Five Times Jenny Reilly Confessed to Tommy Donnelly
Title: Five Times Jenny Reilly Confessed to Tommy Donnelly
Author:
domfangirl
Fandom: The Black Donnellys
Part: 1/1
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Tommy Donnelly, Jenny Reilly, with mentions of Jimmy, Kevin, Joanie and Jenny's husband.
Pairings: Jenny/Tommy
Notes: Spoilers for all episodes thus far up to 1.04, and I borrowed dialogue from episode 1.04. For the sake of this fic, Tommy and Jenny are the same age.
I. Age 7
"Tommy!" His head swiveled on his shoulders at the whispered sound of his name. "Tommy! Come here!" Tommy checked to see that Jimmy and Kevin were too busy torturing the earthworms they’d found near the mud puddles in the alley behind their apartment. Then he snuck off to see what Jenny Reilly wanted.
"What?" he asked in a low voice as he got around the corner from his brothers.
"I stole Jimmy’s Halloween candy. You want some?" she asked, her pale eyes sparkling.
II. Age 12
"What’s wrong?" Tommy asked, sitting down on the front stoop outside Jenny’s house.
Her head rested on her knees but she turned it so she could see him when he sat down next to her. "I had a fight with my pop," she replied softly.
"Oh, Jen, come on. I fight with my mom all the time." Tommy could see the tears still hanging on in the corners of her eyes. "Did he ground you?" he asked.
"No," she said, looking up at him from under her wet lashes. "I just said the meanest thing I could say to him. He didn’t say anything; why am I so mean?"
"Jenny, you’re not mean," Tommy said, smiling at her. Jenny Reilly was the sweetest girl he knew. "What did you say?" he asked, putting a hand on her small, bony shoulder.
"I said it was his fault my mom left." More tears streaked over her nose and she rubbed a hand over her face.
"Is it?" Tommy asked. Jenny’s mother had left a few weeks before, and it didn’t look like she planned on coming back.
"No. She left because I’m bad. I just know it."
III. Age 15
When she walked into 4th period Geometry, Tommy knew something was wrong. She had that wide-eyed look she got when she wanted to tell him something. Jenny always thought she was doing something bad, stuff that really wasn’t that bad, but was bad to her because she was such a good girl. It was a common problem among Catholic school kids.
Tommy understood though, because he was like that. He used to do bad stuff, but then God intervened, and made sure he didn’t do it anymore. He’d had more people than he could count tease him about his Catholic guilt.
Maybe that was why Jenny told him all her secrets, because Tommy had chosen to be good, and she just was good, and so they were alike, by default.
"What’s going on?" he asked as soon as the teacher finished explaining their assignment for the period. He scooted his desk over so it bumped against hers.
Jenny shook her head.
"What, Jenny? What’s wrong? Did something happen with your pop?"
She just shook her head again.
"What is it?"
"Tommy," she whispered, and she leaned close, her hand reaching out to grab at his arm. "I saw Jimmy...doing something really bad. He had a needle." She motioned toward her arm, running her fingers lengthwise up the tracery of veins on the inside of her elbow.
"Where?" he demanded. He was already scooping up his schoolbooks and putting them into his backpack.
Her grip on his arm tightened when he would have stood up. "It was last night, I saw him outside the Firecracker."
He wanted to get up and go find his brother right then, but he was sure Jimmy wasn’t even at school. He rarely was these days. "The Firecracker? What were you doing at the Firecracker?" Tommy looked more closely at her face and saw vestiges of her own guilt as well as his brother’s.
"I just drank beer,” she said shamefully, as if every kid in the neighborhood hadn’t done the same thing at some point. “I would never do drugs," she added.
"Who was Jimmy with?" Tommy knew Jenny having a couple of beers with some older guys wouldn’t lead to anything. But Jimmy and needles-that would be bad. Very bad.
"You know who he was with. That girl. That Joanie girl. The druggie."
VI. Age 19
"It’s the middle of the night, Jen." Tommy rubbed his eyes and shut the apartment door behind him as he eased himself out into the hallway so he didn’t wake his mother.
"I know, I’m sorry," Jenny said, reaching for his hand. "I just needed to talk to you."
Tommy pushed away from the door, letting her hold his hand. Sliding down the wall, they sat side by side. For months now, he’d been working up to telling Jenny Reilly how he felt about her. He didn’t care that she had a boyfriend, because if he let that keep stopping him, he’d never tell her. She always had a boyfriend, and Jason Morgan had been her boyfriend for almost a year now. "What’s up?" he asked as her fingers squeezed his hand tightly.
