Page 25 of Gifted & Talented

21

It wasn’t a long walk to the coffee shop in town, though it was long enough for Meredith to feel eight different forms of dread before eleven. That was impressive for Meredith, who was single-minded enough to feel only one at a time, intensely, usually. She stopped and turned around to go back to her father’s house several times, at least four or five. But eventually she made it to the coffee shop because physical space had limits. Eventually, destinations were reached.

Jamie was already there, sipping a coffee in the public plaza that was the central part of the town. Meredith recognized him immediately, just as she had when he’d first introduced himself to her in college. She had told herself then that she was never going to speak to him, firstly because he was so attractive it was physically crushing her chest, and secondly because he had heard the professor call her a failure and Meredith felt certain that Jamie knew, somehow, in a mind-reading way (Jamie can’t actually read minds) that Meredith agreed with the professor, and that it wasn’t even the first time she’d heard it, because Meredith’s father called her talentless all the time. Not in those exact words, because Thayer wasn’t usually so explicit. But she did understand after eighteen years of routinely suggesting she become a different person that Thayer didn’t like what she actually was, and that was its own version of being called talentless.

And then Jamie had spoken to her because he felt sorry for her and Meredith had the wild, extremely upsetting thought that she would like to have him on top of her anyway, just lying on top of her looking like that, looking at her, being him. Which was obviously so distressing she had needed to leave the room then, which was also what she wanted to do now, because now they were adults and she was the one who wasn’t single and yet she still wanted him to lie on top of her and look at her like that for the rest of her life.

Even though he didn’t look the same as he did when he was twenty— actually, he looked better. And once again it crushed her chest and not at all in the way she wanted.

“Hello,” she said in her coldest voice, sitting down across from him and determining this instantly to be a mistake. He had such a strong jaw. She couldn’t look at him, he was too perfect.

“Meredith, a pleasure as always.” He made her name sound beautiful whenever he said it. Not like Cass, who was always bastardizing it, calling her Mer. Why was intimacy so disgusting? Why couldn’t Cass have remained a mystery, never using the bathroom with the door open or cutting her name into stiff paper strips? Why couldn’t she simply revel in Cass’s usefulness, his magnificent way of existing so stably, which she had envy for, which sometimes felt like desire, like she wanted to peel off parts of him and make them hers? God, what she wouldn’t give to wear Cass’s calmness, to put his practicality on like another skin, and yet she sat there and wanted silently to lick the span of Jamie’s earlobe, to bless him tenderly with the tips of her fingers, to do unspeakable things with him tied to her bed.

The fucking carnality of him, it was relentless! She needed a coffee and ten beers.

“Here,” said Jamie, pushing a latte toward her. “I have no idea how you take your coffee anymore.”

“Thanks,” said Meredith with a brief, all-consuming madness that flashed in front of her eyes like a sudden wash of red. “So, what are you going to do after you destroy me?”

“Hopefully wind up with health insurance,” said Jamie. “Maybe see the dentist.”

His teeth were perfect and the latte was exactly right, the sort of thing Meredith never allowed herself to drink. Sweet and creamy, like a day spent in bed. FUCK. “I just don’t understand why you had to come for me,” she said. “You could have written about anyone.”

“Ah, but you’re the only one pulling off such an amazingly sociopathic con.” He drummed his fingers on the table.

“I’m not a sociopath,” Meredith pointed out. “If anything, I’m a psychopath.”

“No, you’re capable of empathy,” said Jamie. “That’s what makes it all the more insane.”

“Again, assuming any of this was true, it wouldn’t be insane, ” said Meredith irritably. “It would be purely a means to an end.”

“An insane means,” said Jamie, “to an objectively toxic end.”

“Journalism is never objective,” countered Meredith, “or you would have given the article to someone else.”

“I want the money,” Jamie argued. “Actually, I need the money. I’m thirty-three years old and still paying off debt.”

“You could have been partner in a law firm by now,” Meredith reminded him. “I never stopped you from doing that.”

“Yes, true, I could be overpaid to do absolutely nothing of value,” said Jamie. “Or I could actively destroy society, good point.” He gave her a barbed look of significance as he sipped his own coffee, which was black. Meredith resented now that he’d doused her with sugar. “And you wonder why I developed such a so-called obsession with you.”

A series of obscenities reached Meredith from a deep, profound well of rage.

“I will never be able to explain why dating me made you a better person, ” said Meredith exasperatedly.

“I know,” said Jamie. “Which is exactly why I loved you so much.”

They both sipped their coffees as Meredith remembered that she could leave at any moment. She had left before, which made her the leaver. She was actually very good at leaving, she had so much practice at it, and she had the motive to leave as well, because according to a bunch of HR paperwork in Tyche’s corporate offices, she was in a relationship.

Her phone buzzed and she glanced at it. Ward again. She shook her head and dismissed the call.

“Do you remember?” asked Jamie. “The night you showed me.”

Did she remember. She could slap him across the mouth just for that. Motherfucker, did he really think there was any detail she had forgotten? That anything between them had ever evaporated into the ether, slipping carelessly away? For a while she had managed to forget the digits of his phone number, but only in the sense that she had to think about it for a while before it came back. Every year on his birthday she wandered around for the day bereft, like she was missing an organ. Like he’d physically stolen one of her lungs.

“I obviously shouldn’t have,” Meredith muttered to herself. “Which is, again, a compelling reason for you to stop calling me,” she added, louder. “What if I’d sent an assassin here, hm? If you’re dead, the article is dead. Nobody but you would even suspect I was capable of doing something like that. If, allegedly, I even did.”

“Again, I appreciate the effort, but I’m ninety percent sure you’re not going to kill me,” said Jamie. “And you can also stop acting like you didn’t do it, because I’m one hundred percent sure that you did.”

Meredith was pleased she retained a ten-percent chance of homicidal tendencies. That was a real relief, all things considered.

“I didn’t do it,” she said, and then, because it was bothering her, “Are we having an affair?”

“Right now?” asked Jamie.

“Yes.”

“I, personally, am having coffee.” He sipped from his cup to prove it. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.”

“How’s everything with your mom?” asked Meredith listlessly.

“How’s everything with your dad?” Jamie replied.

She longed for the shorthand of sex. There was so much that could be telegraphed with contact and motion that she could never— would never—say out loud. She knew that if she fucked Jamie right now, he would know exactly how she felt about her father’s death, and he would know why she had lied, and he would understand that it wasn’t a grift, it was another utterly talentless act of cold-blooded certainty, a mistake that she would make again and again and again if it meant she could still claw her way forward, so long as there was a finish line to drag herself across. Maybe if they had sex, he wouldn’t publish the article? Maybe if they had sex, he’d feel it all like it had been born in his chest and he’d know, of course he’d know. All of this sitting around and talking, it was such a waste of time, unless you considered time to be an accumulation of moments you’d rather die than go without.

Though if that’s how you saw time, then holy shit, yeah, this was an affair.

“I never really liked my dad much,” she said.

Jamie gave her the same look he’d given her when she met his eye that day in philosophy class, after the professor had finally taught her something. It was actually just a really effective example of pathos, rhetoric used to appeal to an emotion that was already felt, and in the end, Meredith got an A? on the exam.

“I know, Meredith,” Jamie said. “I know.”