Chapter 32
Miller
We spend the next few days not pretending.
We don’t pretend all over the cottage. On the island again. On the couch. In the shower. In the bed we share each night.
In that same seat on the boat in the middle of the lake after I teach her how to drive.
But it’s not just the sex that isn’t pretend. Don’t think I could fake not wanting her in every humanly way possible for another single second, anyway.
We don’t pretend when I kiss her awake each morning. When she brushes my hair off my face and blinks sleepy eyes at me, cheeks creased from my pillows. When we sit, feet tangled together each night, making our way through the entire Jurassic Park franchise.
She was right. The new ones are nothing to write home about, but the original holds up.
It’s not pretend when we buy a shared aquarium pass.
Not when I tell her I won’t waive my clause because I don’t think I’m really interested in being where she isn’t, even if it’s a place Matt never will be again, and not when we lie out on the dock, stretched out under the stars and she tells me she doesn’t want that job.
That she just wants to be herself after all this time—even if that means she’s never anything more than Ren Jacobs, Collections Manager of Vertebrate Paleontology.
I don’t tell her that she was always more than that, and always will be. That I could make an endless list of all the things she is and all the reasons I think she should always, always be herself.
I don’t think there’s anything pretend about the plans we start to make—the ones we say out loud, and the ones I keep to myself.
And I don’t think, when I drop her back off at her townhouse that really could use some organizing, that when she kisses me on the porch and whispers against my forever-ruined-with-her mouth that she’ll see me in a week, that there’s ever been anyone on this planet, or any single other one, that’s as lucky as me.