Chapter 23
Ren
“Do you think the Maritime Museum has a library this big?”
If the self-important sound of loafers clicking on a tile floor didn’t give Scott away, the spite hidden under something most people might mistake for teasing certainly would.
“How would I know?” I don’t bother looking up but keep clicking through the files on my computer.
He helps himself to the chair across from me, like he does with most things in his life, and folds himself neatly down, stretching his long legs out underneath the table so far into my space I feel like ghosts of his stupid shoes whisper past the pointed toes of my heels.
He shrugs, lazy, in my periphery. “I heard a rumour that you might become very well acquainted with the museum in the near future.”
I make a show of clicking down on my mouse harder than necessary. “If you don’t mind, I have a thrilling afternoon of data cleaning to do. As you know, we just acquired a family of saurolophus for the new collection, and I need to make sure the digital assets are catalogued properly.”
He doesn’t make any moves to leave. “Well, do you? Think they have a library this big?”
Pressing my fingers to the bridge of my nose, I try to breathe in and out, and not to let him bait me.
I try not to feel inferior. I try to think of people who think I’m anything but.
A few weeks ago, it would have been just my best friend popping up—bright smile, and even brighter eyes hidden behind her constantly falling glasses, and the way her umber cheeks turn pink when she gets excited about news in the invertebrate world.
But now, there’s someone else there too.
With navy eyes and unruly hair and a grin that makes you feel like you’d be able to climb a mountain if you tried, and a tattooed hand that would help you every step of the way.
I look up, painting on a banal smile. “No, I don’t think the Maritime Museum has a library this big.” But when he nods, something like vindication flashing in his eyes, my smile changes. “My turn. I answered your question, now I’d like you to answer mine.”
Scott shifts, the first sign of his own discomfort.
I ask, before he can say anything else, “Why’d you do it?
Why did you let me leave with nothing more than your disbelief in me and a gesture showing me the door, then parachute back into my life?
Did it take you the better part of four years to realize I wasn’t coming back?
You had a perfectly good job at KU—the job we’d both been dreaming of since we were eighteen.
Did you just wake up one day and think, I bet she’s got more to give? Let me go take another dream?”
He doesn’t blink. He assesses, like always, before he says, “Because I miss you, Renny.”
I can’t help it—I burst out laughing, but that laughter falls into nothing when I see the straight lines of his face. “Oh—oh my god. Scott—you’re serious.” I blink, mouth parted before I slowly shake my head. “You really think . . . you miss me?”
A muscle in his jaw ticks, unamused. “I don’t think. I know.”
“Well, I don’t.” I set down my pen, interlacing my fingers to lean forward on the table—a move borrowed from my therapist. “I think you think you miss me. But I don’t think you really know the first thing about what it means to miss someone for reasons that aren’t selfish.”
“And you do?” The words come out like a scoff.
My brows come together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He leans across the table, too, only inches from me now, and I do my best not to recoil and shift back in my seat.
“You love to make me the villain. But if you put our relationship under a microscope, you’d see we aren’t very different.
You were selfish, too, Ren. You wanted someone to love you, to choose you—” He throws out words I gave him years and years ago when things were still painted in shades of good.
“And that had nothing to do with me or who I was as a person. I’d call that selfish by its very definition, too. ”
“You know, I don’t entirely disagree with you—I guess there’s a first time for everything.
” My smile tilts, sad, before I take a steadying breath, readying myself to explain something like you might to a child.
“But one of us is trying to change our behaviour, Scott. One of us is trying very, very hard not to repeat the same mistakes.”
It’s his turn to laugh. But the edges of his laughter cut. His head tips back, exposing the lines of his neck, and everything about his face says disdain when he finally looks back at me. “And is that what you’re doing with the shortstop? Not repeating your mistakes?”
His words take one of those pieces of me he spent years carving away—the sharpest one, I think—and they slice at all those freshly grown petals. I try to snatch them back when I pull away from the table, but my words sound choppy. “You don’t know the first thing about Miller.”
“But I do know the first thing about you.” He gives me some sort of patronizing smile. “I never said anything about him.”
“I’d rather you don’t.” The forced line of my own smile strains, and I feel some of that bravado wilt away. “He’s none of your business, and neither am I. Not anymore.”
Scott raises a singular brow with a slow shake of his head, and gives what looks like a weary shrug. “What are you going to do, Renny? Interview for the job?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
I throw my arms wide. “I don’t know, Scott. Unfortunately, as I am neither on the hiring committee nor am I clairvoyant, I can’t tell you what comes next.”
“I can.” He says it simply.
“What’s that?”
He leans forward in his seat, and it’s his turn to explain something to me with the patience of a parent to a child.
“They’ll make you an offer, you’ll waffle back and forth about whether you should take it because you want a different title but you won’t go back to school to get it, and eventually, you’ll turn the job down because you can’t be alone. ”
I think he took pruning shears to me that time.
He doesn’t just stop at all the new growth.
He cuts right through my ribs.
But there’s something written on the inside of me. Words given to me by someone who thinks I have a lot of reasons to be exactly who I am.
You survived, Ren. Whether you think you did or not.
“I’ve been alone for four years, Scott.” I sniff, dragging a knuckle along my lash line. It’s one thing for the tears to start—how could they not? It hurts, when someone cuts through to the centre of your very being, even if there’s something good waiting there on the inside.
But I don’t want him to see them fall.
He tried to be supportive when I cried, at the start. But eventually, any sign of a shining tear just frustrated him.
I can’t really tell what he thinks of them now. He just sits there.
I almost expect him to reach across the table, a singular thumb ready to swipe them away. And that almost makes me laugh. Because it’s not Scott who possesses any inkling of kindness and empathy. It’s the other people in my life who care about me who set this other expectation.
Imani or Miller—they’d be leaning across the table to catch the tears, so I didn’t have to.
But Scott looks at them clinically, like he’s unsure of their exact source.
He goes as far as to steeple his hands, resting his fingers on the precipice of his mouth before he decides to stand and offer his final word.
“You didn’t have to be alone, Ren.” He clears his throat, his hands finding the pockets of his tailored khakis.
“You don’t have to take that job. You could apply to school here. I could support you this time.”
One brow arches, and he turns on his heel, leaving me like he’s delivered some impassioned speech about his undying love for me.
And I think, in Scott’s mind—the way Scott sees love—he probably has.
The only thing that left me with was the certainty that Scott Saunders doesn’t know what love is—he never has—and I’m certainly not interested in him, or any suggestions about what I should or shouldn’t do.
But there’s this other thing that’s so hard to ignore, sitting here with my chest, torn open by his hands and his words again—even with all the beautiful, lovely writing, all fresh and newly scratched on the inside of me about my resiliency and strength—that some of those words, they might just be true.