“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
My hand sweeps out. “Look at them! The oldest multi-organ species on earth. Talk about the survival skills. They survived all those extinctions! We should try to be more like the jellyfish.”
“You already did—” he starts, turning to face me, and when he does, our knees touch again. “You said, uh, at the gala ... that you were just like the dinosaurs. That you suffered a mass extinction event. But, uh, I think ... you were already like them.”He waves a hand towards the tank, but his eyes never leave mine. “You survived, Ren. Whether you think you did or not.” His eyes drop to my chest, but they linger right above my heart before he looks back up at me, eyes all clouded with tears. “And you helped me survive too.”
“No,” I murmur, cupping his cheek. He does lean in this time, almost instantly. “You did that, Miller. I offered to help. But no one can make you try again. No one can make you do anything.”
“Helps when someone wakes you up and performs CPR so you can start living again,” he says on a deep exhale.
My heart does this thing in my chest, maybe like he was the one doing CPR, but something pokes at me again, and I let go of his face, spinning back to the tank. “So, if we’re both jellyfish, which one am I?”
He doesn’t hesitate, pointing one out. “The pretty one. With the bright pink tentacles.”
I smile. “Which one are you?”
He shrugs, but a grin bites at his cheek. “I don’t know, probably that ugly, upside-down one over in the corner.”
I don’t try to muffle the sound of my laughter this time.
It doesn’t even occur to me, actually.
Not once.
Miller
“Well,” Ren starts, turning on her heel. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
“It’s not?” I ask, a little skeptical, if I’m being honest.
“I mean—don’t get me wrong.” She tips forward, folding her arms across her chest. “It is still a sprawling monstrosity, and it should definitely belong to some Bay Street douchebag—but it’s not so bad.”
She smiles at me from across my living room, in front of the sprawling windows and the setting sun illuminating my multi-million-dollar view of the Toronto skyline.
If I believed in fate or that sort of thing, I might think twenty-three-year-old me bought this place for twenty-seven-year-old me. So he could stand here right now, four years down the line, looking at her while the sunset over the lake paints her colours he’s never seen before.
Kind of wish he’d done me a favour, though, and warned me that the smartest woman he’d ever meet would end up being the most beautiful and she’d end up tapping softly on his shoulderswith those hands so he could wake up and be something other than a shell. He’d get to watch her grow back into herself, but he’d never, not in a million years, be someone she’d look at as anything more than a friend.
He didn’t though, and I’m stuck here. Stupid me and brilliant, beautiful her.
I run a hand along the back of my neck and offer her a shrug. “Instead, it belongs to me—some dumb douchebag jock.”
She frowns, bottom lip bowing into something that’s almost a pout. “You’re not dumb, and you’re certainly not a douchebag. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything to counteract the statement about your athletic prowess. Just your bad luck, I guess,” she teases, scrunching her nose, before she pads across the floor to flop down on the couch. Her head rests against the back, and she looks up at me, upside down. “If you lived here, where did Matt live?”
Still beautiful, even backwards.
Fuck my life.
“Uh—” I tear my eyes away, focusing on the red hue inching across the floor. “Nice, respectable house tucked away with a yard. It’s where we’d play catch.”
“Oh. Do you still ...” she trails off, and when I chance another glance at her, her lips move back and forth, thoughtful. “Who owns the house now?”
“Me.” I swallow, and even though he’s in this nice open space in my chest now, the shards of glass, left over from a picture of a life he could have had with a partner and children and people to leave shit to other than me, carve up the back of my throat. “He didn’t—he wasn’t, like, married or anything. And he, uh, had a will because he was way better at that stuff than me ... He left everything to me and his parents.”
Her cheeks go soft. “And the house is yours? A place where you two had so many good memories? I think that’s nice.”
