Chapter Three #3
“I stayed to find you, ” he says. “And Rosemary and I were…We weren’t that.
She wasn’t my girlfriend. Not by then. We were already practically broken up.
She was just…lingering. She promised to introduce me to her uncle if I stayed with her through the end of the school year so she wouldn’t have to go to her sorority functions with a new date.
We were friendly by then, that’s all. We had a mutually beneficial arrangement. ”
I tell myself he lies for a living, that it’s his job to perform and do it well, but he sounds sincere.
“I stayed for the party hoping you would show up,” he continues. “Because you were grieving your mom, and we had that thing on the stage, and I…”
I would pay a king’s ransom to know what he would say if he allowed himself to finish that sentence, to have him define thing, but of course he doesn’t.
Instead, James takes a completely conscious step backward, leaving the room entirely to grab his lawyer’s card from the floor.
I watch him the whole time, looking for clues to tell me what’s going on beneath his impenetrable surface.
I track the way his fingers fumble slightly as he picks up the business card and how his eyebrows are furrowed in an expression that might be uncertainty or might be pain, but his face shifts before I can decide.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he says as he straightens, and when he looks at me, the mask is firmly back in place with completely unruffled brows.
“The fact is I could have done countless things better that night, and I didn’t.
Which is part of why I brought you this—” He puts the card in my hand for what feels like the millionth time, fingers sure. “—as an apology.”
“No,” I say, resisting the urge to crumble it. “You brought it to convince me to give up the social media clause.”
“That, too,” he says. “But mostly to pay my debt.”
“Debtors don’t get to decide what to pay their lenders.”
Something flashes in his eyes. I want to believe it’s surprise—the good kind, the oh, this one’s got teeth kind—but it must not be, because he for sure sounds irritated when he digs into his back pocket and pulls out a—
He can’t be serious.
“Um, is that a checkbook?” I ask.
James releases the slim black pen from its holder on the checkbook cover. The cover is leather, of course, and at first I think it has his initials embossed in the corner, but instead it looks for all the world like it says Moo in fine calligraphy.
“How much?” James asks, and he holds the checkbook up to the frame of my door so I can no longer puzzle out the embossment.
I blink at him.
“Oh. My. God, ” I gasp. “You carry a checkbook ?”
It’s the first time he’s looked properly offended.
“It’s a way of transferring larger amounts of funds with ease and convenience,” he says haughtily. “Give me a number.”
“It’s antiquated,” I say. And then, confused, “Why don’t you use Venmo?”
“I don’t have it.”
“How old are you, a hundred and four? What do you mean, you don’t have Venmo?”
“ Juniper. ” He doesn’t sound so much exasperated as tired. “A number.”
I can’t help it. I laugh, the kind of unattractive burst of merriment that sounds more like a donkey’s bray than anything else.
But he looks so serious, so austere and demanding with his eyebrows scrunched low in concentration and his profile rigid as he leans the checkbook against the doorframe to write my name on the top line.
The Henley rises a sliver as he does, exposing the thinnest line of skin just above his jeans.
My laugh dies in my throat.
“Why are you so adamantly against making stupid videos for the Internet?” I ask him. “People do it for free. For fun. ”
James cuts his eyes to me and then quickly away.
“I do not find any aspect of performing for the mind-numbed masses of the Internet the least bit amusing.”
The energy is still rolling beneath my skin, but I make my voice as dry as possible when I say, “Unfortunate considering your chosen career.”
“A stage is not an iPhone.”
“ All the world is a stage,” I retort.
“Then I want nothing to do with it,” he says. “Or at least, nothing to do with the business end of a camera.”
Every bone in my body hates to admit it, but I’m surprised to find myself having fun. It’s so easy to goad him like this.
“How. Much?” James asks again. He’s done with my game. His hand looks clenched around the pen, its point hovering just after the dollar sign.
“I don’t want your money,” I say.
“Juniper—”
“If I held you to it,” I interrupt. “If I held you to your word, your first word when you agreed to do the socials…Would you do it?”
James lowers the pen.
“Your insistence makes no sense,” he says, and the mask is slipping once more. His eyes are a touch wild. “The only logical reason to go through with it would be the extra funds, and I’m willing to give you those funds and more for your troubles. Name your price.”
“I need the visibility,” I say, stepping toward him. “I need to put myself out there so maybe something will come of this after the recording is finished.”
“Do it on your own, then,” and now it sounds like he’s pleading. “Document your journey or whatever it is people do on the Internet, but don’t include me in it.”
