Chapter 17
Ren
I don’t have a favourite thrift store in the city.
I had one in Kansas. But it got ruined when every time I picked something stupid off the rack to try on as a joke, all I could hear was Scott telling me this activity was both of those things.
Stupid, and a joke.
Imani isn’t into thrift shopping—not as a rule. It’s just not something she’s ever done, so she’s no help.
I end up Googling the best thrift stores in the city, and when he’s back from another away series, Miller meets me at one early on a Monday evening.
I’m not sure I’d call it a thrift store—it seems more like a warehouse of thrift-store rejects, tucked into a grocery store–sized building in the West End.
And it’s practically empty, save for us and the teenagers who seem more interested in each other and whatever they’re doing on their phones at the cash.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I say quietly, running my hand over hanging T-shirts. “I had a weird week at work. Lots to think about.”
Graham’s job offer didn’t feel good; it wasn’t something I’d dreamed of. It wasn’t something I wanted.
But maybe it was the right thing to do. The only option for someone without. Someone like me.
“Yeah?” Miller asks, looking away from the vintage TMLB jersey he was inspecting. “Me too.”
I pull my head back. “Really? Didn’t look weird to me. At least, not on SportsCentre.”
One side of his mouth kicks up, and he starts to smile when his brows lift. “Were you watching me on TV, Ren?”
“Imani’s taken a special interest in baseball.” I pretend to look back at the racks of clothes, walking past the T-shirts towards the pants at the back of the store. “I was just being a good friend.”
“Well, no one would accuse you of being anything but just that,” he says. “A good friend, I mean.”
My cheeks heat, and I nod with a quiet smile. “I knew what you meant.”
We stare—for a bit too long. His eyes on me and mine on him.
But he clears his throat. “So, what was Mr. T. Rex’s deal with thrift stores? Seem pretty harmless to me.”
“Believe it or not—” I glance sideways at Miller and pick up a fur hat sitting on top of a tall circular rack of pre-loved jeans. “He didn’t like old things. Which is . . . something, considering his chosen profession.”
I don’t say the truth, that what’s more—he didn’t love me in them. That it was a waste of time, to play pretend with things that used to belong to other people and invent stories and whole new worlds for them.
But Miller looks at me, mouth tilted to the side, and I pull the hat down on my head, tipping my chin and smiling up at him.
“That’s . . . really ugly,” Miller finishes on a laugh, but his tattooed hand raises, and he tugs absentmindedly on one of the flaps.
“Hey!” I pull back, swatting at his hand, lifting the other in defence of my fur hat. “Winters get cold.”
“It’s June,” he says flatly, giving me a knowing look. “And June in Toronto certainly doesn’t get cold.”
I purse my lips. “The fossil lab can get chilly.”
“Oh yeah?” His mouth slants into a lopsided grin, and he points to a hideous pair of jeans that look like they’re insulated with faux fur. “You should try these on. Bet they’d look great.”
I make a show of plucking the pants between my fingers, but when I do, they shift, and I can see into the centre of the jeans rack. The perfect circle makes a little hideaway. “Oh my god, it’s like Narnia in here!”
“I don’t think those kids should have gone through that wardrobe.”
“Think there’s Turkish Delight in here?” I arch a brow, ducking down behind the jeans to step into the centre of the rack.
It’s quiet, a whole other world, and even though he’s just on the other side of some pants, Miller sounds muffled. “Find any?”
“Nope. Just denim. Not even any dust.” I kick a toe into the shining linoleum flooring, and I call back, “But there’s enough room for two.”
Hangers screech across the metal rack as Miller pushes the rows of jeans apart, just as I’m settling down to sit on the floor. He gives me a dubious look. “What are you doing?”
I shrug, butterflying my knees before dropping my elbows to my thighs. “I don’t know. Being silly. Doing something I haven’t done in a long time.”
Something flashes behind his eyes, but I can’t tell what it is, because all six foot, two inches of Miller ducks under the rack and lets the jeans fall back into place when he crouches down to the ground, too.
He takes up most of the room in this little hideaway, but I don’t mind. It’s nice to share it with him.
