Her dreams went out the door when she turned 24, Jackie/Hyde, That 70s Show
Jackie Burkhart does not fix cars. That’s what boyfriends and husbands and mechanics are for. So when her car starts to make strange noises, Jackie debates calling her ex-husband to come fix it. But the divorce wasn’t exactly amicable, and anyway, he’s back in Chicago while she’s three-quarters of the way to Point Place to visit her mother. So she calls Red Forman from a pay phone at a gas station instead. It surprises her that she has to pull out her Filofax to find the number; but then again, it has been five years.
So Red comes and tows the car back to his former shop in Point Place, grumbling that it really only does mufflers the whole time, but tells Jackie that he’ll fix it for her personally, free of charge, even though she offers to pay full price. He also drives her to her mother’s and tells her to call if she needs anything-because Kitty would love to hear from her. She smiles and thanks him and gives him her mother’s number to call when the car is fixed.
Pam is largely the same as always, and after one day, Jackie’s already sick of her. But her car is still in the shop, so she borrows Pam’s and drives, without much of a destination. She ends up at the mall (shocking), where she sits on a bench to clear her head (this is a first, Jackie Burkhart going into a mall and not shopping).
Sitting on the bench, she is no one, just another twentysomething yuppie who’s sick of shopping. Everyone she knows is gone. She wanders, but buys nothing, and when the Duran Duran starts to get to her, she leaves. She ends up on the street between the Formans’ house and the Pinciottis’, just sitting in the car, too afraid to go into either house, and too nostalgic to leave.
Red’s words are in her head, and his card in her pocket, so she pulls the car into his driveway (both the same and different; she never drove, it was always Steven or Michael or Eric) and walks to the door, hands trembling (she’s just here to ask about the car and visit with Kitty, she’ll be out the door in half an hour, tops, and not come back), and rings the bell.
There’s no sign of movement after the first ring, and she thinks that maybe Kitty and Red are both at work (whose car is in the driveway then?), but she rings the bell once more to be certain, and that’s when she hears footsteps and a voice, male, saying, “All right, all right, I’m coming,” and she’s transported back five years and frozen by the door, torn between the urge to run back to the car or the urge to break the door down just to get to him.
Steven looks mostly the same at first glance; she thinks when he opens the door. He’s grown the beard back, he has slightly less hair and has gained a little bit more weight, but otherwise, he’s the same, sunglasses and all. The expression he’s wearing is new, a mix between shock and confusion. “Jackie?” he asks, and she can tell he's trying to regain his cool. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question” she retorts, trying to sound haughty instead of scared and more like the adult she is than the girl she used to be.
“I live here,” he says like it should be obvious. “In the basement. But you don’t. You live in Chicago. So what are you doing here?”
Jackie doesn’t know whether to be impressed that he knows where she lives or annoyed that he still lives in the basement, so she decides to ignore both. “I’m visiting my mother, but my car had trouble, so Red’s fixing it for me, and I just came to see when it would be done, but he’s obviously not here, so I’ll just go, and you can tell Kitty I say hi, and--”
He silences her with a finger to her lips (just like it always was) and “Do you want a drink?”
“What?”
“A drink. You know, beverage, refreshment. I’ve got beer and…” he thinks for a second. “well I’d have to check what Red and Kitty have, but I know I have beer.”
“Beer would be fine,” she says, even though she hasn’t drunk any in years, only wine and mixed drinks, sophisticated fare for her sophisticated life. He moves out of the doorway then, and she thinks they’ll stop right there in the kitchen, which hasn’t changed a bit (he kissed her against that refrigerator), but he leads her down to the basement instead.
The basement is nothing like she remembers it. It’s been painted, and obviously fumigated, since it no longer smells like pot, and where the washing machine and dryer used to be (they made out there too) there’s a stove and oven and a sink and counters and a refrigerator that Steven goes to to get the beers, one which he opens for her, and one that he takes for himself. There’s still a couch in the center of the room, though a different one (and she’d never thought she’d say this, but she misses the old couch), so she sits on that while Steven sits in a chair to her left (same place he always sat, and she can picture herself in his arms).
