24. Ruth
“ S ign the contract, Ruth.” My eyes followed the tablet as it slid across the coffee table.
I lifted a glare to Vaughn. “I’m not signing that.”
He straightened away from the table, slipping his hands into his khaki shorts’ pockets. He had on an actual T-shirt today, horizontally striped and in shades of neon green and navy blue, and he stared down at me from under his rectangular glasses dispassionately. “I’m starting to think you want me to get you and Gemma fired. Looking for a reason to cut ties?”
“Fuck you,” I whispered, my voice thick with tears. I sat back against the too-stiff hotel sofa and folded my arms. “Do it, then.”
When Vaughn pulled his right hand out from his pocket, he had his sleek, black phone in his hand. He had never been one to use protective cases, so the metal exterior glinted brightly in the morning sunlight as he held it up to dial a number.
He’s bluffing , I thought desperately. Don’t fall for this, Ruth. You can still get out of this.
At first, I’d been gripped in despair and paralyzed by fears I couldn’t fully name or recognize when Vaughn had taken me away. Something about the way Vaughn had spoken to me had tangled with my memories and pain, and in a daze, I had followed him. It had felt like the most logical choice at the time.
But then, he had taken my phone from me. He’d taken me to a hotel room, and with detached callousness, had kept me there all day , Sunday. He’d worked on his laptop, on his project—our project—occasionally trying to engage me in the data, in the research, in the amazing discoveries he had made in Italy.
I had watched TV and wondered what the hell I was doing. At least a dozen times, I had decided to get up and just walk out, but then Vaughn had said something, moved—reminded me that he was watching—and I had hesitated. It was staggering the way a man could turn his physical advantage against a woman into a silent threat.
But another sleepless night on the couch had brought some clarity.
There was no fucking way I was doing this. Our plane didn’t leave until Wednesday. That meant two more days and two more nights with Vaughn. Alone. And then five years of interminable pain and longing in a country where I would have no one, no resources, no hope of anything but what Vaughn could offer me.
Vaughn pressed a button on his phone screen, and then the phone rang. I watched him with wide eyes. He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t. Tactically, it didn’t make any sense to release his leverage—at some point, he would realize that he couldn’t force someone to work with him.
This is more than that , a small voice at the back of my mind whispered. It’s not just the job. You know this, Ruth. You know him. You know how he prevented you from meeting other people while you were together, even while he denied you the intimacy you craved. He likes the control, he likes the power, and you are weak. I gave myself a mental shake. I had been weak. But I wasn’t now.
“Hello?” Gemma’s voice asked.
I sucked in a breath. My eyes flew to Vaughn’s, and his thin lips pulled into a smirk. “Gemma, hi, it’s Vaughn. I know it’s been a while.”
Silence permeated the room for a beat, and then Gemma snapped, “Where is she?”
“Who? Ruth?” Vaughn asked, patronizing her even as he confirmed her suspicions.
“I swear to God asshole, if you did anything to hurt her, I will find you and stuff an entire medieval tome up your Victorian-tight sphincter. And if you think I won’t find you—”
“Gemma.” Vaughn cut her off with a condescending chuckle. “Relax. I offered her a job. That’s all. How’s your job, by the way? I hear you’ve found significant success with it.”
The sound of Vaughn’s voice mingling with Gemma’s, wrapping around hers with an insidious slither, made me physically ill. “Stop,” I hissed.
“What kind of job?” Gemma asked sharply. “She’s not going to work with you, tofu brain.”
“Oh, I made her an offer she can’t refuse,” Vaughn said with a nasty glint in his eyes. “Ruth?”
Pain, stabbing and wrenching, filled my chest even as my shoulders deflated in defeat. He really was going to destroy everything Gemma had built for herself here. I hadn’t called his bluff at all. He’d called mine. “Hey, Gem,” I said loudly enough for her to hear.
“Dude,” Gemma’s voice responded in outrage. “Are you fucking for real right now? You don’t show up to work today, and it’s because you’re with that short glass of prune juice? I thought you were with Cal.”
Vaughn hung up. No goodbye, no explanation. Just piercing, supercilious eyes behind thick glasses. “Are we clear, now? Sign the contract, Ruth.”
