Chapter 36 #2
Sam must have had the best view of it all: Melinda leaving him out there alone on the street—and then, the beginning—Drake’s eyes moving back toward the bar to look at Ellie, and really taking her in this time without distraction.
Her face was set right above the window logo he loved, one hand holding her chin and the other jotting something inside a notebook.
She was effervescent. Each of her features was a magnet drawing him closer.
He’d lied to Melinda, or maybe he hadn’t looked hard enough earlier.
The girl at the bar was mesmerizing.
Drake opened the door and moved back through the space with new purpose, settled onto the stool next to Ellie, and said he was sorry to interrupt. Then, everything played out how they both remembered, but this time they saw details they’d missed.
Sam’s face was overtaken by the sting of rejection when Ellie and Drake left together.
Ellie called Sam about an hour after Drake dropped her off to apologize. Did he want to come over that night—no strings attached—and just have fun? Sam showed up at her door with the smell of lemon zest on his hands and spirits on his clothes. Almost immediately, those clothes came off.
Drake called Melinda on the cold walk home and told her he was sorry he wasn’t clear about his intentions for the night.
He stopped and waited for the streetlight to fully change and admitted it was true that he still loved her.
He was pretty sure he was always going to love her.
But he was going to try—to do his very best—to start something new.
He promised her that. Someday, maybe, they could hang out as friends.
“And hey, thanks for pointing out that girl, by the way,” he said.
Then, the movie cut.
Ellie and Drake stayed in the audience for a moment. Both were expecting The End , but it never came. The lights went up. Wordlessly, they waited for the other person to move.
Ellie was the first to stand, and Drake followed behind her. They walked through the lobby under thousands of crystals on the great chandelier and passed the ticket boy forever preparing popcorn. Natalie waved goodbye from behind the snack counter, like she was on a parade float.
In silence, they descended the alley. Each step felt heavy. When they tried to talk, the words went missing. Drake turned to Ellie in front of Mae’s Famous Scoops and held her in place by the shoulders.
“Stay here a second,” he said, racing back to the top of the alley alone and leaving her to wonder what he was doing.
Drake wasn’t sure if he’d even be able to enter the lobby without a ticket. Luckily, the doors swung right open, but the ticket boy was there to stop him when he stepped inside. “You can’t go in the auditorium,” he said. “You don’t have any tickets left.”
“I know.” Drake nodded. “I’m not here to watch a movie.” He rested his weight on his knees, out of breath. He’d been running more than usual lately. “I’m looking for the lost and found.”
“You lost something?” Natalie asked. She’d surfaced in the middle of the lobby, as if from thin air.
“Uh, yeah.” Drake turned to face her, a little disoriented. “I mean, no.”
“So, you do or don’t need the lost and found?”
“I do need it. Uh-huh.”
As soon as he asked for it, the glass counter appeared again at the front of the lobby.
Natalie guided him over to it. The previously blank wall now held posters for movies that weren’t memories.
The two of them had been replaced by sequels to popular hits.
Drake had been so preoccupied with their movies that he’d never asked about one of Natalie’s quirks he’d noticed.
“What’s with you and sequels, anyway?” he asked.
“ Grease 2 ? Jaws 2 ? Miss Congeniality, Armed and Fabulous ?”
Natalie flashed a smile meant to signal he finally asked the right question.
She leaned over the glass display counter that showcased their lost items—from the green plastic dinosaur key chain to the blindfold from his proposal on the bottom shelf.
On their previous stops to the lost and found, Drake had done everything in his power to keep Ellie from reading the plaque on Drake’s Failed Proposal .
“Let me tell you something,” she said in a hushed voice. “I’m a sucker for sequels.”
“Why?”
“Because, Drake,” Natalie confided, “I love second chances.” Drake nodded. He wasn’t sure if she was being flip or trying to impart words of wisdom. But Drake didn’t have time to parse her meaning; he’d come for the preserved red rose on the top shelf: a relic from Drake’s Valentine’s Day Fiasco .
