Chapter Text
She came into the store between 9 and 10am every Wednesday. If she forgot something, she would return after 10pm the same day, just before closing time.
She would spend about an hour in the store in total, longer on the days she lingered in the kitchen aisle. Jackie didn’t understand what was so fascinating about the colourful plastic chopping boards, but the woman would stare at them with a faraway look in her eye until a noise or a passing person disturbed her and she’d move on to the produce section.
Except one week she didn’t come in. And then the next. And on the third week, as the clock neared 10am, Jackie considered looking up her address in the membership database but she didn’t know her name because she’d been banned from checkouts after a particularly bitchy woman had accused her of overcharging her for eggs. Maybe she had, but only because the woman had been an absolute cunt. Nothing like Jackie’s woman.
She walked in at 10:03am whilst Jackie was stacking cereal. Her hair was scraped back from her face in a messy ponytail. Dark wisps framed her round face, deep brown eyes tired. Jackie wanted to ask her what was wrong. Where she had been. Who she had been with.
“Excuse me?”
Jackie blinked. She was talking to her. Actually talking to her.
“Hi.” Jackie breathed, a wobbly smile on her face.
“Hi.” The woman’s tone was clipped, although her voice still seemed melodic. There was a lilt to it - soft like rolling green hills in a far off land. “Are you listening to me?”
Jackie cleared her throat again. The woman had asked her something and she had missed it completely. “Sorry. Yeah. Yes.”
“So you know where they are?”
“Uh huh,” Jackie squeaked. “Follow me.” She turned around and started slowly down the main aisle, hoping they would come across what she was looking for until-
“Thanks.”
The woman disappeared down the magazine aisle. They’d moved it a week and a half ago. Of course she didn’t know where it was. “We swapped it with cheese,” Jackie called after her.
The woman glanced over her shoulder and offered a wry smile.
Jackie’s heart sang.
***
The woman didn’t talk to her again for a month, but Jackie couldn’t stop thinking about her. She had been close enough to smell her perfume. Something like sandalwood, but she couldn’t place it exactly. It was intoxicating. Jackie wanted to bury her face in her neck and inhale until she was dizzy.
She scoured the internet and ordered five different samples, but none of them were the exact scent she was looking for.
She wondered how odd it would be to ask the woman next time she passed by. A typical, girlish question. Where did you get your perfume? It’s lovely! Her mother would be proud.
The woman was probably about her mother’s age, maybe a few years younger - early to mid-forties. She was soft around the edges in a way that had suggested she lived life unashamedly at some point. There was something in her eyes Jackie couldn’t place. Something both cold and inviting at the same time. Her existence contradicted itself.
“Taylor! Jump on checkout for a second. I need to piss.”
Rufus - a large man with a closely shaved head and goatee - excused himself from the lone working checkout.
Jackie slid into his empty chair.
Across from her, there was a large picture board with all of the staff’s childhood pictures on it. They weren't a big store. She could pick out Rufus easily. He had the same rotund belly he had now but more hair; plus he was the only black employee.
Jackie stared at herself for a few seconds. Same wide, inquisitive eyes. A toothless smile and light blonde hair in two bunches on either side of her head. Her mother had dressed her in a frumpy white dress and her fist was raised. The picture had blown out so she couldn’t tell what she was holding. A rattle, maybe. Definitely not a lollipop, as one of her coworkers had guessed. She had never been allowed anything above a certain sugar percentage.
They were running some sort of fundraiser. The person who matched the babies with the correct names would win a spa retreat. She wondered if the woman had placed a ballot. If she’d looked at little Jackie and smiled at her goofy face and knew it was her with a single glance.
Jackie’s attention was dragged back to reality when a customer loudly cleared his throat.
She numbly swiped groceries. The beep beep beep started to sound more and more like a heart monitor. Rufus didn’t come back. Apparently there was some sort of family emergency, relegating Jackie to cashier duty for the remainder of the week.
Jackie wondered if that was why the woman had been gone. The silver band around her ring finger hadn’t moved, so her husband was probably fine. Or her wife. Maybe she had a wife. That train of thought always led Jackie back to one particular image of herself. White sheets and lazy sunny mornings.
Wednesday morning rolled around and Jackie didn’t even realise. She’d worked fifteen days in a row now. It wasn’t like she had much else going on.
