“I’m fine. I can handle it.”
“Okay.” She sits in silence for a few minutes, watching him. Waiting.
She can’t imagine what it has been like for him, to lose both his parents so close together, and so unexpectedly. Her own parents are sometimes annoying, as all parents can be, but she sees them as often as she can. Since they moved to Delaware, it’s not as often as she, or they, would like. To have both of them be simply…gone…Corinne can’t begin to think of how terrible and sad it must feel.
She’s tried talking to him about it, but Reese has said very little, other than to occasionally tell her there are problems with the estate. Lawyers to pay. Mortgages to settle. Back taxes to take care of. She hasn’t pressed him about any of it, though she does wonder if surely, somehow, some way, there is a way they could move into this house and stop paying rent. It might ease some of the financial burden that has started to cause such a strain in their relationship over the past few months. It might help lead them toward some kind of future.
Maybe, she thinks, watching him sort through piles of papers without looking her, maybe the trouble that seems to have crept between them has nothing to do with money.
Maybe Reese just doesn’t want to be with her, anymore.
“You know, I’m here to listen to you. If you need to talk.”
“I don’t need to talk,” he says, still without looking at her. His voice is clipped. Cold. Distant.
“Reese.” When he still won’t look, she says it again, harder. Firmer. A tone that brooks no disobedience.
He has not so much as given her a glance. “I know you get off on bossing me around and stuff, but just drop it right now, okay? I’m not in the mood.”
This, a role reversal and a tossing of her own words back in her face, stuns her so much she gets to her feet without another word. She can’t find any. A breath hisses out of her, but she presses her lips closed to cut it off.
“Just because I submit to you doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do all the time or how to live my life,” Reese says. “You don’t always know what’s best for me.”
Corinne blinks back tears. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”
“Well. I do.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s all she can manage to get out, but the words taste wrong. Everything about this is wrong.
Everything between them has gone wrong, and she can’t do anything about it.
“Will you be home later?” she asks, chin lifted, words gritting out of her, because she refuses to let him see her cry.
“I’m staying here tonight.”
“And tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Reese says with a shrug. She’s never seen him be so cold; she didn’t know he was capable of it, though she shouldn’t be so surprised.
“When do you think you’ll know?” She hates herself for asking, for pressuring, but she can’t help it.
“Shit, Corinne. I have no idea, okay? I have stuff to do here.”
She nods, once, sharply. “Fine.”
Downstairs, she puts the takeout in the fridge. The sound of him in the doorway turns her in relief. He’ll apologize, they’ll talk about things…it’s going to be okay.
“Come with me,” Reese says.
Corinne crosses her arms. They’ve talked about this already. He wants to move out of Lancaster, where she’s still going to school. Where she has a job and a place to live. Where she will be working in a few months when she finishes her classes and starts with Stein and Sons, who were good enough to hire her before she got her degree.
“Where will we go?”
“Anywhere we want. Just out of this cow-shit-smelling town.”
“And what are you going to do,” Corinne says, a chill in her voice colder than the temperature outside. “Tap dance on the streets for cash? What?”
“I can get work.”
“You haven’t so far,” she says and knows she’s being cruel.
Reese could take the few steps across the frigid kitchen to take her in his arms, but he doesn’t. “If I could just get out of here—”
“What’s so bad about here?”
“Everything!” Reese’s shout echoes in the kitchen. “Everything here is shit.”
She shakes her head. “Not everything. I’m here. We’re here together.”
“I want more than this, Corinne.”
More than this. More than her. More than them.
She has nothing left to say.
He doesn’t stop her from leaving. He doesn’t call for two days. When finally she breaks down and calls him, leaving a message on the answering machine, she tells him to come to see her at the diner. It will be her last day there, she tells him. She’s going to take the next few weeks before the new job starts to get everything else in order. She’s going to be there for him, is the unspoken promise, though what she says aloud is that if he doesn’t want this to work, if he doesn’t show, then they’re over. If he doesn’t come to meet her at the diner, he should never bother to call her, ever again.
Chapter Thirty-Eight