“I’ll take the rose,” Drake said, tapping against the glass. “The rose, please.”
Natalie ducked down and emerged with the ancient red flower. “Nice choice.” She set it on the glass counter between them.
“Thanks,” he told her, resting it in the palm of his hand.
“I hope you liked the movies,” she said, locking the case with a small silver key. “Whether you did or you didn’t, don’t come back.”
Drake nodded. “I won’t need to.” As his spare hand moved to open the cinema’s doors, he paused. “By the way,” he said, addressing both Natalie and the ticket boy, “the popcorn here is terrible.” The ticket boy poured butter sauce on his newest batch. “No offense, man.”
Natalie winked, and then Drake slipped out the door.
Running downhill was easier. The sound of his footsteps on the alley’s cobblestones made Ellie look his way.
He remembered the first time she’d turned to him in the bar.
It was like all the parts of his life had been moving and changing shape, and that exact moment had somehow snapped them into place.
Once Drake reached her again, he steadied himself and tried to channel confidence. “Turns out, my mom was right,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Ellie asked.
Drake put both hands on her shoulders, still holding the rose in the right one.
“A long time ago, she told me I was going to find that person who wanted to be my Valentine—and when I did, not to let her go. But look, I think I took the not-letting-go part too far.” He paused to gather his thoughts.
“I tried to hide everything about myself that you might not like because I was afraid of losing you. But now, you’ve seen all my baggage.
You know I’m not perfect. I hope you still love me, knowing everything.
Because despite buying a lot of these roses, you are the only valentine I want. ”
Drake held the rose out to her.
As Ellie took it, she noticed a feeling similar to what she’d experienced on that first night together. There was a charge running through her that made her feet lighter on the ground. Here it was again—the intoxicating rush of a new beginning.
The sky rumbled above them. A storm was coming. Tonight, Drake hadn’t brought an umbrella. Within seconds, a rare winter rain crashed over their heads.
Ellie slid the rose under her leather jacket to keep it safe.
Drake’s strong hands found her back, more confident than usual.
He was going to pull her to safety, she figured, but then, he took her by surprise.
Drake had dipped her. He wiped the rain out of her eyes with his thumbs and moved in for a kiss.
It was a kiss that would’ve warranted applause if there were an audience.
Ellie was still hurting from everything she saw, and she also felt guilty herself, but it would be okay. They could still save this.
Drake straightened himself out and reached his hand toward Ellie. She grabbed it.
“I’m sorry I called Sam that night,” she told him. “I only did it because I wanted to be with you. I thought if I invited you in, I’d mess everything up. I didn’t want for us to become a one-night thing. And I’m really good at self-sabotage, as you’ve probably noticed.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Drake said. “I liked you a lot. So much, Ellie. But we’d just met. I wondered if it was too good to be true. I also felt like if I mentioned why I was there that night, it would have changed the way you saw everything.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “I definitely didn’t love all that. It was excruciating to watch. But now, I understand that … Melinda isn’t actually in our way. I mean, if you think about it, she set us up.”
“I wouldn’t give her that much credit. I guess I should be thanking Sam, too. If he hadn’t told you to come to Finn’s that night—”
“You and I never would’ve met.”
“Geez, Sam,” Drake said. “He’s been so nice to me. That guy should hate my guts.”
“Hardly,” Ellie told him. “The story of how we met saved the bar he loves. I think that’s a part of why he invited me there that night.”
Ellie turned to look back at the theater.
She wanted to remember the way it had come to them by magic.
Even though she couldn’t technically write about it, she could save every detail in her mind’s eye.
She hoped to memorialize it in some way.
Despite everything, it had brought them closer together.
“Okay,” Drake said. “So, now that we’ve finished watching our lives, what do we possibly do with our night?”
Ellie yawned. “You know, I’m pretty tired.”
“You want to go home?”
