Chapter 24
Miller
I pick Ren up in the stupidest car I have in the garage.
Matty’s favourite, actually.
It even has those doors that open up instead of out.
She does do a double take, making a big show of leaning backwards so she doesn’t get hit when the passenger door opens slower than almost anything on the planet, but she’s quieter than usual when she slides into the pristine leather seat.
My thumb taps against the steering wheel, eyes cutting between the traffic on the road and her—the downturned pout of full lips, the bottom one heavier with something, blue eyes still bright but not shining like usual, and her hair, tied in a messy braid, draped over a shoulder.
“You, uh, okay?” I clear my throat, chancing another sideways glance.
“Hmm?” she asks absentmindedly before she turns in her seat to face me.
“You seem quiet, that’s all. We don’t have to do this today, if you’re not up for it.”
“Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m just tired.” She reaches out, tapping my shoulder with each word. “I’m excited to play catch. I can’t wait to see you put those good hands to use.”
She scrunches her nose when she says it, but something winks at me from behind her eyes and I have to put my hands at ten and two, so I don’t veer into fucking traffic.
I tighten my grip on the wheel. “What’s got you so tired?”
Ren swings her feet, kicking her sandals off so she can bring them up to rest on the seat. “Work. It’s a lot to process the new collection for the exhibit, and obviously I have to make sure it’s in the best shape possible for our practice date.”
She throws me a look, and a grin twitches at the corners of my mouth. “Oh yeah?” I ask. “For us and our practice date, not for any of the donors or partners?”
“Obviously our foray back into dating will be the most important part of the night.” She clicks her tongue before flicking a hand in the air. “It doesn’t help that Scott’s constantly lingering; you never know when you might round a corner and, poof, there he is.”
“Too bad it’s not the other kind of poof.” I finally cut her a sideways look. “You know, the one that made all the dinosaurs go extinct back in the day.”
She tips her head back, the lines of her neck shift in laughter, and her braid brushes across the curve of her chest. “That would save me all the unfortunate run-ins.”
My eyes snap back to the road. “Are there ever . . . fortunate run-ins with him?”
“You know, I don’t think so.” She considers, and all the former lightness in her words seems like it’s eclipsed by whatever happened between them last.
“Was he—he’s not—he isn’t hurting you or—” I start.
“Scott’s not . . . like that.” She frowns, tapping a finger to her bottom lip before I can say anything else.
“He’s certainly not harmless, don’t get me wrong.
But he’s not . . . like that. The way he behaves .
. . it’s so much more about him and how he feels about himself than it is anyone else, I think. ”
“What do you mean?”
Her teeth come down on the inside of her cheeks as she tips her head back and forth.
“He came into the library the other day when I was digitizing some of the new assets.” She throws me another sideways look, whispering, “Very boring,” before she keeps talking.
“He was just . . . being typical Scott. Throwing his weight around and acting like a superior asshole about the job application. But I finally asked him why he decided to come back after four years. Why he felt the need to . . . take again.”
“Let me guess. Some big show about how great he is and how you can only advance the collection at the museum with him there.”
She snorts a soft laugh. “Shockingly, no. Though I’m sure those thoughts are floating around somewhere in that brain.
But he said it was because he . . . missed me.
” She stumbles over the last words, and my heart stumbles too, because there’s no fucking way.
But Ren shakes her head. “The crazy thing is, I think he meant it. In his limited capacity.”
My heart stops this time. “What do you—uh, what does that mean?”
“I think he does miss me. But not for the right reasons.” She knots her fingers together.
“He misses having someone to fill the purpose he thinks love is supposed to serve. For him, that was this . . . selfish thing. He thought it was to make him feel better, to exist solely to prop him up. But in his case, that better turned into superiority eventually.”
I nod. I’ve never been in love, but that definition feels . . . hollow. I’d like to think, if I loved someone, it’d be so much more about them and who they are than what they did for me. “What is it . . . for you then?”
Ren sniffs, tossing me a wry look. “I can tell you what I thought it was. Being chosen. But I don’t think I ever really learned how to love properly, either.”
“Isn’t it, uh, supposed to be a team sport?” I ask, scrubbing my jaw.
