Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“Why have this conversation now?” I ask, still not looking at her.
“I tried to tell you before, but you wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t listen.” I squeeze the back of my neck and train my stare on the blanket spread beneath us. “I know.”
“If I had seen you with someone else in the position you found me in, I would have responded the same way you did. That would have qualified as cheating to me, too. We were… We were exclusive.” She blinks rapidly, hands twisted in the hem of her shirt, like I’ve seen her do so many times when she’s agitated. “You were mine and I was yours. I understood what that meant. I deserved to lose you, and I know it hurt. I just want you to know…”
A tear streaks over the smooth slope of her cheek. She brushes it away so quickly in the waning evening light I’m not sure I didn’t imagine it.
“I know I was the one who broke us,” she goes on. “But I was left in pieces, too. For a long time, I felt so guilty that I didn’t allow myself to feel that.”
“To feel what?”
“Heartbroken.” Another tear slips over her face, but this time she doesn’t bother to swipe it. “Just because I was the one who threw it away, doesn’t mean I didn’t lose it, too. I was in a really bad place, and on top of that, I lost the most important person in my life.”
“What kind of bad place were you in? If we’re unpacking it all, can you tell me that? Was it like what happened when you were out here in Cali for college the first time? Junior year?”
Something akin to panic flashes across her face, but it’s gone before I can pin it down.
“Y-yeah, same kind of stuff,” she stammers. “Overwhelmed and not sure how to handle it.”
“Relationships should be like driver’s licenses,” I say, redirecting the conversation, sensing she doesn’t want to discuss what happened junior year. She never does. “The same way you can’t get on the road to drive until you’re sixteen, seventeen, there should be a license to have a serious relationship. Not allowed until your frontal lobe is fully developed.”
“I know, right?” She sniffs, swiping at the last of her tears and aiming a rueful grin at me. “It’s the body’s bad joke that we start getting horny and thinking about sex a whole-ass decade before most of our brains are fully mature enough to deal with the consequences of it. Of getting it wrong.”
“You mean sex? Getting sex wrong?”
“No.” She looks up from the remnants of éclair she’s shredding into a napkin. “Love.”
Who knows if things would have been different had we really discussed it then, when I stormed out of Top Dog and she left Finley so abruptly before we got to talk? There was no chance for explanations. No time to forgive, so my fury and betrayal have been preserved in ice like some prehistoric creature that no longer belongs in this era. But tonight, it’s not the residual bitterness or the anger gnawing at me. It’s a desire that I’m not sure ever went away. A perverse wanting. I’m still desperate to drink her down, even knowing that first sip was laced with poison.
I have no idea what to say in the face of her brave vulnerability. It feels like something between us is being repaired, and my frontal lobe may be good and developed, but I’m still liable to get this wrong so I take the coward’s way out.
“Well, uh,” I say, turning my attention to the screen. “Looks like the movie’s starting.”
TWENTY-NINE
Verity
I can’t believe we pulled this together so quickly.
Over the last two weeks, Monk has been in the studio with the musicians recording songs for today’s Savoy number. We haven’t been in the same place since the showing at Hollywood Forever. We walked down memory lane that night, and not just watching the movie. We talked things through in a way we haven’t before. When he asked about my “hard time,” I was this close to telling him everything. My monumental meltdown in the fine arts building, the cops, the hospital stay. The diagnosis. But even though we’ve made progress, I’m not sure I can fully trust him with that yet.
Enough of that. Today is about work, and what we’ve accomplished together. We continued coordinating the elements needed for the Slim Gaillard cameo and spotlight. Fortunately, Canon loved the idea but left the execution completely to us.
And we were off.
Technically, I don’t have to be on set today, but I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Seeing the history I love so much come to life, a cast and crew full of Black and brown folks, and this story unfolding in a way that is even more extraordinary than I could have imagined—I don’t want to be anywhere else.