Chapter Sixteen
A mistake. A cosmic one. I get it now. Like, get it, get it.
Because this thing where you actually love someone and are attracted to their face and their personality and even their grumpiness and their truly impressive Henley collection is literally devastating.
And finding out that not only are they very good in bed but you, too, can be very good in bed—multiple times in the same night, even—with the right person just adds fuel to the world’s saddest bonfire.
This is what the Taylor Swift songs were referencing. This is why grown humans sob in bathrooms and at parties and wherever else: Unrequited love or love with an expiration date or love that you feel so deep in your bones, it’s like it becomes your marrow, is the worst.
Because this was just one day.
And now it’s done and tomorrow has come by all definitions of the word, but I have all these feelings and nowhere to put them because time is up.
We had a bargain.
James is still asleep. Not that I can see him with the way he’s spooning me with his face buried in my neck, but I can feel his long, even breaths and the involuntary spasms of his hands on my waist. I try not to be envious that for him, it’s still yesterday.
Until he wakes and opens his eyes on a new day, he is still living in the last one where we weren’t pretending. Or were we? I’m not sure anymore.
The light coming in from the pitched roof windows is literally golden, like this is the part in the movie where the cinematographer really wants to drive home that this is happily ever after.
This is where there should be a cute little epilogue promising eternal bliss long past the credits, and for all intents and purposes, the story is over.
End game. And the picture-perfect lighting confirmsit.
But instead it feels insulting to have James stir behind me and slowly roll out of our sleepy embrace to pull himself into a sitting position against the headboard all while the sun mocks us with its cheer.
“You’d make a great scientist,” he tells me when I roll to face him.
“What?”
His grin is wolfish.
“You’re great at researching.”
I blush a hundred shades of red.
“Stop,” I beg. “How long have you been sitting on that line?”
“Since you called me a science experiment.”
“I did not call you that.”
“Call it whatever you want,” James says, leaning toward me. “I don’t care so long as we get to do it again.”
Without meaning to, I draw back. It can’t be more than an inch, but James stops short like I’ve just leapt to the other side of the bed.
I wonder if he would have noticed my minute movement before we spent an entire night fine-tuning ourselves to each other’s frequencies. I wonder if I would notice the way his index finger twitches before his entire hand flexes, like he’s physically holding himself back.
Probably.
There’s an awkward moment where James looks away and I pull the sheet up to my neck. Last night the blankets felt like silk against my skin. Today they burn and scratch like fire ants.
When I look back up at James, his face is stone. His hands are steady.
“You’re right,” he says, and his voice is kind even if his eyes are expressionless. “I’m sorry. We had an agreement.”
And maybe it’s so very, very painful because this is…what? The fifth-act breakup? There is no such thing. But whatever we call it, it has to be the end.
I can’t do this again. Ever. Now that I know that is how it feels when it’s happening and this is how it feels when it’s done, I’ll forever be trapped between wanting to find it with someone else and knowing that I will inevitably not because whoever it is, it won’t be James.
“It’s not just our agreement,” I say, “it’s the impossibility of us. The magic and coincidence stops here, right? Because no matter what we said last night, you are going to make your movie and I’m going to go to the city because that’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.”
“For you,” James says, his voice quiet. “It’s always been the plan for you.”
And he’s not accusing me, but the hurt and longing lodged in my throat is coming out as anger, and I’m powerless to stop it.
“ You’re the one who changed course last minute,” I said. “It’s not my fault if you entered this fake relationship to avoid another fake relationship and now you’re still going to have to go through with it.”
James should answer in kind. He should be indignant, at the very least, but instead he looks impossibly sad.
“I have no choice,” he says. “It’s the best course of action.”
“Says the robot.”
He’s still not angry, but he doesn’t hide his irritation when he arches an eyebrow and responds, “No, Juniper. Says the human. A human who has to think about more than just himself. A human who owes a lot of things to a lot of people. Other people’s jobs are counting on this, you know?
It’s not just me. It’s not even just my dad.
