12. Ruth
Chapter twelve
Ruth
Ruth
G emma dunked a crispy fry into a puddle of ketchup, watching me with suspicious, blue eyes. “We should just internet stalk him.”
“We’re not internet stalking him,” I replied dismissively. Around us, the small, cafe-style restaurant teemed with patrons, filled to the brim for lunch. The great thing about Angel’s Bistro was that it had the best fries in the city. The problem with Angel’s Bistro was that everyone in Eugene knew that. Gemma and I had managed to grab a table for an early lunch, and she had ordered a hamburger and fries while I’d gotten the Reuben… and fries. Obviously. One did not come to Angel’s and not order fries.
We were at an inside table, seated along the window wall that overlooked the equally full patio outside. Although it was the second week of August, people were that desperate to get high-quality sandwiches, apparently. Angel’s had a modern, industrial vibe accented with rustic touches that softened the edge of all the black metal, exposed ductwork, and shiny chrome finishes.
I took a bite of the last half of my Reuben, savoring the salt and tangy bread mixed with Angel’s signature fry sauce. Gemma gave me a squint. “Because you’re ignoring him?”
“Because… I don’t want to know,” I admitted around a mouthful of sandwich.
“You don’t want to know if your ex is successful?” Gemma asked, poking her plate with her fry to punctuate each question. “Or a failure? Or dating someone? Or married?”
I swallowed and gave her a sardonic mouth scrunch. “Why would I want to know that?”
“Because… we just do.” She shoved the fry in her mouth.
“I really don’t,” I insisted. Alright, lied . I’d already internet-stalked Vaughn the day I’d gone home with Gemma after my failed date. I amended that in my head quickly. Failed fake date. The “fake” part was important because I’d totally ditched Cal Reed with a hastily typed text, and I hadn’t heard from him since. After I’d managed to calm myself down from my panic attack, I’d called Gemma and begged her to come get me from the hotel. She’d stayed the night with me, and then we’d high-tailed it out of there early in the morning.
But it wasn’t ditching him if the date hadn’t been real, right?
My conscience didn’t seem to think so. The guilt over leaving Cal there after he’d bought me a hotel room for the night kept niggling at me. The embarrassment of having a panic attack after one kiss was even worse. It was better not to think about it, but I was having as much luck with that as I was with ignoring the fact that Vaughn had texted me out of nowhere.
Our waitress brought our check, and I reached for my purse, only to realize it wasn’t there. It was still in Cal’s car. Gemma gave me a shrewd look as she pulled her bright pink wallet out of her designer bag. “You going to call your husband and get your purse back sometime this century?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. I took a sip of diet cola and swallowed hard. Even the idea of texting Cal again—where it would butt up against the last one that said, “Went home with Gemma. Thanks again.”—made me want to shrivel up like a prune. “I’ll just… cancel all my cards and get new ones.”
“And get a new license?” Gemma’s long lashes fell to half-mast. “Really?”
Sighing in disgust, I leaned my forehead against the glass wall to my right. “I don’t know. I can’t text him again.”
“Aren’t you supposed to go to like, an award thing with him next weekend, anyway?” Gemma asked absently as she filled out the tip on the receipt.
I waved a lazy hand. “I was supposed to. I seriously doubt he’s going to bring that up now. I completely freaked out on him, Gem. Like… psycho-lady freakout.”
Gemma sighed, setting down the pen firmly. She gave me an irritated, direct glare. “Unresolved trauma will do that to you. Moron.”
“ You’re a moron,” I mumbled back. I leaned back in my chair, pressing my glasses to my face as the embarrassment of Friday night washed over me again. It was Tuesday, now, and I still felt that unease as acutely as I had Saturday morning when I’d left. Actually, it was almost worse.
“Actually, I take that back,” Gemma said thoughtfully, picking up another fry. “I saw what you did with your newest set of matches yesterday. I knew you had a genius brain.” She pointed the fry at me. “Thank you for proving me right.”
I gave her a hopeful smile. “Yeah?”
“ Dude , sending them three options for potential matches was brilliant.” She quoted my colorful, brightly designed email as she waved her fry around. “‘Would you like your match based on astrological sign, matching interests, or physical description?’ I can’t believe we didn’t think to organize it that way.”
I sat up and leaned my chin on my hand. “They all responded, and they all had different preferences, so here’s hoping.” I had spent all weekend distracting myself from my discomfort by launching myself into a new matchmaking plan. What Janice had said, and my experience with Cal, had ignited the idea in my brain. So far, it seemed promising.