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” she says, because she has to say something. “It looks better.”
“Yeah, well, when Forman and Donna went off to New York, Kitty and Red were talking about selling the house because it was too big and it wasn’t like we were using it as a hangout anymore. I mean, Kelso went all square, got married and had a baby and a real job, Forman and Donna left, Fez got deported…” Her face grows dark at that, so he hurries on. “and you took that job in Chicago. I couldn’t let some yuppie couple buy this place and ruin it, so,” he shrugs. “I told the Formans that I’d help pay the mortgage and then I moved in down here and made it into an apartment. I added the kitchen stuff and a bathroom in the back, and well, that’s enough for me.”
“That was so sweet of you, Steven,” and the words are out before she can think, and she watches him flinch, knowing that she lost her right to say things like that long ago. “So how’s the record store?”
“Well, it’s doing well. We opened another a couple of more in neighboring towns, and we’re always looking to expand.”
“We?”
“My dad made my sister and I co-owners with him, so yeah, we run the company together.” She wants to ask about that, when he learned enough responsibility for that, when he matured (because marrying a stripper when drunk was the epitome of immature), but it’s like he can read her mind, because he changes the subject. “So how’s the TV hostessing? I caught you on the news a couple of times, but you didn’t seem to be on consistently.”
“Yeah, I was substituting on a news program for a while, but now I’m hostessing my own show in Chicago. It’s on in the middle of the day, which is a bad slot, but if it does well, maybe it can at least get moved to the morning, which would be better. I’d love a night slot, but, well, I’m not serious enough for that.”
“Not serious?” He leans forward in his chair and puts his beer on the coffee table, and then his hands on his knees, angling towards her. “Jackie, how can you say that? You’ve never been more serious about anything.” He leans back then, as he says, bitterly, “except getting married.”
That hurts, the blow about marriage, even if Steven doesn’t know it, the wound Jake left still to fresh, and the mention of Fez earlier, and Steven himself, doing just fine without her, so she can’t be blamed for what she says next, not really. “For your information, Steven,” she says, in her bitchiest tone, “marriage is a sacred institution that has been around for centuries, and is it wrong to want to find a person to spend the rest of your life with and then celebrate finding him? Just because you treat relationships like a pair of sneakers doesn’t mean that everyone does, and just because your heart’s never been broken, doesn’t mean we’re all so lucky. In fact, I think that some of us should be commended for still believing in marriage after all we’ve been through.” She realizes that she’s standing (when did that happen), so she slams her beer down on the table and heads for the door to the outside (that, at least, is where it’s always been), but she can’t resist a parting shot. “And I meant that the content of my show wasn’t serious enough, not that I wasn’t. Tell Red and Kitty I came by.” Then she turns and walks to the door, trying not to cry (because what did you expect, Jackie? Did you expect him to profess his undying love and propose?), when he murmurs something she can’t quite make out.
“What?” she asks, because if he’s ridiculing her, she can go back and slap him.
He stands and sighs, pulling off the sunglasses, and she wonders if he’s preparing himself for her slap. “I said; my heart has been broken.”
She turns back to look at him, because he can’t be serious, not really, and she’s a little bitter. “When Sam left?”
He smiles then, in that “I can’t believe you’re such an idiot” way that he always used on Michael, and sometimes on her. “No, Jackie, not when Sam left. When you left for Chicago. The first time.”
It all comes rushing back then, her leaving him in the basement, Michael coming to her hotel room, Steven finding him and taking off for Las Vegas, him coming back married, and her need to move on. She thinks of Fez, poor, sweet Fez, who she’d put her hopes and dreams on, whose visa ran out and was deported, and of Jake, who was everything she thought she wanted, and who, in the end, was nothing she wanted, and of Steven, living here the last five years, here where they both began and ended and everything in between.
