Chapter 6
Chapter 6
Jaime cursed as some of the onions he was sautéing spilled over the edge of the pan, splattering across the cooktop. He was absentminded after a good first day. He and Scarlett hadn’t put a single damn word on paper that would be filmed, sure, but they’d made some major decisions.
Across the house, a door opened. Bare feet padded down the hallway, then the front door opened. Was Scarlett ... leaving?
Jaime turned the heat off and slipped out of the kitchen. In the entryway, Scarlett was collecting an order from a delivery driver.
The guy was getting an eyeful since the strap of her Barbie-pink tank top was falling off one of her shoulders, revealing a glorious expanse of cleavage and sports bra. Paired with skintight leggings it was ... quite a look. Quite a good look.
With a whoosh, Jaime released a long breath. When they’d knocked off an hour ago, he’d invited her to eat with him, but she’d only said, We’ll see .
Jaime could’ve accepted her rejection and retreated. But he leaned against the wall, crossing one leg over the other and effectively blocking her path back to her bedroom. He could at least make her feel guilty about ditching him.
Scarlett gave the driver a wave with her free hand before closing the front door, then jumped when she saw Jaime, almost dropping the white paper take-out bag in the process. “Hot damn.”
“You get enough for two?”
She rolled her eyes. “Please, you don’t want to eat with me. We’ve been together all day.”
“I wouldn’t’ve offered if I didn’t.” When Nate and Jaime were writing together, they tended to work more or less around the clock. Jaime had decided that it was his job to make sure they stayed reasonably healthy and took some breaks, and he’d made it Nate’s job to track their progress and manage the to-do list.
Jaime needed to figure out how he and Scarlett were going to divide the writing, but he had no idea why dinner couldn’t be part of the bargain.
“We don’t have to do this.”
Setting aside that he wanted to be with her, there were logistic reasons why he’d offered to cook for her. “Do you know how to work the raccoon lock on the trash can?”
“You have a raccoon lock on your trash can?”
“It’s the country.” He wasn’t going to mention the bears. That would make her bolt for sure. “Come eat in the kitchen at the very least.” Eating in her room would be like having room service—and everyone knew that sucked. “Then I can show you how the trash works.”
For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure she was going to agree. Scarlett sometimes seemed almost feral, as if she didn’t know how to be with other people. But then she swished off toward the kitchen.
One thing was certain: Scarlett never walked anyplace. Even just crossing the house was an event when she did it.
But now Jaime faced the problem of how long it had been since he’d seen her in the flesh wearing so conspicuously little. So much between them had changed, but the one thing that hadn’t, which at this point he might have to admit would never change, was how attracted he was to her.
Inside his heart, Scarlett had punched out a cookie-cutter hole that only she could fill. Everyone else he’d tried to fit there hadn’t been right. Only Scarlett could stanch that wound.
“Plates?” she asked, blissfully unaware of how he was lusting over her.
“Here. And silverware’s in that drawer.”
He turned back to the fried rice he was making, grateful that cooking gave him something to do other than feel addlepated.
“There’s some beer and wine in the fridge,” he offered over his shoulder.
“Nah, I’m still not fully rehydrated from my trip here. I never drink enough water when I’m traveling.”
Jaime dumped a bowl of brown rice into the pan where the veggies had been cooking. “How do you feel about our first day?”
“Well, we didn’t actually write anything.”
He snorted. “You expected us to?”
“At the very least, I thought we’d litter the floor with crumpled-up pieces of paper.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies. You regretting signing up for this?”
That made her roll her eyes. “I might be nervous, Jaime Croft, but I’m not having doubts.”
She popped open her take-out container. Of course it was a pulled-pork sandwich from County Grill. That had always been her favorite place in town. Jaime should’ve thought to suggest it for dinner for both of them last night. Maybe then he could’ve established a routine where they ate together.
He dumped the sauce into the pan, then transferred a good portion of the fried rice to a bowl and topped it with cilantro and green onions.
Scarlett applauded. “You can cook.”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“Back when I knew you, you couldn’t boil water.”
“That was seventeen years ago.” Once Mom had gotten a job and he’d had to start taking care of Ev on the days when Mom had the late shift, he’d had to learn life skills real quick.
“I’m impressed.”
Jaime grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat at the table with his dinner. “You mean that a privileged prick like me isn’t a total idiot?”
“I never thought you were an idiot.”
That was an answer and a half.
