Page 25 of Gifted & Talented

“Yes.” She did look at him that time, though only briefly. “Yes, Jamie, I have always answered your calls. I will always answer them.” She turned to look at the road again. “I thought you understood that.”

He said nothing.

Then he shook his head.

“There’s an exit,” he said, pointing. “Can you stop?”

“Yes.” She flicked her turn signal.

“I can drive if you’re tired.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of relaxing, actually. I don’t mind.”

“Okay.” He fidgeted, picking at his cuticles as she took the curved exit toward the nearest gas station. She pulled into a parking spot and cut the ignition, catching his eye by accident.

“Please,” said Jamie. “Just tell me you didn’t do it for the money.”

Deny it,said the gremlin who lived in Meredith’s brain.Use the word “allegedly” again. Make it conditional. Do not say something quotable. He is not your friend. He is not your lover. He is a journalist. He is a member of the faceless public. He will not hesitate to put you in jail.

But,a smaller voice said,if you lie to him, he won’t get back in this car.

And for probably sane and normal reasons, that was an unacceptable condition.

“I can’t honestly tell you that,” said Meredith. “I wish I could. But it’s…” She looked away, then back at him. “It’s not what I wanted.”

Her hands were still on the wheel. The moment felt heavy and unfinished.

“Can you believe that?” she asked him.

Jamie exhaled swiftly, like he’d just been given bad news. Like the tumor was malignant. Like the symptoms had already suggested the disease.

I probably don’t need to tell you that Jamie Ammar is very firmly not an asshole. He is, however, an idiot, and while there is definitely some truth to what Meredith is currently saying to him, we can’t actually point to it and name it honesty. And because Meredith is spectacularly absent self-reflection, we can only speculate as to whether she was telling Jamie the truth or just telling him the acceptabledegreeof truth she knew would still allow her to hold him in her web.

We haven’t discussed Meredith’s past with Jamie Ammar, but surely you’ve grasped some idea of it by now. It was powerful and lifelong, and Meredith, like a spider, consumes her mates. Whether by biological, survival-driven instinct or on purpose, just for fun, is really the question, though, isn’t it?

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is no question, and Meredith is just a dick.

“Meredith,” Jamie said, “if I didn’t already believe the woman I loved still existed in there somewhere, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car.”

See? What did I tell you? An idiot. As if Meredith couldn’t be worth loving and a fucking liar at the same time. Evensheknows he’s allowing her a small but significant sliver of falsity, a place to exist between guilt and innocence without necessarily confessing to one or the other or both. He is practically handing her the means to get away with it, to change his mind.

And Meredith is a lot of things, including a so-called genius. So she said nothing. She reached out and tapped Jamie’s knuckle with one unpolished but carefully manicured finger. In response, he gave her something of a grimace that was as good as a promise. They split up temporarily to empty their respective bladders and Meredith thought melancholically about the grammatical use of past tense.

Then she got back in the car and so did he. He put a bag of her favorite gummy candy in the cup holder, presumably as some sort of peace offering. She put the car in reverse, then drive.

“What if I tell you part of the story?” she said.

“Okay,” said Jamie with palpable relief, despite the fact that Meredith had rehearsed this line and everything to follow in the mirror of the gas station bathroom. Despite the fact that over the course of their technically very brief courtship, Meredith had lied to him as often as she had told the truth. Despite the fact that he knew this, and had loved her anyway—despite the fact that Meredith Wren had never technically learned that love was a tacit agreement not to grievously injure the other person—despite the many people Meredith Wren had already fucked over and left behind, because her tolerance for pain was high—despite the fact that just because she loved someone did not mean she couldn’t also stand to hurt them—

Despiteall of this,Jamie Ammar, who had once been a very promising prelaw student at Harvard until Meredith Wren broke his heart—Jamie Ammar, a very talented investigative journalist who coincidentally did not have health insurance or a life partner or anything really beyond a ratty futon in storage and a set of lifestyle choices that didn’t really fit and whose job was currently being threatened by the use of content-deriving machines that spat out listicles and grammatically accurate drivel that was, to be fair, indistinguishable from what an overworked, underpaid human being could probably write—which happened to be developed bythe very same father Meredith was going home to mourn—

Despite all this, Jamie simply said to her okay, I’m listening, go ahead.

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