Chapter 28
Chapter 28
The reviews for the first episode of Queen’s Kiss were stellar, and Jaime couldn’t care less. Well, he was relieved. Appreciative. If the show wasn’t any good, it would’ve destroyed whatever reasons he’d had for making it. He’d look like a one-hit wonder, and he’d probably never get to produce another television show. Or at least that was what he felt would happen.
Sure, sure, sure, from that perspective, the write-up in the Times bearing the headline Croft Delivers a Potent ‘Kiss’ in Brooklyn allowed him to take a deep breath. But Jaime didn’t feel good about it, and he didn’t have to call his therapist to work out why: Scarlett Arbuthnot and the fact that he’d torched any hope of ever being with her again.
It had happened because he was a proud, emotional asshole who couldn’t come to terms with the past. The irony .
Whatever he’d achieved professionally had been because Jaime was supposedly “unflinching” in his self-examination. But it turned out, when the rubber met the road, he was actually full of shit.
Here Jaime was, sitting on a Manhattan patio, eating breakfast the day after Queen’s Kiss ’s successful premiere, with the city in full bloom mode all around him. He ought to be on top of the fucking world, but instead, he felt like a slug. Lower than a slug, actually. Jaime was the slime that slugs left behind, smeared down the side of your pots after they ravaged your basil.
Across the table from Jaime, Nate was cooing over his plate full of pancakes. He obviously didn’t feel like slug slime. “Nowhere else does brunch like New York. Other cities try—oh, they try—but they fail.” Nate held up his fork, loaded with a bite of pancake slathered in pecan honey butter. “Tell me this doesn’t look like the best breakfast food in history.”
“I have completely fucked up.”
Nate regarded Jaime’s own plate with pity. “You’re right, those waffles look sad in comparison.”
“No, you jackass. I mean with Scarlett .” Jaime would’ve thought that was completely obvious.
She’d stood in his hotel room in Vegas, and she’d said she loved him and wanted to be with him in Musgrove. It was everything he had ever wanted from her for eighteen years, and he’d thrown it in the trash. Seeing her again had brought it all back. The gift of what she’d offered him, and his stupidity at turning it down.
He’d spent yesterday in a daze. The last few months, really. He knew why he’d made every choice that had led to this place, but he hated it so much. The past was, it turned out, past. Goddamn it, Jaime was turning into a cliché, but that didn’t mean it was untrue.
The only way he was going to cross the gaping canyon Scarlett’s confession had carved in the previously smooth plain of his life was to realize the crap that had happened couldn’t be changed and that life without her sucked. Even if Scarlett’s inclination was to go things alone, it would still be better for Jaime to accept being her backup than to not have her at all.
It was both as easy and as hard as that.
When Jaime looked at the situation dispassionately, when he imagined it was a letter sent to an advice columnist and had nothing to do with his own life, he could see that eighteen years ago, both he and Scarlett had played their positions in the best way they knew how. Scarlett had uncovered something he’d been too stupid and privileged to see, and she’d responded better than anyone else would’ve. Full stop.
And by giving the Musgrove Messenger that silly story, Scarlett had thought she was helping his family. She had been helping. Only she could deploy vibrating butt plugs as a diversion and end up getting wall-to-wall international coverage—though admittedly, the bar for that was pretty low in the chess world.
So what if she hadn’t consulted with him first? That didn’t mean she wouldn’t next time. That was what he would’ve told anyone else if this thing had happened to them.
All Jaime had to do was say that to himself in a way that actually penetrated his thick skull. Watching Clara up on that screen last night, perfectly playing a miracle of a character who brimmed with contradictions and life and cleverness, all while sitting next to the very real Scarlett and seething because she’d done some pro forma flirting with Jack Davis, Jaime had realized that this infuriating, brilliant, and, yes, deeply moral woman was the only one for him.
Nothing else mattered.
If Nate had regarded Jaime with pity when he’d thought the subject at hand was pancakes, it was nothing compared to how thick his condescension was when he knew they were talking about Jaime’s heart. “Yeah, Kit and I were talking about that last night.”