"I’m getting married." She said it so lowly, he thought for a moment he’d misheard her.
"What?" he croaked, dipping his head so that his face came closer to hers.
"Jason and I are going to get married."
"He asked you?" Tommy asked, wondering what the hell kinda guy Jason was to ask a girl to marry him in the middle of the night.
"No," she said shaking her head. She lifted her gaze to his, and though the light bulb over their heads was burned out, the light outside the next apartment over gave him a shadowed view of her eyes. They were filled with despair. "Tommy, I have to marry him. I...we...We went all the way tonight."
It took a moment for her words to register and Tommy felt his own eyes widen in realization. "Oh," he breathed. "Oh. No. Jenny, you don’t-"
"It’s a sin, Tommy. It’s sin to do that with someone you’re not married to." Her hand clenched painfully around his and he wondered if she would ever guess that his heart had just been similarly crushed, turning to figurative dust just as the bones in his hand wanted to give way.
"Everybody does it," he whispered. "Everybody does it before they’re married. You don’t have to get married, Jenny."
"Yes, I do," she nodded her head furiously. "I don’t care what everyone else does. It’s a sin, and I know it’s a sin."
"Jenny..."
"Tommy, I know it. You know it, too. I know it."
He yanked his hand from hers, unable to stand the continual pressure on his bones that resonated in his chest. "What did you come here for? My advice? My approval?"
He didn’t intend for his voice to sound so cruel, but she was ripping his heart out. It was bad enough he had to hear about her going all the way with another guy, but knowing that was enough reason to propel her into marriage made his head throb with the dismal sound of finality. Tears started down her face in response to his tone and the loss of his touch, and he suddenly felt worse than he knew was possible. "No," she whispered, and a sob bubbled up, corrupting the word. "I don’t know why I came here. It’s you, Tommy. It’s me. I tell you everything."
Unable to stop himself, he wrapped his arm around her and she folded like a house of cards. She buried her face against his thigh and sobbed, choked cries that echoed through his body as her tears soaked his flannel pajama pants. "You don’t have to marry him, Jenny," he said again, leaning down over her, his lips touching her hair. But telling Jenny Reilly something wasn’t wrong when she knew it was never changed anything.
V. Age 22
When she came in the bar, he knew it. He could feel her behind him, but he stayed facing his brothers, watching them play pool, hoping she’d just turn around and walk out. He didn’t need to hear this confession, but he knew exactly why she was there.
But this time it was different. Her confession was to him, about him, and he didn’t have the stomach for it. He was done with being Jenny Reilly’s buoy. He was done with easing that pain in her eyes. It was different when they both could give that to each other, but her offering had been gloriously conditional. And he didn’t have anything left to extend to her. If his soul was slowly going to be lost to the duty of holding his family together, he wouldn’t have anything left for Jenny when she couldn’t give anything back to him. And for the first time in his life that he could recall, he didn’t want to give anything to Jenny Reilly without receiving something in return.
“Hey,” she said, her voice almost lost in the shouts of his brothers at their game.
Glancing at her, he said her name, acknowledging her, albeit reluctantly.
“I was in here earlier looking for you.”
I bet, Tommy thought darkly. When Jimmy shouted at him about playing nine ball, he longed for the escape, but then Jenny asked meekly, “Maybe you wanna go outside and talk?”
Pinning her with his eyes he responded, “Didn’t we do that last night?” Hadn’t he sat close to her, her forehead pressed to his, and for a split second hadn’t he thought she would just let it all go, and trust him, and it would be how it should have always been? Hadn’t he already been bitterly disappointed?
She nodded a little. “I know I hurt you last night. I’m sorry.”
Hurt wasn’t what Tommy would have used to describe the feeling he’d had when she walked out of the Firecracker with Samson. Hurt didn’t even come close to spitting on what he’d felt. But he just said, “You wanted something else, I get it.” And I sure as hell don’t need you pounding it into me some more tonight.
When his brothers continued to yell in the background (mostly Jimmy) the real Jenny Reilly made an appearance. “Shut the hell up, Jimmy! We’re trying to have a conversation here!”
Jimmy made a smart-ass remark, while Tommy just stared at Jenny. She didn’t say anything to carry on this ‘conversation’ they were having, and finally Tommy prodded her because he couldn’t help himself. Call it force of habit, it nothing else. “What?” he snapped.
“What I did to you last night was mean…and stupid,” she finally said.
