“Uh… whenever I got reminded.”
“How often is that?”
“I don’t know. A couple times a week?”
“Couple times a week,” Carver repeated, and Scott’s stomach swooped. That was far too often, he knew this. “What do you think of when you think of me?”
“Just, I don’t know, remembering you, wondering how you’re doing.” Scott was quiet. “I saw you at the fifteen-year reunion.”
“You did?” Carver said, sounding surprised. “I didn’t know you went.”
“Letty dragged me. I was only there for like half an hour, I left with Bryce and Eli and those guys, and we posted up at a bar down the street for the rest of the night. But I saw you, I think with Lillian, and I thought you looked a little… I don’t know. I started wondering if you were doing alright.”
“I barely remember being there,” Carver said, shaking his head.
“I was surprised you came.”
“You should have said hi.”
“Would you have wanted me to?”
Carver smiled. “Probably not, no.”
Scott studied him. “How often did you think aboutme?”
Carver began to laugh, sounding genuinely amused, which was not the reaction Scott either expected or wanted. “I’ve tried not to. Christ. I spent eighteen years just forcing myself not to think about you.”
“Why? Even if you never saw me again, wasn’t it a nice memory?”
“Because I wanted to see you again,” Carver said, like he was dumb. “Becauseit was a nice memory.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
They were quiet. Carver was starting to look cold, so Scott gathered up the comforter where it had been tossed and made up the mattress. They both bedded down, cuddling into each other, laying their heads side-by-side on the single pillow. Carver reached up to play with Scott’s hair, twirling it in his fingers.
“Do you know what you’re gonna do?” Scott said carefully. “About…”
“My job and my wife?” Carver supplied. “No. Not yet.”
“Okay.”
“I do want to leave her. I do want to leave my job, too, but I don’t know where I’d go — oh, fuck!” He slapped the meat of his palms to his eyes as if they’d just been gouged out. “Shit. Fuck.”
“What?” Scott said, alarmed.
“Nothing. Sorry. Nothing. I just thought about my carry.”
“Who’s Carrie?”
“My carried interest. Fuck! Don’t worry about it.”
“Carver,what?”
“It’s just money, it doesn’t really matter, but if I leave now I’m going to forfeit millions of dollars.”
Scott sympathetically sucked in air through his teeth. “Millions?”
“Yep,” Carver said, his hands still pressed to his eyes. “Even if I handle this as well as I can, I’m still going to leave something like…” He trailed off for a moment as if doing mental math. “Fourteen million dollars on the table.”
