The Imitation Game ✓

THIRTY-ONE | WELCOME TO NEW YORK, PT. II

Rasmus felt like he was looking at a ghost.

But if she were a ghost, she would have looked exactly as she had four years ago, and she didn't, not quite. Her hair was still so bright red that she appeared to have been plucked right out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but it was longer now, and she was sporting a tiny nose stud that he'd never seen before. He'd always imagined that if they were to meet again, she would be frozen in time, trapped in amber, unchanged. So perhaps the most jarring realization of them all was that he was no longer looking at the feisty girl with big dreams and graphite smeared on her hands and paint stains on her jeans, but at a grown woman who had found her place in the world and built a comfortable nest in it. The jeans had been traded out for an elegant white jumpsuit and long earrings dangled from her ears.

Cora had shut the door behind herself when she slipped away, but Natasha didn't come any closer to him yet. Instead, she diplomatically asked, "How have you been?"

"Good," he said, somehow able to find his voice while everything inside him felt like it was constricting and expanding all at once. He was startled by how calm he sounded. "How about you?"

"Good."

She was eyeing him like she wasn't entirely sure what to make of him, and he imagined he looked much the same. They had never been like this, never done the small talk thing, so despite knowing that he was walking on thin ice, Rasmus questioned, "Why now?"

"Well, for starters, I couldn't pass up the chance to see you two onstage together—and playing a married couple no less." That hint of playfulness, the hint of how they used to be creeping up in her voice was enough to make him nearly begin to grin in spite of himself.

It was also enough to make him relax the slightest bit. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling to make sure he got all of that pesky gel out of it and not realizing until too late that Natasha would probably interpret it as nervousness. "Yeah, who would've guessed we'd end up here?"

She didn't immediately answer, and he self-consciously wondered if he should busy himself with something else while they talked. But he didn't want to look like he wasn't paying attention to her, not when she'd waited so long and come so far.

"You seem calmer," she eventually observed out loud.

"I grew up."

Something almost like a smile started to tug at her lips. "I was kind of hoping you'd say that."

Rasmus didn't know how he had expected her to respond, but it certainly wasn't like that. "...You were? Why?"

"You sort of treated me like shit," she shrugged; he swallowed down his shame.

"I know. And I'm really sorry, Nat. You deserved so much better from me."

"I know, and I forgive you," she said softly, finally closing some of the space between them to plop down on the carpet and rest her chin in one hand, thoughtful. "In a way, you sort of did me a favor because I really needed to get away from here and don't know if I could have done it if you and I didn't have the falling out that we did. But I guess I said goodbye to you hoping it wouldn't have to be goodbye forever...we were best friends."

His throat had started to close up, the weight of all their memories clenching onto it, as she spoke of forgiveness. So instead of instantly giving her a verbal response, Rasmus reached into his drawer and brushed a couple of stray bits of pencil lead off the cover of the notebook inside. He saw her eyes widen, almost imperceptibly, when he held it out to her—that first sketchbook she'd ever given him.

"I still use it."

She handled it gingerly, as if it were much older than it was. "You know, if you were a serious artist," she teased. "You would have used up all the pages ages ago."