There are real people with families and mortgages and overdue dental bills who are counting on me to take this. ”
“ They can find somebody else, ” I argue. “It’s not fair for you to sacrifice your life like that, and damn your father for letting you think that you should.”
I scrape my last shred of bravery together to propel me from the bed to the pile of clothes that have grown cold by the glass door overnight.
It takes me a good two minutes to detangle my bra and panties, and I try not to think about the fact that I’m doing it completely naked in front of James Freakin’ Neely.
Which is ridiculous. He saw more than this last night.
I grab my bag from the bathroom floor, and when James makes to follow me in only his boxers, I hold up a hand.
“I need a minute,” I say. “I’m going to change in the other bedroom.”
“Juniper, let me—”
I point a finger at him. “A minute,” I repeat. “Please.”
When I turn out of the master into the room immediately to my right, I reach for the light switch and flick it on before I realize this is not the guest room.
It’s the other closed door, the laundry room. Or that’s what James had said.
But this is the furthest thing from a laundry room.
It’s an art studio.
James is next to me in a heartbeat, his hand reaching across me to flick off the light, but I grab his wrist before he can.
“What…” I breathe, stepping into the room. “What kind of rental has this in it?”
James’s stare is sitting on my shoulders like a weighted blanket that has ten too many pounds sewn in it to be comfortable.
“It’s not just a rental,” he says. “This place belonged to my mother. This was her home.”
And yes, of course. I can see it now that I know. I would have seen it on my own eventually, because there on the far wall are photos of James from toddlerhood to boyhood to manhood, sometimes alone, sometimes standing next to a smiling woman whose eyes look just like his.
There are endless tubes and brushes, and two easels with half-finished paintings waiting for their creator to return.
There are knickknacks on shelves and empty frames and canvases stacked against walls, and…
The cruelest magic of all: a painting that looks like it might belong in this century or another of a woman sitting beneath a tree looking down at an e-reader, which would be startling enough if not for the framed T-shirt beside it with Meadow Mama hand-stitched along its front.
The world tilts a little, just enough that I don’t fall back onto James so much as lean into him, our near nakedness suddenly apparent to me when our skin touches.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Why didn’t you tell me this house was your mom’s?” I ask.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” James says.
“It’s a bit of a sore subject. My father likes to use this to realign our visions, as he calls it.
He reminds me that this house is his, not mine, and if I want it left to me someday in his will, it would be better if I saw things his way.
” James’s laugh has no humor in it. “For me, it actually is a rental. I don’t get a friends-and-family discount, either. ”
“But…” I walk toward the painting, the shirt—my mother’s shirt. “These are…I have this shirt,” I say, pointing at the frame. “You saw it. The one that I spilled—”
“I know,” James says. “The same one.”
I gape at him. “You didn’t say anything.”
James throws out his hands like I’ve attacked him.
“And what should I have said? That I have a framed shirt that looks an awful lot like that shirt at my mom’s old house I’m renting from my dad?
That I wondered if it was some sort of sign from the universe that we should…
That I maybe…” He re-collects himself. “It was ridiculous to assume it was anything other than a mass-produced Meadow shirt,” he says.
“It’s not as if my mother ever explained why she had this one framed. ”
“You could have asked me,” I say. “Because that ”—I point at the painting next to the shirt—“is nearly identical to my mom’s favorite painting, which she got from a friend after a weekend painting intensive.”
“That’s impossible,” James says. “That was my mom’s favorite self-work. She had dozens of people ask to buy it or reproduce it, and she always refused. She said it was the most ‘her’ thing she had ever created.”
My head feels like a bag of Legos with no instructions, no way of knowing how the final product should take shape.
There’s James’s dead mom and my dead mom and matching shirts and matching paintings that James swears shouldn’t exist, and then there’s us: standing in our underwear looking up at them.
There’s a chance that the “me” of yesterday would see this as a good omen rather than an ominous one. That this would feel like magic, like the right place, right time. Like maybe James and I were destined and everything would work out in the end if we just believed.