31. Eli
— ? —
Eli
Five Months After June’s Birth
The arena is sold out.
A whole arena’s worth of people packed into the same building where I gave away Az’s seat to a woman who was trying to destroy my marriage, and I can’t stop pacing backstage. Dez keeps looking at me like I might need to be sedated.
“You’ve done this a thousand times,” he says.
“Not like this.”
“It’s the same stage. Same lights. Songs you know by heart.”
“It’s not the same.” I stop pacing long enough to check my phone. No messages. “She should be in her seat by now.”
“She’s still getting June settled. Abbie just texted. You saw them ten minutes ago.”
“She should be in her seat.” I resume pacing.
“The show doesn’t start for another hour.” Dez says it slowly, like I’m a spooked horse.
“I know when the show starts, Dez. I’m the one playing it.”
He holds up his hands. “You need to breathe. You’re going to give yourself a stroke before you even get onstage.”
He’s not wrong. My heart is doing something concerning, and my hands are shaking, and I’ve been to the bathroom four times in the last twenty minutes. Stage fright. I haven’t had stage fright since I was nineteen and playing bars for tips.
But this isn’t about the show. This is about the seat.
Row A, seat one. I had someone tape a sign to it this morning. White paper, black letters. AZ. Just her name, nothing else. No explanation. Anyone who sees it will know what it means.
“She’s coming,” Dez says, watching my face. “She said she’d be there, and she’ll be there.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you-”
“Because I want her to enjoy seeing me play again.” The words come out wrong. Tangled. “It’s been too long since she felt like she belonged. She stopped coming because I made it unbearable for her to come. And now she’s coming back, and what if-”
“What if what?”
“What if she remembers why she hated it?” I sink onto the dressing room couch. “What if she sits in that seat and looks at all those people and thinks this is what he chose over me and walks out?”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know her.” Dez sits down across from me. “She’s tougher than you give her credit for.”
“I know she’s tough. That’s not-”
The door opens. Abbie sticks her head in. “She’s in her seat. June’s with me in the green room. You’re on in forty.”
Forty minutes. Forty minutes until I walk out there and play for a sold-out building of people who paid to see me, and all I’ll see is her. Row A, seat one. My wife.
“Okay.” I stand up. Shake out my hands. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Ten minutes before I started interrogating Dez, Az had found me in the green room before taking her seat. June was asleep on her shoulder, milk-drunk and dreaming.
“If I say no,” she said, “you just keep playing. You don’t make it a thing.”
“If you say no, I nod and move on.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You don’t owe them anything, Az. You don’t owe me anything. This is just… if you want it. Only if you want it.”
She kissed me, soft and quick. “Ask me. When you get there, look at me and ask. And I’ll decide.”
So that’s the deal. No pressure. No audience manipulation. Just me and her and whatever she chooses.
The lights go down, and the crowd screams.
I’ve missed this. The energy. The noise.
The moment before the first note hits where everything is possible and nothing is wrong.
But I’ve missed a lot of things in the last five months.
I’ve missed sleeping more than three hours at a stretch.
I’ve missed having a conversation that doesn’t involve diaper brands or feeding schedules.
I’ve missed the feeling of Az’s body against mine in the dark.
I haven’t missed the stage more than I love being home with them.
“Los Angeles,” I say into the mic, and the crowd roars back. “It’s been a while.”
I can see her. Front row, first seat, exactly where she should have been that night I gave her seat to Brynn. She’s wearing something blue, her hair pulled back, her face turned up toward the stage, and she’s smiling.
She’s smiling.
Four songs in, I look for her again.
Row A, seat one, the paper sign with her name still taped to the chair. She’s watching me with that look, the one that’s equal parts I love you and you’re ridiculous.
I check. Just a small glance, an eyebrow raised.
She shakes her head. Not yet.
I nod and keep playing. The next song is one she’s never heard, something I wrote at the farm, about mornings and coffee and the sound of her laugh through the kitchen window. When I finish, the crowd roars.
I look at her again.
This time, she catches my eye. Holds it. Mouths: Yes.
“Az?” I say into the mic, soft enough that it feels private even with the whole arena watching. “You sure?”
She’s already standing, already moving toward the stage. The crowd starts clapping, not chanting, not demanding, just… welcoming. The security guard at the barrier looks at me, and I nod.
She climbs the steps.
Azalea Moore, who became Azalea Jackson in a courthouse nearly six years ago, who forgave me even when she didn’t have to, who put my ring back on her finger herself.
She crosses the stage.
“Hi,” I say, when she reaches me.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Probably.” I hand her a microphone. “You don’t have to say anything. I just… I wanted them to see you. I wanted them to know who you are.”
“They know who I am. The tabloids made sure of that.”
