Chapter 17
JULIAN
New York should feel like closure. It should feel like the familiar relief of survival, the quiet satisfaction that comes with finishing another leg of the tour intact, without incident, without damage.
I have always been good at endings, good at walking away cleanly, good at leaving before anything has the chance to unravel.
Precision has been my shield, and careful distance my sanctuary. Tonight, that instinct abandons me.
The final notes of my set are still echoing in my bones when I leave the stage, applause rolling behind me like thunder.
Someone presses a towel into my hands, the fabric soft against my fingertips.
Someone else congratulates me, their voice melting into the ambient noise.
The words blur together, polite and automatic, as my body moves through the motions on autopilot.
My fingers still tingle from the pressure of the keys, muscle memory carrying me forward while my mind drifts elsewhere.
My bag is ready, packed with the meticulous care I give to everything in my life. This is the moment I usually disappear. To the hotel or my bus and on to our next destination, wrapped in the comfort of routine and professional detachment.
Instead, my feet slow. Malik’s dressing room is only a few steps away.
The door is closed, unremarkable and yet impossibly significant.
Light spills faintly from beneath it, a thin golden line against the dark floor, and the sound of the crowd swells as his name is shouted, chanted, demanded as he enters onstage.
The roar is deafening even through the walls, the kind of adoration that has always followed him.
I stop, checking the corridor for anyone watching, my eyes scanning each shadow, each corner. With the show in full swing the hallway is quiet, abandoned for more important moments happening under the lights.
The decision feels reckless even as it settles into certainty, a weight dropping through my chest. If I don’t do this now, if I don’t face him while the adrenaline is still sharp in my veins and my resolve hasn’t had time to erode against doubt, I know myself well enough to understand that I never will.
I’ll retreat back into silence, back into the careful construction of my life that has no room for unresolved pain.
I open the door and step inside, letting it close quietly behind me with a soft click. The room is empty, the monitor is turned down to a murmur, but I can hear Malik as he talks to the audience, his voice carrying through the walls and into this private space.
“New York. My home away from home. How y’all doing tonight?” he says as the crowd screams in excitement, their collective voice rising like a tide.
Malik’s jacket hangs over the back of a chair, deep burgundy fabric draped carelessly as if it’s still holding the shape of his body.
His saxophone stand waits empty for its precious instrument to return to it, polished and patient.
The air still holds the warmth of his presence, the faint mix of sweat and cologne that has always been uniquely his.
There’s something intimate about standing in this space that belongs to him, surrounded by the evidence of his existence.
The walls are thin enough that the music bleeds through, muffled but unmistakable.
His voice carries first, rich and unguarded, followed by the slow, aching cry of his saxophone that seems to pierce through everything else.
I lean back against the counter, arms braced against the cool surface, fingers gripping the edge, and listen. Really listen.
I have heard these songs dozens of times by now.
During rehearsals, during soundchecks, in the quiet moments backstage when I couldn’t escape them, but standing here, alone in his space without the buffer of other people or distractions, they land differently.
The lyrics are stripped bare of performance and spectacle, reduced to what they have always been beneath the polish and production.
Confessions. Regret woven into melody, each chord progression a step through memory.
Longing disguised as rhythm, hidden in the spaces between notes.
Apologies that never quite say the words directly but circle them relentlessly, like water around a stone that refuses to be moved.
I close my eyes and let myself feel each word, each note, each vibration through the floor. The emotions overwhelm, making it hard to breathe, constricting my chest until each inhale feels like a struggle against the weight of years.
Every song a conversation he never finished having with me, sentences left hanging in the air between us. Every note an attempt to explain himself in the only language he knows how to speak without breaking. Music has always been his truth when words failed him.
“Goddamn it, Malik,” I whisper as I hold back the tears that flood my eyes, hot and insistent at the corners. My voice sounds strange to my own ears, rough with everything I’ve refused to say.
Why now? Why this tour after all these years of careful avoidance? Why this particular moment when I’d finally convinced myself I was free of him?
Why this album, this insistence, this relentless proximity when distance was the only thing that made our separate lives possible? All the questions I’ve wanted answered but didn’t allow myself to care out of anger, out of the need to protect the life I’ve built without him.
The crowd roars as he hits a high note, the sound vibrating through the floor and into my chest like a physical touch.
He plays looser than usual tonight, more exposed, his usual technical precision giving way to something raw and visceral, like he’s bleeding something out in real time for thousands of witnesses.
The realization settles slowly, heavily, like sediment in still water.
This isn’t an act. No. Every night, every time he watched me from the wings: New Orleans where we played the night away amongst the crowd of onlookers in the Quarter.
Chicago where he tried to protect me, stepping in the way of my mother’s curiosity in the only way he could.
Philadelphia with its echoes of something new brewing between us.
The kiss. It was him reaching out to me despite the line I’d drawn in the sand between us, a boundary he refused to honor.
This is Malik reaching out to me. Asking.
. .wanting. . .needing my forgiveness like it’s oxygen he can’t breathe without.
He didn’t do all of this for publicity or strategy or redemption in the public eye. He did it because he couldn’t let go, couldn’t move forward without resolving what lay between us.
Anger flares, sharp and immediate, a flash of heat behind my ribs. How dare he decide when and how we confront our past? How dare he orchestrate this elaborate reunion without my consent? Fury burns bright and fast, followed just as quickly by something far more dangerous.
Understanding. I don’t want to, but I do. The recognition sits heavy in my stomach, unwelcome but undeniable.
I pace the length of the room, running my hands over my hair, feeling the tight coils beneath my palms, my thoughts spiraling faster with every song that filters through the walls.
Seventeen years of silence press down on me all at once, the weight of everything we never said, everything I refused to hear because it hurt too much to listen, because acknowledging the wound meant facing how deep it went.
The applause crests again, louder this time, a wave of sound that seems to shake the walls, and I know the set is ending. My pulse spikes as the crowd demands an encore, their voices merging into one insistent call.
Malik doesn’t disappoint, he never does, and I blow out a relieved breath because it gives me a little bit longer to pull myself together, to find some semblance of composure before facing him.
When the final song finishes and Malik thanks the fans once more, his voice hoarse with the effort of giving everything to the performance, I know this is it. There’s no turning back, no retreating into the comfort of avoidance.
Voices echo outside his door, Renee’s authoritative tone cutting through the chaos, telling him she’ll see him at the hotel as the door opens and suddenly he’s there, filling the doorframe with his presence.
Malik freezes when he sees me, his expression shifting from exhausted satisfaction to shock in an instant.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. The noise of the crowd still echoes faintly in the hall behind him, the last vestiges of the performance clinging to his skin like a visible aura.
He looks flushed, breathless, caught somewhere between the stage and reality, between the persona and the man I once knew better than anyone.
“Julian,” he says, my name in his mouth still sending a jolt through me after all this time, surprise giving way quickly to concern. “What’s wrong?”
The question breaks something open inside me.
Because there’s no reason for me to be here for anything else, is there?
I wouldn’t dare grace him with my presence unless I absolutely had to.
This is what we’ve become, strangers who once thought the world of one another.
Two teenage boys who clung to each other with both hands, who made music that felt like magic, who whispered dreams into the darkness.
Now, two souls, lost in the dark, searching for the light of the other across an expanse of years of hurt and silence.
I turn toward him fully, squaring my shoulders as if preparing for impact, the words already spilling out before I can stop them, sharp and desperate and long overdue.
“Why did you kiss me?” I demand the question that’s been burning in me since that night in Philadelphia. “Why this tour? Why now? Why after all this time do you get to walk back into my life and turn everything upside down like you have the right?”