Then, he knew. This wasn’t just a confession of why she’d walked out with Samson. This was a confession about what had happened afterwards. And the girl who’d gotten married because she committed a sin suddenly didn’t seem to be in front of him any longer. Only she was. She could say a million things here to set it right, but just like every time before, Jenny had to tell the truth. She was just that good, and infuriating. “Did you sleep with him?” he asked. Two days after you slept with me?! is what he wanted to demand from her, but he just hoped, somewhere inside him that she wasn’t about to tell him the truth.
Her eyes were wide, her confession face right before him, and he couldn’t have run from it if he tried. She gave him a slight nod and said, “Yeah.”
Smirking under the all-encompassing, damning fire of it all, he replied, “You coulda lied to me.” He’d spared her his sins of the past week, but she couldn’t return the favor.
No, I couldn’t, her eyes told him. And he knew that. He knew it. But he wished, in so many ways, on so many levels, that he didn’t.
“Tommy,” she said his name pleadingly, a breathy sound that only made him angry. For a moment her voice sounded as it had that night, the other night she didn’t lie to him, when he really could have appreciated a lie. A lie of No, Tommy, I don’t want you. Go home. That lie would have saved him all this…hope, every time he saw her. All the memories of her body, of her hands, of the crying, gasping sound of his name on her lips when he made her come. “I don’t want to be the person that I was last night.” Her words tumbled out, almost on top of each other. “I need a fresh start. I need to not be married. I need to not be with you; I need to not be with another guy in order to get at you-“
“Jenny!” Did she really think that she got to do this, now? Did she really think that little Tommy Donnelly would make love to her all night long and two days later be willing to sit quietly while she told him everything that was wrong about it? “I don’t wanna hear it. Whatever you gotta do, you should just do it. Okay?” Turning away from her, first his body and then his eyes, though they lingered, like the way kids have to rubberneck to see a car wreck. You shouldn’t look, and you’re afraid of what you might see, but you still gotta look. That was Tommy Donnelly looking away from Jenny Reilly right then.
In a wounded voice, Jenny said, “Guess I’ll go then.”
And Tommy couldn’t say anything else but “Good.” He wouldn’t look at her again and he rubbed his palms against each other to keep from reaching for her. To keep from putting his hand on her arm and telling her she could say anything she needed to, to him. She couldn’t anymore, and he couldn’t. They couldn’t. It was done.
Confessions were a thing of their past. Because their past had been together, but their future was not.
Author:
domfangirl
Fandom: The Black Donnellys
Part: 1/1
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Tommy Donnelly, Jenny Reilly, with mentions of Jimmy, Kevin, Joanie and Jenny's husband.
Pairings: Jenny/Tommy
Notes: Spoilers for all episodes thus far up to 1.04, and I borrowed dialogue from episode 1.04. For the sake of this fic, Tommy and Jenny are the same age.
I. Age 7
"Tommy!" His head swiveled on his shoulders at the whispered sound of his name. "Tommy! Come here!" Tommy checked to see that Jimmy and Kevin were too busy torturing the earthworms they’d found near the mud puddles in the alley behind their apartment. Then he snuck off to see what Jenny Reilly wanted.
"What?" he asked in a low voice as he got around the corner from his brothers.
"I stole Jimmy’s Halloween candy. You want some?" she asked, her pale eyes sparkling.
II. Age 12
"What’s wrong?" Tommy asked, sitting down on the front stoop outside Jenny’s house.
Her head rested on her knees but she turned it so she could see him when he sat down next to her. "I had a fight with my pop," she replied softly.
"Oh, Jen, come on. I fight with my mom all the time." Tommy could see the tears still hanging on in the corners of her eyes. "Did he ground you?" he asked.
"No," she said, looking up at him from under her wet lashes. "I just said the meanest thing I could say to him. He didn’t say anything; why am I so mean?"
"Jenny, you’re not mean," Tommy said, smiling at her. Jenny Reilly was the sweetest girl he knew. "What did you say?" he asked, putting a hand on her small, bony shoulder.
"I said it was his fault my mom left." More tears streaked over her nose and she rubbed a hand over her face.
"Is it?" Tommy asked. Jenny’s mother had left a few weeks before, and it didn’t look like she planned on coming back.
"No. She left because I’m bad. I just know it."
III. Age 15
When she walked into 4th period Geometry, Tommy knew something was wrong. She had that wide-eyed look she got when she wanted to tell him something. Jenny always thought she was doing something bad, stuff that really wasn’t that bad, but was bad to her because she was such a good girl. It was a common problem among Catholic school kids.
