Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Scarlett stopped on the landing between the second and third floors, breathing hard. Jaime Croft in her lobby. Freaking Jaime freaking Croft in her freaking lobby. She hadn’t been expecting that when she’d gone for a walk, hoping to enjoy the autumn sunshine and find a double espresso and a bagel. Not her ex—and definitely not her ex wanting to option her book.
Violet, her agent, hadn’t mentioned Jaime had offered for Queen’s Kiss , but why would she? Scarlett had been pretty darn clear that she wasn’t interested in seeing her life dramatized like an episode of I Survived a Crime . One time through the real version had been enough, thank you very much.
You free? Scarlett texted Violet.
Violet might’ve followed Scarlett’s instructions, but Scarlett was going to need every detail.
She hadn’t written Queen’s Kiss to crow about her success ... or at least not only to crow. It had mostly been a primal scream about everything she hated and loved about chess. About the things she’d gotten right and the things she’d gotten really, really wrong.
Critics—the dingbats—had praised the book for being one big middle finger to the establishment, but they’d missed all the places where she’d talked about her own doubts and criticized herself. At best, it was a pair of coy middle fingers, to the establishment and to herself.
The thing no one had understood about Scarlett was, for all that she would call you out at your own funeral and wear a bright-red dress while doing it, she didn’t leave herself out of her tirades.
Well, Jaime had understood that. Scarlett had tried to hide her feelings from him, like she did with everyone else. But despite her best efforts, Scarlett had always had the sense he had seen her down to her bones. It had made her feel like a trapped wolf—snarling to hide her fear.
But his hold on her had also been an anchor. When they’d met, she could’ve broken bad. Whatever the odds that she would become a chess grand master and an international celebrity, it had been much more likely that she would’ve ended up on a reality show about wayward teens. Those had been the glory days of 16 and Pregnant , after all. Getting tangled up with Jaime had been the escape pod from the life she might have led.
Her phone rang in her hand. Scarlett suspected Violet was never more than twenty-four inches away from a device. She was basically part robot.
“What’s up?” Violet said when Scarlett answered.
“Quick question: Did you turn down an offer for Queen’s Kiss from Jaime Croft?”
“I’d have to check, but if he asked, I would’ve declined. You were pretty clear. You said something like ‘Not even over my dead body.’”
Yeah, that sounded familiar. If anything, Violet was downplaying Scarlett’s forcefulness.
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh, Jaime and I grew up together.”
Which didn’t come close to capturing the problem here. Scarlett ought to let this go, the way she’d done so much of the past. Nothing good could come from picking at this particular scab.
But since Jaime would never know she’d asked Violet to see his email, the only feelings she was risking were her own. And she tended not to be very kind where those were concerned.
“Want me to search my archive?”
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m ... curious.” And stupid. Mostly stupid.
“Give me a minute.”
From the moment Scarlett had waltzed into Tokyo a few weeks after her high school graduation and won a match against the runner-up from the previous world championship match, the bozos at the Panel de Ajedrez International—everyone called chess’s governing body PAWN, even though the acronym didn’t quite work—had cast her in the role of the brilliant drama queen who didn’t give a fig for anyone’s feelings. They all said she was fearless and confident. This could be a compliment. Usually it was a curse.
Sometimes, Scarlett wished she were beautiful and terrible rather than a redneck who faked her way through self-doubts every day of her life.
But Jaime had always seemed to see more of the truth than anyone else, hadn’t he? From that first moment she’d walked into their English class and had almost swallowed her own tongue when they’d locked eyes, it felt as if he’d seen her .
Teen movies had prepared Scarlett for those royals of American high schools, the kids who’d come into their bodies and their good looks while the rest of their classmates were still gawky or short or shy. The ones with their parents’ platinum cards, who had the right cars and the right clothes and the right ambitions.
But of all of them, Jaime Croft had come into himself the most. Like, whoa .
The first time Scarlett saw him, Jaime had been sitting in the front row, those long, long legs of his sprawled out in front of him. Scarlett had had to step over his foot to present her new-student schedule to the teacher, and when she’d shot him a dirty look over her shoulder—just to let him know that she was prepared to hate him on principle—something had passed between them.
Clean and white hot as lightning. Smelling of ozone. Making the hairs on her arms stand straight up. Even now, Scarlett could still feel the shock of it.
She didn’t believe in love at first sight. Who the heck could? But she couldn’t deny the burning chemistry she felt between them.
So she’d done what anyone would’ve done—avoided him and told everyone that she didn’t like athletes or rich kids, and she especially didn’t like Jaime Croft.
