Chapter 13
Thirteen
Scarlett
22 Years Old
“Are you okay?” Harper’s voice was calm as she set a mug of tea in front of Scarlett, who grimaced and shrugged, trying to look indifferent.
“He was bound to come back at some point. I saw him once in Lydia’s Grocery two years ago, so it’s not like I didn’t know he’d be back every Thanksgiving and Christmas at the least,” Scarlett reasoned.
“That’s a hell of a lot different than moving back permanently,” Harper noted.
“I’m over it.” It sounded false coming out of her mouth, so when Scarlett clocked her sister’s reaction, she wasn’t shocked to find that Harper didn’t believe her at all. “I need to be over it,” she corrected herself.
“Just start thinking of him the way I do, and you’ll get there.” Harper stood up and smiled down at her.
The problem with Harper’s train of thought was that she was wrong. Colin wasn’t some evil man, luring women to his bed so he could purposely hurt them later. That was why it hurt so much. It would be so much easier if Scarlett could say that he had cheated on her or something equally awful so she could call him a womanizing asshole and move on to someone kind like Braiden. Instead, she had had the time of her life right up until the end, when Colin’s demeanor changed so drastically that it didn’t even feel like him. The Colin she saw today felt like the old one, before the day he broke up with her.
“Yeah,” Scarlett said, her voice fading with her complacent response.
“Oh, come on. What the fuck do you want?” Harper called out. The outburst caught Scarlett off guard, and she peered toward where Colin was standing—alone this time—near the entryway. “I already told you the painting isn’t for sale.” Scarlett had no idea what her sister was talking about, but it didn’t matter, because the only person she could focus on now was Colin as he slowly approached her table, nervously playing with his hands. She already wanted to cry again, and it pissed her off that she couldn’t hold it together for two seconds around him.
“What do you need?” Scarlett asked bitterly as she rose from her chair.
“I just want to talk to you,” Colin said. His voice was almost shy, the movements of his body timid as he finally made it to the table she was seated at. “I know you told me that we should stay away from each other, and if you still want me to do that at the end of this conversation, then I will.”
“I can kick him out, Letti,” Harper said.
Scarlett shook her head. “It’s fine. I can deal with this.”
“Are you sure?” The concern on Harper’s face made Scarlett feel like a child.
“I’m sure.” Scarlett made her response strong this time. She could do this. She could have one conversation with him and not be a wreck after. Colin slowly sat down at her table as she reseated herself.
“Let me know if you need me.” Harper called back as she moved toward the counter.
At first, Colin said nothing. They sat in silence as the people in the coffee shop around them sipped their drinks. It unnerved Scarlett that he wasn’t talking, but she refused to be the one to break the silence when he was the one who had demanded to speak with her. She took a sip of her tea instead.
“I want to be your friend,” Colin finally said. The tea sliding down her throat made her choke. She coughed violently and took another sip to calm the burning sensation.
“We can’t be friends, Colin,” she finally said.
Face falling, Colin looked at the floor. “Why not?”
“How can you not know why?” The scoff Scarlett let out sounded so hurt that even she was surprised by it.
“Explain it to me like I don’t know why,” Colin said.
“Well, for starters, you have no idea who I am anymore. We don’t know each other. You’ve been gone for five years.”
“Four,” he corrected. “Four years, six months, and twelve days.”
“Semantics.” She set her mouth in a flat line.
“You’ve changed that much since I’ve been gone? Because I haven’t.” Colin apparently failed to notice how his own body had changed, but she could see that his personality was still the exact same.
“I’ve changed enough to know that you don’t know where I work or what I spend time doing anymore.” Not many of her aspirations had changed since high school, but it didn’t change the fact that he hadn’t been around for the last four years to catch on to any of the little differences.
“You work for your brother’s foundation. And I assume you still spend a lot of time painting because you also run an after- school program for at-risk youth. You’re on a rec league soccer team in the fall. You have bangs now, and tattoos that I assume you designed yourself because they look like the watercolor flowers you used to paint all the time,” Colin rattled off.
Scarlett frowned. “So, what? You’re stalking me on social media now?” If Colin had any social media, she probably would have done the same, to an unhealthy degree, but she wasn’t the one that had ended things.
“Not just now,” he admitted. “Once a week for the last four years.”
Her heart almost stopped beating completely. “Why?”
“Because I think it probably would have been unhealthy if I did it more than that, so I scheduled it for Wednesdays.”
