Then wondered why her laugh was still so small.
Then
She intended to go after him to give him a piece of her mind. She wasn’t a freshman anymore, just finding her feet and full of uncertainty about her place at Nordbrook. She was a strong and confident woman, who had gotten anAin the very class he spent all his time rolling his eyes at her in.
Plus she had friends.
An almost boyfriend.
He didn’t have anything at all. Just his favorite seat in the cafeteria, far away from everyone else. His crappy austere meals, his cross looks, his constant complaining about her stories and her cute comments and her cackling laugh. So maybe now she could actually just tell him,No, I’m not putting up with this anymore.
But when she got to the stairwell he’d disappeared into, just past their usual battleground of Professor Dunderson’s classroom, she had to stop at the bottom step. Frozen, in that dim, cloistered little space, one hand on the banister, still ready to go up. Because she could hear him talking. That was his voice, from somewhere up there, beyond the twist the stairs took.
She’d heard it snapping at her often enough to know it.
Though it did seem different now. Less sardonic, softer—and definitely more halting than he usually was with her.You said you would tell me if she was doing okay, she heard him say, and almost just ran right back out of that little space. You weren’t supposed to find out that your mortal enemy had problems. Or felt sad about those problems. Or cared about someone enough to need that sort of information.
They were meant to stay two-dimensional.
A villain in your story.
Only now she couldn’t help thinking about who thisshewas. A woman he had loved, maybe? It sounded like it. But she knew there were other possibilities, many possibilities, and she couldn’t help straining, for a second, to unearth what they were. His mom, a secret daughter, a mysterious fourth thing she couldn’t even imagine.
And all of them slotting neatly intowhyhe had taken so long to try for a degree in creative writing. Why, when he was so good at it—god, even she could admit he was good at it. His work was often dry, true. All the messy edges sanded down. But there was something about it, something she could almost hear in his voice right now.I know she’s not upset withmeexactly, but— he started to say, then seemed to cut himself off. As if, for a moment, actual emotion had overwhelmed him.
But then just as suddenly it switched.
Aw, go to hell, he said, as the beep of a call being ended rang out.I don’t give a shit.And now there was the sound of his heavy boots rattling back down the stairs and fuck fuck fuck, she should never have eavesdropped, should neverhave stayed. She ran through the double doors down the hall, heart hammering at the thought of him discovering her.
And by the time she got to the cafeteria, where her sort-of friend group was waiting, where her almost boyfriend was waiting, she had convinced her heart. He hadn’t meant that sadness and emotion at all. He was Miller, just Miller—her mortal enemy, and not a single thing more.
Seven
He took a while to get into whatever his rules were. Probably because he had thought her laugh meant she wasn’t seriously interested in hearing. Or maybe just because he actually did need a bathroom stop. He abruptly took the off-ramp to some gaggle of restaurants and gas stations, somewhere just past a town called Benford. Parked on the forecourt of a place that advertised free hot dogs with every fifty-dollar purchase of gas.
It had a giant bottle of mustard attached to the roof.
At one point, she thought, it must have turned in circles. But now it was slightly flaccid and stained and all it seemed to do was creak back and forth. The kind of thing he hated, she knew. She even remembered a line from one of his books, his fourth one out of the eight total he’d ever written, while gazing at it out of her window.The abandoned gods of gaudy consumerism surrounded her on all sides.
Though it was the heroine of that story she wound up thinking about, as he strode across the tarmac to the entrance. Clara Bendrick, bright and brilliant as a star amidst the tawdry drabness of the grocery store sheworked at. Caught reading round the back next to the bins by a guy up to no good.
Though of course he hadn’t really been up to no good.
The narrative had just insisted on it, so strongly she had never really known if Miller truly thought Jake Tulliver was rotten. In fact, she had never known if he thought all his heroes were rotten and irredeemable, or not. He’d always judged them so harshly on the page that readers had sometimes wondered if they really did deserve the heroine—a remarkable feat, really, given how sympathetic people usually were to the sexy dude love interest in a romance novel.
But it was also probably part of the reason for the slowly declining belief in his happy endings.
Sometimes she shouldn’t love him, she thought she remembered reading.She shouldn’t, because he cannot change. Then she suddenly felt the deepest urge to double-check it had really been that way. She opened the app on her iPad and flicked to the book, and somehow found it bookmarked on something even worse.
Their eyes locked through the pool of light behind the diner, and held. He held her gaze, despite knowing how unworthy he was of it. She was as soft and fragile looking as a wisp of cotton on the breeze, and he knew how easily he could crush such a thing. Those large and luminous eyes, that startled look in them.
She had looked the same that day in the store, but at least then she’d had the armor of her uniform, the counter in front of her. The name badge he hadn’t looked at, for fear of knowing her name and liking it alittle too much. Now she was in a simple dress, tennis shoes. Too much sweetly rounded leg visible beneath the hem.
He turned his face away the moment he wanted to look.
He was good at that. Resisting temptation. He had to be, because what good could it ever come to? He would never be good for anyone, let alone someone like her. Standing there reading her little book, probably understanding it better than he ever would. Probably understanding a lot of things that he never could.
He thought in grays and blacks and whites.