“If your opinion of me was so low, why did you date me?” He threw it out like a lure, half hoping she’d bite and half hoping she’d swim past it.
She surprised the stuffing out of him when she swallowed it whole. “I didn’t date you.”
“I’m pretty sure the stuff we got up to is what you do with the people you’re dating.”
“Or the people you’re fucking.”
He almost choked on his fried rice. She was attempting to rile him. It worked.
After a long sip from his beer, he had himself put back together. “The two sometimes go together.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But as long as we’re on the subject—”
“We aren’t.”
“You could’ve fooled me.” He had her here, and they both knew it. “So let’s clear the air.”
“I thought we said no talking about the past.”
She had said that—but she’d also started them down this path. He was getting the distinct impression that Ms. Arbuthnot didn’t have a clear sense of what she wanted here, which suited Jaime fine. He still hadn’t gotten his head on straight since she’d surprised him in the lobby of her building and ripped the rug clean out from underneath him.
“But we haven’t really written anything yet. Come on, Scarlett, are you chicken?”
She blinked slowly. Just like when she’d emerged from her car—messy and beautiful—she wasn’t wearing a lick of makeup. Her mouth looked so naked like this, without that coat of bright-red armor. She looked so young without it, so like the girl he’d worshipped.
“What do you want to know?” she asked softly.
“Was there any way we could’ve worked out?”
He wanted to know what she thought about that—and he really, really did not want to know what she thought about that. Because if the answer was yes, if Scarlett said that if he’d gone with her to Tokyo, everything could’ve been different ... well, that was the kind of regret that might fester and give him sepsis.
Even if Jaime knew there were no guarantees in life. Even if there was no way to be sure what might have happened in some multiverse world where he’d been a totally different person who could’ve abandoned his family in their greatest hour of fucking need. Even with all that, he would have a lot of trouble moving on if she thought there had been as much as a sliver of a chance.
But then she gave the answer that he wanted even less than yes.
“Nah. We were doomed from the start.” Scarlett shook her pretty head. “From that very first moment in English, we were gasoline and a match. We should’ve stayed away from each other.”
Wanting to wash down the arguments that were rising in his throat, Jaime drained his beer and grunted. He sounded petulant and stubborn and pissed off, which wasn’t far from the truth.
Even if he could go back, knowing how it was going to end, knowing how many years it was going to take to pick himself up off the dirt, Jaime would’ve signed up to relive it all over again. That was how good it had been.
Scarlett shot those green eyes of hers at him. She knew he was barely restraining himself from arguing with her.
“You think I’m wrong?” she asked.
Jaime honestly didn’t know. He didn’t like the idea that there had been no chance for them, and he hated the idea that they could’ve made it. “I don’t mean to be starry eyed, but we couldn’t have stayed away from each other.”
He and Scarlett had had the kind of chemistry people wrote songs and movies about. The kind that made Neanderthals paint on cave walls and medieval fiefdoms start wars. Teenagers just weren’t equipped not to give in to that kind of temptation. No one was.
It would have been good not to have the accident, sure, but he and Scarlett had been eighteen-wheelers facing off down on a single-lane road. Their crash had been unavoidable.
Even now, he watched her swallow in response to his words. Watched the small movements of the muscles of her jaw, watched her throat work, watched her draw in a deep breath, and watched her chest swell as a result, and every memory was there, as fresh as the day he’d formed them. Scarlett under him: her stomach’s soft skin pressing into his, her warmth pouring into his hands, her breath roaring in his ears.
It was the kind of recollection he hadn’t taken out often, worried it might fade if he handled it too much. And it was good to keep some things as vivid as when they’d happened.
Scarlett was desire, and she was tenderness, and she was intimacy. The kinds he hadn’t known before or since and might not know ever again. Scarlett was what an art professor he’d taken a class from had called sui generis. One of a kind.
No, even knowing that he couldn’t keep her, he still would’ve wanted to have her.
“Was it worth it?” she asked.
Ah, so they both had things they couldn’t help but wonder about. That was a relief.
“Yup. Was it worth it for you?”
She pulled her feet up to the edge of the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. There was something youthful in that pose. It made this night feel timeless. As if it could’ve been in the past or the future or any point in between.
“I’m not good at romance,” she said after a long pause. “At forming connections. I’m a total maverick.”
Which was absolute bullshit. “You had plenty of friends back then. Emery what’s-her-name, and that Finn guy.”
“They were more lunch buddies than true friends—and I haven’t talked to them in seventeen years.”
