“Dr. Saunders.” He nods politely at Scott before turning to me, flaxen hair still neatly pushed back off his face. “Ren, could I speak to you?”
Scott pastes on some stupid, polite smile for Graham, but manages to throw me what’s probably supposed to be a withering glare before he turns on his heel, leaving me alone with our boss and the ferns.
“Having a nice evening?” Graham asks, blinking at me from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, staring a bit too intently when he takes a sip of sparkling water.
“Oh—uhm, yes. The collection looks great.” I wave a hand towards all the saurolophus fossils and their entirely inaccurate twinkling lights, smiling too wide while I wait for him to deliver some sort of admonishment about the same lack of professionalism Scott seems to think I’m exhibiting by being on a date with Miller.
He doesn’t. He gives me an absentminded nod, like his mind is already back on whatever research he left in his office. “Mm. It does. You did excellent work. I’ve just spoken to my colleague at the Maritime Museum. They were quite taken with you.”
“Oh?” I say weakly.
“Indeed. They found you to be quite charming,” he says, all surprise, like he can’t believe someone would notice or consider personality in something like an interview. “They’re going to offer you the job.”
“Oh,” I repeat, my voice falling into nothing. “Oh. Wow. Okay, uhm, thank you, Graham. I need—I need a minute.”
He doesn’t seem to notice that I’m not overjoyed, I’m not thankful at all. Everything about my smile is entirely flat when I pick up the silk skirt of my dress and start towards the stairs.
It’s not a moment of triumph or vindication. It’s not something that makes me want to march up to Scott and every single person that sat on that hiring committee and told me I wasn’t enough and scream “Ha! See!” in their faces.
I’m not sure what it makes me, exactly.
Confused, maybe, to be presented with the only thing I thought would make me worthy. This thing I thought was the culmination of all my dreams.
Unsure and unsteady on my feet with the brand-new roots of a person who’s trying to learn and unlearn things.
But I do find my way towards the extinction theories exhibit, staring at the triceratops fossil in the display where a man with a tattooed hand and a broken heart and navy eyes thought I was so very, very enough and showed me there are all kinds of worthy dreams to have.
I start to have other dreams while I blink at the dinosaur, frozen in time forever. Dreams about going to sleep beside Miller and waking up beside Miller and learning to love him properly and learning the difference between can’t and want and goingback to school because I want to so very badly and despite it all I do love my job and—
“Seriously? Him?” Scott’s voice, unmistakable and sharp, cuts across the silence.
“What are you talking about now?” I turn from the triceratops and throw up tired hands.
“You’re actually ... with him?” He laughs, cold and cruel and awful just like him. “You’re together? You and the playboy athlete—sorry, former, maybe you’ve reformed him, Ren.” He says the last part like it’s somehow a statistical improbability—that there wouldn’t be anyone in the world who might want to change for me because he couldn’t. And he stands there, one brow arched, hair artfully styled, baleful blue eyes staring at me from behind glasses, and despite all my best efforts, I think he still has all these pieces of me, and I want them back so badly, but above anything and everything, I don’t want him to have Miller, too.
So I say this thing that feels like a horrible, leaden lie on my tongue, and I try to stand tall under someone who’s always going to be holding a carving knife to my throat. My chin tips up, and I try to keep my wobbling mouth in a straight line. “No. You are so far off base, Scott, as per usual. We aren’t. We’re not together.”
“Off base?” He snorts. “You’re using sports analogies now?”
“Off base as inmistaken.” I try to emphasize the last word. “You are mistaken.”
He gives me an amused look that’s really all lines of cruelty. “Oh? What about all those pictures online and the flirting? That kiss downstairs?”
“Yes. It was ... all for show.” I almost choke on those last words.
It wasn’t, even when it was. Not for a single second, I don’t think.
“But it wasn’t just for show, was it Renny?” He gives me a sort of patronizing smile that makes me want to dismantle the exhibit behind me and try to pick up the triceratops femur so I can throw it at him. “As much as you like to pretend otherwise, I know you. And I saw you looking at him downstairs. All moony eyed. Ready to give anything and everything up for him. Ready for someone else to choose you.”
“No. No. I chooseme.” I start to shake my head, and I feel like I’m unspooling, somehow. Like I’m scrambling to keep hold of all these pieces I worked so hard to pick up and they’re all falling out of my arms, tumbling to the ground, and shattering at my feet, so I throw the only one at Scott I think he could possibly understand—even though it’s another lie. “Graham just let me know I actually got the job at the Maritime Museum, and you know what? Thank fucking god—maybe I’ll finally be free of you because Dr. Scott Saunders and his endless fucking list of accomplishments wouldn’t deign to follow me there!”
His brows lift, eyes wide and disbelieving, like he might understand something I don’t. He turns on his heel and calls over his shoulder, words laced with pity, “We’ll see.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, and I try to stop the tears from spilling over, but they do. And they don’t stop, even when I hear another set of footsteps echoing through the empty exhibit.
“Scott—go away. What else could you possibly have to say—”
But it’s not Scott who speaks.
