My diaphragm seizes, and I clamp the armrest so hard the brass tacks indent the heel of my hand.
Scottie Kerr doesn’t walk into a room, he fills it. Even a small cinema. A mountain in a navy blue Rebels hoodie, he moves like a man who has always been too much for the world he inhabits.
Not for me. He’s not too much for me.
The doors swing shut behind him, and the dark erases everything except his silhouette against the green wash of the exit sign.
Scottie scans the rows and tracks straight to the highest tier. He knows where to find me.
Then he climbs up the slope. I spend my life studying bodies, and his is wary. Realising that I’m the disaster he is trying to survive leaves a bitter taste on my tongue.
He reaches the end of the row. His face is close enough to read, and I almost wish it weren’t. Tired shadows under his eyes. Thick stubble. But underneath all of it…tenderness. Hope, maybe.
Or maybe I’m imagining it because I want it so badly I’m inventing things.
‘Ava.’
My name in his mouth after months of silence reduces my finale to a desperate urge to simply touch his face.
I can’t look at him for long. If I really look at him I’ll start crying, and I can’t start crying because I haven’t even apologised yet and?—
Okay, calm down.
‘Hi. I got you popcorn.’ I look at the bucket the size of a pedal bin that I put on the armrest.
Scottie stands there at the end of the row. I feel the heat of his focus on me, and I still can’t meet his gaze. If he’s angry, if he’s here to tell me to stop contacting him, I don’t think I’ll make it out alive.
And I deserve it. I earned every bit of his resentment. I still hope he can forgive me.
‘Ava, what?—’
‘I’m sorry.’ It comes out too fast, and I’m talking to the popcorn bucket because I still can’t lift my chin. ‘I’m so sorry. I know I don’t have the right to ask you to come here, I know I hurt you, I know I—’ I dig my nails into the velvet. ‘Please sit. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.’
I squeeze my lids shut and wait for the inevitable thunk of the other shoe dropping. Yes, he’s turned up. But what if it’s not why I hoped?
Oh God.
This is it. This is where he tells me no. Where he says I had my chance and I blew it. And I’ll have to watch him leave and know that I did this, I ruined this, I?—
He squeezes himself into the narrow space beside me, and the relief that jolts through my body is overwhelming.
‘Did you book the entire place?’ he asks.
One elbow bumps the cupholder, and his knees jam into the seat back in front. He brushes my arm through the hoodie, and the contact registers from wrist to neck, injecting bubbles straight into my bloodstream.
‘I did.’
‘Why?’
This is where it started and maybe… Maybe it’s where we can start again.
‘Because each time we were here, you didn’t ask questions. You just let me be. And that…was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. And I owe you an explanation. Plus an apology. And I thought?—’
‘That’s a lot of popcorn, Ava.’
‘I wanted to repay the favour.’
He takes a fistful and eats it, watching me while he chews, and I can’t tell whether he’s deciding to stay or working out how to leave without making it worse.