“I do, yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Home is good. Home it is.”
So they drove home and flung open the door to the place where they lived together—a house where their life would happen.
It was a house where they would fall deeper in love and have kids.
They would watch as those kids grew bigger, learned to drive, and moved out.
Even as life started to move faster, they would return to this place to reminisce about that past and the things they were looking forward to together.
But for now, as the sun rose, they set the future aside and lived in their firsts a little longer—their first date, their first kiss, and the first time they watched a Thursday-night monster movie at Drake’s apartment.
“I love you, Ellie,” Drake said, admiring the view outside and inside.
“I love you, Drake,” she told him. And then they both fell asleep on the couch, Nancy at their feet, a life together on the horizon.
When summer came, Ellie and Drake were the stars of a film again, but this time, it was different. They chose this spotlight. Curled under the quilt Ellie’s grandma made, with Nancy at their side and a delicious bowl of stovetop popcorn balanced between their knees, they pressed Play and watched.
The boutique hotel had almost closed before Ellie found it, not long after their last night at the cinema.
“It looks like a cake,” she’d said when she spotted the taffy-pink facade.
“A cake you’d never want to eat.” Flower beds lined the windows, scaling up to a glowing sign that painted the hotel’s name in the sky: The Bernadette.
It had been named, Ellie heard on her first visit, after a rival hotelier who became the owner’s sweetheart.
Guests filtered through The Bernadette’s revolving door into the rose-colored world.
The now-defunct art deco elevator was set up as the altar.
Marc adjusted his lift man costume from behind the podium, waiting to pronounce them husband and wife.
Drake’s parents sat with Sandra in the front row.
Naomi, oblivious to her fashion faux-pas of wearing a long white dress, scooted in next to them as guests milled about waiting for the bride and groom.
Each of the guests settled into their seats with help from Jen and Lola.
Eager to assign himself a task, Nolan handed out the programs. Ben was there, too, by way of the photos Jen arranged next to the guest book.
“No headshots ,” Ellie had told her. Instead, Jen featured shots of the siblings in their wild Halloween costumes, one of the proms where Ben paired his tux with sneakers, and the Polaroid of Ben and Ellie at the run-down historical society house from so long ago.
Drake teared up when Ellie appeared at the start of the makeshift aisle on her dad’s arm.
Ellie looked ethereal in the dress she’d bought at Melinda’s shop; her crystal-embellished heels that peeked out from the bottom of the dress; and a cranberry lipstick that stoked the fire of her hair, which was piled high in an updo.
During the vows, Drake confessed that there wasn’t another person he’d want to discuss weird facts with over breakfast, and that he loved how she made him more brave and adventurous.
Ellie narrated a part of her story about Finn’s from a leather notebook.
Their guests laughed at the punchlines in their vows.
Marc’s chuckle was louder than the rest.
The camera did a close-up on their dramatic first married kiss inside the elevator, where thousands of introductions had once happened within its opening and closing doors.
After watching other people dance at a small ballroom reception and cutting their cake, Ellie and Drake skipped down the seashell-patterned carpet of the twelfth floor and rounded the corner into their suite, the lens blurring on their wave goodbye as the door clicked shut.
The television screen turned black. Ellie and Drake each took a pause to process the film until Nancy hopped down and broke the spell.
“Now, that was my kind of movie,” Drake said. He tossed the remote off to the side. “Hey, have you seen this lead actress in anything else? I hate to tell you this, but she’s my hall pass.”
“Yeah, the lead actor is really something, too,” Ellie teased, putting her fuzzy socks up on the ottoman.
Drake gave her a playful nudge. “Want to watch it again?”
“No,” Ellie said. She tossed a handful of popcorn in her mouth. “I think I’ve watched enough memories now.”
“What do you want to do then?”
Ellie wrapped the blanket tighter around them, then reached to pet Nancy, who had curled up at her feet on the floor. “I want to just be here,” she said. “To be right here, in this moment with you.”