Nate and Kit had been texting since Scarlett’s friends had visited the set of Queen’s Kiss , and they’d left the premiere together looking very cozy.
Well, at least someone hadn’t shot themselves in the foot where their heart was concerned. That meant there was still some hope in the world.
“Your pillow talk was about how much I suck?” Jaime clarified.
“Pretty much. You and Scarlett need an intervention or something. Can you be sent to the romance principal’s office, and if so, am I empowered to send you there?” Nate seemed pleased by the prospect. “Wait, can I be the romance principal?”
“Did Kit tell you that Scarlett sent my dad to jail?”
Nate was Jaime’s friend. He ought to be, at least a little bit, on Jaime’s side. While Jaime was willing to concede that his reaction to the news had been extreme, it had been decently motivated. Several operas hinged on smaller acts of disloyalty.
“But is that what Scarlett did, though?” Nate popped the pancake into his mouth and chewed in a way that clearly communicated they both knew the answer to that question.
“It feels like it,” Jaime said, trying to sound reasonable and not petulant.
He failed. Utterly failed.
“Well, if it feels that way, then it must be true,” Nate deadpanned.
Contextualizing his emotions and recognizing them for what they were, rather than letting them control him, was something Jaime had learned to do in therapy, and he wielded that knowledge in his writing and on set. In those other situations—situations in which he managed to act like an adult and not an embodied paper cut—he’d lectured everyone who would listen about it.
Tease out what’s real from how you feel about it, he’d say, smug in the knowledge he’d broken out of that trap.
Jaime didn’t know if it made him feel more or less like slug slime to know this was the one case in which he couldn’t be rational. Also to know that he was a hypocritical prig.
More. Definitely.
“It’s frustrating when you deploy my own lines against me,” he told Nate.
“I can imagine. I avoid getting slapped with the hypocrisy thing by never saying profound things.”
“Smart.”
Nate beamed. “Hey, you’re the one who’s asking for my advice here. I can’t be too dense.”
It would probably be more accurate to characterize this as Jaime having a revelation in front of Nate, but whatever. Those were details. He wasn’t going to fight with his coproducer about semantics. Jaime needed to stop fighting with everyone for every reason. It only made him feel like a bigger horse’s ass.
Jaime had spent more than a year marinating in pain, but what he really wanted was for his dad to have woken up one day and turned himself in. Except that hadn’t happened. Jaime would always hate that it hadn’t, but he couldn’t will it into being.
It was right and fitting that Dad had faced consequences for what he’d done. Scarlett had made an impossible decision, and she’d done it out of genuine concern for people in Musgrove. He shouldn’t punish Scarlett for making that call, and he shouldn’t punish himself for not seeing what his father had been up to either.
Jaime knew all that. But when Scarlett had told him what she’d done, he’d regressed into some damn-fool place where lashing out made sense. It had been stupid and cruel, and he was done doing it.
He was going to stop acting like a jerk, and he was going to make it up to Scarlett. Whether she forgave him or spat in his eye was totally up to her—and he wouldn’t blame her if it was the second one. He’d earned it.
“She didn’t talk to me about it,” he said.
“That is frustrating,” Nate agreed.
“Scarlett ... she’s been a team of one for a long time. But I have been too.” It wasn’t as if he’d treated Mom and Evelyn as equals in their family unit. He’d very much cast himself as the coach and manager. “We’d both need to work on that, I guess.”
He wanted to believe what Scarlett had said to him, that she would involve him in big decisions in the future. But he was so miserable without her that it didn’t matter. If she made another unilateral decision, he’d live with it, because being with her was infinitely better than being without her.
“If she agrees to take you back.”
That was a big if . “How do I convince her that I’ve realized I was a massive tool and that I’m sorry?”
“Sorry isn’t going to cut it.” Nate took another bite of pancake. “You know the Candidates Tournament starts soon?”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, opened an app, and passed it across the table to Jaime. It was a schedule of Scarlett’s matches, starting with one a few hours from now, in Jersey City.