My heart thundered in my ears, but I held his gaze. Gemma wouldn’t want me to go through with this. Actually, she’d probably murder me before she let me waltz off with “prune juice,” as she’d called him. But Gemma also bought food for her Doberman with the last of her paycheck before buying herself food, so I knew better. It would ruin her life, and she would do it for me. I couldn’t let her.
Still, I couldn’t sign my life away without putting up a fight, either. I’d been stepped on my whole life—used and discarded, abandoned, and taken for granted. Vaughn himself had done much of that, and perhaps a month ago, I might have accepted this as my fate and resigned myself to the life I’d mourned before. I might have even seen the positives in it.
But that had been before Cal, and it had been before I’d invested in myself for once. Before I’d taken this crazy matchmaking job and discovered that my intelligence didn’t stop at a certain degree or type of research. It could expand and evolve.
My heart could, too.
“I’m an open door, and you can walk right in and get comfy, Shortstop.”
If Vaughn was an ironclad prison door determined to shut me up and trap me in my own insecurities, then Cal was the opposite. Cal was a glass door, thrown wide open and inviting me into a world of light and air. And I’d shut it right back in his face.
I sat back on the couch and pushed the tablet back toward Vaughn with my toe, adjusting my glasses. “I’ll sign that when you take me back to my apartment. I want details on where we’re going, how long we’ll be there, and what I’ll need to pack.”
Vaughn wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to let me go far, even on an invisible leash. He considered me with a quiet kind of venom that leeched through my pores and straight to my aching heart. Finally, he said, “Alright. We have a few days. I’ll take you back to pack. You can have an hour in the apartment to pack. We’ll be in Denver for three months while I secure our funding and make arrangements for our research team in Florence. From there, it will depend on how our research at the University of Pisa goes.” He held out his hands, bowing slightly in mockery. “Appeased?”
I wanted to kick him in the nuts. “Fine. I’ll sign that,” I said with a flick of my eyes to the tablet, “when I see proof of funding.”
“Fair enough,” he glared.
I had to get to Janice and tell her the truth about my forged resume before Vaughn did. That was the only way I could see my way out of this suffocating conundrum I’d found myself in. If I made my way to Janice and took the fall—the entirety of it—before Vaughn could hint that Gemma had been involved, then at the very least, I could take the power out of his threats.
But the more I stole glances at my door as I puttered around my apartment, the closer Vaughn loomed over me like a threatening shadow. I tried to ignore him, gathering clothing blindly and stuffing it into a blue duffel bag without really caring what I’d chosen. He watched every movement, his eyes tracking my hands and his arms folded. I felt every slide of his eyes over my body like an oil-slick caress, and I suppressed a shiver several times. The longer this went on, the more insidious it felt.
Fight back , that braver voice inside of me whispered urgently. This is wrong. This is bad. Fight back.
As he followed me to the bathroom where I intended to grab toiletries, I whirled suddenly to face him in my narrow hallway. Although it was noon, and the sun should have permeated the space, the hallway always managed to be indefinitely dark and quiet with no access to windows. Shadows swathed Vaughn’s gaze, and he pulled up short.
I dropped my bag onto the floor. “Why are you doing this? You can’t be this desperate for a research assistant.”
“I’m not,” he said quietly. His voice lowered, and its edge nicked my intuition like a paring knife.
I’d suspected as much, but hearing it injected my veins with ice water. “Then, why?”
Vaughn unfolded his arms, dropping them with a shrug. “What’s that they say about absence? Makes the heart grow fonder, right?”
“You were never fond of me,” I shot back, my voice just above a whisper. “You enjoyed owning me.”
“You’re easy to own,” he replied easily, maliciously.
That dread that had been swirling around inside of me endlessly, suddenly settled into a razor-sharp panic. “Vaughn, I don’t know what happened in Italy, but whatever this is—”
“ Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” he snapped. His hand shot out to grab my upper arm in an iron grip. He dragged me away from the bathroom doorway and down the hall. “I just realized things were simpler with you, Ruth. If I wanted something, I got it. If I asked, you did it. A point you’re going well out of your way to prove wrong.”