Tommy understood though, because he was like that. He used to do bad stuff, but then God intervened, and made sure he didn’t do it anymore. He’d had more people than he could count tease him about his Catholic guilt.
Maybe that was why Jenny told him all her secrets, because Tommy had chosen to be good, and she just was good, and so they were alike, by default.
"What’s going on?" he asked as soon as the teacher finished explaining their assignment for the period. He scooted his desk over so it bumped against hers.
Jenny shook her head.
"What, Jenny? What’s wrong? Did something happen with your pop?"
She just shook her head again.
"What is it?"
"Tommy," she whispered, and she leaned close, her hand reaching out to grab at his arm. "I saw Jimmy...doing something really bad. He had a needle." She motioned toward her arm, running her fingers lengthwise up the tracery of veins on the inside of her elbow.
"Where?" he demanded. He was already scooping up his schoolbooks and putting them into his backpack.
Her grip on his arm tightened when he would have stood up. "It was last night, I saw him outside the Firecracker."
He wanted to get up and go find his brother right then, but he was sure Jimmy wasn’t even at school. He rarely was these days. "The Firecracker? What were you doing at the Firecracker?" Tommy looked more closely at her face and saw vestiges of her own guilt as well as his brother’s.
"I just drank beer,” she said shamefully, as if every kid in the neighborhood hadn’t done the same thing at some point. “I would never do drugs," she added.
"Who was Jimmy with?" Tommy knew Jenny having a couple of beers with some older guys wouldn’t lead to anything. But Jimmy and needles-that would be bad. Very bad.
"You know who he was with. That girl. That Joanie girl. The druggie."
VI. Age 19
"It’s the middle of the night, Jen." Tommy rubbed his eyes and shut the apartment door behind him as he eased himself out into the hallway so he didn’t wake his mother.
"I know, I’m sorry," Jenny said, reaching for his hand. "I just needed to talk to you."
Tommy pushed away from the door, letting her hold his hand. Sliding down the wall, they sat side by side. For months now, he’d been working up to telling Jenny Reilly how he felt about her. He didn’t care that she had a boyfriend, because if he let that keep stopping him, he’d never tell her. She always had a boyfriend, and Jason Morgan had been her boyfriend for almost a year now. "What’s up?" he asked as her fingers squeezed his hand tightly.
"I’m getting married." She said it so lowly, he thought for a moment he’d misheard her.
"What?" he croaked, dipping his head so that his face came closer to hers.
"Jason and I are going to get married."
"He asked you?" Tommy asked, wondering what the hell kinda guy Jason was to ask a girl to marry him in the middle of the night.
"No," she said shaking her head. She lifted her gaze to his, and though the light bulb over their heads was burned out, the light outside the next apartment over gave him a shadowed view of her eyes. They were filled with despair. "Tommy, I have to marry him. I...we...We went all the way tonight."
It took a moment for her words to register and Tommy felt his own eyes widen in realization. "Oh," he breathed. "Oh. No. Jenny, you don’t-"
"It’s a sin, Tommy. It’s sin to do that with someone you’re not married to." Her hand clenched painfully around his and he wondered if she would ever guess that his heart had just been similarly crushed, turning to figurative dust just as the bones in his hand wanted to give way.
"Everybody does it," he whispered. "Everybody does it before they’re married. You don’t have to get married, Jenny."
"Yes, I do," she nodded her head furiously. "I don’t care what everyone else does. It’s a sin, and I know it’s a sin."
"Jenny..."
"Tommy, I know it. You know it, too. I know it."
He yanked his hand from hers, unable to stand the continual pressure on his bones that resonated in his chest. "What did you come here for? My advice? My approval?"
He didn’t intend for his voice to sound so cruel, but she was ripping his heart out. It was bad enough he had to hear about her going all the way with another guy, but knowing that was enough reason to propel her into marriage made his head throb with the dismal sound of finality. Tears started down her face in response to his tone and the loss of his touch, and he suddenly felt worse than he knew was possible. "No," she whispered, and a sob bubbled up, corrupting the word. "I don’t know why I came here. It’s you, Tommy. It’s me. I tell you everything."
Unable to stop himself, he wrapped his arm around her and she folded like a house of cards. She buried her face against his thigh and sobbed, choked cries that echoed through his body as her tears soaked his flannel pajama pants. "You don’t have to marry him, Jenny," he said again, leaning down over her, his lips touching her hair. But telling Jenny Reilly something wasn’t wrong when she knew it was never changed anything.