That sounded even stupider out loud than it did in my head.
But she doesn’t seem to think so. She cocks her head, brows drawn in thought before a smile lights up her face. “You might be onto something, Miller.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her smile turns quiet. “Scott wasn’t a team player. But to be fair, neither was I. I was only playing for one team—his. And I let my own down colossally.”
“I’m team Ren.”
“Oh good, our first supporter,” she says on a laugh.
I shake my head, palming the wheel as I make the turn onto Matty’s old street. “Pretty sure you were first. When you decided to choose yourself four years ago.”
She straightens her shoulders. “Are you, Miller Colson-Burke, shortstop and competitor extraordinaire, willingly putting yourself in second place on a team?”
“If it’s your team? Yeah,” I tell her, and I let myself stare for a minute when I put the car in park.
At the faint sweep of pink brushing across the pillows of her cheek.
The tiny swallow working her throat, the part to her lips and the scrape of her teeth across the bottom one, and the tears that shine like stars up in her eyes.
“I think we make a good team, actually,” she whispers, blinking up at me.
I swallow. “Me too.”
Ren’s mouth curves with a smile, and she raises her brows knowingly. “It’s a good thing, then, we decided on a practice date. I hear teamwork makes practice all the more effective.”
“From, uh, experience, it does.” I flash a flat smile to hide the way the word practice digs into my skin. “You wouldn’t . . . date, then? For real?”
“Not until I’m sure I know how to actually be a team player.” She rolls her eyes through laughter as she shifts to undo her seat belt and put her sandals back on.
You already do, I think.
We’re a team.
The best one I’ve ever been on.
But when she sits up, shoulders straight, shining smile, and the words “Ready to see what those good hands can do, if you are” spill from her lips, my heart does a freefall into my stomach, and the only thing there to catch it is the hard ground of realization that I’m not the kind of teammate she’d be interested in.
“Oh my god, he really was neat,” Ren says, half in amusement, half in wonder, arms wrapping around her stomach when she wanders down the hallway into Matt’s forever empty house.
“Looks exactly like he left it,” I tell her, feet somehow still rooted to the spot in the foyer. “Fresh off the World Series celebration, and there wasn’t even a dish left in the sink when we went up to the cottage for the weekend.”
Those words snag, but they don’t echo endlessly through my chest like they would have a few weeks ago. And for the first time in a while, I imagine what he’d say.
I can feel him—arm slung lazily over my shoulders while he gives me a shake, whispering just for me, “You would use my clean house to impress a girl. Penthouse too messy?”
“Not just a girl,” I’d tell him.
That not just a girl glances back over her shoulder at me and starts walking backwards with one hand stretched out in invitation. “We can go in together, if you think that would help.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Okay.”
My hand meets hers, and when her fingers slide in beside mine, I imagine Matt clapping me on the back, how he’d tell me not to fuck it up with her.
But he’s not here, and as much as that doesn’t hurt the way it did a month ago, I’ve got no way to tell him that someone else already did fuck it up with her, and even though I think it’d be an honour to spend the rest of my life on my knees picking up the pieces, she wants to pick them up herself.
Ren rolls her fingers along the back of my hand, tapping where the inked M stretches. I’ve started to notice she does that every time she touches the tattoo. Like she’s introducing herself to Matty each time or saying her own version of hello.
It does help, walking into the house with her. I don’t come here if I can avoid it, and it’s a weird sort of feeling in my chest—happiness, maybe—when I notice how good of a job the housekeeper’s done making sure everything’s still the way he liked it.
Ren fakes a gasp, her fingers squeezing mine, when we get into the living room. “I’m besmirching his clean floors and tidy house by being here, Miller.”
The back of my neck heats, and I force a sideways grin. “You’re really not.”
The same pictures hang in a gallery wall behind the couch. Illustrations of vintage cars. Paintings of his favourites he had commissioned. A sketch of the stadium. Our rookie cards, hung proudly between all of them.
“Is that you?” She points towards the frame in the middle left.
“My rookie card, yeah,” I say roughly.
She glances at me, cheeks soft with a gentle smile. “He framed your rookie card? And hung it in his living room?”