“This is bananas. How is Scarlett going to survive?” She had a major match most days for the next two and a half weeks.
“She’s been training, like, fourteen hours a day for six months.”
And all the while, she probably hadn’t been taking care of herself decently. Jaime had been working long hours getting the show edited and put together, but Scarlett’s work ethic put his to shame. When she was absorbed in memorizing every single opening played at the Zurich Candidates in 1953, she wouldn’t have spared a thought for whether she was getting enough sleep.
“Did Kit say how Scarlett’s been?” Jaime asked.
Scarlett had looked stunning, both at Hear Her and at the premiere. But Scarlett could put on a mask when she wanted, and she usually did. Her gorgeous gowns and her careful smiles didn’t tell him a thing about how she was feeling.
“Kit said you should probably avoid Martina Vega.”
“Will do.”
“And they said ... Scarlett will get through it.”
If it was her feelings for Jaime and her pain about his rejection, Jaime didn’t want her to get through it. Scarlett was larger than life. She ought to fly over it, blast through it, vaporize it, reverse the flow of its particles, or something else magical and transformative and science-fiction-y.
When Jaime had been at his lowest, he’d thought she’d betrayed him. But now, he knew he had actually betrayed her. Maybe it wasn’t possible to heal that kind of breach. He had to try, though.
Even if she didn’t want anything to do with him, he needed to apologize. Not with the objective of getting her back—okay, not only with the objective of getting her back—but because he’d messed up. And when you messed up, you showed contrition. That belief was at the core of who Jaime was.
“Can you check in with Kit, see if it would mess Scarlett up if I went?” he asked Nate. Jaime didn’t want to make Scarlett’s big day about him, and he definitely didn’t want to throw her off her game. But when the person you loved competed at one of the biggest chess tournaments in the world, you showed up.
That was as key to a relationship as scratching each other’s hard-to-reach itches and bitching about the latest bad Supreme Court decision.
“Can you even buy tickets to this thing?” Jaime asked.
“Sure, but they’re sold out.”
“They’re sold out ?”
“Chess is really popular, man.”
“I’m aware of that.” That was why Jaime had made a soon-to-be-massive-hit television show about it. “I wonder if people resell them on StubHub.”
“Or you could just ask your best friend in the entire world, who happens to be dating the second of one of the players.”
“You have tickets?” This day just kept getting stranger and stranger.
“Yup. Scarlett gets an allotment, but her mom isn’t coming, and she doesn’t have any other family. So she gave them all to Kit and Martina.”
Other than her friends, Scarlett was alone in the world—and Jaime had responded to that by cutting her off from him. Jeez, he’d been a self-absorbed snot. She really might not ever forgive him.
Nate took his phone back from Jaime and gave it a waggle. “What’s the magic word?”
“Please,” Jaime said cautiously.
“And?” Nate prompted.
“You’re an excellent AD and coproducer?”
“And?”
“I have no idea what you’re looking for here.”
Nate dropped his phone to the table with a thud. “That you’ll never act like a big man-baby where Scarlett Arbuthnot is concerned again. I love you, Jaime, but you’ve been a total ass to her. If I help you get her back, I have to know you won’t do it again.”
“Oh.” That was ... reasonable, and it showed more kindness toward Scarlett than Jaime had recently. “I have been a total ass, and if she’ll let me, I’ll tell her that every single day for forever. Believe me, I’ve been paying for this one big time. I won’t risk doing it again.”
He meant every word of it.
“There we have it.” Nate had picked his phone up and was already typing out a text. “You can call me Cupid. He was the god of love, right?”
“I will not be calling you Cupid.”
“And you’re the lovesick swain. Oh, after I text Kit, I’m getting us T-shirts. It’ll be great.”
“Arg.” But Jaime said it without any animosity.
He was done with anger and bitterness of any kind. All that mattered was apologizing to Scarlett and hoping against hope that she could forgive him.