Chapter Thirty-Six #2
“Oh, shut up,” she said under her breath, rolling her eyes.
Above and below, he was so conceited when he wanted to be.
His smile widened as she kept going, punctuating each argument with a jab of her finger into her palm.
“You love this job. I’ve seen you in your classroom, the way you light up around your students.
You love teaching here. What would possess you to give that up? ”
Arthur looked at her thoughtfully. “I didn’t know you noticed,” he said quietly.
Somehow this made her even angrier. At him. At herself. She wasn’t sure which. “Of course I noticed! You think I don’t see you the same way you see me?”
His fingers flexed, and he looked like he wanted to take another step forward, but he hesitated. “You’re right, I do love teaching. But it doesn’t matter where I do it.”
Had he really quit his job for her? It was ridiculous. Maggie was used to chasing certainties. She made decisions after mapping every possible outcome and feeling satisfied with all of them. But Arthur had just leaped off the building without so much as a soft place to land.
“What if this doesn’t work out?” she asked frantically. “What if you give this up for me and I’m not who you think I am? What if we fight all the time and you can’t stand me?”
“Then it doesn’t work out. Maggie, I’m not giving up a lifelong dream. It’s a job.” He paused and then frowned before asking, “Maggie, what happened in the pall?”
Did he remember? She tried to stall. “What do you mean?”
“I was ready to let you go,” he admitted, stepping just a little bit closer to Maggie.
“I was. But then I started to make sense of everything that happened. It became clearer which memories belonged to the unsettled dead and which ones were mine.” He watched her intently as she bit her lip, but then he closed his eyes and his voice sounded so broken when he asked, “Were you just telling me what I wanted to hear?”
Gods below, how could she have ever made him feel that way? She swallowed, her eyes welling up with tears, and she shook her head. “No,” she rasped. “No, I wasn’t, but…”
Maggie looked away from the hope in his expression, hope she knew was mirrored in her own chest, which was holding a heart that beat too much and too fast. Arthur took another step forward, and, this time, Maggie didn’t back up.
Tentatively, he closed the gap even more, the distance between them narrowing until he could reach out and touch her.
Just as she was about to close that small distance left between them, she came back to her senses. She backed up again and said sharply, “You can’t do things like this without talking to me about it. Quitting your job, Arthur?”
For the first time, something like anger flashed across his expression.
His words were only laced in bitterness, but it was enough to knock the breath out of her.
“Do friends who fuck need to run career decisions by each other?” She winced as he threw her own words back at her.
Had she really said those awful things to him?
“I didn’t—”
“Tell me,” he said suddenly, all the bitterness gone and replaced with pure need. “Tell me you don’t want this.”
Lie to him, came a traitorous voice in her head, but she could no more lie to Arthur now than she could that first day they kissed. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“You can’t what, Maggie? Please be specific.”
She closed her eyes, squeezing her hand against her thigh.
She wished she could lie to him; it would be easier than cracking her chest open so thoroughly.
“I can’t tell you that, because I can’t lie to you.
” She paused. “I won’t.” Then, in a small, pleading voice, she said, “I want you to say it.” She didn’t deserve it, but she wanted to hear it all the same.
He smiled, and he was so handsome, his face alight with a happiness that thrilled and terrified her.
“I love you, Maggie Linden.” Her heart was beating so fast, she thought it might come out of her chest. She could barely breathe as his words settled on her skin, as soft and warm as his jacket.
“I love you more than this job, and I am not content with a summer fling. I want all of you. Always.” He stepped closer and closer with each word, the few feet between them suddenly nothing.
“And I understand if you aren’t ready for that.
I don’t…” He searched for the words. “I don’t expect anything of you.
But if the fact that we are both employed by Hawthorn College is the reason you want to throw this away, then I am no longer employed by Hawthorn College. ”
The silence stretched as they stared at each other.
Arthur had stopped when there was about a foot left between them, unwilling to make the final move to close the remaining space, like he was convinced it had to be her.
So she took a single step forward, reached up, and brushed a stray dollop of pall slime off his cheekbone.
Her hand cupped his cheek, and he leaned into her touch. She felt, inexplicably, like crying.
“I ripped up your resignation letter and threw it in the trash,” she said with a hiccup that devolved into a full laugh. “I told Dean Clearwater I wouldn’t let you quit.”