“Usually, we just read through their stuff and kind of go off gut instinct, but you got all clever, you nerdy scientist,” Gemma grinned. “Make them choose, and then even if it sucks, they can go with something else they’re in charge of.” She made the “chef's kiss” motion with her fingers. “ Brilliance.”
“Thanks.” I nudged the corner of my glasses with my knuckle. “I might save my job yet.”
I went to cross my legs, and just in time, remembered my knee was in agony. The joint gave a painful throb, and I glanced down at it. My long, yellow, floral skirt covered my legs, but I knew under the fabric, there was a ping pong ball-sized splinter infection on my knee. I hadn’t been able to get the entire sliver out Friday night, and I had assumed it would “work its way out” like my grandmother had always told me. But on Saturday it had ached fiercely, and on Sunday it had begun to swell. When I’d woken this morning, I knew something was wrong.
Like a physical echo of my discomfort over Cal and our date, the pain in my knee had grown and festered, and I knew if I didn’t do something about it soon, it was going to become unbearable. Only, that required a visit to the doctor. No can do , I thought grimly. I had outright lied to Cal about seeing Dr. Rook regularly. I didn’t know the man—had never seen him and had no idea he was an OB/GYN. I’d just seen his name on the nameplate at the bottom of our building and had figured I could get away with the lie. I didn’t see doctors.
I stood stiffly, taking the weight off my leg and waiting for Gemma to box up her leftovers. She glanced at me as we threaded through the packed restaurant. Although the hum of voices buzzed in my ears like an angry hive, I distinctly heard Gemma’s tsk of reproval before we walked out of the air-conditioned building and into the sweltering heat. I limped beside her, and she gave me an expression that practically shouted her thoughts across the space between us.
I lifted my hands. “What, Gemma?”
“Are you for real?” She gestured to my knee as we made a left turn down the sidewalk lined with mature trees and pretty business fronts. Gemma ambled along to my right between me and the car-lined street. “How long are you going to ignore that?”
“How long are you going to pester me?” I shot back.
“As long as it takes for you to knock it off,” she snapped.
I glared, but it was hard to hold it with Gemma giving me that goofy, wide-eyed look that pulled her round, cherubic features into a comical mask. I was fairly certain it was impossible for Gemma to look anything but kind of cute or kind of silly. Her angry face usually came across as pouty and pink, and the incredulous expression she wore now looked just shy of crazed. Coupled with her curly blond hair she wore in two buns on her head, I couldn’t help but bite down a smile. “You’re overreacting.”
“You’re limping.”
I was. As we walked down the paved sidewalk, and a bicyclist barely managed to swerve and avoid us, the pain in my leg had notched up to a twenty out of ten, and the entire appendage shook with the effort to keep my body upright. I kept limping anyway. “It’ll work its way out eventually.”
“That’s a myth,” Gemma said with a roll of her eyes.
“I don’t think it is.” I pulled out my phone and tapped on the browser icon. “I’m looking it up.”
“I’m sorry, wait,” Gemma pressed her palms together and brought them to her mouth, rounding another incredulous look my way. “You’re just now looking this up?”
“I told you, they work themselves out,” I replied, distracted by the search I was typing into the search field. “Why would I look it up?”
“Wow.” Gemma shook her head. “Really, wow. You astound me. I’m amazed at how perfectly crafted your delusions are. You should teach classes: How to Ignore Everything That Has Hurt You.” I did a fast scan of the information that popped up on my phone screen. Biting my lip with a grimace, I closed the screen and slid the phone into the pocket of my skirt. Gemma gave me a cocky eyebrow tilt. “What did you learn, Dr. Coldwell?”
I cleared my throat. “I might need some antiseptic spray.”
“I knew it,” she sighed in exasperation. “Your self-harming trauma responses are finally going to find a way to kill you.”
“You’re very dramatic,” I pointed out.
“I’m a matchmaker,” Gemma said, gesturing at her entire, curvy body. “The fuck did you expect? I’m all about passion. And drama. And anyway, don’t you need your purse back from Dr. Dreamsicle? You should just kill two birds with one stone. ‘Hi there, Manly MD! You have my purse. Also, I have this wound.’” Gemma slid her hands down her waist suggestively. “‘Could you take a look at my body?’”
