Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Hours later, after Scarlett had eaten and showered, she still felt downhearted. In the past, she’d shrugged off goodbyes more easily than a duck did the rain. This one was going to sting, though.
Old Scarlett would’ve chided herself about how silly she was being. But New Scarlett went in search of Jaime. He wouldn’t think she was being silly, and he’d make her feel better.
For reasons she didn’t quite understand, their affair had been conducted exclusively in her hotel rooms. Maybe it was chivalry, but Jaime seemed to want to give her the opportunity to deny him access to her space, to make sure that she was in control.
As she knocked on his door, the racing of her heart was giddy, just on the fun edge of manic. Like a fairground ride you just know is going a little faster than it should be.
When Jaime answered, he didn’t seem surprised to find her on his threshold, but he also didn’t seem excited. He ushered her inside, but after she had shut the door, he kept them both in the little hallway that led to the bedroom.
“I don’t think I’m up for it tonight,” he said carefully.
“Amazingly, I’m only here to talk.”
“Go ahead.”
Here went nothing. “Right, well, I think we should be together. For real. I want to move to Musgrove.” She wouldn’t even hate it, though she would one hundred percent have all their groceries delivered. That bit was nonnegotiable. No one wanted to be judged in the pickle aisle.
As for the rest of it, the town had grown on her during the months she’d spent there, and it wasn’t only Jaime. She found that she’d liked air that smelled like pines instead of moldering city. She really liked the farm-fresh vegetables and the sourdough bread. She enjoyed seeing Evelyn and reconnecting with her old friends, and she had even learned to like the quiet—though not the threat of giant owls carrying her off at any moment.
No, Scarlett knew she could be happy living in Musgrove, and it wasn’t just the promise of amazing sex with Jaime that made her think so. She could thrive there, and because it was the twenty-first century, she could get out a few times a year when she needed a big city and a bagel. It would be the best of both worlds ... if Jaime would agree to it.
When Scarlett made her proposal, however, a strange thing happened. Nothing.
She’d said to him that she wanted to be with him, that she would rearrange her life in order to be with him, that she was going to give him the thing he had always wanted from her for what felt like most of her life—making their relationship real. And his response was ... neutrality.
Not excitement.
Not relief.
Not delight.
His eyes and his mouth betrayed not a single thing.
All the air vacated Scarlett’s lungs. If she’d missed the bottom step and wiped out, she wouldn’t have lost her breath so completely.
She’d expected something here. She had no idea what to do with nothing.
At last, he asked, “Why?”
That was reasonable. On some level, Scarlett had assumed she could say I’d like to be together and all the old arguments would still apply. It made sense that he wanted her to remind him what those old arguments were.
But since her brain was still oxygen deprived, she bungled it and went too literal. “Because Musgrove is where you live, and—”
“No, why do you want us to be together?”
Jaime would force her to actually use her words and say exactly what she wanted as if she were a grown-up, wouldn’t he? The bastard.
The frustrating, sexy, aggravating bastard.
“Because we love each other, you dingbat!”
There, now Scarlett sounded extremely petulant. She’d shouted it at him like a teenager arguing with their parents about whether she could leave the house in a miniskirt—or at least the parents in movies, because Alma had never cared what Scarlett left the house in.
Jaime absorbed Scarlett’s shouted declaration of her feelings without so much as blinking. It was like making an argument to a pillar of granite—and it was beginning to freak her out.
Where was the soft, foolish boy Scarlett had fallen for the first time, the one who didn’t know he needed to keep his emotions guarded because sharing them gave people too much power over you? Had she destroyed him for good?
Scarlett shook her head in disbelief and watched the hair around her face stir. It was good to see at least some things in the universe still behaved the way they were supposed to.
Okay, so she’d blundered, but she could still turn this around.
Jaime looked tired and surprised. He wasn’t making this easy for her because she hadn’t made the last year easy for him. Or any year, really. That didn’t mean she couldn’t do this. She would do this. She would nail this pitch, and then they could both have what they wanted.
Softer, more genuinely, she said, “Because we’re never going to find anyone else who we want to be with as much as we want to be with each other. Who suits us as well as we suit each other. We are it for each other, and I’m tired of pretending that isn’t true.”
The admission made Scarlett want to crawl out of her body and find another home for her soul, much like a molting crab searching a beach for a larger shell. But she pushed her shoulders back and met Jaime’s eyes. For him to see, hopefully, that she meant every word. That it had taken her too long to admit it, but that she’d gotten there in the end.
Being with Jaime was what she wanted—and crucially, obnoxiously, what she knew he wanted. How difficult could it be to admit that? To decide to do that ? They had found each other, and they had fallen in love, and she had told him the truth. Those were the hard parts.
All they had to do was get over the teensy-tiny speed bump where she had sent his father to jail, and the rest would be like rolling down a hill. If they could let go, gravity would take care of it.
The bald truth of what Scarlett had just said, the vulnerability of it, sat between them for several bloated seconds.
