Page 49

FORTY-TWO

ruby

“So you think I should put off culinary school?” My heart sinks as I stare back at my advisor.

Marta swivels her computer screen toward me. “Do you want to look at the numbers again?”

I shake my head quickly and close my eyes. “I remember them.” Tuition numbers. Big numbers. Completely and hopelessly out-of-reach numbers.

“Look, the good thing about becoming a research chef is there’s not one single path to get there.

You work in research and development for a few years after graduation, you save money, and then you go to culinary school.

” Her features tighten. “Now, you haven’t been planning for a career in R and D, so getting a job isn’t going to be a slam dunk.

No internship experience at this stage isn’t good, and you’re quite late to be applying for a fall internship.

We’ll have to work hard to land you a good one in spring. ”

I sigh, feeling my resolve begin to crack.

“It’s still possible, Ruby.”

Sure. Possible. Like winning the lottery is possible.

“I guess I need to think about it. I’ll—” I scramble for an excuse to get out of there, suddenly unable to bear another minute of this conversation.

“Maybe my parents will consider paying after all.” It’s as far from the truth as anything could be, but I just need to leave.

I feel limp with defeat as I head for the biology building for my shift. Score a job in R and D when I’m up against candidates like Bree? Never going to happen. Fuck.

The aquarium room is quiet and empty when I walk in, just as I’d hoped, the only activity the silent, graceful movement of the fish and the soft bubbling of the aquarium filters. I’ve never needed solitude more than I do now. And the bad news from my advisor is the least of it.

All last night I tried not to think about what Lorenzo told me.

And when that didn’t work, I tried to convince myself it didn’t matter what he told me.

So I confessed my feelings to him years ago.

And? He probably would have known I loved him whether I said the words or not. My devotion has never been subtle.

I check the notes left by the last employee—nothing unusual to report. Then I work my way through the feeding schedule.

It’s unfair. That’s what gets me. Lorenzo knew I loved him, knew I wanted him, knew if he said the word, I was his. I feel childish being so hung up on this feeling, but I am. He had the advantage all along, and I went on playing the just-friends game like an idiot. For years.

When feeding is done, I start the long task of checking equipment. It’s tedious, but the repetitive nature is soothing, letting me work on autopilot so I can attend to the tedious and repetitive thoughts in my brain.

Did Lorenzo know I had no memory of saying those words to him?

My stomach drops every time I imagine how it went down.

I was such a sloppy, emotional drunk back then.

Did I cry? Beg him to love me back? Or— oh, god —offer myself to him?

Take my clothes off? It’s all so possible.

And Lorenzo would never have the heart to tell me if I humiliated myself like that.

I picture my high school self with a runny nose and tear-streaked face and mascara everywhere, words tumbling out of my mouth while Lorenzo stares down at me, a deer in headlights.

That’s when it occurs to me to ask the question.

The glaringly obvious question that I overlooked yesterday in my shock and embarrassment.

I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask him.

“What did you say when I told you I loved you?”

I’m standing in the sunbaked parking lot outside the athletic facility, where I’ve waited for the last twenty minutes for Lorenzo to come out, this question burning my mouth.

His expression moves from happy to confused. He stops in front of me. “What?”

“What did you say when I told you I loved you? Did you declare your love to me, Lorenzo? Or did you stand there and say nothing?”

I expect him to tell me to get in the car so we can talk about this in private, but he only looks at me. His silence tells me everything. “I didn’t say anything.”

How can it hurt so much to find out something that, deep down, you already knew?

I swallow, nausea gripping me from my stomach to my throat, the smell of hot asphalt impossible to escape.

I want to turn from him so he won’t see the humiliation on my face, but I can’t seem to look away from the sorrow in his dark eyes.

Can one moment define your life? What about a moment you can’t even remember? Turns out, yes—that moment on the dock that has never even lived in my memory.

When the silence goes on too long, he says, “Don’t go reading into it like that. Please?”

“Why not? You tell someone you love them and they’re silent? What should I read from that?”

“What was I supposed to do, Ruby? I was a kid. I didn’t know what to think or how to feel.”

“You must have felt something. Or maybe that’s it; maybe you felt nothing at all.”

“I felt a hundred different ways! Doesn’t mean I knew the words for them. We were drunk, you were crying, it was a mess. I didn’t expect those words from you. I just ... didn’t know.”

All reasonable enough, but fuck reasonable. I turn and walk away, knowing he’ll follow me, and good—but I can’t keep staring at him.

“Okay, what would make you feel better? If I told you right now that I said the same words back to you? Is that the problem here?”

“No.” But the truth is yes, that would make me feel better. Knowing that, at least then, we were on equal footing.

“Then what?”