But then they’d been paired to peer-review each other’s “My Plans for the Future” essays, and she’d stupidly blurted out her dreams to him. Jaime was the prince from a fairy tale, the one who had never heard no or that his family couldn’t afford it. What was the harm in saying I want to be the chess world champion to a prince?
It was like wishing the sandcastle you’d built at the beach wouldn’t crumble—harmless and hopeless at the same time.
Except Jaime had told her that she would do it. He’d said it instantly. Confidently. Without hesitation or doubt. Then he’d asked when her next meet was, and Scarlett had thrown out that she’d been invited to the junior national championship game. She’d been trying to brag (who wouldn’t?), except he’d asked where it was.
Jaime had been interested . The bastard.
Scarlett had explained that she was going to have to turn down the invite because the school didn’t have a team. And of course her mother, who was more of a mother in name only, couldn’t cover the cost.
That sucks, Jaime had said.
The next day, he told her he’d mentioned the situation to one of the football team’s boosters, some golf buddy of his dad’s. That guy was happy to make a donation to the school for a chess team as long as Scarlett competed on it.
This school could use a national champion, he’d said, as if it were that easy—and for someone who was rich, she guessed it must be.
But what the hell did she care, if the offer came with a bus ticket and a hotel room?
The entire thing had been more intoxicating than the whiskey Jaime and Scarlett had nicked from his parents later on. Across time and space and all the freaking water that had flowed under the bridge in the last decade and a half, Jaime’s confidence in Scarlett still made her head spin.
She’d made a wish, and Jaime had made it come true. How the hell was she supposed to resist him after that?
So she’d clean forgotten to be jaded. To know her place in the world. To take care of all the soft parts of herself, extra-especially her heart. For the first time in her life, Scarlett had stopped being a maverick and let someone in.
What had followed had been like a plane crash, scattering wreckage over half a dozen lives. Even now, Jaime didn’t get the full scope of it, because Scarlett hadn’t explained. If he hated her now, when all he thought she’d done was leave him behind to go get famous, imagine how much more he’d loathe her if he knew the truth.
Scarlett was reckless, but she wasn’t that reckless.
“Here it is,” Violet said. “Yup, he’d like to option it for Videon.”
“Would you have passed this proposal along if I hadn’t told you not to?” Scarlett asked.
“It’s my job to field offers, and this is a good one. Croft is legit. I loved The Devouring Sun , and this seems to have Videon’s seal of approval, so it isn’t going to get stuck in development limbo. It’s going to get made, and probably pretty quickly. That’s what I would’ve told you.” She paused. “Wait, are you considering it?”
“No. Maybe.”
If Scarlett were going to be honest with Violet, from the moment Jaime had said he wanted it, she’d been kinda, sorta ... intrigued. She’d seen The Devouring Sun too—more than once—because who wouldn’t watch their ex’s much-buzzed-about streaming docudrama?
The first time, she’d expected it to suck, and then she’d put it on a second time because it hadn’t. She’d watched it a third time because she’d been feeling homesick, and there were the Appalachian Mountains, the scent of which she’d never been able to wash off. And then maybe she’d watched it a fourth time because hearing Jaime’s voice still could set off a boil in her gut. For reasons Scarlett didn’t want to poke at, no one else had ever been able to make her simmer like that.
She’d drawn the line at watching it five times, though. That would’ve been too far.
Of course she’d watched the Emmys, though. Scarlett didn’t know crap about Hollywood, but everyone including her enjoyed judging the clothes. That was just human nature, and Scarlett’s nature was even more human than most people’s.
When Jaime had lost, she’d been crushed for him. But everyone thought he should’ve won, and that was almost as good, maybe even better, because he’d been brimming with artistic credibility. Obviously Videon had believed in him enough to let him pursue the next project he wanted, and it just so happened to be her book.
So for all the crap that had happened to him and his family, Jaime Croft hadn’t been devastated. He’d stayed in Musgrove, sure, but he’d helped out his family and gone to school and become a director anyhow. Then he’d competed for some awards, and he’d kept his hair.
That he’d succeeded despite everything made sense. Under Jaime’s golden-boy exterior, he had a good soul. That was why she hadn’t been able to resist him, in the end. Why he was the poisoned apple that she’d just had to wolf down.
If she were going to give anyone the rights to Queen’s Kiss , she’d give them to Jaime. He’d do right by her. He was the only person who would.
She still wasn’t going to let him have it, though.
“I like the sound of maybe .” Violet had always thought Scarlett’s position on this was daffy.
“It’s closer to a warm no,” Scarlett warned.
But Violet could smell blood in the water. “You want me to send this proposal to you?”