“Not like this.” I turn to face her. “They saw pictures. Stories. They saw you crying outside a restaurant. They saw Brynn’s lies. But they didn’t see you.”
“Eli-”
“This is my wife,” I say, loud enough for the back row to hear.
“Azalea Jackson. The woman I met in a bar in Silver Lake when I was a nobody playing open mics, the woman who let me make her eggs the morning after and then somehow decided to marry me. The woman I almost lost because I was too stupid to see what I had.”
Az’s eyes are wet. She’s blinking hard, trying not to cry, and I love her so much it hurts.
“I’m going to sing her a song now. One I wrote on her couch about the morning I paced her doorstep because I couldn’t wait another second to see her again.”
The band starts the intro. Doorstep. The first song I ever wrote for her. The one that made my career, the one I’ve played a thousand times for a thousand crowds, and I’ve never meant it more than I mean it right now.
I sing it to her. Just her. The arena full of people, the cameras, the lights. None of it matters. Just Az, her face, her tears. The way she reaches out and touches my arm like she’s checking to make sure I’m real.
When the song ends, I kiss her.
Full, deep, in front of everyone. Her hands come up to my face, and she kisses me back, and the crowd explodes, and I don’t care about any of it. I don’t care about the headlines or the photos or the hashtags. I care about her.
“I love you,” I say, against her mouth.
“I know.” She pulls back, smiles, squeezes my hand. “I’m going to go check on June.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s probably driving Abbie crazy.” She heads toward the wings, and I watch her go, and I’ve never wanted anything more than I want to run after her.
At the scheduled band feature after the next song, I do.
“Make some noise for these people,” I tell the crowd, handing my guitar to the tech as the band launches into the instrumental we rehearsed. I have six minutes. Nobody is waiting in silence while I make a decision.
I catch her in the hallway outside the green room. She is stepping out again after checking on June when I call her name. She stops and turns toward me.
“Eli, what-”
“I need to say something.”
“You’re in the middle of a show.”
“The band has their feature. Six minutes.” I’m breathing hard. My heart is doing that concerning thing again. “I need you to hear this.”
“I heard it. You sang me a song in front of a sold-out arena. I got the message.”
“That wasn’t the message.” I take her hands. Both of them. Hold them against my chest so she can feel how fast my heart is beating. “I mean, it was part of the message. But there’s more.”
“Okay.”
“I was going to do this onstage. I had this whole plan. Bring you up, sing the song, drop to one knee in front of everyone-”
“Eli.”
“But then I thought about it. Really thought about it. And I realized you’d hate that.
” I swallow. “You’d smile and say yes because you wouldn’t want to embarrass me in front of all those people, but inside you’d be furious.
Because I’d have put you on the spot again.
Made it about the audience instead of about us. ”
“You’re not wrong.”
“I know. That’s why I ran.” I take a breath. “That’s why I’m here, in this hallway, while the band plays the feature we rehearsed, because I wanted it to be just us.”
Az stares at me. Her face is unreadable. “Wanted what to be just us?”
“The question.” I reach into my pocket. Pull out the ring box I’ve been carrying for three months, waiting for the right moment, the perfect moment, and now I’m standing in a fluorescent-lit hallway with arena noise bleeding through the walls and it’s not perfect at all but it’s right. “Marry me again.”
“We’re already married.”
“I know. And I would marry you in that courthouse all over again.” I open the box. Simple band. Diamonds set into the gold so they don’t catch on anything when she’s working with flowers. I thought about what she’d want. What she’d actually wear. “This one is for choosing each other again.”
“You planned a break.”
“Yeah.”
“For this.”
“I wanted to do it onstage. You’d have hated it.” I hold out the ring. “I wanted it to be just us. And if you want time to think, we can talk at home. Nobody out there knows what I’m asking.”
She’s crying now. These aren’t the quiet tears from the stage. Real crying. The kind that comes from somewhere deep and doesn’t stop.
“You’re such an idiot,” she says.
“I know.”
“You could have just asked me at home.”
“I could have. But I wanted you to know-” I stop. Try to find the words. “I’ve been pacing doorsteps my whole life. Rehearsing how to be worth you. And the only thing I’ve ever gotten right is saying it badly and meaning it.”
She takes the ring from the box. Studies it. Turns it over in her fingers.
“Yes,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Obviously yes.” She slides it on, next to the first ring, the one she put on herself nearly five months ago. “Now get back out there before your band has a mutiny.”
I kiss her, hard and fast. Not enough.
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Go.”
I go. Back down the hallway, back through the wings, back onstage where the whole arena is still waiting. The band is reaching the last chorus of their feature. I wait in the wings until the drummer gives me the cue we rehearsed.
“Give it up for the band,” I say into the mic.
The crowd cheers.
“Where were we?”
And I play the rest of the show, and I don’t explain to anyone why my face is wet.