Her boyfriend had broken up with her two months ago after three years, saying something about wanting to discover himself. Jackie didn’t care as much as she should have. All she said was okay.
They still hooked up sometimes. Missionary. Quick thrusts. One and done, usually. Then he’d start talking about his mom or his sister and Jackie would wonder if she ever really liked him to begin with.
They’d met when Jackie briefly went to college. Community college, much to her mother’s disappointment. She’d left home at eighteen and insisted she be self-sufficient. She didn’t know that that meant making rent would require forty plus hour work weeks and no free time.
She hated college.
So she left. Kept her job at J-Mart and here she was. Twenty five and still here. Twenty five and pining over–
The woman stood in front of her, eyebrows raised. “Are you always up in space?”
Jackie swallowed thickly. “Better than down here.”
Was she hallucinating or had she actually made the woman laugh?
Jackie slowly started to scan the groceries. Beep beep beep. Much slower than her own heartbeat. She could hear blood rushing in her ears. The woman was already holding out her membership card.
Jackie’s hand trembled as she took it and scanned. Beep. The woman’s picture loaded slowly. A tiny square in the corner of the screen. She wasn’t smiling, although they always said you could. It wasn’t a passport photoshoot.
There it was. Her name.
SHAUNA SADECKI.
Jackie could feel those brown eyes boring through her skull.
Shauna. It sounded like a summer breeze. Shauna. Like waves against the shore. And whatever other cheesy fucking metaphor her mind could think up. Shauna made her believe in all of them.
“Is there a problem?”
She was cute when she was irritated. Her brow furrowed and highlighted the little creases at the top of her nose. Her lips pursed, holding back on kicking up a fuss.
“You’ve got some points you can use if you’d like to. Twenty dollars,” Jackie lied.
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
Jackie bagged up the groceries slowly, with too much care. Eggs on top. Large items packed to the bottom.
She smiled too wide at the woman - at Shauna.
“Thanks, Jack.”
And she was gone. And Jackie had never been happier to have a hand-me-down name tag in all her life.
***
Jackie left work early that day. They were cutting hours and, despite five years of service, she was on the chopping block. She kicked at rocks in the parking lot on the way to her car.
One of them leapt up and hit the bumper of a station wagon. It left a small dent. She wondered what would happen if she took her keys and scraped at it until the paint came off. Would it make it worse? So much worse she could blame another car?
“What the fuck are you doing?”
There she was. Shauna.
Perfect Shauna with eyes she could drown in. Pillowy thighs she would happily suffocate in, and every single other cliché that would lead to the air being stolen from her lungs.
“Did you just hit my car?”
“No.”
“Then who did.”
“He ran away.”
Jackie blurted it out so quickly that she almost believed herself.
Shauna looked utterly unconvinced. “He ran away?”
The parking lot was empty except for a truck on the other side, Jackie’s car two spots away and a motorbike by the door.
“That way.” Jackie pointed towards the main road.
And she would never forget the way Shauna looked at her then. Like she was a curiosity that demanded to be studied. Observed. Understood. No, not understood. The opposite of that. Discovered but never fully understood was Jackie’s usual state of being. She had spent most of her teenage years thinking love meant being understood in the way that she wanted to be.
Love wasn’t that at all. Love was being understood in the ways you didn’t want to be and letting it happen anyway.
Shauna didn’t even pretend to look for the imaginary perpetrator. “Do you need a ride?”
The question hit her like a bolt of electricity.
“Yes,” Jackie lied.
“Okay. Get in, then.”
Jackie was quite certain she’d died and gone to heaven.
***
The car smelled like her. Discount aisle perfume and something earthy.
“Sorry. My daughter never takes her soccer uniform inside.”
Crumpled in a heap in the backseat there was a uniform. Blue and yellow caked in mud.
Jackie had tried soccer when she was in elementary school after her mother told her she needed to do more extracurriculars or she would never make it to college. She didn’t like how the material felt against her skin so she cried and cried until they switched her to ballet.
That lasted 3 months before they gave up altogether.
“It’s fine,” Jackie answered absently. She had never been so aware of the sound of her own voice. The radio was silent. Did she not listen to music when she drove? Not even a podcast? Jackie had taken her for a podcast listener. Or some of those steamy audiobooks that middle-aged women loved and Jackie only listened to when her imagination wasn’t good enough to get her off.