I spin to face him. “You’ve had this over me for four years. You knew this about me, the fucking deepest part of my heart, and you just let it ride. You knew a secret about me that even I didn’t know. And you never bothered to tell me, just held on to it until you could use it to your advantage.”

“Use it to my advantage?” His voice dips low.

I shouldn’t have said that. “That’s what you think of me?

What’s my advantage exactly, Ruby? How the fuck am I winning right now?

You’re angry I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back, but you’ve been doing the same thing to me—pulling away, making me ask you to say the words. ”

“It’s not the same. Maybe you didn’t love me in high school. Fine. But you let me believe we were on equal ground this entire time.”

“We were!” He throws his arms out to the sides. “No one has ever come close to you. Whether it was platonic or not, no one has ever meant more to me than you. Even then.”

I wait for this to soothe me, but it doesn’t.

I don’t want to just be his favorite person, the best friend he ever had, the one he respects above all others.

Right now I want to know he’s loved me as long and hard as I’ve loved him.

That all those days and nights I was lovesick for him, he felt exactly what I did.

That’s the kind of love I want. “I’m sorry,” I mumble. “It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“What am I supposed to say?” His shoulders sag. “I don’t have a time machine. I can’t go back and say something different, I can’t make my seventeen-year-old self into anything other than the confused kid I was.”

I give a single nod because I know this too well. How many things would I do differently if I could go back?

“What would you have done?” he says. “Flip the situation. What would you have done if I’d said those words to you when we were seventeen?”

I shake my head and look away, but he takes me by my shoulders.

“No, tell me. I want to know what you would’ve done.”

“I don’t know, Lorenzo.” I shake off his grip, but I don’t turn away.

I have nothing left to hide from him. He knows it all.

He always has. I look into his eyes and I find him there, the same person he’s always been.

Even with this humiliating revelation wedged between us.

He loves me. He’s never wanted to hurt me.

He spent the entire span of our teenage years fighting fiercely to protect me while pretending he wasn’t.

And he wants me to love him. Am I really going to hold that against him?

I drop my head to his shoulder. His arms wrap around me, and I’m safe. I have everything I want.

Maybe if Lorenzo hadn’t asked the question, it would all be okay. I would have moved on. We’d be a couple in love. But he asked and now all I can do is imagine my answer.

Flip the situation. What would you have done if I’d said those words to you?

If Lorenzo had stood on the dock on the last night of summer when we were seventeen and told me he was in love with me, I would have dropped to my knees and praised heaven.

I would have kissed him and told him I loved him right back.

I would have put his drunk ass to bed and spent the night awake, wondering whether anyone else in the world was as happy as I was.

And when he woke up the next morning, I would have told him I loved him again.

I can’t stop picturing it. When I stood on the dock and told Lorenzo I was in love with him, he said nothing.

Not shit. Not then, not the next day. He pretended it never happened.

And this, essentially, is the story of Ruby and Lorenzo.

This is the story we would tell our grandchildren: how I needed him, worshipped him, loved him since time immemorial.

And how ... eventually ... he learned to love me too.

I can’t stomach it. He kept a secret from me about myself, something I had every right to know.

Maybe he did it to save me from embarrassment or maybe to save himself from having to make a choice, but it doesn’t change what I realized the instant he answered my question—that Lorenzo can love me all he wants, but he will never need me like I need him. He never did.

Now I’m the one keeping a secret.

Outwardly, we’ve been okay the last few days.

He’s busy with football camp and I’m working as many hours as they’ll have me and we never miss dinner together and the sex is still good enough to make me temporarily forget everything that’s changed.

And, sometimes, in the moments after sex when real life bleeds back into my consciousness, I tell myself I can move past finding out he’s known for years how I felt for him.

He wanted to know that I loved him; that’s the only reason it came out. What’s more pure than that?

But I’m not okay. I can’t move past it. I don’t want to be the girl he finally learned to love, who he concluded, after careful consideration, will always have his back and therefore makes a solid, logical choice for a partner.

I want him to feel the desperation that I’ve spent a decade getting to know.

And without that, the foundation I thought we had—the one that might help us weather our uncertain futures—has been ripped away.

Monday morning, as if a switch was flipped, I wake up knowing what I need to do. After all the hours of indecision and weighing the options and wishing everything were different, it’s a relief to suddenly feel so sure.

I text my parents the news instead of calling, knowing that’ll offset their sense of satisfaction just a little bit.

I can already hear Richard: Texting when you could just as easily call is the ultimate example of modern disregard for common courtesy.

He’s said these exact words to me multiple times.

I think he keeps them written down in a little pocket notebook somewhere.

The little book of Richard-isms. I bet he thinks they’ll be donated to a museum or some shit after he’s gone.

And I’ll be hearing a lot more of them now that I’ve done what I swore I never would.