I leaned over and pushed her nearly off the curb. “Will you stop it?”
Gemma cackled, righting herself and then threading her arm around my waist and supporting my weight on the right. “Fine. But you should take the rest of the day off and go get this looked at by someone. Yeah?” I accepted her help gratefully, leaning against her as we reached the street and hit the crosswalk button. The sun slanted down on my head, angry and sizzling, and it made the ache in my knee grow hot-poker painful.
I swallowed, and although we’d just eaten, my throat already felt parched. “Yeah, alright,” I conceded. “I’ll go to the pharmacy and get some stuff. I think if I get it out, it’ll be okay.”
Gemma gave me a dubious look. We were nearly equal in height—both of us were much shorter than average. Her long lashes did a fast blink. “Did you intentionally mishear me or…?”
“Lay off,” I said with a side glare. “I will handle it.”
“You are horrible.”
“You’re just as bad,” I countered. “Remember when you got your wisdom teeth out, and they told you to bring someone with you, so you didn’t have to walk home? And you didn’t?”
“Shush,” Gemma sniffed.
“Or that one time you got tennis elbow and played actual tennis the next day?”
“Alright, alright, shut up,” Gemma gritted out, her eyes flaring. “Point made. You want me to drive you somewhere?”
“No, I’ve got it. Chill.” We crossed the street, moving slowly as I limped and my leg shook. The further we went, the worse I felt. I knew Gemma was right. And she knew why I couldn’t find a doctor.
It was unspoken between us—she’d been there when my grandmother had passed away. She’d stayed up late with me after each tortured appointment, and she’d been there to let me cry or rant. She’d picked me up from the hospital where they had poked, assessed, drugged, and ultimately couldn’t save the only parental figure who had truly loved me. Gemma had been there with me while I watched my petite grandmother fade away, her soft face going skeletal and her precious hands curling in and shaking with the effort to stay on this earth with me. Gemma knew why I didn’t do hospitals. She knew why I didn’t do routine doctor’s visits.
It wasn’t logical. I knew that much. But I couldn’t seem to get around the hurdle that had built itself in my brain. The logic was on the other side, but I couldn’t reach it. So, as Gemma had astutely pointed out, I avoided it. Because unlike carbon dating calculations or silverpoint painting facts, trauma didn’t make sense. It didn’t have rhyme or reason. It didn’t have something I could see or grasp. But it did make me feel things, and I didn’t want to feel them. So, I ignored them instead.
We reached our building finally, and Gemma disappeared into the double glass doors and into the main foyer, giving me another useless directive to find a doctor “or else,” and I waved her off, hobbling to the car that I had parked along the curb in front of a meter. At the very least, I reasoned, I needed to accept my reality instead of hoping it would go away. Gemma was right—I practically had a PhD in Pain Avoidance at this point.
As I got in the car and headed for the pharmacy, I took stock of my situation. As far as the texts from Vaughn went, I was fairly certain that ignoring them was still the way to go. It was tempting to give in and find out what he wanted. A bizarre little part of me, a dancing, internal imp, wanted to know what he would say and what could have possibly brought him back from Italy early. The more reasonable, logical part of me knew that would be a mistake. Whatever it was, it would only dredge up pain.
As far as my knee went, I simply had to take better care of it. If I could get the damn splinter out, and possibly clean the area thoroughly, then the infection would subside and I might avoid a hospital stay. I could do this. I was absolutely, one hundred percent in control.
My mind wandered over to Cal. Alright, so maybe I wasn’t one hundred percent in control. A small percentage of me still whirled around like a runaway top about to skid off the table because that small part of my brain remembered how it had felt to be around Cal. The problem was, I liked Cal, and I’d liked that kiss in the hotel room even more…
I shook my head. No, that was one thing I would simply have to continue avoiding. I could only force myself to grow so much at a time. My psyche couldn’t take looking him in the face right now. His handsome, chiseled, green-eyed face.
I made it back to my apartment complex with a grocery bag full of supplies that would hopefully fix my knee. After hobbling across the expanse of grass and sidewalks, and nearly collapsing in the process, I managed to make it to my building. As I rounded the corner with a heavy limp, I drew up short.
