Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Three weeks after returning to Virginia, Scarlett made a catastrophic error: she asked Jaime where he bought the sourdough bread he kept using for sandwiches. She wasn’t normally someone who cared about that kind of thing—she sure as heck couldn’t tell the difference between a shiraz and a merlot—but it was such good bread that it scrambled her judgment.
“The farmers’ market.” Jaime’s reverent tone had matched the way someone else might say El Dorado or Bloomingdale’s clearance shoe sale .
“Musgrove has one of those?” Back when Scarlett had lived here, there’d been farm stands, but the town hadn’t had anything bougie enough to qualify as a market.
“You have to come with me to the next one,” he’d insisted.
Despite her intention to put him off, when Saturday morning rolled around, Scarlett allowed herself to be dragged along.
This kept happening. She’d draw a chalk line on the sidewalk and Jaime would skip right on over it as easily as if they were playing hopscotch. But the worst part was that rather than enforcing the boundary and telling the man to stay on his own damn side, Scarlett would find herself asking Well, what’s the harm?
The harm was when he grabbed a stack of canvas bags out of his trunk and she said, “Of course you’re a PBS donor.”
Sweet sardines, she was flirting with him about his reusable bags.
“Oh, it’s worse than that—I’m a sustaining member. Those Ken Burns documentaries won’t finance themselves.” Jaime waggled his brows.
That made parts of Scarlett want to waggle along. She was in a mound of trouble here, and she had no one to blame for it but herself.
But Jaime, who was blissfully unaware of how much grief he was causing her insides, was just pointing to the surprisingly large market. “You wanna start with the baker, or you wanna browse the vegetables?”
Before Scarlett could answer this scintillating query, someone shouted, “Scarlett Arbuthnot, is that you?”
There, at a stand whose sign declared Bleat Dry Skin, Try Goat Milk Soap! , a woman was waving at her.
“Emery Cartwright?” Scarlett called back.
Emery had eaten lunch with Scarlett almost every day in high school. She’d helpfully joined Scarlett in hating Jaime when she’d been trying to do that ... and then had tactfully not mentioned the previous hating after things had changed between Jaime and her. Emery and a sweet, nerdy guy named Finn Lamott, who’d been way into Star Trek , had been the closest things to friends Scarlett had had back then, and Scarlett had repaid them by not keeping in touch when she’d skipped town.
Oh boy. Emery probably loathed her.
Jaime tipped his head at Scarlett to ask if she wanted to go over there and say hi—but it was entirely too late to run now. She had to face the music.
Scarlett’s feet felt heavy as they crossed over to the soap stand. Emery’s hair was much longer than it used to be, but she had the same amused gleam in her eye and clearly the same fondness for plaid.
Even more odd was that, when Scarlett got to the stand, Emery wasn’t scowling. Indeed, if they hadn’t had a folding plastic table between them, Scarlett had the distinct impression that Emery might hug her.
“It’s Emery Matthews now.” Scarlett’s former lunch buddy beamed and held out her left hand. A medium-size diamond sparkled on the fourth finger. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”
“Yeah,” Scarlett said carefully. “Jaime and I are working on some scripts for—”
“ Oh my gosh , are you adapting Queen’s Kiss ?” Emery squealed at Jaime.
“I am.” He gave a modest shrug.
Then Emery did the darndest thing: she started jumping up and down. “I am so excited! It’s going to be amazing!”
“You ... read it?” Scarlett asked, shocked.
“Of course I did! Everyone did!”
That couldn’t be right. Scarlett thought no one here beyond Jaime and Evelyn had followed her career. She’d always assumed it would’ve only made sense to folks here if she’d gone to Nashville. That they might’ve put up signs declaring the town Home of the Musgrove High Muskrats and Country Superstar Scarlett Arbuthnot .
Scarlett wasn’t sad about the lack of recognition or anything. She didn’t want it. And besides, she and Musgrove had always tiptoed past each other, the same way a guard dog and a cantankerous cat kept their distance from each other by mutual agreement.
Except Emery’s delight was too genuine to be fake.
“We read it in our book club,” Emery was saying. “We would’ve asked you to be a guest speaker, but we figured you were too busy.”
For maybe the first time in her life, Scarlett had no idea what to say. She was still adjusting to the fact that not everyone in Musgrove loathed her—and that, despite Scarlett never giving them a reason to, some of them might have been cheering her on.
“That’s ... flattering,” she finally managed.
“Will you come and sign our books?” Emery demanded. “We meet on Tuesdays at the county library. Jaime knows where it is.”
“Sure.” What else could Scarlett say except that?
