Page 55 of Gifted & Talented
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The sky went black, and Meredith stumbled. At first she assumed that it was just her, that this was finally the karmic punishment she deserved, that the stye in her right eye had always been a prequel to the way the heavens would ultimately decide to push her out. She waited for the rumble of cosmic thunder, the lightning bolt from fate saying haven’t we given you enough, you had love and success all before you were thirty, did you really think that was normal? Didn’t you wonder, all that time that you were treating thirty like the finish line, didn’t you think it was possible, that it was inevitable, that if you rushed through everything in your life, then of course you would pay for it, because you only get so many wins?
But Jamie kissed her back, and kissed her again, and then he pressed her safely away from the edge of the trail. He kissed her with a growing heat, a thickness, like a binding ritual or the prologue to sex. He kissed her again, again, again again again until the coffee cups clutched in their hands became active enemies of state. He couldn’t touch her the way he wanted to; there was too much standing between them, like, for example, a fiancé. He stepped away forcefully, winded with the blow of a gut punch and said, “No. No, no.”
“I’m sorry,” said Meredith, feeling blindly for his face in the dark, meeting the edge of his cheek with the tips of her fingers; self-flagellation of the slightest, lightest brush. “Jamie, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry about this, this is fucking—fuck you, Meredith.” He was breathing hard, his voice rotten with pain. “Fine. Fine, I won’t do it.”
Fear tightened around her heart. “What?”
“The article, Meredith.” Her straining reach found his wrists as he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Fine, Meredith, you win, I love you, I don’t want a life without you, tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do it, okay? You win.”
Meredith felt bereft, bewildered, like she’d woken up that morning and everything was upside down, like she no longer knew how to read, like everything around her was suddenly gibberish. The darkness seemed like an afterthought, as if it had always been this way and she had only just noticed.
“But you can’t pull the article,” Meredith said. Her eyes were adjusting, but barely. Jamie was still only outlines and muscle memory, still the partial projection of who he’d once been. “You already told me it’s going to print.”
“Right.” Jamie’s chin lifted, looking miserably at the sky. “I did say that.”
“You’re publishing it because you love journalism. Because Tyche is violating social ethics and the public deserves to know.” The darkness seemed convenient, then. As if there were no further reason to lie because nobody could see. All of this was secret-telling now, the clandestine whispers of two lovers in bed.
“Yes,” said Jamie. “Fuck.”
“You need the money,” Meredith pointed out.
“Fuck. Yes, I really do.”
“You were willing to destroy me this morning, weren’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I know, I still kind of am.” Jamie sank blindly into the dirt, crouching on the edge of a rock, one hand still wrapped around his coffee cup. The other still in hers.
Meredith sat numbly beside him, an untranscribable whorl of nonsense in her head.
“The thing is,” said Jamie, “I love you too much to hurt you.”
She waited, and of course he said it. “But.”
That word, the inevitable one, was deafening. On-screen, the captions would say something like I love you, but I love my conscience more . In French, presumably.
Jamie swallowed, hanging his head as he looked at their joined hands, safely blanketed by a sunless void of unintentional apocalypse.
“I’ll pull my name from the article,” he said. “I’ll have my editor take the credit, he’ll be happy to do it.”
“No,” said Meredith, tightening her grip. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “I’m not going to be the one who does this to you. I’m not letting the New York Times run ‘et tu, Brute’ when I marry you. I’m not promising my life to you or asking you for yours knowing that my name is forever tied to yours by something ugly like this.”
It hit her like a shotgun blast to her sternum.
“When you marry me,” Meredith echoed.
“Yes, when I marry you.” He reached over and kissed her brutally, with the savage adoration of a man who knows only one thing about the world, that the sun could snuff out like a light and he would stay there, kissing her. “You’re not marrying anyone else, Meredith Wren. I’m not letting you. You told me you love me and I’m holding you to it. You’re going to be accountable for at least one fucking thing in your life, and if it won’t be federal prison time then it’ll be me, god damn it.” He kissed her like she’d rear-ended him on the freeway, like she’d stolen his parking spot, like she’d cut him off at the light. “It’s me.”
Oh Jesus, thought Meredith, who kissed him back and realized she’d never been so turned on, not ever, not once in her goddamn life.
“No.” She struggled to pull away, but managed it. This was important. “Jamie. That report is going to win awards, I’m not joking. And you have a chance to take down Tyche for real.” She swallowed hard. “You have to take me down with them.”
“But—”
“I’m not saying I won’t fight. I’m saying put your fucking name on it.” Her eyes were swimming, they leaked out helplessly, she realized her nose was running only when she felt it drip onto her lip. “All that work, Jamie. Take the payday, cash out, love me or hate me or both. Have it all.”
“Meredith.” He frowned at her.
“It’s my fault. I did this to myself, you were right, it’s my fault.”
“Meredith, I don’t care whose fault it was—”
“Yes, you do. Yes, you do care, you should care. I want to be happy. I want to be happy, I want so badly to be happy, but it isn’t real, it never worked.” She was gasping it, convulsing with sobs. “It isn’t real and I knew it. If I ever actually believed that happiness was real, I would have made a different choice. I didn’t want happiness, for fuck’s sake—I wanted an A!” She felt sick with herself, with the repulsion of having seen her insides. “I wanted to get a good grade in life, in adulthood, in existing —but who was ever going to give me that?”
She was babbling now, giving into her instincts for absurdity, the thing she’d known was the problem all along. She’d wanted to make things better—how many times had she said that? She’d wanted to make a world where her mother lived, and lived and lived and lived, and yet she also wanted her father to think she was worthy, to think she was worth it, and if there was a Venn diagram, a space where both things could be true, Jamie had always lived outside of that. Jamie, her love for him, that was irreconcilable with her potential, with her genius. Jamie was her failure, he was her downfall, and it seemed only fitting, only right, that she should suffer for choosing him now.
“I always knew that choosing you would hurt,” said Meredith, whose chest ached with pain, sharp throbs of it. “I knew it would hurt but I want it, I deserve this.” She couldn’t breathe, wasn’t confident he understood her. “I deserve it.”
“No,” Jamie said, and his hand was on her heart, a weight to hold her steady. “No, Meredith, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Yes, she thought, yes you are, you already have.
He kissed her gently, so softly it was like a child’s wish, like a prayer before bed. She kissed him back, the cyclone between them tightening, closer and closer, threads of fate inseparable, more tangled up than sweet. Like someone had dropped them on the floor and lived a life before picking them back up again years later, entropy and carelessness having formed, however unintentionally, an inseverable knot.
His hand found the waistband of her yoga pants, hers found the hem of his shirt. Skin on skin was feverish, burning. Everything was dark and hot, fresh earth and primal screams. Into his mouth she panted please, he licked back mine, she let out an animal whine of forever, he gritted his teeth with yes . Coffee spilled into the dirt, forgotten. The apocalypse carried on, irrelevant. Overhead a bird took flight, uninvested. The black of midmorning was godless, divine.