He wanted easy? I laughed, letting it bubble out and skitter around the room as he dragged me to the front door. “You want me because I’m a doormat? ”
Vaughn paused, pulling me close and shaking me roughly. “You think you’re worth more than a doormat, Coldwell? Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m wrong.”
The manic smile on my lips died. I swallowed a sudden rush of tears, staring up into his doughy soft, unforgiving features. I couldn’t make my mouth move.
Vaughn scoffed, wrenching open the front door. “That’s what I thought. Get in the car.”
I stumbled away from him, pressing a hand to my glasses to keep them from sliding down my nose. But I righted my inner equilibrium faster this time. A comment like that would have thrown me off my axis for days, before. Not now. I saw his words for what they were, and I wasn’t going to let him use them like a cattle prod to force me into obedience.
But even knowing why he had said those things, I was adrift in my fear, unsure of how I would pull myself back to shore and safety. As I walked numbly to Vaughn’s rented sedan, he circled my arm in a firm grip that even I knew wouldn’t look normal from an objective perspective. But I doubted anyone would say anything or do anything. Did they ever? Had they when I’d collapsed outside Vaughn’s door and wept for hours ?
And then I was in the car again, we were pulling away from the parking lot, and I realized that I had been so consumed by my own thoughts, I’d forgotten my bag. I glanced at Vaughn, but his eyes were on his GPS as he followed it to our hotel.
Two days. I had two days to find a way to escape. There had to be a rational way, a methodical way. There was always something . Short of completely losing my cool, short of breaking free of rational decision-making and going batshit crazy, there had to be something that made sense.
Vaughn made a left turn, heading down the main historical district street. In the passenger seat, I leaned my forehead against the window, watching the full trees pass by, and my eyes danced over the thin foot traffic that dotted the brick sidewalks. My eyes latched onto Goldbrook Urgent Care, and my stomach twisted so painfully, I brought my arms around it. Would Cal be in there now? Was he upset? Or angry? Had I hurt him, or had he already forgotten me and added me to the deck of cards that made up his stack of past dates? Maybe he’d been relieved to have gotten rid of me.
Bullshit , that courageous voice argued. You’re supposed to be smart. Be smart. He isn’t relieved. He was gutted. You saw him. He told you how he felt, and you threw it in his face. Be brave; accept that you are worthy of love.
Traffic lurched forward and we moved from the red light down the street where I knew we would pass Kiss-Met’s building. I almost closed my eyes. I almost let myself shield myself from the hurt, but I couldn’t. Gemma was there. The life I’d barely begun to build was there. Cal was ther—
I did a double take. That had to be wrong.
But no, I hadn’t been seeing things. There, just outside the charming historical building, was a familiar tall figure in a gray dress shirt, his hands in his charcoal pants, and his copper-brown hair gleaming from a shaft of sunlight that broke through the maple tree leaves. He stared across the street, eyes on nothing in particular, and his mouth turned down in a heartbreaking line.
The image shattered through my doubts. It smashed them to pieces and left them in meaningless shards at my feet. That glass dome of insecurity that had muffled the braver voice, the smarter voice, suddenly fell in a tinkling rain through my thoughts, and it left only one thing.
That voice.
My voice.
Go. Run. Run. Run, Ruth.
The thing about rationality was that it had limits. There were laws and rules, that if broken, led to messy results. It was this fact that had drawn me to science in the first place—there was nothing so messy as disorganized decision-making, but in science, there are systems. Methods. Equations. When solving a problem, all I had to do was choose the most logical course of action, follow through, and achieve the desired results.
But love? Nothing could be less logical. It doesn’t have bounds or constraints that rope actions into predictable outcomes. Love is wild and capricious. It’s a riot of color and spontaneity, and it follows no preset coordination to its destination. Love isn’t a science. Love is art.
That realization alone turned the voice in my head into a full-out roar. As the car passed that figure, that one body who housed all my hopes for something more , my hand took hold of the door handle. I popped it open, and the wind whistled through the open crack.
Vaughn turned to look at me in surprise. “What are you—?”
The car slowed, but he didn’t stop. I didn’t care. I unbuckled my seatbelt and gave him one unyielding, determined look. I didn’t need words to convey my message.
Fuck. You.
Then I jumped.