Emery was still beaming at Scarlett as if she couldn’t believe she was real. And for all that Scarlett was used to being famous, it was uncanny to be treated as if she was by someone she’d known when she was a kid. There was something doubly disorienting about it.
Thank God Jaime never treated Scarlett like that.
“How are things going?” Emery asked Jaime.
“Pretty well. We’re screen-testing an actress to play the lead next week.”
“Anyone whose name I know?” Emery was almost levitating now.
“No, she’s a newbie, but we have high hopes.”
“Well, she’ll have to be a goddess to play our Scarlett.”
Our Scarlett? She wasn’t anyone’s , and she didn’t want to be—did she?
Wanting to change the subject, Scarlett interjected, “Didn’t you leave for college?”
Back in high school, Emery had been almost as excited to get out of town as Scarlett had been, which was saying a lot. That had actually been the basis for their camaraderie: neither of them had thought Musgrove was nearly as cool as most of the people here did.
Emery nodded. “I did. But after a few years in Richmond, Ben and I wanted a slower change of pace. I’d gotten into soapmaking, and I needed room for some goats.” She gestured at the tarp hanging behind her, where she’d tacked up a dozen pictures of different goats.
In her defense, they were extremely cute.
“And nowhere else except Musgrove really felt like home,” Emery added.
“Oh, oh—yeah,” Scarlett said for lack of a better response. Home was one of those words that almost seemed to come from a language Scarlett wasn’t fluent in. In the vaguest sense, she knew what other people meant by it, but it was an empty concept to her.
She owned an apartment in New York, but she didn’t have any emotional attachment to the place, beyond her pride that she’d earned enough to buy it.
Scarlett cast a glance around the parking lot off Main Street where the farmers’ market was being held. She remembered walking through it next to Jaime during the Christmas Stroll one year, carefully not holding his hand but holding his full attention in a way that mattered so much more to her.
The truth was, Scarlett had a zillion memories like that here. For better or for worse, she had an emotional connection to Musgrove. It could never be neutral for her.
Whether that was what Emery meant by home , or what Jaime meant by it, she had no idea.
Luckily, Emery was too buzzed on reconnecting to pick up on this. Scarlett could only hope she was masking the turmoil inside her well enough to also hide it from Jaime.
After a few more minutes of pleasantries, Scarlett bought a hundred dollars’ worth of goat-milk soap from Emery—she didn’t know what else to do—before she and Jaime waved goodbye. Then they picked up several loaves of incredible bread, a jar of honey, and a case of local hard cider.
“It’s much less sweet than that crap they make in Albemarle County,” Jaime assured her, which wasn’t something Scarlett would ever have worried about.
Jaime greeted pretty much everyone at the market, including several people whom, he explained, he knew from a support group he ran for families of incarcerated folks. And as they were leaving, they ran into Evelyn, who convinced them to have lunch with her at the deli across the street, a meal that ended up stretching out over an hour.
Through it all, Scarlett couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be entirely too easy to spend a lot of Saturday mornings like this.
The realization made her so itchy even Emery’s goat-milk soap probably couldn’t cure it.
Several hours later, after they’d finished their trip to the farmers’ market and lunch with Ev, there was no escaping Jaime’s den and their writing. Scarlett was beginning to hate this room, with its demands and expectations. She was used to being competent—more than competent. She was used to being the best.
She was also used to thinking of Musgrove as a crap place she’d escaped from, a place where no one cared about her. But seeing Emery messed up that story. The entire morning, with its sunshine and its six varieties of local honey, with the way Ev had made her laugh and the approving gleam in Jaime’s eyes when he’d watched her, had been disorienting.
Scarlett felt like a shaken-up snow globe. Uncomfortable emotions were billowing around her insides, and she wanted to pound her fists on the glass dome and get out. To go back to her real life, where she was alone and in charge.
“I don’t think the climax of episode two is working.” Jaime liked to pace when he read, or at least when he read the final final draft, not to be confused with the final draft or the polished draft or the almost final draft or any of the others that had come before the final final.
The fall of his feet on the wooden floor had started to set Scarlett’s teeth on edge. The slightly syncopated bum- bum -bum of his gait. The ruthless way he always found whatever they were getting wrong and dragged it back in front of them, making them hash through it until they’d improved it to his satisfaction.
“It’s totally acceptable, dude,” Scarlett huffed. “We need to move on to episode three.”
“But episode three grows out of episode two. We can’t move on, not until we get this one right.”
It was as if he thought this were a chess match and they were blundering. Scarlett had assumed the best part of writing was that they weren’t locked in. That they could keep revising, at least until the moment they shot the thing. It wasn’t as if they were stuck with a move the instant they touched a piece.
