Chapter 21 #2
I do love the Dangerous Lagoon. I love Ray Bay. I even love the Kelp Forest, but I think my new favourite place in the whole aquarium is standing side by side with Miller, watching the jellyfish.
They drift along, lazy, plumes of tentacles and oral arms dragging behind them in bright, beautiful colours, illuminated by the glow from the specialized LED lights placed along the bottoms of the floor-to-ceiling tanks.
Children have come and gone, sprinting around and pushing their faces to the tanks—but for some reason, we’ve sat side by side on a bench, shoulders and thighs brushing like ghosts against each other’s skin, just watching.
Miller tips his chin. “They old too?”
“Mhm,” I say quietly, scared to disturb them even though we’re separated by inches of glass. “Oldest multi-organ animal on earth, actually.”
“No way.”
Nodding, I bump my leg against his. “They’ve existed for somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred million years.
” I shift, angling towards him, and when my knee rests where the ridge of his thigh muscle dips to meet the stretching tendons of his calf, he takes a heavy swallow.
That tightens my throat, too, but I lean forward, whispering, “Some—Burgessomedusa phasmiformis—have fossil evidence from 505 million years ago. They were drifting around long before the dinosaurs, and somehow, they survived all five major mass extinction events.”
He glances at me, the column of his throat working when his eyes watch my mouth as I spell out the words.
But navy eyes flick up to mine, and he looks at me a bit in awe.
“How do you know so much about jellyfish? Aren’t you in charge of .
. . vertebrates? And they don’t look . . . particularly spiny.”
“They aren’t.” I shake my head. “They’re invertebrates. Imani knows all about them. We have an extensive collection actually, at the museum.”
The corner of his mouth tugs up. “Her big passions in life are jellyfish and baseball, then?”
“Well, the second one is newfound, but we’ll see where it leads. Who knows, maybe she starts over and tries her hand as a . . . baseball statistician.” I lean forward, wrinkling my nose. “Do they have those?”
“Yeah.” He gives a slow nod. “They do. We’ve got, uh, analysts. They do a lot of math.”
Smiling, I wave a hand. “Great, she’s excellent with numbers. I’ll be sure to let her know she has a solid backup if, you know”—I tip my head towards the jellyfish—“the jellyfish and all the other invertebrates go poof.”
“Poof,” he echoes quietly, and for some reason, I feel the singular word and the way his mouth moves all the way down the column of my spine.
He might even lean forward, too, an almost imperceptible amount—I can only tell by the way the shadows shift across his face, but he takes a hard blink, and pulls back, clearing his throat.
“So, uh.” His hand lifts towards the jellyfish circling the tank. “The aquarium.”
“The aquarium,” I repeat. “Thank you. I know it’s . . . stupid—”
“It’s not.”
“And just for kids—”
“It’s not.”
A soft smile warms my face, and I give him a tiny shrug. “Well, I was told it was childish.”
“Not by a very reliable source,” he mutters with a poorly restrained eye roll.
“We went . . . when I was a kid. My dad used to take me, and I just—” My shoulders dip. “It always made me feel happy, to be surrounded by all these other living things.”
Miller shakes his head. “It’s not . . . weird, to want to do things you associate with a happy childhood memory. Look at Matty, we played cars as kids, and he started buying every single one he liked.”
“Sadly, I don’t think I’ve amassed the funds to purchase an entire aquarium.”
“You want one?”
“Maybe I’ll start with an admissions pass.” Rolling my eyes, I give his shoulder a playful shove, but my fingers linger a bit too long on the jut of muscle.
His pupils swallow the navy of his eyes, and he clears his throat again, but he doesn’t shift away from my hand. “So . . . why him? Why Scott? Both times I’ve asked, you said you’d tell me next time.”
“I guess it is that time.” I cringe, dropping my hand to my lap.
I stretch out my fingers, wringing them together while minutes pass and more children sprint by as I try to decide how to fit the why and what of Scott into a few sentences.
When I finally lift my head, Miller’s still staring at me, in that patient way of his.
“You remember what I told you? About why it was dinosaurs for me?”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Your dad.”
“My dad. Well . . . as you know, he . . . left. And then . . . my mom remarried. She had my brothers. She . . . started over.” I dig my thumbnail into my palm.
“I know I told you I don’t begrudge that.
That I don’t blame her, and I don’t. I really do mean that.
But I do think, too, that somewhere along the way .
. . I started to wonder why just me wasn’t enough for her.
Or my dad.” Blinking up at him through wet lashes, the jellyfish blur into swirls of colour beside me, and all I can see is the flinch of pain lancing across his eyes when his thumb immediately finds the curve of my cheek, sweeping away a stray tear.
“I just wanted someone to choose me. And when we were eighteen, Scott did.”
Miller’s thumb twitches against my cheek, but his hand splays out, fingers finding the bottom of my chin so he can hold my head up.
“It’s something you don’t think would ever happen to you.