She thinks of all this, one hand on the door, her mind spinning, just staring at Steven, who seems to be frozen where he stands (he was never good at expressing his feelings) until she gets to don’t think, Jackie, just do, and then her purse is on the ground and she’s across the room in a heartbeat, her hands on his face, staring into his eyes (so cliché), and she’s not sure who leans in first, but their mouths connect, and it’s like fireworks coursing through her body (she’d forgotten how right this always felt, how well they’d always fit), and when he pulls her closer, hands around her waist, so that their whole bodies are touching, she gives up on any thought at all.
They stay like that for minutes, hours, days, until he pulls away from her and slowly, but firmly, and removes her hands, placing them down at her sides as he takes a step away. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? For insulting me or for kissing me? Because you really only--”
“Both. I shouldn’t have-I mean-I knew you were married, so I shouldn’t have said anything about marriage. Or kissed you.”
He doesn’t know. Eric must have told him when she married Jake-or he saw the invitation she sent to the Formans, but no one told him she got divorced. This, combined with the fact that Steven is actually apologizing-Steven apologizing, Jackie really needs to alert the media-is so ridiculous that she stars laughing, and she can’t stop.
Steven just looks pissed though. “I get it. There’s irony in the timing, that when you were ready to give me another chance I was married, and now here I am telling you what I couldn’t say five years ago and you’re married to some rich bastard. Yeah, that’s funny.” And he shakes his head, picks his beer up off of the table, and takes a long pull.
She’s missed this, his sarcasm, the way he cares even though he doesn’t want to, and the way he just fits with her (and his kisses, oh God, his kisses), so she composes herself to tell him so. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s heading for his bedroom with a “You can let yourself out” just when she has something to say.
“Steven,” she calls, and he turns (when did he put the sunglasses back on; she needs to see his eyes). “Steven, I’m not married.”
“Really? Then the cream-colored invitation that invited Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Forman to see Jacob Ringgold and Jacqueline Burkhart joined in holy matrimony was just a really big joke?”
“No, Steven, that was real, but--”
“Right, then. You should get going.” He turns back to his room and she has to make him listen somehow (she can’t lose him again; she never gets what she wants, but he is within reach).
“Jake and I divorced.” There. She’s said it, admitted that she’s failed. She’s admitted that she was wrong about the fairy tales; that getting married to the handsome prince doesn’t lead to happily ever after. Steven’s looking at her now, and she recognizes that look, the look he gave her after Michael cheated on her all those times, that mix of pity and sympathy, neither of which she wants now.
“No one told me.”
“It was pretty recent.” And then before he can offer up fake words of understanding, she says, “I don’t need your pity, Steven. And I don’t need a shoulder to cry on either. I’m a grown-up. Things have changed in five years, and I don’t have any illusions about people, or marriage, or life, and I certainly don’t have any illusions about you. I took off the rose-colored glasses, and the world isn’t filled with unicorns and rainbows, having a brain means something more than being pretty does, and being Jackie fucking Burkhart doesn’t mean shit without hard work to go with it. So why don’t you take off the sunglasses and look at what’s right in front of you?”
She can feel his stare piercing through her, even with those fucking sunglasses, and then he says, “You being Jackie Burkhart always meant something to me.” Then (and this is surreal, and she isn’t drunk or high, but it feels like she is) he takes off the sunglasses, throws them backwards into his room, walks forward, takes her into his arms, and leans down to kiss her, murmuring “I’ve never been so glad to hear about a divorce”, before he does kiss her and the fireworks go off again.
They end up horizontal on the couch (hardly surprising, the sex was always best after they fought), and he’s fumbling with the clasp of her bra when she says, “You’re not married, right?”
He stops, looks her right in the eyes, and says “Absolutely not”, and then unhooks the clasp as he kisses her again. He doesn’t say “I love you” or “Will you marry me?” or anything else she would have wanted him to say if this moment had taken place five years ago, but that isn’t what she needs anymore. There will be time later to talk about their careers, what they want, where they’ll live, and all of that, but right now, all Jackie needs is Steven Hyde, totally and completely. After all, he’s been deprived of sex with her for over five years. That needs to change.