Maybe—maybe—the line of Jaime’s brows was beginning to soften, but then the shields went back up as he looked away from her. “I’m exhausted.”
That was certainly better than a flat no.
“I can imagine. You’re going to take some time off, right? Before you start postproduction?” Maybe Scarlett could convince him to go someplace sunny and tropical with her. The kind of place where unlimited fruity drinks appeared in your cabana, and all you had to do was nap and stare at the ocean. She could use a break before she had to start preparing for the Candidates Tournament.
“We could go somewhere,” she said. “I spent a week in Mayakoba once. You’d love it. And look, we’re both beat because the shoot was long, but also because stuff with us has been so unsettled. We’ve been fighting the inevitable. I guess I thought I couldn’t let anyone in because I needed to be independent and blah, blah, blah. But I’m going to stop doing that. No more walls, Jaime—that’s what I’m saying. I’m going all the way in with you. I love you.”
She’d never said those three words to him with her clothing on. It had been like a secret he’d dragged out of her, using orgasms like truth serum. She’d never been certain if the circumstances in which she’d blurted it out had made it more or less true. But obviously the only way he was going to believe her was if she gave him the entire truth. Every corny, warty detail of it.
“I do too.”
“You do what too?” she demanded. Because it was very unfair that she was standing here in all her mortifying feelings and he hadn’t reciprocated.
“I love you.”
Scarlett would’ve melted if he hadn’t spat the words out as though they tasted bitter in his mouth.
He buried his hands in his hair and tugged at it. “And I want you. It’s not like this with anyone else. It won’t ever be. But I just don’t know—take today.”
“Today?” Scarlett had no idea what had happened today.
“The Musgrove Messenger profile.”
“What about it? Like I said, I was trying to help you out, so I gave the reporter something in order to change the story.”
“To one about you.”
None of this made sense. Why wasn’t Jaime listening to her? “If that’s what it took.”
“ You confuse attention and affection.”
“And you can’t recognize when someone is trying to help you.”
“Without asking me about it?” he snapped.
No good deed went unpunished, clearly. “That’s the problem, that I didn’t consult you?”
“That’s a big part of it, yes. I can’t—I don’t want to feel alone inside my relationship, and you’re so independent, I worry that I would be.”
It was if they’d slid through the looking glass, and everything was now upside down. Scarlett felt sick. Not like being sick , but the way that sick itself must feel: achy and guilty. Sick couldn’t possibly feel good about infecting you, and Scarlett didn’t feel good about the way she’d infected this relationship. The way she’d ruined it.
“Would you bring me inside?” Jaime asked, the question clearly an ultimatum.
“I would try to.” That was the very best Scarlett could do.
When Scarlett had thought Jaime was mad at her, she’d been able to deal with it because rage was something, and deep down, she’d been confident in her ability to take something , even something bad, and turn it around. That was why she was good at chess: she didn’t give up. Even when you blundered in your opening game, if you kept at it, a strategy would open up. Never say die, and all that.
But he wasn’t mad. Not anymore.
Instead, and worse, Jaime didn’t know if Scarlett could give him what he wanted from her. And Scarlett couldn’t tell him he was wrong, because she didn’t know if she could give it to him either.
But Scarlett couldn’t say that. She absolutely could not say that. So she asked, “What have we been doing the last few months?”
Because she had been there. She had lived every caress, every orgasm. Whatever he might pretend now, those moments had mattered a lot to them both. They had showed that whether she let him in or not, they were good together.
Jaime scrubbed a hand over his face. The lines around his mouth suddenly seemed canyon deep. “We were ... blowing off steam together,” he said. “But that’s not enough, not to build a life on. I want a partner. I deserve that.”
He did. He honestly did.
Scarlett suddenly felt as old and desiccated as Jaime looked.
“Okey dokey.” Okey dokey? What the fuck was wrong with her?
This conversation, that was what. None of this was going the way she’d thought it was going to. She’d been prepared for Jaime to be unable to forgive her. But she hadn’t been prepared for him to want more than she could give.
“I’m going to go,” she said. When she opened the door, though, and stepped through it, she found herself calling back to him. “Jaime?”
He took a half step into the hallway. The overhead light was harsh, unflattering. It cast a dark shadow from his brow ridge down and over his face, hiding his eyes from her.
So she couldn’t see his expression as she lobbed a bomb at him. “Who’s running now?”
Literally no one was. To the extent that one of them was leaving, it was Scarlett. But she’d showed up and asked for a future, and Jaime was the one pushing her away. In demanding something she might not be capable of giving, he was running away from them—just like he’d accused her of doing.
A minute ticked by. In any other world, Jaime would’ve tackled her. In frustration, in annoyance, in arousal: the line would’ve provoked a zillion different responses from him, depending on when and how she’d said it.
But now, they really might be done with each other. Because Jaime just released a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of his feet before he stepped back into his hotel room and closed Scarlett out.
Maybe for good this time.