“Why’d you never do your PhD?” he asks, crossing his legs, settling in for the long haul here amongst the forgotten and pre-loved pairs of jeans from all across the city.
“Already time for that then?” I sniff a laugh.
“You don’t have to—not if you don’t want to,” Miller offers. His hands flex against his knees, and when they do, his thumb whispers past my calf and I think it travels all the way up my spine.
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s . . . maybe more embarrassing than the fact that I stayed with a man who stole from me for the better part of a decade.” My laugh turns sad, wilting at the edges like I did for so many years. “I don’t want you to think less of me.”
Miller’s eyes darken, and his full mouth parts before he starts with a slow shake of his head, his voice dropping to nothing when he whispers, “Impossible.”
I’m buoyant again, under Miller Colson-Burke’s stare and the shield of ancient, thrift-store clothing hanging around us.
Swallowing, I start from the beginning. “I can’t really explain that without explaining some of Scott, to be honest. We met when we were eighteen.
Freshmen, aspiring bachelor of science honours in paleontology students at the University of Alberta.
BIO 108—Introduction to Biological Diversity.
We shared a lab bench.” I sniff, looking over Miller’s shoulder, studying the stitching along a pair of frayed denim wide-leg pants.
“I was, uhm, lonely. I think I’d been lonely for a long time .
. . and he looked at me, and you know, I thought it was like the movies? ”
I wait for lines of laughter to sketch across Miller’s face, hilarity at this idea that young, eighteen-year-old Ren was that na?ve. But the drawing never comes, and he waits, unblinking with a straight set of his jaw, his thumb skating across my calf again.
“Anyway—” I wave a hand. “Lab partners who both loved dinosaurs. We shared a lot of the same interests. Friends. Extracurriculars. We were together by Christmas.” I skip over the good parts.
Or, what I thought were the good parts. I’m not sure if they ever were—it’s a bit hard to say, when they were painted a different colour by all the bad years.
“He had an interest in the Tyrannosaurus rex. I was really interested in studying the social behaviour of velociraptors.” Leaning forward, I wrinkle my nose and try for conspiratorial.
“It’s not what people think. They were tiny and covered in feathers, and they weren’t highly coordinated. ”
The corners of Miller’s lips twitch.
“And lo and behold, we could study those things together at UC Berkeley. We moved to California. We moved in together—this tiny, horrible apartment. Neither of us could afford to live alone.” It’s harder to pretend when I get to this part.
The good years shifted to the bad, and it’s a double-edged sword, for me to think about sitting knee to knee with Scott on the crappy carpet in that even crappier apartment, eating ramen for the fourth night in a row because that’s all we could afford, too.
Our laughter was what kept us full. That, and the pursuit of dreams we crafted together.
Until slowly, he decided to use me in a different way, to fill the still-empty spaces of him.
Forcing a smile, I press a cheek to my shoulder. “Anyway, two years go by and then it was time for our PhDs. We both wanted to go to the University of Kansas. They have a fantastic program.” Fresh embarrassment, like it was yesterday, burns across my cheeks. “He got in. I didn’t.”
Miller makes a noise in the back of his throat, the first sound since I started talking.
“What?” I blink.
He shrugs. “Admissions committees are probably made of people a lot smarter than me. But that seems like a pretty stupid decision on their part.”
“Thank you,” I say softly, before I shrug too.
“We didn’t want to be apart—honestly, I don’t think we knew how to be.
I couldn’t . . . I needed him. So, I pivoted.
Applied to the museum studies program at KU, too.
I liked it. I thought it would be a great way to pad my resume for when I applied again.
But I . . . never did. I didn’t think . .
. I could move somewhere without him. I hadn’t been without Scott since I was eighteen, and I was too nervous to apply at KU again.
” Tears well along my lash line. “And he made it . . . seem like I couldn’t be without him.
That I wouldn’t get in, anyway. In that special way of his.
” I snort dryly, shaking my head. “So, I stayed. And he still liked it, I think. How dependent I was on him. How . . . needy. It filled a void he needed filled, and it . . . filled me too. But when that particular baggage of mine, this need to be chosen, this deep fear of being alone . . . being left behind like I was as a kid became too much, he started picking it apart. Picking me apart.”