“You and I both know I’ll have no reach on my own,” I say. “That’s why the project managers are saying it’s both of us or nothing. Because I am the nothing part of this equation.”
James rolls his eyes.
“You are not nothing.”
He says it so casually, so matter-of-factly, that my heart shouldn’t flutter, but of course it does. And of course I ignore it.
“You know what I mean,” I say. “But you still haven’t answered the question.”
It’s hard not to appreciate the way James moves, even as he grumpily snaps the checkbook closed and stuffs it into his back pocket. (The cover definitely says Moo. ) There’s a fluidness to him, an elegance of movement that I associate with professional athletes.
His facial expression is the furthest thing from graceful, though.
He’s big mad. Or maybe he’s just big. The expanse of him in my doorway is making my brain do the romantic hero paper doll bit again, and I remind myself that this is absolutely not acceptable.
His jaw works back and forth before he answers, “I keep my word, Juniper.”
I inhale.
“So you’ll do the socials, then?” I ask.
“I said I keep my word,” he repeats. And he says it like it’s a curse instead of a promise, which maybe for him it is.
Guilt, my brain whispers. He’s going to do it out of guilt. Out of some absurd place of honor. Is that really how you want to play this?
My silent answer is sure and swift: Yes.
I hold my hand out toward James.
“So we’re doing it then,” I say. “Let’s shake on it.”
“What?”
He sounds so bewildered, I can’t help but laugh a little, thankfully not the donkey version, though.
“Shake on it,” I repeat. “You know, the societal custom in which one promises to uphold their end of a bargain and you join hands to seal the deal. Other variations include crossing your heart, pinkie swears, and—if you’re not squeamish—spit swears. Surely you’re familiar?”
He looks so unnecessarily anguished —like Mr. Darcy finding out he is going to have to use a subpar fountain pen or William from The Meadow picking up a car rental expecting a sports car and being given a family van—that for a moment, I reconsider everything.
I could just…let this all go. The whole thing. I have no business— none —doing a project of this magnitude. I ought to go back to my life from two weeks ago, the life before I walked into the sound studio and possibly rerouted my life, his life, and god knows who else in the process.
But then again, there’s not much to go back to.
Onward, then.
I stick my hand out toward James, expecting a begrudging shake or a we don’t need to do that as a dismissal.
So I’m more than a little surprised when—with a noted sigh of crossness and a muttered, “ I’m not spitting ”—James leans forward and links our pinkies together.
I expect him to immediately let go. I expect him to act like he’s been scorched and jerk his hand away, but instead we stand there staring at each other, linked by only our fingers.
When the silence becomes an unbearable roar of blood in my ears, I say the first thing that comes to mind, which is—unfortunately—“Moo.”
James’s reaction is the strangest yet. His eyes widen like I’ve just used profanity, and his tense mouth slackens into a look of surprise that any director would call overacting if it was on a stage.
“What…what did you just say?” he asks.
He still doesn’t drop my finger.
“Moo,” I repeat, and his pinkie twitches around mine. “Your checkbook cover. The word in the corner looked like it said moo.”
He’s still staring at me—not quite like I’ve lost my mind, but adjacent. So I add, “I know it doesn’t, but that’s—”
“It does,” James interrupts. “It does say moo.”
He says it with such gravity, I don’t know how to respond.
“Okay,” I say, and our fingers are still curled around each other. “Good to know.”
James blinks rapidly before dropping my hand and exiting my room like the floor is lava, the walls are lava, like I am lava.
“Text me your plans for—” He hesitates. Seems to gather himself. “For the social platforms. I’ll show myself out.”
He’s halfway down the stairs when my body and brain decide to reunite, when my hand registers that James’s is gone and has been replaced with the lawyer’s card between my fingers. It’s the only evidence that this whole interaction occurred and wasn’t a delusional daydream.
“Wait,” I say, coming around the corner to look down the stairwell.
There’s a sense of power that runs through me—just a little—when he obeys. James pauses, but he doesn’t turn to look back at me, like he’s bound. Like our bargain is more than just his agreeing to the social media.
There’s that whisper on my spine again, the one I thought long lost: He remembers, too. He felt something, too.
I push it away, the weirdly insistent voice and the spine tingle that feels like its own kind of untamed magic.
“I don’t have your number,” I tell him.
He turns, just slightly, so I can see him in profile.
“Genie has it. She’ll give it to you when you call.”
And then he’s gone, down the steps and out the door, and I’m once again alone in an empty house.