They needed to get this written—the sooner, the better. Then Scarlett could leave this cursed place and get back to her real life—not the fake version they were writing. She was getting too comfortable here, and it was endangering everything she’d built for herself.
“Someone’s being anal,” Scarlett said, faux sweetly.
“And someone’s being lazy,” Jaime replied, amused.
No, she was being tetchy, probably because Scarlett could feel herself going soft. Which was happening because being in Musgrove and with Jaime was nice, and if there was anything Scarlett despised, it was niceness. Wheat Thins were nice, and everyone knew those were the worst crackers. Bland. Brittle. Unsatisfactory.
The problem was that when she’d agree to come here, she hadn’t realized, in the years since she’d known him, Jaime had become an adult. A list-making, responsible adult.
Scarlett normally barreled through life with at least one gaping wound, whether it was a doctor’s visit she couldn’t seem to schedule or a bare pantry she couldn’t seem to fill. Once, she’d gone through not one but two different tournaments with a hole in the sole of her favorite chocolate-suede boots before throwing them away. She still hadn’t filled that slot in her wardrobe. The point was, Scarlett tended to wait until something became so loathsome to her that it was a matter of dealing with it or expiring, and even then, she gave considerable thought to expiring.
Jaime would never put up with that. Not for himself, and not for the people around him. Every day, Scarlett discovered another area in which Jaime had realized what she needed and made sure she had it. He’d stocked the medicine cabinet in the guest bathroom and then refilled it when she’d run out of toothpaste. He’d offered to include her dry cleaning with his. He’d made sure every meal included fresh fruits and vegetables. His wholesomeness made her want to go on a ten-day bender, and it made her never want to leave. At the same time.
“Do we need to knock off early?” he teased.
Which would entail retreating to his kitchen, cooking and watching freaking game shows, and laughing like an old married couple. Or a frisky middle-aged married couple.
At first, the scene had nauseated her. Now, and more concerningly, the nausea had faded.
She found herself liking it.
It would take so very little for Scarlett to sink into the fantasy of this situation, but she’d poisoned the well. For all that Emery had been glad to see her today, Scarlett knew that there were people here who despised her—or who should despise her.
Even now, with Jaime giving her that sly, familiar grin, she was tempted to say that yes, they ought to stop early. She wanted to let him feed her. She longed to pretend for one more night that they were back in time, back before she’d inexorably wrecked this.
But the impossibility of that fantasy was probably why, with her next words, she broke the pleasant present, as surely as a cat pushing a glass off a shelf while it looked you dead in the eye.
“No. I think I should go back to New York.”
If Scarlett had slapped Jaime, he couldn’t have been more surprised. “ What? ”
“We’ve gotten a good start here, and I don’t really know what I’m doing anyhow. You can finish the rest without me.” If it wasn’t why she wanted to leave, her reasoning was true enough. This time, Scarlett was determined not to lie to him when she lit out of town.
Jaime was still processing what she’d said. “Excuse me, what?”
“I really should start getting ready for Norway Chess. I only insisted on cowriting to make sure you were going to do a decent job, and you are.”
If anything, Scarlett trusted Jaime more now than she ever had. He cared about writing this in a way that was compelling, entertaining, and accurate. He’d be fine without her. He’d be better without her.
He popped his jaw, but he didn’t say anything.
“We’ve talked through every scene,” she said. “You have everything you need. I’m just getting in your way. I’m just someone else for you to take care of.”
She couldn’t have predicted it when they were kids, but Jaime had grown into one of the most conscientious people she’d ever known. Scarlett was dead selfish compared to him, and dead clueless too. She couldn’t so much as keep a houseplant alive, and he’d managed to support his father in prison, help his mom keep her house, and raise his sister—all while putting himself through school and building a career as an indie filmmaker and making a difference to the people of Musgrove in a dozen ways.
If Scarlett did manage to become the first woman to win the world chess championship—the actual world championship—it would be a toss-up if that accomplishment could sit next to Jaime’s on the shelf and not feel shabby in comparison.
“Why are you saying these things?” he finally got out.
“Because it’s true. And I’m ... bored.”
“That is a lie.”
Sakes alive, she hadn’t meant to tell that one, but she’d panicked. “So what if it is? Why do you care?” He ought to be cheering. He ought to be delighted to cut her deadweight.
“Because if you’re going to run away again, I deserve an explanation this time.”
Oh no, he had not just said that. They’d managed to go several days without talking about their past; this was no time to bring it in to spoil things, like a specter at the feast or a colony of termites in your walls. “Don’t make this about us.”