If she saw Shauna in traffic, she would have imagined her listening to one of them with a straight face, ignoring the thrum of her heart and the heat between her legs as the pirate or the plumber or the mail man thrust into the-
“Where are we going?”
Jackie blinked.
“Your address.”
Jackie told her.
They rode in silence.
It had never occurred to Jackie to be ashamed of where or how she lived. It was small, tucked away at the back of an old three story and definitely illegally subleased by her landlord. The guy made appearances every so often in a beat up 2005 Hyundai reeking of weed and Old Spice.
“This is it?” Shauna wasn’t good at hiding her distaste. Jackie loved that about her. The way her brow wrinkled looking up at the apartment. That her eyes screamed judgement. Terrifying judgement that Jackie both wanted to be on the other end of and wanted to avoid no matter what. She craved the potential for attack that crawled underneath Shauna Sadecki’s skin.
“It’s a little further down,” she lied. “Don’t want to give you my real address. You might be a serial killer,” she joked.
The resulting silence was loud.
“Okay.”
Jackie made no move to get out.
“Bye?” Shauna’s tone was clipped yet uncertain.
Jackie wondered if she wanted her to stay. Keep her company so she didn’t have to go home to her dud husband. The daughter she mentioned didn’t seem to be at the forefront of her mind either. If she was so desperate to get home to her perfect family then she never would have driven Jackie home.
Jackie, whose car was now abandoned at work because she wanted to spend a few minutes more with this stranger. No. No, she wasn’t a stranger. She was Shauna.
“Bye,” Jackie echoed. She got out of the car far slower than necessary, feigning an injury to her hip. Like a dog desperate for attention. Shauna didn’t seem to notice.
She drove off before Jackie even made it to the door.
***
She dreamt of Shauna again that night.
Of her hands, gripping her the same way she had gripped the steering wheel. Of her lips, grazing her ear as she whispered words that didn’t quite make sense. Her name. Well, almost her name. Jack, she would say. The hand around her wrist would loosen and Jackie would lean back into her touch.
Jackie’s tongue would press against her neck, tasting the salt on her skin and the perfume she sprayed onto her chest every morning. She would dip her hands underneath her shirt and dig her fingers into her skin and hold her there. Jackie’s girl.
She would let Shauna eat her whole if she asked. Even if she didn’t ask. She’d let it happen. There was no happier way to die than in her arms.
She woke up sweating.
She had a fever.
When Jackie reached for the water she usually kept by her bedside, she found it empty. Flopping back into the sweaty mattress, she stared up at the ceiling. What if Shauna went to the store today? What if she wondered where she was?
She swallowed thickly and forced herself to sit up.
If she closed her eyes, she could see Shauna. She could see her entering the room with a floral tray, stacked with soup, bread and tea. She could almost taste it. Camomile and honey. The cure Jackie’s mom had given her every time she was sick as a kid. The soup had always tasted bad. Her mom couldn’t cook. She imagined Shauna could.
Jackie dragged herself up by the corner of the headboard and somehow made it to the bathroom.
The rest of the day was a blur.
At some point during her doomscrolling, she found Shauna’s Facebook account. Of course she used Facebook and not Instagram. She scrolled through her liked pages - things from years ago that didn’t exist anymore. Events she had responded to. She used a lot of exclamation points.
‘See you there, Kelly,’ she had written in response to an invite to an engagement party.
So she didn’t like Kelly. Good to know. Kelly wasn’t worthy of her false excitement. Jackie wondered how she would text her. Would she use exclamation points or would she let her real self come out on display? Maybe she would send emojis. No. Shauna was too classy for emojis.
Jackie scrolled all the way back to the mid-2000s. When her account was created.
There were pictures. None that Shauna had uploaded herself. She was tagged in pictures, sitting at the corner at parties with a plastic cup in hand. There were half-assed attempts at Halloween costumes. In one, she was dressed as a cat and was carrying her beer around in a dog bowl.
Jackie laughed like she had been in the room when she walked in, imagining the looks on the faces around her. Her friends. Was Jackie her friend now or just someone that happened to get a ride in her car one day?
She pressed the ADD FRIEND button and immediately closed her phone.
Lying on the couch, a sitcom playing on the ratty old TV she’d inherited from the old tenant, Jackie prayed to a God she didn’t believe in. The laugh track punctuated the notification.
SHAUNA SADECKI IS NOW YOUR FRIEND.
***