A male figure leaned against the siding next to my door, and I recognized his distinctive, square build. Vaughn. He looked up as I approached slowly, doing my best to hide my limp. He wore his brown hair the way he always had, parted to the side and gelled away from his rectangular, age-lined face. Vaughn was fifteen years older than I was, but I didn’t remember it being quite as obvious as it was now. He still had rimless glasses that hadn’t changed, and he wore a button-down, short-sleeved shirt with a tropical print on the fabric.
Honestly, I had no idea what I’d seen in him.
“Hey, Ruth,” he smiled.
I gave him an incredulous frown when I reached him. “How did you know where I live?”
“You left it with the school registrar,” he said, hooking a thumb behind him like he was pointing even remotely in the right direction of Denver, Colorado.
“Yes, but how did you get it?” I glared. I folded my arms over my ribbed tank top, waiting for his answer.
He scratched his arm. “Well, I’m technically still your PI.”
“The fuck you are.” I tightened my arms, but it did little to hold together the wounded pieces of me that were clamoring to escape and shatter to the pavement at his feet. You left me! They shouted. You abandoned me. You tricked me.
“Ruth, listen,” Vaughn said, holding out his hands for me. I tried to back away from him, but my knee buckled, and he reached out to catch me. His sweaty palms made contact with my elbows, and to my horror, he managed to pull me close to his body. His brown eyes studied mine with worried intensity. “I know what I did was wrong. Hurtful, even. But you have to understand, I needed to protect our funding.”
“‘Our’ funding?” I hissed through a bubble of angry tears.
He ignored that, which was kind of his best talent. “I didn’t know how long the research would take, but it’s going better than I expected. So well, that I really do need research assistants. Real ones.”
“Right, because all the work I did for you was fake,” I replied icily.
Vaughn’s thin lips pressed into a hard line. He gave me a look over his glasses. “Don’t be unreasonable. You know what I’m saying.”
God, that patronizing look . How had I endured that for so many years? What had I hoped to gain from him? “Let me go,” I bit out.
He complied but didn’t move far. “I need you, Ruth.”
My heart squeezed painfully, and I put my hand to the base of my throat. “Well, I don’t need you. Please leave me alone. I don’t care what the opportunity is—I pass. Goodbye.”
“Ruth,” he repeated, and this time his faded eyebrows met in an angry line. I tried to move past him to my door, but he took hold of my arm and pulled me back to him. “If I don’t get enough assistants, they will pull my funding. I need you,” he repeated.
“You are unbelievable.” I struggled to free myself from his grip, but he was surprisingly strong. “You should have thought that through in November.”
“It’s a five-year contract,” he gritted out. “A real one. I have it in my car and you can sign it right now.”
“Absolutely not,” I nearly shouted. My leg was on fire and my brain reeled, overcome with the impossibility of Vaughn even being here, let alone trying to coerce me into working with him again. “Get your hand off me. I’m not interested.”
“How many humanities doctorates who specialize in medieval art history do you think I’m going to be able to find?” Vaughn insisted, his voice rising and his grip tightening. The lines around his eyes had deepened, and his pale skin mottled with angry red splotches. “I’ve looked. You are it , which is why I asked you to get your degree in the first place.”
Of course. He hadn’t asked me to get the degree because he’d wanted me at his side. He needed a warm body with the right piece of paper. “Then you should have respected me,” I shot back.
Vaughn released me with a shove, and I slammed into my front door, banging my right knee against the metal siding. Blinding white streaked across my vision as debilitating pain crackled from my leg to my teeth. I grasped the handle tightly to keep from falling. “Go,” I choked out. “I mean it, Vaughn. My answer is no.”
“You will change your mind,” he seethed. He came up behind me, and crowding me with his body, he slammed his hand against the door next to my face. I gasped, curling inward. He’d never been violent like this… not really. He’d yelled at students and snapped at waiters, but he’d never threatened me physically like this. My hand shook on the doorknob as he hissed in my ear. “You can play hard to get, but we both know you’ll do anything for me.”
I withered on the inside like a torched dandelion. My shoulders shrank inward, and my breath froze in my lungs. “Please go,” I whispered brokenly.
He left, and I fumbled with my keys struggling to open the door before wrenching it open and twisting myself inside. The pain in my knee slammed against the hurt in my chest, and with a sob, I crumpled to the ground. I gave into the tears that had clawed up my throat, and lying down on my side, staring at my kitchen counters, I let them wash away the flood of insidious feelings that had awakened with Vaughn’s return.
It wasn’t until hours later that I managed to move. And then I lost myself in the pain and burning fever that swept through my body.