My hand jerks on my seat belt latch. “Don’t, Tobe. Don’t let him do this to us.”
His throat bobs. “Why didn’t youwantto?”
I hate Tor Renner. He isn’t even here, yet he’shere,the way our families have always managed to wedge themselves between us. We’ve been fighting about who gets to wear what costume in made-up dramas, when we should’ve been paying attention to our own villain origin stories.
“I wanted to. I was going to. But then after the wedding…” Ah, my breath is shaking. I don’t want to cry, but a lot of things happen the way you don’t want them to, and you just have to keep going. “Our wedding day… we didn’t do a good job for each other that day. It seemed like… like neither of us could break away from our families to putusfirst. And I already felt so small, like nobody saw me. I don’t know. I didn’t want to disappear completely, and if my name was Renner-Lewis… yeah.”
A mountain biker rolling past does a double take at the car filled with crying people.
“There’s no privacy here. Let’s go home.” Electric cars are unsatisfying at times when you want to stomp on the accelerator and make a lot of noise, but I do my best. Tobin opens his window, drifting his fingers through the slipstream. Across the chalk-blue river, Grey Tusk broods, too.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Tobe.”
“It’s all right.”
“It isn’t.” It is bonkers that I want him to be angry and not forgive me right away. I don’t want him to please me in the creepy way he’s been taught. And I don’t want him to think pleasing me counts as an apology. I’m not the only one in the wrong here.
Maybe that realization is why I decide to push it. “I need you to saynosometimes, Tobin. It’s hurting me, having to defend us against everything. I know it’s hard with your parents, but someone who loved you wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself to please them.”
He sets his hand over mine on the steering wheel, caressing my fingers, all intimacy and no sex. Emotions smash inside me, love and fear and anger doing their best to mess each other up.
“Okay. Whatever you want, Diz, I can do that.”
I asked him for what I needed, and he said yes.
I couldn’t have played myself better if I’d planned it. If he refuses, I lose. If he agrees, I can’t know whether he wants to, or thinks he has to. And I lose. But I can’t ask him a question with no right answers and then be angry he got it wrong.
All I can do is keep driving, and hoping, and trying. Change doesn’t happen overnight.
But one thing could change right now. Me. I could take him at his word, believe he wants to do this for us. For love. And I can give him a commitment in return. Yes, and.
“I’ll file the name-change paperwork tomorrow.”
He stares at me, blank-faced and puffy-eyed. “You will?”
“It’ll take a couple of weeks to get processed, but if I go to the office in person, it’ll be faster.”
“You don’t have to.” In the curve of his lips, I see a boy torn between asking for love and pretending he’s fine.
“I want to. I want us to put each other first. I want us to be there for each other, and I—” I almost slip right into the word “love.” “I think that means we don’t pretend bad things didn’t happen. We ask for the things we need. And we need this.Ineed this.”
Something in him loosens, letting his body fall into its proper shape. “Yes. Me too.”
It’s lucky we’ve made it back to the house, and we can stagger inside and give up on this night together. Something in me still vibrates to the feeling ofcoming home,to this place, with this man. Tobin’s as much my home as any physical place I’ve ever been.
I wait for him to walk around the car so I can take his hand and climb the stairs of the house we bought together, into the life we made together, into a future we could have together if we can just keep trying. It doesn’t matter if the steps we take are small, as long as they’re toward each other.
And in the morning, when we wake up in the same bed, it feels right to turn toward his body. To go slow not because I asked him to, but because we both understand we’re reaching for each other’s hearts.
Chapter Twenty-two
Time behaves differently in improv. A second chance doesn’t mean rehearsing the scene until you get it right, or repeating the same joke at the next performance. In improv, there is only this moment, which means your second chance is neither in the past, nor in the future. It’sright now.
—The Second Chances Handbook
It’s day one of the West by North corporate retreat, and like all the employees jostling each other in the parking lot, I’d rather do a week in detention than get on this school bus.
For everyone else, it’s basic survival instinct: don’t be the first penguin to get pushed off the ice floe and into the grim orange vehicle disguised as a forty-minute team-bonding exercise.
