Chapter 26
Ava
The cinema is empty. That’s because I bought out the entire evening screening. Principal dancers get paid well enough to have one spectacular lapse in financial sanity per calendar year, and this is mine. Also, I’m out of options, and this is the only gesture I could think of.
I’m wearing his hoodie. The heather-grey one I took from Oban and never returned, because the thought of handing it back felt like losing a limb.
The sleeves drown my hands and the hem grazes mid-thigh over my tights.
Deep in the cotton fibres, there’s still a trace of him.
I pull the cuffs over my hands because it’s the only thing keeping me from walking out of here before he arrives.
If he arrives.
He might not come.
I walked out of AxeVenture with the pieces of his heart in my fists because accepting that another human being puts me before anything else, even himself, felt like standing on stage without skin. Unsurvivable.
I wasn’t protecting him. I was protecting myself from the day he’d discover what everyone figures out eventually: that loving me is too hard.
My knee bounces. Up-down, up-down. The old metronome. I plant my boot heel into the sticky carpet and hold.
He’s a no-show. Ten past the hour. And why would he come? I know I wouldn’t. Today is the first of April so maybe he thinks it was an April fool’s day prank.
I stand up and grab my bag. This was silly. Grand gestures are for people who haven’t burned the bridge. I made a horrible mistake, and I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.
I get up and turn to the aisle.
The double doors swing open. Foyer light spills in, a golden column across the floor.
My diaphragm seizes, and I clamp the armrest so hard the brass tacks indent the heel of my hand.
Scottie Kerr doesn’t walk into a room, he fills it. Even a small cinema. A mountain in a navy blue Rebels hoodie, he moves like a man who has always been too much for the world he inhabits.
Not for me. He’s not too much for me.
The doors swing shut behind him, and the dark erases everything except his silhouette against the green wash of the exit sign.
Scottie scans the rows and tracks straight to the highest tier. He knows where to find me.
Then he climbs up the slope. I spend my life studying bodies, and his is wary. Realising that I’m the disaster he is trying to survive leaves a bitter taste on my tongue.
He reaches the end of the row. His face is close enough to read, and I almost wish it weren’t. Tired shadows under his eyes. Thick stubble. But underneath all of it…tenderness. Hope, maybe.
Or maybe I’m imagining it because I want it so badly I’m inventing things.
‘Ava.’
My name in his mouth after months of silence reduces my finale to a desperate urge to simply touch his face.
I can’t look at him for long. If I really look at him I’ll start crying, and I can’t start crying because I haven’t even apologised yet and—
Okay, calm down.
‘Hi. I got you popcorn.’ I look at the bucket the size of a pedal bin that I put on the armrest.
Scottie stands there at the end of the row. I feel the heat of his focus on me, and I still can’t meet his gaze. If he’s angry, if he’s here to tell me to stop contacting him, I don’t think I’ll make it out alive.
And I deserve it. I earned every bit of his resentment. I still hope he can forgive me.
‘Ava, what—’
‘I’m sorry.’ It comes out too fast, and I’m talking to the popcorn bucket because I still can’t lift my chin. ‘I’m so sorry. I know I don’t have the right to ask you to come here, I know I hurt you, I know I—’ I dig my nails into the velvet. ‘Please sit. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.’
I squeeze my lids shut and wait for the inevitable thunk of the other shoe dropping. Yes, he’s turned up. But what if it’s not why I hoped?
Oh God.
This is it. This is where he tells me no. Where he says I had my chance and I blew it. And I’ll have to watch him leave and know that I did this, I ruined this, I—
He squeezes himself into the narrow space beside me, and the relief that jolts through my body is overwhelming.
‘Did you book the entire place?’ he asks.
One elbow bumps the cupholder, and his knees jam into the seat back in front. He brushes my arm through the hoodie, and the contact registers from wrist to neck, injecting bubbles straight into my bloodstream.
‘I did.’
‘Why?’
This is where it started and maybe… Maybe it’s where we can start again.
‘Because each time we were here, you didn’t ask questions. You just let me be. And that…was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. And I owe you an explanation. Plus an apology. And I thought—’
‘That’s a lot of popcorn, Ava.’
‘I wanted to repay the favour.’
He takes a fistful and eats it, watching me while he chews, and I can’t tell whether he’s deciding to stay or working out how to leave without making it worse.
‘You got the salted.’ He speaks around a mouthful, and the unmasked gratitude on his face is a dead giveaway.
I knew it.
‘Yeah, I caught the wince you tried to hide each time you forced down the sweet stuff.’
