“You know, I don’t think so.” She considers, and all the former lightness in her words seems like it’s eclipsed by whatever happened between them last.
“Was he—he’s not—he isn’t hurting you or—” I start.
“Scott’s not ... like that.” She frowns, tapping a finger to her bottom lip before I can say anything else. “He’s certainly not harmless, don’t get me wrong. But he’s not ... like that. The way he behaves ... it’s so much more about him and how he feels about himself than it is anyone else, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
Her teeth come down on the inside of her cheeks as she tips her head back and forth. “He came into the library the other day when I was digitizing some of the new assets.” She throws me another sideways look, whispering, “Very boring,” before she keeps talking. “He was just ... being typical Scott. Throwing his weight around and acting like a superior asshole about the job application. But I finally asked him why he decided to come back after four years. Why he felt the need to ... take again.”
“Let me guess. Some big show about how great he is and how you can only advance the collection at the museum with him there.”
She snorts a soft laugh. “Shockingly, no. Though I’m sure those thoughts are floating around somewhere in that brain. But he said it was because he ... missed me.” She stumbles over the last words, and my heart stumbles too, because there’s no fucking way. But Ren shakes her head. “The crazy thing is, I think he meant it. In his limited capacity.”
My heart stops this time. “What do you—uh, what does that mean?”
“I think he does miss me. But not for the right reasons.” She knots her fingers together. “He misses having someone to fill the purpose he thinks love is supposed to serve. For him, that was this ... selfish thing. He thought it was to make him feel better,to exist solely to prop him up. But in his case, that better turned into superiority eventually.”
I nod. I’ve never been in love, but that definition feels ... hollow. I’d like to think, if I loved someone, it’d be so much more about them and who they are than what they did for me. “What is it ... for you then?”
Ren sniffs, tossing me a wry look. “I can tell you what I thought it was. Being chosen. But I don’t think I ever really learned how to love properly, either.”
“Isn’t it, uh, supposed to be a team sport?” I ask, scrubbing my jaw.
That sounded even stupider out loud than it did in my head.
But she doesn’t seem to think so. She cocks her head, brows drawn in thought before a smile lights up her face. “You might be onto something, Miller.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her smile turns quiet. “Scott wasn’t a team player. But to be fair, neither was I. I was only playing for one team—his. And I let my own down colossally.”
“I’m team Ren.”
“Oh good, our first supporter,” she says on a laugh.
I shake my head, palming the wheel as I make the turn onto Matty’s old street. “Pretty sure you were first. When you decided to choose yourself four years ago.”
She straightens her shoulders. “Are you, Miller Colson-Burke, shortstop and competitor extraordinaire, willingly putting yourself in second place on a team?”
“If it’s your team? Yeah,” I tell her, and I let myself stare for a minute when I put the car in park. At the faint sweep of pink brushing across the pillows of her cheek. The tiny swallow working her throat, the part to her lips and the scrape of her teeth across the bottom one, and the tears that shine like stars up in her eyes.
“I think we make a good team, actually,” she whispers, blinking up at me.
I swallow. “Me too.”
Ren’s mouth curves with a smile, and she raises her brows knowingly. “It’s a good thing, then, we decided on a practice date. I hear teamwork makes practice all the more effective.”
“From, uh, experience, it does.” I flash a flat smile to hide the way the wordpracticedigs into my skin. “You wouldn’t ... date, then? For real?”
“Not until I’m sure I know how to actually be a team player.” She rolls her eyes through laughter as she shifts to undo her seat belt and put her sandals back on.
You already do, I think.
We’re a team.
The best one I’ve ever been on.
But when she sits up, shoulders straight, shining smile, and the words “Ready to see what those good hands can do, if you are” spill from her lips, my heart does a freefall into my stomach, and the only thing there to catch it is the hard ground of realization that I’m not the kind of teammate she’d be interested in.