“Because you left without a backward glance.”
He didn’t blame her exactly. Musgrove had not been friendly to Scarlett back then. For all that the town prided itself on being friendly, it wasn’t always welcoming , and Scarlett had been an outsider.
“In the chess world,” Scarlett said, “I am ... not popular. I have a little circle of chess outcasts I occasionally chat with—but if I didn’t go back to New York, if I gave up playing, I bet we’d lose touch too.”
“You don’t know that,” he said reflexively. But Jaime had to remind himself he didn’t know her anymore. Still, he wanted to go to battle over her self-perception. She ought to understand that people cared about her. Otherwise, her life might feel lonely, and it didn’t need to. “You have this warped notion of how people respond to you, and you use that to justify whatever you were going to do already.”
It was like knowing the answer before you did the experiment. No, it was even worse. Scarlett was shaping the experiment to confirm her hypothesis. Pushing her thumb on the scale until it registered the number she wanted. It took a will of iron to make the world the way you wanted it to be, but it also wasn’t very honest.
Across the table from Jaime, anger smoldered in Scarlett’s eyes. “Because I know myself. I know I have to take care of myself because no one will do it for me.”
“Maybe because you won’t let us.”
At that, Scarlett snapped to her feet and began scooping up her trash. “I told you earlier, I don’t want to rehash the past.”
“Okay. After tonight, I won’t ask.” He would try not to, anyhow. “But I have to know: How serious were you about asking me to come to Japan? If I had said yes, would you have been disappointed?”
Those days were such a smear of emotions, Jaime didn’t trust his own memories. What had been real, and what had he added after the fact? He had no idea. But he didn’t like how simple Scarlett seemed to be trying to make things—and how pessimistic she was that it ever could’ve gone down any other way.
Scarlett was facing toward the window with her back to him, and he could see her face reflected in the glass. Against the inky night, she glowed like a candle.
“I don’t know,” her reflection told him.
“Yes you do. You always know.” Because she was always in control. Always acting deliberately.
He trusted her recollection more than he did his own. He was the emotional one, the impulsive one. Everyone would look at them and think he was predictable, professional. He was the filmmaker controlling every detail, planning everything in advance, and she the mercurial chess champion, the one who sparked like a live wire, sometimes dazzling her opponents and sometimes detonating like a percussion shell.
But they both knew the truth: when Scarlett blew, she meant to, while Jaime acted on impulse that most people wrongly understood to be deliberate.
“If I answer,” she asked, “you’ll let it go?”
“Yes.”
He had to. This had to be the only moment when they exhumed the dead. His heart wouldn’t be able to take it otherwise.
Slowly, very slowly, she turned.
He wasn’t going to get used to seeing her again, that much he knew now. She was still going to take his breath away every time. The cream of her skin. The arch of her brows. The declaration of her nose. The pout of her mouth. No other face was ever going to mess him up like this. Snare him this tight. This was the face of his life. Always had been, always would be.
“I meant it, Jaime. But I was a kid, and it was a mistake. If you think I did a number on you when I left—it would’ve been even worse later on.”
And there it was.
At least at the time, she’d thought they had a chance. At least at the time, she’d wanted him.
His head was a squall: all winds and rains and everything upside down.
“Thank you for ... answering,” he managed. “I’ve always wondered.”
“Stop wondering. Stop thinking about it. Those days, they’re over. When I’m playing in a match, I have to let each move go as soon as I’ve made it. Once I release the piece, there isn’t right, there isn’t wrong. I can only play the board that I have now, not the one I might have had if I made different choices.”
“No regrets?”
“No regrets.”
But he didn’t believe she lived that motto. Not for an instant. Scarlett analyzed every move later; of that he was sure. How else would she improve?
It wasn’t his job to pry or accuse her of lying, though. He’d asked a question, and she had answered. That had to be good enough.
“Well, I have some regrets,” he said at last. “And one of them will be that I didn’t believe you when you invited me. I couldn’t have gone, regardless, but ... I’ll always wish I did.”
Jaime wasn’t as good as Scarlett at keeping emotions off his face or from influencing his decision-making. He was always going to be softer, always going to be more open. And that was why he would always be fascinated by her. She was everything he wasn’t. Everything he would always want.
“You didn’t, though. So let it go. I know that we’re going to write about the past, but we have to start pretending it happened to other people. Otherwise we’ll get burned again.”
Then she was gone.