“Ask them if they want to trade knee and elbow joints with you when they’re thirty-five,” she says wryly. “Trust me.” She points down at her legs. “Thirty-two-year-old knees aren’t for the faint of heart.”
“I like your knees,” I blurt.
She takes a soft inhale. “My knees?”
“Yeah—” I pinch the bridge of my nose to hide my wince. “They’re nice.”
Her bottom lip dips, and the corners of her eyes crease, all apprehensive, but she whispers a soft “Thank you” before she makes a show of looking around, tipping forward on her heels. “I heard a rumour.”
“Oh yeah?” The corner of my mouth lifts in relief. I don’t know how I’m going to survive being here with her when I’m saying dumb shit like “I like your knees.” Maybe I should wear a sign that says: I have a crush on Ren Jacobs and she’s way out of my league. I swallow. “What’s that?”
She makes a come-here motion with her hand, and against my better judgement, I angle my head down, closer to her and just a breath away. There’s a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and I start to count them, but she interrupts with a conspiratorial whisper. “Imani told me professional baseball players are some of the highest paid athletes.”
I shake my head and lose count of the freckles. “Nah. Basketball and professional soccer have us beat.”
“She’ll be sorely disappointed to hear she didn’t invest her energy and statistical mind in the highest paid athletes, then.” She rocks back on her heels, and her eyes sweep over everything again, but I notice she stares a bit longer out the window, down towards the dock and the waiting boat. Her voice drops, gentle, when she asks, “What did you two do ... when you came here together?”
“We didn’t get to spend a lot of time here together in the summer, actually. Maybe two days if we were lucky.” I swallow—we were, lucky. To have each other. Or maybe it was just me who was the lucky one, to have a best friend and brother and the best person on the planet for twenty-seven whole years. I curve the brim of my hat under my palms. “Matty came up more than me. Pitchers typically get more rest. So, uh, nothing?”
“Nothing?” she asks, teasing.
“Yeah, sorry, I didn’t—think this through.” My cheeks burn, and I lift a hand uselessly. “There’s food and we could go into town. You can swim off the dock, we could take the boat out and—”
But she looks at me, eyes bright and alive, cheeks pillowed and soft, full lips moving together when she says, “I’d love to do nothing with you.”
Doing nothing with her turns out to be the best thing I’ve ever done.
It’s showing her around the rest of the cottage while she tells me what she’s going to take if I default on my child support to Victor.
It’s dying inside when she steps out of the guest room in this white bathing suit. The top tied around her neck, messing up her hair I’d love to run my fingers through. The bottom knotted right where her waist dips into the swell of her hips that I’d give anything to grab onto and never let go of.
It’s her, leaning across the kitchen island, plucking an apple from a fruit bowl the housekeeper left out. The way she tries to toss it in the air but ends up dropping it, her head tipped back in laughter while her hair tumbles down her back. How her fingers brush mine when I pick it up and hand it to her.
It’s telling her you can sometimes see turtles off the edge of the dock, and when she leans down to look, already talking about extinct species in the fossil record from over 230 millionyears ago, it’s me, sprinting across the wood, wrapping my arms around her waist, and sending us both careening into the cold water.
It’s the way she sputters, eyes wide and mouth parted, until she bursts out laughing again, splashing me in the face. The way we fight like kids until she climbs on top of my shoulders and says she’s the winner because I cheated when I knocked her into the water without warning.
It’s her lips, poised at the precipice of a perspiring bottle of beer while she sits, propped up on her elbows, and we watch ducks swim across the lake.
It’s the lazy feeling of the sun dropping lower and lower in the sky, dipping the world into dusk, but we’re still out there, stretched out along the dock, talking about anything and everything and nothing all at once.
And somehow, all that nothing rips out a page in the history book of me and Matty—the one from the chapter where it all ended—and she writes over it in messy scrawl,Ren Jacobs was here, and it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore to read it again.
Ren
It’s easier than I thought it would be.
To have this mass-extinction-sized crush on him, to wear around the feeling of the corner of his mouth on mine, and to spend all day laughing and playing and just being ... me with him.
I think, for the first time in a very long time, I’m just me with myself, too.
No more shards at my feet poking me. No more curving inwards of my shoulders because I’m too afraid to stand up straight. No more hurting my neck because I’m straining to look up at someone on this pedestal I crafted for them.
Just me and someone who, even though he stands almost a foot taller than me, seems like he’s always looking at me from eye level anyway.
It’s the best day, really.
I forget about the job I lost and the one I might have that I’m not even sure about. I forget that Miller asked for a trade because the death of his favourite person haunted himso horribly, he didn’t think there was anything worth sticking around for the way no one stuck around for him. I forget that the clock ticks down and somehow, I’m supposed to pretend he’s just this person who helped me with this arbitrary list.
