CHAPTER SIX #3
"First time past twelve months in nine years.
" She turned her own mug slowly on the table, not quite looking at him, the way he so often didn't quite look at her when a sentence carried more weight than he was used to handling.
"I don't entirely know why I did it. Or — that's not true.
I know exactly why I did it. I just don't know how to say the reason out loud without it sounding like more than I've got a right to ask for yet. "
"Say it anyway," Renz said, echoing, without either of them quite noting the echo, the exact words she'd said to him three weeks ago at the fire pit, the phrase apparently having lodged itself somewhere useful in both of them, a small shared incantation for the moments that needed courage more than eloquence.
Pip looked up at him. "Because for the first time in longer than I can remember, I don't want the ceiling above my head to still be a stranger's ceiling in two years' time.
I want it to be one I know the shape of the water stains on.
I want—" and here her voice caught, briefly, the first genuine crack either of them had let show all month, "I want a kitchen table I've actually eaten a hundred dinners at, with someone specific, instead of one I keep half-set for a life I never quite let myself live in.
I'm tired of being good at leaving, Renz.
I've been good at it my whole life and it's never once felt like a gift.
I just want to be bad at leaving for a while. I want to see what that feels like."
Renz reached across the table — not for her hand this time, but for the empty frame, turning it slowly in his fingers, looking at the bare space where a photograph would eventually go, the driftwood grain catching the kitchen light. "You'll need something to put in this," he said, quiet.
"I know."
"I could bring one round. From the gathering. Cal took a decent one of the whole crew, by the fire — you and me're in it, if you don't mind sharing a frame with forty other people for a first go."
Pip laughed, wet and sudden and real, the tension of the last several minutes breaking loose all at once, and reached over to take the frame back from him, and set it down between them on the table, still empty, but no longer quite so unbearably so.
"I don't mind sharing," she said. "Not with this lot. Not with you."
"Might need to get a second frame eventually, though," Renz said, something careful and hopeful in his voice. "For just us. Once there's a photo that's just us, I mean. Not sharing with forty other people."
"Getting ahead of yourself, Kowalski."
"Maybe a bit." He didn't take it back, though, and Pip found she didn't want him to, the small unclaimed hope of it sitting warm between them alongside the empty frame, both of them aware, without needing to say so, that the sentence had been its own kind of small proposal, tentative and entirely sincere.
He stayed later than usual that Thursday, the two of them talking about nothing in particular long after the tea had gone cold, and when he finally left, standing at her door with his hand on the frame of it, not the picture frame but the actual doorframe, he looked back at the kitchen table behind her, the empty frame still sitting propped against the fruit bowl, and something in his face settled, quiet and certain, the specific expression of a man beginning, very cautiously, to believe that a thing he wanted might actually be allowed to happen to him.
? ? ?
The vet clinic rang the following Monday, the head vet asking, plainly, whether Pip had given any more thought to the permanent position — the one she'd deflected in under four words the last time it came up, quick enough that she'd half-hoped nobody would notice she'd done it.
She noticed herself hesitating this time, the old reflex rising to deflect again, and then, deliberately, didn't.
"I'll take it," she said, before the hesitation could win. "The permanent role. I'm in."
"Bloody oath, finally," the vet said, laughing, clearly relieved. "Was starting to think you liked being on a contract just so you'd always have an excuse ready to leave."
"Bit close to the mark, that," Pip admitted, "but not anymore.
" She hung up a few minutes later, the paperwork already promised for the following week, and sat a moment at her kitchen table — her table, properly hers now, the way the lease and the frame and the whole quiet accumulating shape of her life here had slowly stopped feeling provisional — and felt the same clean, frightening certainty she'd felt signing the two-year lease, a woman choosing permanence twice in the same fortnight and finding, both times, that the ground held.
She rang Renz before she'd even properly decided to. "Got some news."
"Good news, from the sound of your voice."
"Took the permanent position at the clinic.
No more contracts." She could hear him smiling down the line, that specific warmth he never quite managed to keep out of his voice when something good happened to her.
"Feels like I'm just handing in my resignation from the whole leaving business, one contract at a time. "
"Proud of you," Renz said, simple and plain, no elaborate framing round it, the exact unadorned honesty she was slowly learning to trust rather than brace against. "Come round tonight. I'll cook something to celebrate properly."
"Wouldn't miss it," Pip said, and meant it in every sense the words could carry.