“No, why did you stalk me at all, Colin?” Scarlett’s mind was whirring and spinning with the information. “You’re the one who blew us up. You decided it was over, so why are you looking at my Instagram every week on the day we used to…” She trailed off, shaking her head from the memories.
“You still can’t say the word?” Colin asked.
“I can say ‘sex,’ Colin.” Scarlett folded her arms over her chest, self-consciously covering her breasts. “It’s not the word that’s throwing me off, it’s you. Why are you stalking my Instagram?”
“I like seeing you happy,” he said. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”
“I am.” It came out rough from her mouth. Right this very second, she wasn’t sure that she was. “Are you?”
Colin folded his hands on his lap and shrugged. “Sometimes.” He looked toward the counter, and something crossed over his face that she couldn’t read. “Did you paint the art above the espresso maker?” He pointed to the canvas she had just hung up earlier that morning.
“Yes.” She swallowed. “It’s new. It’s not my best work.”
“It’s beautiful. I can see the improvement, even though I never understood how you were doing it to begin with.”
“Is that the one you were trying to buy? Harper commissioned it for the coffee shop, so it really isn’t for sale.” She watched as Harper took someone’s order behind the counter and casually looked over at them, keeping a watchful eye.
“No.” Colin shook his head. “There was one leaning against the cabinets behind the counter. A double helix?”
For some reason, the knowledge that Colin was going to buy Theodore’s art was what hit her the hardest. Years later, Colin still was able to pick out the things that were important to her. She didn’t care about the mug piece above the espresso maker at all. The DNA painting was much more special. So, she surprised herself when new words came out of her mouth. “That piece is for sale.”
“It is?” Colin sat up straighter.
“Yes. I hadn’t decided on a price yet, but a quarter of the profits go to the art program I’m running for supplies, and then the rest I stash away for each of them until they graduate high school.” For some reason, out of anyone, it felt like Colin was the one who should own the piece. Maybe it was because she had that same feeling about Theo as she did with Colin forever ago. They were both going to be somebody. They were both irrefutably special. The type of minds to change the world. The type to see everything differently. Theo’s autism allowed him to see the world at a different frequency, enough to make masterpieces that she could only imagine in her wildest dreams. Colin’s straightforward way of thinking and desire to find the knowable in everything was going to get him places. “That piece was made by my favorite student, so if you plan on buying that one, you have to promise me you’ll take care of it.” Colin’s mouth flatlined, and he cocked his head to the side. “Right. You keep everything pristine. Who am I kidding, I’m sure you’ll keep it safe. You take care of the things you love. I guess I’m just the exception to that rule.”
“Scarlett.” His voice cracked as if he were shocked by the statement, but she just lifted her eyebrows in a challenge. “I never wanted to hurt you. I know I did, but I’d like to explain, and?—”
“No,” she cut him off. “I’m not interested in dredging up the past. I’m sorry I brought it up. We didn’t even date, right? It was all just one big experiment.”
Colin looked stricken. “It wasn’t just an experiment to me.”
The shrug she gave him was as nonchalant as she could make it. “Well, I won’t hold you to anything you said back then.”
“I meant everything I said back then,” Colin said with a bitter edge to his voice. “You watched me cross off the no strings attached rule on our chart, Scarlett.”
“We agreed originally to an experiment, and that’s what it turned out to be in the end. No matter how convoluted it got.” It was a blatant lie, and she waited for only a split second for him to call her on it, watching his mouth open in protest before she spoke again. “I have some bubble wrap in the back, and I can wrap the piece up for you if you still want it. But I was serious about not wanting to cross paths, Colin. As much as we can avoid each other, that’s what I want. I can’t be your friend. I’m trying to be happy, and you make me…”
“Sad?” he asked, his expression somber as he looked down at his hands.
“And mad.” Scarlett let out a long sigh. “I never want to be blindsided again the way I was blindsided by you. I don’t even want to be having this conversation right now. I want to be done wondering what I did wrong. If I was too much. I want to be done ever thinking about it. I want to move on, and you moving back here is going to really suck if you keep coming around.”
“Okay,” Colin whispered. He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes for a brief moment. The look of misery on his face made her heart ache in her chest, demanding that she say something to ease his pain. But all it took was the memory of him watching her break down in tears and choosing to walk out the door anyway, and she was cured. “I won’t bother you again, and I’ll try to keep my distance.” He lowered his head a second later and started to get up. “Sell me the painting?”