Scarlett ought to decline. Stop this right here. But before the good sense of that could make it through her brain, she said, “Sure, what’s the harm in taking a look?”
“No harm at all.” A few keys clicked over the line. “Okay, sent.”
“I’ll call you back.” Just to close the loop on this, to assure Violet that Scarlett had returned to her senses. She’d write Jaime a note, thanking him for coming to New York but explaining that she couldn’t possibly agree to the adaptation.
Scarlett started up the stairs, feeling better, feeling balanced. Now that she and Jaime had seen each other, if it ever happened again—at a party in Hollywood or at South by Southwest or any of the other places she’d worried she might stumble into him—she didn’t have to be nervous.
Hey, remember me? I left my virginity in your bed and broke your heart. That was bananas . So how have things been?
They could just skip that part now and stuff those feelings under the bed, only taking them out for ten minutes of booze-fueled what-ifs on New Year’s Eve, like normal people. Thank God.
And now that the initial meeting was out of the way, Scarlett didn’t have an objection to seeing him again. It might even be nice—as long as they could skip reminiscing. No good would come from that .
Scarlett unlocked the door to her apartment and tossed her purse on the nearest armchair. Imagine if she’d led Jaime up here. Imagine if she’d let herself hear his entire pitch. Imagine if she’d tried to explain why she’d left Musgrove and what had preceded that decision.
Imagine.
That would’ve been ridiculous.
Jaime looked good, though. That wasn’t ridiculous. His hair, still dark and full, was shorter now. It didn’t fall in a tousled mess over his forehead, making him look as if they’d just played hooky and ended up in the back seat of his car behind the water tower. Again.
There were deeper lines on his face too. Clearly the man still liked to spend a lot of time outside, and he didn’t have any more time for sunscreen now than he had in high school, but it was working for him. It was so unfair how society let men “weather” like that, age like fine bourbon in a cask, while screaming at women who didn’t have at least five steps to their nighttime skin care routine.
That was yet another example of the sexist double standards she faced every day as a female grand master.
It was probably rude that Scarlett hadn’t heard Jaime out. It would have been ... neighborly. And once upon a time, they’d been awfully neighborly to each other.
The memories had her temperature beginning to climb. In the round mirror behind the couch, she watched her cheeks pinken. She and Jaime had never lacked for chemistry. Everything else, sure, but not that.
Yet there wouldn’t have been any point in hearing him out. If she weren’t going to give him the rights, it would’ve been cruel to lead him on. Surely Jaime thought she had been, even though she’d tried hard not to be.
Which left her . . . where?
If she wasn’t going to tease him and she wanted to see him again, she could let him adapt the book.
It would be fun, wouldn’t it, to watch him do it? To get to say to an entirely new group of people—the ones who hadn’t yet read Queen’s Kiss —what she thought about chess. To say that it didn’t have to be stuffy and elitist, that it was actually one of the most accessible games in the world, one that anyone could play and get good at without coaches or fancy equipment or any of that nonsense. That if you were willing to do the work, even a hick and a loner like Scarlett, coming from nothing, coming from nowhere, could become a grand master. And that women ought to be able to play with the boys if they wanted to—and she wanted to.
Jaime probably had a real good plan for adapting her book too. Maybe he’d made some mood boards. She did love a good mood board. Maybe he’d gone so far as to think about casting. She’d pay a lot of money—and she could afford it now—to see who he thought might be up for playing her.
“Ha.” The thought was so amusing she actually laughed out loud.
No one would want to play her. Scarlett was living herself, and she didn’t want to, some days.
Look, she’d seen him again, and she’d done it without exploding. She’d be even better the next time she saw him. Even more in control, even more lashed down—or at least as lashed down as she ever got.
And she could set the rules. When Scarlett had first said she didn’t want to sell the option, Violet tried to convince her to reconsider. “You could insist on cowriting the script,” she’d said. “You wrote every word of that damn book on your own, and it’s a bestseller. They’re not going to deny you. And you could force them to make you a producer. That way nothing ends up on that screen that you don’t like.”
Of course, Scarlett would also demand to be on the set and to teach the cast chess—because if there was one thing she didn’t have patience for, it was bad chess scenes in movies. Because if they were doing this, they were going to do it right.
Because she wanted to do this.
Scarlett’s mouth dropped open. “Holy heck.”
It turned out that Jaime didn’t have to convince her. He just had to present himself, and she supplied the rest.
“This is stupid,” she told her reflection.
But the good sense of those words didn’t matter. Once she’d decided something, the only way out was through.
With shaking hands, she dialed Violet. “Okay, I’m in. But I have some conditions.”