A single corner of his mouth ticks upward. A tiny victory, but it doesn’t mean I’m off the hook.
Time for the next move.
I pull my phone from the hoodie’s front pocket and text Fraser up in the booth. The projector hums to life above us and the opening credits of A Scottish Castle for Christmas roll across the screen.
‘It’s April, Ava.’ Scottie sinks lower in his seat, and his knee bumps mine.
‘So what? I was feeling nostalgic. And true Christmas romance aficionados don’t stop only because it’s spring.’
Neither of us moves. The touch stays, denim against tights, and that small connection gives me enough courage to speak.
‘I was wrong,’ I say. ‘In the bar. I told you that you saw people as projects, and some of that was true. But it’s not a bad thing.
It means you care. So much. And I’m not used to that.
’ I take a long breath before I continue.
‘I labelled myself as a lost cause so I wouldn’t have to find out if you would stay.
I used my own mess as a shield. And I’m sorry. ’
He angles his body toward me. The pale blue glow of the projector washes over his profile.
‘But… The thing is…’ I trace the armrest with my finger. ‘I’ve spent my life waiting for somebody to choose me. In auditions, in relationships, in a twisted way even by my parents. And, very often, they didn’t. So that’s what I learned to expect.’
‘You’re not the only one who fucked it up.
’ His hand is curled on his thigh. ‘I was afraid that you’d realise you didn’t need me.
’ He turns to face me properly, and the naked honesty in his face tears a strip off my heart.
‘I thought if I bulldozed every problem… If I made myself indispensable and held up the roof, you’d have to stay.
But all I did was show you that I didn’t think you were strong enough. Which is utter pish.’
‘It is, and it isn’t.’ I reach out and find his hand. ‘But I can hold the roof for a while. Or we can both hold it.’
Scottie stares at my hand covering his. Then he brings our joined hands to his mouth and kisses my knuckles.
‘I almost called you three times,’ I say. ‘Got as far as your name on the screen and then I threw my phone across the room.’
‘Only three?’
‘Took out my last tea mug on the third one. Had to stop.’
He laughs, and the sound of it breaks the dam that I’ve been holding in place with force of will for forty-four days. I drop my chin to hide my face and swipe both sleeves over my cheeks, but the water falls faster than I can wipe.
‘I’m sorry, Bear. I’m so sorry. I want to try again. I want to do this right, if you let me. I-I… If you need time to think about that I understand, but I did pay for the length of one film, so—’
Scottie knocks the bucket clean off the armrest. Kernels erupt across the carpet, and while I’m still mourning the loss of fifteen quid worth of kiosk goods, he leans over and grabs me.
One palm behind my neck, the other on my waist, he lifts me out of my seat.
I land hard on his broad thighs, straddling him.
It’s messy, a tangle of limbs, but his hands are iron bands on my waist, and I don’t care because now his lips are on mine.
Eleven weeks of silence compressed into a single, burning point of contact.
He kisses me with the ferocity of a man who has been running this moment behind his eyelids every night since I left. His stubble scrapes my chin, a coarse sting I will cherish for days. I bunch fistfuls of his hoodie and make a sound that’s extremely unbecoming of a professional dancer.
My hands find his face, his hair, the dense ridge of his shoulders. He is vast and concrete and here, and I’m trying to get closer, trying to crawl inside him, but the armrests are digging into my knees, and the angle is all wrong and I don’t care, I don’t care—
He pulls back a fraction. We’re nose to nose, breathing hard, foreheads touching.
‘I love you, Ava.’ He says it simply – as if he’s been holding it in, waiting for the right moment. ‘I love you, and I am forty-four days starved of you. And if you ever do that to me again, I swear I’ll—’
‘I love you, too.’ I’ve said it before, but now I finally understand why people write songs about it. The feeling fills every single one of my cells with warmth.
‘You nicked my jumper,’ he murmurs against my chin.
‘It’s cosy. And it smells like you.’
His hands travel under the hoodie and find my bare skin. The texture of his rough palms catches on my skin. ‘You’ve nothing under this again. No bra?’
I gasp as his thumbs graze the underside of my breasts. ‘Maybe.’
He groans, low and gut-deep. ‘You’re by far the cutest and sluttiest friend I’ve ever had.’
‘I hope so. In fact, I don’t want you to have any other slutty friends.’
‘How slutty exactly are we talking?’
I move my hand between my thighs, fist the fabric of my tights and yank. The nylon rips with a loud hiss.