“Sure.” The silence between them felt like a ticking time bomb as she walked over to the counter. Harper looked between the two of them warily as Scarlett cleared her throat. “I’m going to go get bubble wrap for that.” She pointed to Theodore’s painting, still leaning against the cabinets, before turning to Colin. “I normally sell Theo’s work for three hundred.”
“Okay.” He pulled out his wallet as she moved to pick up the painting, walking it past her sister to the back room.
The second Scarlett pushed through the door, the emotions lodged in her chest finally released. There wasn’t a way to hold back anymore, and she finally decided, just once, that she could allow herself to cry over a man, because fuck it , being fully known and then subsequently unwanted was never not going to sting. A broken sob escaped her lips. That all-consuming sorrow she had been better about fighting off lately was still there. It was lurking in the shadows and waiting for Colin to come back and remind her that love was a fleeting thing she couldn’t hold on to. It left like her brother. It left like her father. And it left like Colin. No matter the magic of the feeling, it wasn’t there to stick around, because the men in her life either had no choice but to leave or had left of their own accord. She could forgive her brother for dying. She could decide that her father wasn’t worth her time. But Colin? She really hoped he wouldn’t forever be the gaping wound that constantly reopened, letting all her worst fears in.
Tears fell silently down Scarlett’s cheeks for only a minute before she collected herself enough to wipe them away and wrap Theo’s painting in the bubble wrap she had packaged it in earlier that day. She regretted selling it to Colin now because it almost felt like he was getting yet another piece of her, but it was too late. She always ended up paying for her impulsive tendencies. Even having sex with Colin the first time had been a snap decision. And now the painting. Colin made her brain foggy and her heart plummet when it was no longer his to hold on to.
A final sniff, and Scarlett had her tears dried and a carefully wrapped painting ready to hand off. Colin was holding a check when she pushed out of the back room, careful to not hit the painting on any edges. He slipped the check onto the counter, sliding it toward her as she moved to pass the painting to him. Their hands barely grazed, and Colin sucked in a breath, no doubt due to his hatred for soft touch. She almost pressed against his fingers to soothe his problem, but fought against it, letting go and releasing the painting into his hand.
“Is there anything I can do to help you at all?” Colin finally asked, gripping the painting hard. “I won’t come around, but if there’s something you need… I’m here. I’ll be your biggest supporter.” He tipped his head to the side and added, as an afterthought, “from afar. Miles away from you. So far away that you’ll wonder if I even exist anymore.”
A small laugh pushed up Scarlett’s throat, and she was surprised that it wasn’t bitter or hurt. Colin had always been funny to her, even inadvertently, though it seemed like he was intentionally trying to make a joke this time. And maybe that was why she felt she could ask, at least not for her own sake, but for someone else. She already felt guilty enough that with her schedule, she couldn’t volunteer herself. “My aunt runs a mentorship program through the children’s advocacy center. They’re hard-up for volunteers. The kids are older, anywhere from seven to seventeen, so it shouldn’t be a noise issue for you. And I know it doesn’t help me directly, but?—”
“Done.” Colin gave a firm jerk of his head. “I’ll sign up.”
“Great.” Scarlett drummed her fingers on the counter and saw her sister pretending to make a drink in earshot. There was no good way to end this conversation, and she seemed to be locked in place, waiting for the ground to swallow her up or for Colin to become a mirage and fade into oblivion like one of her dreams. In the end, she could always count on Colin to get right to the point.
“I’ll leave now.” He held up the painting. “Thank you for this.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll tell Theo it’s in good hands.” The awkward nod she gave him did nothing to alleviate the discomfort of watching him turn to walk away. It was as if the sight of him leaving were ingrained in her on a cellular level, her chest tightening around her heart just like it had the last time. What she wasn’t expecting was for him to freeze halfway to the door, turning slightly back over his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth, you were never too much, Scarlett. You’re everything good and right in the world.” Without another word, he opened the door and left, leaving her to stare after him with her mouth slightly parted.
“Letti,” Harper soothed, coming up behind her and rubbing a hand up and down her arm.
“I’m fine.” Scarlett took a shaky breath and finally reached for the check sitting on the counter, noticing first that Colin seemed to know exactly who to make it out to, and second the incorrect amount he had written on the check. Her eyes widened.
“Holy shit,” Harper whispered. “Didn’t you say it was three hundred?”
“Yep.” Staring at Colin’s neat script that she had seen a hundred times didn’t change the numbers he had written. One thousand dollars was a far cry from what she had told him to pay, but the note on the memo line seemed to explain it all.
For your favorite student.