“ Of course it’s about us.” Because Jaime thought—and repulsively, he was right—that their romantic past was the subtext for everything that was going down here.
Unable to take the intensity of his brown gaze anymore, Scarlett moved away from him. She crossed to the window where, outside, everything was breezy sunshine, with the boughs of the pine trees swaying gently and the soft blue peaks of the mountains in the distance.
The way she was disappearing into the comfort of this vacation from her real life was terrifying. Left to her own devices, Scarlett might forget to pick up mouthwash every now and again, but she’d never been able to rely on other people before. She’d never had the luxury. Forgetting that now would be dead stupid.
She had to climb out of this sinkhole, even if she had to scratch them both up in the process. “Fine. Other than your mom and sister, do people in Musgrove know what you’re working on?” Emery had certainly seemed surprised by the news.
He blinked rapidly. He hadn’t been expecting that. “No, but I—”
“Which is exactly like before. I never cared that you treated me like a dirty secret back then, but—”
“I never treated you like a dirty secret.”
She’d known that accusation would fire him up. That was why she’d said it. When in doubt, poison the well: that was how Scarlett’s mother always managed things.
And while Scarlett generally tried to handle things differently than Alma, it was the right play for this moment. Underneath it all, Jaime had as much of a temper as Scarlett did. It shouldn’t be too hard to get him pissed at her and to throw her out, and that would be better for both of them.
“Sure, Jan.” Scarlett hefted as much disdain as she could manage onto her words. “Which is why you took me to prom and gave me your ring and held my hand on the quad.”
“You never wanted those things!”
Scarlett hadn’t ... and she very much had. But it would’ve been embarrassing to ask for them, would’ve been embarrassing to reveal how deep she’d been in things. Drowning in her feelings for him had made her basic, like one of those Stepford kids from school who were convinced that it was never going to get any better than senior year of high school because, for many of them, it was going to be all downhill after that.
She hated that she wanted to wear the pretty dress, that she wanted the attention of the popular boy, that she wanted everyone to know that he was hers . Wanting someone in this dopey way made you vulnerable, and Scarlett didn’t want to be vulnerable or dopey. She wanted to be mean and strong, and away from this place and the scary things it made her crave.
“Of course I did,” she admitted. Because she no longer wanted that stupid stuff. “I never asked for those things because you didn’t want to give them to me.”
“Scarlett, everyone knew how I felt about you.”
“No, everyone knew that we were fucking.” She hoped choosing that word would help Jaime understand she was serious here. “Those are not the same. If we’re going to do this, then we ought to do it on the level.”
Scarlett and Jaime had been the talk of the school; he was right about that. But everyone had assumed things were what they’d seemed like: the town’s golden boy slumming it with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. That assumption had been right enough, in the end. If the trope version flattened some things out, it wasn’t a total lie.
“Okay, fine. Let’s do this on the level.” He spit that out as if it were battery acid. “You run away the second things get hard.”
“What? I work my butt off . I’m not lazy.”
“You work hard, that’s true. But the second things get complicated emotionally, the second you lose control, you’re out of there. You didn’t want to stick around, you didn’t want to stick with me, through what was going to go down with my father.”
Oh boy. “I will not talk about that time with you. I won’t do it.”
“Okay, then let’s talk about what you’ve done since and how you sabotage yourself all the time. You aren’t wrong about PAWN, but you undermine the case you’re trying to make when you pose naked in Vogue —”
“Don’t you dare slut-shame me, Jaime Croft.”
“I’m not, swear to God. I highly support you posing naked in every goddamn fashion magazine on earth. But you embarrassed PAWN when you rubbed your celebrity in their faces, which makes it less likely that you’ll get what you want. It’s why you wrote your book! Becoming the center of attention puts you back in the driver’s seat.”
She wanted to heave the couch at him, and if he didn’t knock it off, she was going to get mad enough to Hulk out and do it.
“You ass,” she spit. She didn’t say you liar , because Jaime wasn’t lying. Running away wasn’t something Scarlett was going to apologize for. Hiding was good. It was safe. It made sense. But he was being an ass.
“You said to do it on the level, and that’s how I feel.”
“And I feel like you’re punishing me because you’ve never gotten over me.”
“I’ve never tried to hide that.”
Oof.
How could he do that, stand there with all his feelings hanging out there like that—his real feelings, not some dramatic mask version of them he’d slapped over himself? She’d get hives if she tried it.
But the rainbow spill of things his words had set off in her gut had her reverting to the thing she did best: she left.