled him back down, pressed a kiss, like a promise, against his forehead, and drew his head in to nestle into the crook of her neck.
He settled down more deeply into the sand now, fully stretched out beside her, cradled and relaxed in her arms, and breathing deeply of the scent of her hair-because that was something else he'd always wanted to do. He felt her hands stroking his back, tentatively massaging the part that would have been excruciatingly painful right now if he hadn't been popping those pills like so much candy all night, and he thought he heard her whisper defiantly into the night, "This is real."
And he agreed-this was the most real and alive he'd ever felt, as if he'd slept his whole life up until that moment. And he might have told her that...but maybe he didn't...because he never knew when the meds finally took over.
And contrarily, just when he'd never felt more exquisitely awake...he fell asleep.
So he never knew that she laid awake for hours afterwards, letting her hands explore the hard muscles of his back, and the crisp hair on the back of his neck, memorizing them for future, wistful, reference.
And he never knew when, just as the first faint pink of the sun began tinting the horizon, she'd glanced towards their sleeping friends, and rolled out of his arms, and cried herself to sleep.
