Chapter Fourteen #2
He pauses, collecting his thoughts. I wonder if he realizes when he brings my hand up to his mouth for a kiss, because his eyes are unfocused when he does it.
“They honored the love they once had,” he says. “And Dad did that by giving Mom the life she wanted—the art, the life in the woods with the rocks and the trees that he never wanted, paying her medical bills—and Mom in turn tried to mend our relationship, mine and Dad’s, before she had to go.”
“Did it work?”
James drops my hand as Cassio—as if the wolf has just remembered we exist—butts his head against James’s jeans.
“There wasn’t much to mend in the first place,” James says. “Dad has always wanted the best for me more than he actually wanted me, and I’ve always known.” He shrugs. “It’s fine.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
James laughs at that, but it’s tinged with sadness.
“I’ve met your dad, remember?” he says. “Of course you don’t understand. That man is the definition of wild horses couldn’t stop him from loving you, no matter, however, wherever.”
“I would let it stop me,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Horses hate me. If there were a bunch of them standing between me and Dad, we’d just have to go our separate ways because I’m not risking it.”
But apparently James is in no rush to veer away from this conversation. I wonder if he, too, is overly conscious that this is the one day to tell each other everything, to ask each other everything, before we have to return to normal.
“He’s a good man,” James says. “My father is a good man. He retired early from financing to become my manager when I got burned in my first job right out of school. He helped me establish a career, make a name for myself.”
“But if it’s not the name you want,” I say hesitantly, “if it’s not the kind of work you want, then is it what’s best for you?”
“It makes the most money,” James says.
I snort. “Money isn’t everything.”
“It’s not,” James says. “But, as you’ve so kindly pointed out, it also is. Especially in an industry where at any moment I might be deemed too old or too old-news to be hirable.”
We’ve reached the edge of the pen now, and it’s a much shorter distance to the other side. Cassio’s world is long and rectangular, it would seem, and I idly wonder what physical shape my own life has taken. Probably a small, disorganized squiggle with no discernible edges.
We make it back to the gate and I take endless photos of Cassio and James, my mind already swirling with possible Meadow -related captions.
I have James take a few of me, too, and though I try to look stoic and serious for the camera, I can’t help but laugh when Cassio whines in a high-pitched keen each time I get next to him.
“He likes you,” James says, his face hidden as he looks through the viewfinder.
I blow on Cassio’s nose and he sneezes.
“I forget he’s not a dog,” I say.
“So does he,” Miranda says from behind us. She is watching us with hands on her hips and legs shoulder-width apart like Peter Pan at the window come to take us away to a land of wolves and foxes instead of pirates and fairies. “Time for you two to say goodbye.”
“Kicking us out already?” James asks.
“Yes,” Miranda says bluntly. “I’ve got a hot date with my recliner, a pitcher of lemonade, and a British baking show.”
I want to ask so many things, still, and I hate that I won’t get the chance.
I want to know if James has ever baked cinnamon rolls for Miranda, how often they talk, why he didn’t bring his fake ex-girlfriend to the sanctuary if it would have been good publicity.
But what I hate most is that I’ve spent enough time with James to guess at the answers but will have no way of knowing if I’m right.
Because the day is over.
—
“Did you get everything you needed?” James asks.
We’re parked in front of the coffee shop where my car has sat patiently waiting for our return. James watches me carefully as I gather my camera, my tote, my purse.
“I think so,” I say. “And I still haven’t posted the interview with the composer, so that’s a biggie.” I sigh. “We’ll either make it or we won’t. Barring another scandalous live video idea you have hidden up your sleeves, I think we’ve done all we can do.”
“We’ll make it,” James says. “The numbers were so close last I checked. Cassio will pull his weight, and we’ll make it. You’ll makeit.”
With nothing to busy my hands, I move to get out of the car, but I’m unsure how this is supposed to end, our one day. With a kiss? A handshake?
“I don’t know what to do, either,” James says, like he can read my mind. “All I know is…It was nice spending the day with you, Juniper.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls who end up with a mouth full of wolf tongue.”
James smiles. “I do. Because there’s only ever been the one. You heard Miranda: You were the first.”
And it’s painful, really, the way his smile turns me inside out and makes me hope that this does end in at least one more kiss.
This is why our one day was a terrible idea: because just like I saw our lives unfold all those years ago dressed in Shakespearean garb on a stage, I can see it all here, too.
“And now we’re done,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Because we agreed.”
James’s expression doesn’t change.
“We have to run our races,” he says.
“Separately,” I say, sighing. “It’s the fourth-act breakup,” I say.
His forehead crinkles. “The what?”
“It’s a joke Serena and I made up. There’s this thing in romance books called the third-act breakup—”
“I know story structure,” James interrupts.
“I know you know,” I say, “but we changed it from third-act breakup to the fourth as a joke about relationships in the real world, implying they lasted beyond what they should have. They ran off script. They lost the plot and took too long to end.”
James looks down at me, his eyes dark.
“You think we lasted too long?” he asks. “Our one day was too much for you?”
I want to be funny, to joke that yes, I’m sick of him, that I can’t imagine spending another day like today with him ever again, but I can’t.
If bravery is a muscle, mine should be fatigued, but instead it has taken on a strength of its own and makes me say, “It was never just the one day. I’ve thought of you millions of times since that night onstage. Millions.”
James’s eyes widen, but I press on.
“And there were all these what-if scenarios about us that I played out to the nth degree, but now I know some of the answers. I know I was right: We could have been great friends then.”
James swallows. “And now?”
I’ll pass his test. He’s spent an entire day telling me that the love he grew up watching between his parents, the love he exchanges with the one surviving parent, is contractual. James is loyal. James keeps his word.
So I’ll keep mine.
“And now our day is over,” I say. “And so are we.”
—
Serena is tired when she answers the phone—I can hear it in her voice—but she listens to me cry, and cry, and cry.
“ Call him, ” she tells me, after I tell her about the one day. “Tell him how you feel. If that pretty-haired idiot doesn’t feel the same, then your tears are wasted. If he does feel the same, then your tears are wasted. Call. Him. ”
“I can’t,” I say. “We agreed. And it doesn’t matter anyway because our lives are going in different directions on purpose and what’s the point?”
Serena coughs, and her voice is still gravelly from it when she says, “Love. Love is the point, you idiot.”
“But it doesn’t work,” I say. “It’s like Arabella and William: They only were able to properly love each other when William said, Screw it, I’m going to love you against all reason, and James will never—literally never—do that.
Because this is real life and he’s going to be a fucking movie star and I’m going to…
do whatever it is I’m going to do somewhere else. ”
“Sacrifice isn’t fictional,” Serena argues. “Deciding you want a different life for yourself isn’t a fairy tale. People change. They get new jobs or take back old ones, they grow and—”
She keeps going, but I stop listening.