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Fic: Inertia
Title: Inertia
Characters/Pairings: Jenny-centric, Tommy/Jenny
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoiler alert: Spoilers through the first two or three episodes
Summary: One day, Jenny just stopped waiting for the catalyst.
Disclaimer: They aren't mine. If they were, they wouldn't be canceled, now would they?
She married Michael because he was the first guy who ever asked her out.
He certainly wasn’t the first guy to want to take her out. She saw the way guys looked at her, and her dad had told her since she was a little girl that she was beautiful. But no guy was going to ask Jenny Reilly out, no matter how hot they thought she was—no one wanted to mess with Tommy Donnelly. And everyone in Hell’s Kitchen knew that if any guy so much as looked at Jenny too long, they’d find their faces buried in the sidewalk and Tommy’s foot on their back.
When she was fourteen, fifteen, it just seemed a matter of time (sooner or later, Tommy would say something or maybe just grab her and kiss her, and then the world would be as it should be), and so she inwardly thrilled that everyone assumed that she was Tommy’s girl. She doodled their initials in a heart in the back of her Physics book, then scratched it out because she’d always hated those kinds of girls. She didn’t need to lay claim to him, to remind everyone else that he was hers and she was his. They just were.
But senior year of high school came and went and then Tommy was off to art school, and he still had never said anything or done anything or even hinted that one day he might. And then she started to resent that everyone else took it for granted that they would be together one day, because didn’t everyone see that there was no guarantee of that? She could love him all she wanted; that wasn’t going to change anything. They were stuck exactly where they’d been since they were twelve years old: on the edge of a precipice, hanging by a thread, just a whisper away from something so big that she couldn’t even let herself think about it. Objects at rest….
Michael came into the diner every night for dinner for three weeks before asking her out. He took her to an Italian restaurant, which she found hilarious, even if she didn’t laugh (he never made her laugh). True, the restaurant was over in Midtown and had no ties to the mob that she knew of, but still. Tommy had always teased her about how much she loved pasta, saying it was a sign that one day she was going to switch allegiances on them.
She thought of Tommy the whole time Michael was telling stories about the funny, naïve things the kids in his class said, and she smiled at the places she was supposed to laugh and dipped her head at the places she was supposed to say “Awww.”
She shied away when he tried to kiss her as he dropped her off at home that night. He laughed, kicked a can, and glanced over his shoulder at her when he left.
After that, he still came every day to the diner and took her out every Friday night. She never once laughed, but then, she never once cried, either. Three months later, he proposed.
“Take your time. Think about it,” he said. “Don’t make a rash decision.”
“Yes,” she said.
She found Tommy out behind the Firecracker, emptying the trash. She stood and watched him as he swung one bag, then another into the dumpster. “Michael asked me to marry him,” she said.
I’m not going to wait to live my life. I can’t sit around and wait for you forever. I have to live. Now. Not in some hypothetical future where we’re together and your brothers are out of trouble and you take me far away from here. That isn’t fair. I have to live now.
He let the top of the dumpster fall, and the hollow bang echoed through the alley. “Breaking another heart, Jenny?” he asked.
“I said yes.”
He stared at her for a long moment that stretched out to infinity in the summer heat, the waiting vibrating in the night, with the sound of traffic and radios and shouts several blocks over fading in and out like static. It wasn’t just the two of them in their own world, though; it never had been. All the rest of the world pressed in close around them and she forced herself to look at him.
And then suddenly his hand was on her shoulder and that was the closest they’d been in ages and she wanted to break down and cry. She didn’t.
“Congratulations, Jenny. I’m happy for you.”
He said it so earnestly and clearly that if she hadn’t known him since they were born, she would never have seen the twinge in his eyes. As it was, she gaped at him, confused and hurt and heartbroken and suddenly, inexplicably cold and lonelylonelylonely. She hadn’t really expected the news to make him finally say something (but a part of her had hoped it would).
He brushed a kiss across her cheek, and she couldn’t stop that single tear from falling.
He stepped back and just stood there looking at her in that way that had always broken her heart, and she could no longer meet his eyes. She turned to walk away, wrapping her jacket close around her, and she realized that even though she had just made the biggest decision of her life, she was still exactly where she’d always been.
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