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“Hey, Scarlett,” he murmurs. “Did you miss me?”
I shake my head at him behind her.
He doesn’t care, he’s already smiling at her like he knows she did kind of miss him.
She laughs lightly. “You barely gave me a chance to miss you.”
“Damn,” he jokes. “I was hoping you’d be desperate for my company by now.”
“Well, it depends how good you are at cleaning,” Scarlett says. “If you feel like helping me …”
“Lead the way,” he says, surprising us both.
He’s not really the kind of person who cleans anything, at least not without being told to do it, multiple times over. He can tidy, sort of, when he needs to, but usually that means hiding piles of stuff that was laying around for a while by stuffing it into a drawer or closet and forgetting about it.
“Uh, it’s your house, but sure,” Scarlett tells him as she moves toward the kitchen.
Rueben follows her, whistling as he goes.
I let them go, knowing if I tag along, Rueben will only crack jokes about me being his boss.
Scout looks up from his seat when I step into the lounge and close the door.
There’s a folded-up newspaper on the cushion next to him, but he isn’t reaching for it.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask.
He frowns. “I don’t know. Maybe I should exercise.”
“I don’t think so. If something’s bothering you, we should talk about it.”
“It’ll sound crazy.” He leans back in his seat.
“Well, whatever it is, I bet it won’t sound crazier than any of those conspiracy theories Rueben used to go on about when he went through that phase.”
He snorts. “I don’t know. One of those theories could be the answer.”
“Okay, now you’ve got to tell me.”
“There’s something really different about Scarlett,” he admits. “It feels like she’s a whole different person. I know she’s been dumped and that’s probably never happened to her before, but seriously, Cap, she doesn’t feel one tiny little bit like the same woman who once looked at me like I was lower than dirt in her eyes.”
She did look at him like that once. I’m pretty sure she’s looked at the rest of us the same way at some point, too. I should have guessed that Scout might take it a little more personally. His parents are assholes. They had one golden child, and they expected Scout and his other brothers to compete to get up to his level, which none of them ever could in their eyes.
“We can’t get too caught up in the past, Scout,” I remind him, gently. “We need to take things as they come. Maybe she’s changed, or maybe this is the real Scarlett, the parts she never showed us while we barely knew her.”
He sits there for a second, frowning at the wall, before he gets up.
“I can’t explain it,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know how, or why, or what it even means, but she’s not Scarlett.”
His parents really did a number on him. I’m not sure how to unpick what they did. I don’t know if that’s even possible. It just makes me angry and sad at the same time.
He can’t trust Scarlett now, or how he feels about her.
The changes he sees in her are too good to be true.
“I know it feels that way now,” I start.
He shrugs, and I can tell he’s done talking about this.
