19. Juliette #3
“I love you,” I whisper into the damp skin of his throat, voice ruined. “Even when I hated how much I loved you. Especially then.”
He presses a trembling kiss to my temple, then my mouth, soft and lingering. Stickers are stuck to both of us. Neither of us moves to peel them off.
“I know,” he answers, arms tightening until there’s no space left at all. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never have to ration another fucking thing again.”
I’m wearing his shirt. The torn one. It’s hanging off my shoulders, and I have no memory of putting it on.
“I’m updating the score,” he says finally.
“The score?”
“You said you were keeping score of the ways I loved you without saying it.” He turns his head to look at me. “I’m updating mine.”
“What’s the tally?”
“You’re winning by miles.” His hand finds mine on the cold floor. “And I don’t think you even know you’re playing.”
“Give me a number.”
“There’s no number. It’s not that kind of score anymore.” He turns his head to look at me, cheek against the concrete, absurd and sincere. “It’s the kind where I stop counting what you owe me - which was nothing - and start counting what I owe you. Which is a career.”
“So you’re saying you’re in debt.”
“Catastrophically. Historically. They’ll write about my debt.”
“And your repayment plan?”
“Daily installments. In perpetuity.” His thumb crosses my knuckles. “No early payoff. I checked the terms.”
The callback hits me somewhere soft.
“That’s cheating,” I say. “Using my own words.”
“It’s not cheating. It’s learning.” He squeezes my fingers. “You taught me how to speak your language. I’m just getting fluent.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
“The divorce is still pending.”
“I know.”
“And I’m still angry at you.”
“You should be.” He sits up, running a hand through his hair. “I’m still angry at me.”
“Good.” I sit up too, pulling his shirt tighter around me. “You should be.”
“I should also probably leave.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
“That didn’t happen,” I say finally.
“Understood.”
“I mean it. This didn’t happen. Tomorrow we go back to - whatever we were doing before. The professional distance. The carefully maintained boundaries.”
“The boundaries that just ended up on your worktable?”
“Different boundaries.” I stand, gathering my clothes. “Better boundaries.”
“Define better.”
“Boundaries with more accurate maps.” I locate my sweater under the worktable and shake a price sticker off it. “The old ones kept getting invaded.”
“By whom?”
“Unclear. The invader wore your face.” I pull the sweater on and emerge to find him watching me with his undershirt in his hands and his heart in his expression, doing nothing about either. “The new treaty has clauses.”
“Send it to my people.”
“You don’t have people anymore. You have a shirt with no buttons and a chair at my worktable.”
“Best deal I ever closed,” he says.
“Right.” He stands too, accepting his undershirt from the floor with a nod of thanks. “Better boundaries.”
“This was a mistake.”
“Obviously.”
“A one-time lapse in judgment.”
“Completely understandable, given the circumstances.”
“The circumstances being-”
“The fight. The bookmarks. The emotional pressure of opening a business.” He pulls the undershirt over his head. “Take your pick.”
“All of them. I pick all of them.”
“Very thorough.” He’s almost smiling now. “Very you.”
I finish dressing in silence. The sweater is wrinkled but intact. The jeans are fine. The shirt-
He crouches and picks something off the concrete - one of his shirt buttons, sheared clean off in the first act - turns it over in his fingers, and pockets it.
“Evidence goes both ways,” he says.
I’m still wearing his shirt over my clothes.
“I’m keeping this.”
“You mentioned.”
“As evidence.”
“Of my destruction. Yes.” He crosses to the door, pausing with his hand on the frame. “Same time tomorrow?”
“I didn’t invite you tomorrow.”
“You didn’t uninvite me either.” He looks back over his shoulder, his expression giving away nothing. “Goodnight, Juliette.”
He’s gone before I can respond.
I stand in my bookstore, surrounded by scattered price stickers and the lingering scent of disaster, and I tell myself that this definitely didn’t happen.
The shirt says otherwise.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out, expecting Rosie, expecting a text about tomorrow’s delivery schedule.
The name on the screen is worse than any unknown number could be.
ELEANOR.
We should talk about my son’s recent behavior. I have a proposition.
The shirt suddenly feels like a noose instead of a trophy.
I stand in the dark of my shop with her name burning a hole in my hand.
I don’t answer it. I don’t screenshot it for Zachary. I don’t do anything except stand there in a torn man’s shirt among ten thousand price stickers, and feel the evening drain out of me degree by degree, and think, with a calm that surprises me:
No. Not this time, Eleanor. Whatever this is, you don’t get to schedule it.
I put the phone face-down on the worktable, and I finish the inventory, and if my pricing gets slightly vindictive toward the end, that’s between me and the mass-market paperbacks.