He doesn’t make any moves to leave. “Well, do you? Think they have a library this big?”
Pressing my fingers to the bridge of my nose, I try to breathe in and out, and not to let him bait me. I try not to feel inferior. I try to think of people who think I’m anything but. A few weeks ago, it would have been just my best friend popping up—bright smile, and even brighter eyes hidden behind her constantly falling glasses, and the way her umber cheeks turn pink when she gets excited about news in the invertebrate world. But now, there’s someone else there too. With navy eyes and unruly hair and a grin that makes you feel like you’d be able to climb a mountain if you tried, and a tattooed hand that would help you every step of the way.
I look up, painting on a banal smile. “No, I don’t think the Maritime Museum has a library this big.” But when he nods, something like vindication flashing in his eyes, my smile changes. “My turn. I answered your question, now I’d like you to answer mine.”
Scott shifts, the first sign of his own discomfort.
I ask, before he can say anything else, “Why’d you do it? Why did you let me leave with nothing more than your disbelief in me and a gesture showing me the door, then parachute back into my life? Did it take you the better part of four years to realize I wasn’t coming back? You had a perfectly good job at KU—the job we’d both been dreaming of since we were eighteen. Did you just wake up one day and think, I bet she’s got more to give? Let me go take another dream?”
He doesn’t blink. He assesses, like always, before he says, “Because I miss you, Renny.”
I can’t help it—I burst out laughing, but that laughter falls into nothing when I see the straight lines of his face. “Oh—oh mygod. Scott—you’re serious.” I blink, mouth parted before I slowly shake my head. “You really think ... you miss me?”
A muscle in his jaw ticks, unamused. “I don’t think. I know.”
“Well, I don’t.” I set down my pen, interlacing my fingers to lean forward on the table—a move borrowed from my therapist. “I think youthinkyou miss me. But I don’t think you really know the first thing about what it means to miss someone for reasons that aren’t selfish.”
“And you do?” The words come out like a scoff.
My brows come together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He leans across the table, too, only inches from me now, and I do my best not to recoil and shift back in my seat. “You love to make me the villain. But if you put our relationship under a microscope, you’d see we aren’t very different. You were selfish, too, Ren. You wanted someone to love you, to choose you—” He throws out words I gave him years and years ago when things were still painted in shades of good. “And that had nothing to do with me or who I was as a person. I’d call that selfish by its very definition, too.”
“You know, I don’t entirely disagree with you—I guess there’s a first time for everything.” My smile tilts, sad, before I take a steadying breath, readying myself to explain something like you might to a child. “But one of us is trying to change our behaviour, Scott. One of us is trying very, very hard not to repeat the same mistakes.”
It’s his turn to laugh. But the edges of his laughter cut. His head tips back, exposing the lines of his neck, and everything about his face says disdain when he finally looks back at me. “And is that what you’re doing with the shortstop? Not repeating your mistakes?”
His words take one of those pieces of me he spent years carving away—the sharpest one, I think—and they slice at all those freshly grown petals. I try to snatch them back when I pullaway from the table, but my words sound choppy. “You don’t know the first thing about Miller.”
“But I do know the first thing about you.” He gives me some sort of patronizing smile. “I never said anything about him.”
“I’d rather you don’t.” The forced line of my own smile strains, and I feel some of that bravado wilt away. “He’s none of your business, and neither am I. Not anymore.”
Scott raises a singular brow with a slow shake of his head, and gives what looks like a weary shrug. “What are you going to do, Renny? Interview for the job?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
I throw my arms wide. “I don’t know, Scott. Unfortunately, as I am neither on the hiring committee nor am I clairvoyant, I can’t tell you what comes next.”
“I can.” He says it simply.
“What’s that?”
He leans forward in his seat, and it’s his turn to explain something to me with the patience of a parent to a child. “They’ll make you an offer, you’ll waffle back and forth about whether you should take it because you want a different title but you won’t go back to school to get it, and eventually, you’ll turn the job down because you can’t be alone.”
I think he took pruning shears to me that time.
He doesn’t just stop at all the new growth.
He cuts right through my ribs.
But there’s something written on the inside of me. Words given to me by someone who thinks I have a lot of reasons to be exactly who I am.
You survived, Ren. Whether you think you did or not.
“I’ve been alone for four years, Scott.” I sniff, dragging a knuckle along my lash line. It’s one thing for the tears to start—how could they not? It hurts, when someone cuts through to thecentre of your very being, even if there’s something good waiting there on the inside.
