Chapter Twenty
The rest of the afternoon passed in quiet discomfort. Cassie read some more, but she could hardly concentrate on the words. And even when she could read the words, the sentences didn’t make sense. Still, she persisted. She needed to do something.
For dinner, Blaine made grilled chicken and salad. “Since we weren’t exactly healthy the rest of the weekend,” he said.
It was nice to have someone looking after her, but she refused to get used to it.
After dinner, she searched for the ammonite sketch she’d made yesterday and found it on the shelf with his collection.
“Blaine,” she said. He was in the kitchen, scrubbing a pot, but he came immediately. “Ammonites had soft bodies, right? There must have been something inside the shell. Like snails.”
“There was.”
“Do scientists know what they looked like?”
“They have a pretty good idea.”
“But soft bodies aren’t preserved, right?”
“In rare cases they can be. Very special conditions are required. For example, there is excellent preservation of the soft parts of animals in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. But those are from the Cambrian, and I don’t think ammonites appeared until the Devonian.”
“I can’t figure out,” she said, “whether I would have learned better in school if you were my teacher, or if I would have been too distracted by your good looks to absorb any information.”
He chuckled. “Where is the Burgess Shale?”
“British Columbia. You just said that.”
“See? You would have learned just fine.”
She made a face at him. “You liked school, didn’t you?”
“I enjoyed university. Before that, I liked learning, but I didn’t always enjoy school. How about you?”
“I didn’t mind it, but there was never anything that truly captured me. Unlike you, who seems to find so much interesting.”
“Perhaps you just haven’t found the right thing yet.”
“Perhaps. I like art, but it’s a hobby. I’ve never had a desire to pursue it further.” She paused. “I do like my job, actually, working in healthcare. After the pregnancy scare, I got more interested in women’s health in particular. I’ve considered studying to be a nurse but never seriously. I’m not sure what I want, and sometimes it feels like it’s too late.”
“Which is ridiculous. You’re young.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“You could live with me and go to school in Ottawa. Free accommodation.”
“Blaine. Don’t.”
He looked at her sadly. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
He sighed. “What can I do to change that?”
“Time machine?” she suggested. “Or you could knock me on the head and give me amnesia. But it would have to be just the right sort of amnesia, so I’d forget the week we spent together and how heartbroken I was afterward, but not the rest of my life. You’re an engineer. You should be able to figure it out.”
He quirked his lips as he picked up the picture of the ammonite.
“May I keep this?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He returned the drawing to the shelf. “I’d feel guilty if I needed to resort to amnesia. And if I had a time machine, I suppose I would try to save my dad, so we might never have met.”
There was no point in thinking about how things could have been different. It was what it was. They’d had one week plus a weekend together, and that would be the end of their story.
“Your father,” Blaine said. “He cheated on your mother, she took him back, and then he did it again with a different woman, right?”
Seriously? These were their last few minutes together, and he had to bring up that unpleasant memory? She ground her teeth and nodded. “That’s right.”
“But I’m not like him,” he said. “I swear to you, I would never break your heart again. You can trust me with a second chance.”
How many times had they gone through this? “How can you know that? You only decided on Thursday—”
“Cassie.” He spoke quietly but firmly. “I’ve never felt like this about any other woman. I love you. I want to marry you. I won’t change my mind.”
His conviction was touching. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
He took her hand. “I think you love me.”
That was probably true. She didn’t want to examine her feelings too closely. If she didn’t admit she loved him, maybe she wouldn’t hurt as much tomorrow.
…
Blaine was pretty sure Cassie was in denial about her feelings for him. But nothing he’d said had made her change her mind about staying. Instead of saying she loved him, she had taken a deep breath and asked him to drive her back to Georgeville.
They were on the road, almost halfway there. He wasn’t sure why she had put her beaver costume back on for the drive. The two dresses she liked were in a bag at her feet.
They’d barely said anything for the past hour.
“What did you dress up as for Halloween when you were a child?” she asked.
The break in the oppressive silence threw him off for a second. Then he said, “You can probably guess.”
“Dinosaur?”
“More than once.”
“Scientist?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What else?” she asked.
“Albert Einstein.”
“I already guessed scientist.”
“I dressed up as a scientist when I was seven. I wore a lab coat. But when I was eight, I dressed up as a specific scientist. Then when I was nine, I was zombie Einstein.”
She laughed.
Oh, he would miss that sound.
“What about you?” he asked.
“The usual things. Princess, fairy. The Little Mermaid. My mom sewed my costumes, and they were pretty good. One year I was even a dinosaur. See? We have something in common.”
“I know,” he murmured. “We have lots in common.”
She kept chattering away. “Stegosaurus was my favorite. What was yours?”
“It kept changing.”
“Ah. You have commitment problems.”
He gave her a hard look before turning back to the road. “Don’t tease me about that. It’s not true.”
“Fine. So what was one of your favorites?”
“Pachycephalosaurus.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“It had a very thick skull. I thought that would be useful. Also, ankylosaurus. It was covered in armor plates, plus it had a club at the end of its tail. Sounded cool to me.”
“I remember that one,” she said. “Do you still read about paleontology?”
“Yes, but I’m less focused on dinosaurs. Ammonites, for example, are cool, too.”
They were quiet for a few moments, but he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“You could be a sexy ladybug next year,” he suggested. “Or maybe a sexy stegosaurus.”
“Ha. When I was nineteen, I dressed as a female lumberjack. Can’t remember why.”
“Because you wanted to make jokes about wood, obviously.”
He shouldn’t be teasing her about some old Halloween costume. He ought to say something meaningful, make one last attempt.
“If you gave me another chance,” he asked, “logically speaking, what do you think are the odds that I’d leave you?”
She thought about that for a while. He slowed down so he was driving below the speed limit, increasing the time he’d get to spend with her, if only by a tiny amount.
“One in three,” she said at last.
“So you think there’s a better than fifty percent chance that I wouldn’t leave you?”
“It’s not enough. A one in three chance of dying in a car accident—those would be terrible odds. Or a one in three chance of being clubbed by an ankylosaurus. Can you imagine?”
“I’ll miss you,” he said. “So much.”
…
When Blaine dropped Cassie off, she walked out of the car without a kiss, without a backward glance. He sat there for a few minutes, staring up at her apartment.
So this was it. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted.
If he was honest with himself, he’d always kind of expected her to leave. He’d hurt her badly. He’d just clung to the hope of winning her back because he knew how much it hurt to lose someone he loved, and how he’d have done pretty much anything to make that pain go away.
And now he’d lost her.
He started on the long drive home, all by himself.
As he crossed a bridge, he had the impulse to jerk the wheel to the right, to crash over the barrier and into the water. And that would be that.
He took deep breaths. “Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian…” he muttered. Since there was no reason to be quiet when he was all alone, he spoke again, louder this time. “Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian…”
He was a nut. That was okay.
But he would not drive off a bridge.
Dad, why did you do it? Why didn’t you tell me?
There were no answers, and he didn’t know how he would get through this. His fear of losing control of his life, of losing someone else he loved—it had happened again.
And it was just as horrible as he’d expected.