V. Age 22
When she came in the bar, he knew it. He could feel her behind him, but he stayed facing his brothers, watching them play pool, hoping she’d just turn around and walk out. He didn’t need to hear this confession, but he knew exactly why she was there.
But this time it was different. Her confession was to him, about him, and he didn’t have the stomach for it. He was done with being Jenny Reilly’s buoy. He was done with easing that pain in her eyes. It was different when they both could give that to each other, but her offering had been gloriously conditional. And he didn’t have anything left to extend to her. If his soul was slowly going to be lost to the duty of holding his family together, he wouldn’t have anything left for Jenny when she couldn’t give anything back to him. And for the first time in his life that he could recall, he didn’t want to give anything to Jenny Reilly without receiving something in return.
“Hey,” she said, her voice almost lost in the shouts of his brothers at their game.
Glancing at her, he said her name, acknowledging her, albeit reluctantly.
“I was in here earlier looking for you.”
I bet, Tommy thought darkly. When Jimmy shouted at him about playing nine ball, he longed for the escape, but then Jenny asked meekly, “Maybe you wanna go outside and talk?”
Pinning her with his eyes he responded, “Didn’t we do that last night?” Hadn’t he sat close to her, her forehead pressed to his, and for a split second hadn’t he thought she would just let it all go, and trust him, and it would be how it should have always been? Hadn’t he already been bitterly disappointed?
She nodded a little. “I know I hurt you last night. I’m sorry.”
Hurt wasn’t what Tommy would have used to describe the feeling he’d had when she walked out of the Firecracker with Samson. Hurt didn’t even come close to spitting on what he’d felt. But he just said, “You wanted something else, I get it.” And I sure as hell don’t need you pounding it into me some more tonight.
When his brothers continued to yell in the background (mostly Jimmy) the real Jenny Reilly made an appearance. “Shut the hell up, Jimmy! We’re trying to have a conversation here!”
Jimmy made a smart-ass remark, while Tommy just stared at Jenny. She didn’t say anything to carry on this ‘conversation’ they were having, and finally Tommy prodded her because he couldn’t help himself. Call it force of habit, it nothing else. “What?” he snapped.
“What I did to you last night was mean…and stupid,” she finally said.
Then, he knew. This wasn’t just a confession of why she’d walked out with Samson. This was a confession about what had happened afterwards. And the girl who’d gotten married because she committed a sin suddenly didn’t seem to be in front of him any longer. Only she was. She could say a million things here to set it right, but just like every time before, Jenny had to tell the truth. She was just that good, and infuriating. “Did you sleep with him?” he asked. Two days after you slept with me?! is what he wanted to demand from her, but he just hoped, somewhere inside him that she wasn’t about to tell him the truth.
Her eyes were wide, her confession face right before him, and he couldn’t have run from it if he tried. She gave him a slight nod and said, “Yeah.”
Smirking under the all-encompassing, damning fire of it all, he replied, “You coulda lied to me.” He’d spared her his sins of the past week, but she couldn’t return the favor.
No, I couldn’t, her eyes told him. And he knew that. He knew it. But he wished, in so many ways, on so many levels, that he didn’t.
“Tommy,” she said his name pleadingly, a breathy sound that only made him angry. For a moment her voice sounded as it had that night, the other night she didn’t lie to him, when he really could have appreciated a lie. A lie of No, Tommy, I don’t want you. Go home. That lie would have saved him all this…hope, every time he saw her. All the memories of her body, of her hands, of the crying, gasping sound of his name on her lips when he made her come. “I don’t want to be the person that I was last night.” Her words tumbled out, almost on top of each other. “I need a fresh start. I need to not be married. I need to not be with you; I need to not be with another guy in order to get at you-“
“Jenny!” Did she really think that she got to do this, now? Did she really think that little Tommy Donnelly would make love to her all night long and two days later be willing to sit quietly while she told him everything that was wrong about it? “I don’t wanna hear it. Whatever you gotta do, you should just do it. Okay?” Turning away from her, first his body and then his eyes, though they lingered, like the way kids have to rubberneck to see a car wreck. You shouldn’t look, and you’re afraid of what you might see, but you still gotta look. That was Tommy Donnelly looking away from Jenny Reilly right then.
In a wounded voice, Jenny said, “Guess I’ll go then.”
And Tommy couldn’t say anything else but “Good.” He wouldn’t look at her again and he rubbed his palms against each other to keep from reaching for her. To keep from putting his hand on her arm and telling her she could say anything she needed to, to him. She couldn’t anymore, and he couldn’t. They couldn’t. It was done.
Confessions were a thing of their past. Because their past had been together, but their future was not.