It’s the type of thing that happens to other people.
But then . . . it’s you and it’s your life, and you’ve got no reasonable explanation for it other than you just .
. . let it happen.” I chew on the inside of my cheek, with a half-hearted shrug.
“It wasn’t always bad, and even when it was, it wasn’t all bad, if that makes sense.
We had a lot in common. We had shared interests.
Once upon a time, we could talk about those interests for hours and hours, before the debates turned cutting and cruel.
Don’t get me wrong . . . he’s not . . . he’s not good.
Our relationship wasn’t good. It was one-sided, and it was a thief.
But I do think, in so many ways, we made each other.
” Confusion flickers across Miller’s face, and I try to explain the best way I can.
“He didn’t have the best homelife. His parents were .
. . cruel. And I think, he wanted to be loved.
So very, very badly, too. But I don’t think he cared how he got that love.
So, he took. And he took. And he took.” I press my palm to my chest with a wet laugh.
“And there was me, giving and giving and giving, inflating his ego so much I won’t be surprised if one day it bursts and kills him. ”
“That’d be a real fucking shame,” Miller says flatly.
“So, there you have it. Nothing special. Nothing earth-shattering. Just the oldest story in the book.” I snort, shrugging again. “Don’t worry, it’s not a mistake I’ll be making again.”
He nods, slow, dragging his tongue along his teeth before he asks quietly, “Is that why—dating was on your list too? Do you not . . . have you not dated?”
I shake my head. “No. Not really, and I still don’t . . . trust myself to be able to love someone properly, without . . . mixing the whole thing up.”
Something else flashes in his eyes—pain or disappointment or longing—but it’s gone as quickly as it came, and he taps his thumb against my cheek before he gently lets go and swings back around to face the jellyfish.
He watches them before he says, voice rough, “I’d have chosen you.
” He swallows, and he chokes out, sort of like he’s rushing to add the words, “Back then.”
The words are right there—my tongue moves against my lips, ready to spell them out.
To tell him that he’s worth choosing, too.
That I have no idea why his mom left him behind as a kid, and even though he thinks he didn’t find him in time, and even though I didn’t know him, I’m so, so certain Matt would have spent his entire life choosing Miller, too. The way his aunt and uncle did.
That, I think, there’s an ever-growing part of me that would love to be chosen by him.
But the pieces of me that still sit around my feet poke and prod at me, sharp, and I wonder if I’ll ever understand the difference: between being chosen and being loved.
And if, maybe, I’d ever be so lucky to experience both at the same time.
So, I nudge my shoulder against his instead, whispering, “I certainly hope not. I was too old for you.”
He laughs, and it really is a beautiful sound that makes me wonder, too. Swinging my feet around, I plant them on the ground beside his and ask, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you ever . . . loved someone?”
“Sure.” He shrugs a shoulder. “Matty. My aunt and uncle. My mom, when I was a kid.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I correct softly. “Have you ever been in love?”
He swallows. “No.”
“Too bad,” I murmur.
He turns to face me, brows dipped, and full lips set in a frown. “Why?”
“I think you’d be good at it.”
He laughs again, harsher this time, and palms his jaw. “No one . . . uh . . . I don’t think any of them—the people I’ve dated—wanted to be loved by me. Not . . . really.”
“Their loss,” I whisper, blinking up at the jellyfish. “I know you said I’m the shark and you’re the dinosaur—”
“Rawr,” he says again, and I snort, biting down on the inside of my cheek.
I point towards the aquarium glass and all the swirls of colour. “But I think, we should both be jellyfish.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
My hand sweeps out. “Look at them! The oldest multi-organ species on earth. Talk about the survival skills. They survived all those extinctions! We should try to be more like the jellyfish.”
“You already did—” he starts, turning to face me, and when he does, our knees touch again.
“You said, uh, at the gala . . . that you were just like the dinosaurs. That you suffered a mass extinction event. But, uh, I think . . . you were already like them.” He waves a hand towards the tank, but his eyes never leave mine.
“You survived, Ren. Whether you think you did or not.” His eyes drop to my chest, but they linger right above my heart before he looks back up at me, eyes all clouded with tears. “And you helped me survive too.”
“No,” I murmur, cupping his cheek. He does lean in this time, almost instantly. “You did that, Miller. I offered to help. But no one can make you try again. No one can make you do anything.”
“Helps when someone wakes you up and performs CPR so you can start living again,” he says on a deep exhale.
My heart does this thing in my chest, maybe like he was the one doing CPR, but something pokes at me again, and I let go of his face, spinning back to the tank. “So, if we’re both jellyfish, which one am I?”
He doesn’t hesitate, pointing one out. “The pretty one. With the bright pink tentacles.”
I smile. “Which one are you?”
He shrugs, but a grin bites at his cheek. “I don’t know, probably that ugly, upside-down one over in the corner.”
I don’t try to muffle the sound of my laughter this time.
It doesn’t even occur to me, actually.
Not once.