It was Arthur who turned around to see her. Slowly, hedropped the sponge back in his bucket and dried his hands on the old jeans he was wearing. He jumped down from the ladder and lifted a hand in an awkward greeting before saying, “Hi.”
She wanted to run to him. She wanted to say sorry, a thousand times, and then kiss him until he was sick of her. Instead, Maggie couldn’t stop the words that spilled out of her. “You can’t leave,” she sputtered.
He crossed his arms and leaned against one of the cleaner tables. “Why not?”
“You need a job! You need a job here, at Hawthorn,” she rattled on. “You can’t leave Rory and Simon now. And I can’t be—I won’t be—responsible for breaking up your family because you need to find a university job somewhere else.” She was rambling and pacing as he stood watching her with frustrating amusement. “Do you know how rare it is to find an academic job near the place you want to live? It’s impossible! Why would you throw that away?”
“I think you know, Maggie,” he said.
He was putting her in an impossible position—she didn’t want him to have to choose between her and his job. She had left him so that he never had to make this decision at all, and he’d quit anyway. That wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she’d asked for. If he had justtalkedto her before doing this absurd thing, he’d know that.
There was a small, careful smile on his face. The one that seemed to say he knew her better than she knew herself. He took a step toward her, but Maggie stepped back and her face heated. “Did you think this would make me change my mind?”
“No,” he answered simply.
“Is this supposed to make me fall for you? Some kind of grand gesture?”
“I think,” he began, “you’ve already fallen.”
Maggie screwed up her face and was ready to argue when Arthur went on. “It’s okay if you’re not ready to admit it. It’s okay if you still need space. I’m not expecting anything.” His voice was so soft, so tentative, as he went on. “But I’d be an absolute fool to let something stupid like a job stand in the way of whatever this is between us.”
“You’re throwing this away because I might like you?”
“Would you say youlikelike me?” he asked, that grin quirking up again. She never should have told him about that conversation.
“Arthur,” she groaned, throwing up her hands.
“Maggie,” he replied gently. “I’m Arthur Taliesin. I can get a job wherever I want, doing whatever I want.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said under her breath, rolling her eyes. Above and below, he was so conceited when he wanted to be. His smile widened as she kept going, punctuating each argument with a jab of her finger into her palm. “You love this job. I’ve seen you in your classroom, the way you light up around your students. You love teaching here. What would possess you to give that up?”
Arthur looked at her thoughtfully. “I didn’t know you noticed,” he said quietly.
Somehow this made her even angrier. At him. At herself. She wasn’t sure which. “Of course I noticed! You think I don’t see you the same way you see me?”
His fingers flexed, and he looked like he wanted to take another step forward, but he hesitated. “You’re right, I do love teaching. But it doesn’t matter where I do it.”
Had he really quit his job for her? It was ridiculous. Maggie was used to chasing certainties. She made decisions after mapping every possible outcome and feeling satisfied with all of them. But Arthur had just leaped off the building without so much as a soft place to land.
“What if this doesn’t work out?” she asked frantically. “What if you give this up for me and I’m not who you think I am? What if we fight all the time and you can’t stand me?”
“Then it doesn’t work out. Maggie, I’m not giving up a lifelong dream. It’s a job.” He paused and then frowned before asking, “Maggie, what happened in the pall?”
Did he remember? She tried to stall. “What do you mean?”
“I was ready to let you go,” he admitted, stepping just a little bit closer to Maggie. “I was. But then I started to make sense of everything that happened. It became clearer which memories belonged to the unsettled dead and which ones were mine.” He watched her intently as she bit her lip, but then he closed his eyes and his voice sounded so broken when he asked, “Were you just telling me what I wanted to hear?”
Gods below, how could she have ever made him feel that way? She swallowed, her eyes welling up with tears, and she shook her head. “No,” she rasped. “No, I wasn’t, but…”
Maggie looked away from the hope in his expression, hope she knew was mirrored in her own chest, which was holding a heart that beat too much and too fast. Arthur took another stepforward, and, this time, Maggie didn’t back up. Tentatively, he closed the gap even more, the distance between them narrowing until he could reach out and touch her.
Just as she was about to close that small distance left between them, she came back to her senses. She backed up again and said sharply, “You can’t do things like this without talking to me about it. Quitting your job, Arthur?”
For the first time, something like anger flashed across his expression. His words were only laced in bitterness, but it was enough to knock the breath out of her. “Do friends who fuck need to run career decisions by each other?” She winced as he threw her own words back at her. Had she really said those awful things to him?
“I didn’t—”
“Tell me,” he said suddenly, all the bitterness gone and replaced with pure need. “Tell me you don’t want this.”
