Chapter 51 Eliana
ELIANA
umami: /o?o?m?mē/: noun
Bastian is waiting outside the church when Mom and I emerge into the cool May evening. He’s framed in the shrinking aperture of my vision, leaning against the Range Rover with his hands shoved in his pockets, backlit by the indigo sky.
I pause for a second and admire him. His hair is brassy under the streetlight. The white shirt he wore this morning is rumpled now, sleeves pushed past his elbows to expose those scarred forearms—burn marks and knife nicks, the accumulated damage of a life spent working with heat and edges.
Mom notices him a second after I do. She looks at him, then at me. Then a slow, subtle smile crosses her face.
I take a mental Polaroid of that smile and tuck it away, even though I’m slightly embarrassed that she put two and two together so quickly. Guess I’m not as sneaky as I think I am.
We hug goodbye. She promises to get home safe and I promise to call her tomorrow.
Then I walk toward Bastian. My heart does a double-time tempo as I get close, but when he wraps me into a hug and kisses my temple, the ever-present chorus of competing voices in my head smooths out into a blank and beautiful stillness.
This is my safe space. This is my haven. This hug, this kiss, this man, this moment. I can’t see much of the world around us anymore and I don’t have to—because as long as he’s got me, I can close my eyes and know I’m okay.
“Hi,” I say when I finally let him loosen his arms around me.
“Hey.” He studies my face in the streetlight. “How’d it go?”
“Good. Really good, actually. Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Always,” he says simply, and opens the car door for me.
I slide into the passenger seat, and he closes the door behind me with a soft click. The interior smells like wintergreen, as always. He circles around to the driver’s side and settles in, but doesn’t start the engine right away.
He looks at me. “Where do you want to go?”
I look out at the church. The stained glass windows are beautiful dots of blurry oil paint. So are the streetlights, and the stars, and the faces of strangers. The whole world is, really. A Tuesday Evening on the Street of Chicago. My own piece of pointillist perfection.
I look back at Bastian. “I don’t know.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I have an idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He starts the car, and the dashboard lights up in a soft glow. “Do you trust me?”
I turn to look at him. He’s so beautiful. Sharp jaw, proud nose, that mouth I’ve memorized in a dozen different contexts. “Always,” I tell him.
The corner of his mouth lifts. He reaches over and takes my hand. I don’t ask where we’re going. I don’t need to.
Or at least I didn’t think I needed to. But when we pull up behind Frank’s trailer at the Project Olympus site, I snort and turn to look at him.
“Did you not get enough of a dose of this today? Needed to come back for more?”
Bastian merely smiles. “C’mon.”
He comes around the car to help me out. I cling to his elbow as we navigate through the site in the semi-darkness, picking our way to the front of the building. Bastian fishes a key out of his pocket and unlocks the giant door. Then, with a groan of effort, he starts to drag it open.
It takes a second to build enough momentum. But as Bastian strains, his forearms flexing, the door moves one inch, then another, then another, until finally, the whole bronze contraption swings silently on its hinges until it reveals the mouth of darkness waiting for us.
He comes to stand by me and holds my hand again. It’s a huge rectangle of shadow, with the two of us waiting right on the edge. He looks at me. I look at him.
Then we step in.
I can’t see a damn thing. My vision’s been dwindling for weeks, but this is different. This kind of pitch-black makes everyone equal. Bastian can’t see any better than I can right now.
His hand tightens around mine. “Stay close.”
We shuffle forward together. I can feel the vastness of the space around us—the high ceilings, the open atrium. Everything we saw this afternoon in the light now exists only as memory and sensation. Every breath is sucked up into the rafters.
“Where are we going?” I whisper.
“You’ll see.”
“That’s optimistic, considering the circumstances.”
He laughs. “Fair point.”
We keep moving, slow and careful. My free hand trails along what I think is a wall. The stone is cool and smooth under my fingertips. Bastian guides me around corners, through doorways, his breathing steady in the darkness.
We climb stairs. Endless stairs.
My thighs burn by the third floor. By the fifth, I’m breathing hard. By the seventh, I’m wondering if Bastian’s secretly trying to kill me.
“Hold up,” he says. “Let’s take a break.”
“I’m fine,” I insist.
“You’re wheezing.”
“I’m breathing.”
“Horses do it quieter.” He stops on the landing but keeps hold of my hand, forcing me to stop, too. “Take a minute.”
I want to argue, but truthfully, my lungs really are screaming bloody murder and I haven’t made acquaintances with a Stairmaster in an embarrassingly long time, so I lean against the wall and try to catch my breath. Bastian stands close by.
“Better?” he asks after a moment.
“Peachy. Let’s keep going.”
We resume our upward trek. Fortunately, the stairs peter out at the fourteenth floor and we spill out onto a long hallway lined with dark wood paneling. Side by side, we keep walking to the door at the end. Bastian pushes it open and guides me inside.
“Come,” he says. “Sit. Look.”
He lowers me to a seat. Then, with two fingers on my chin, he directs my gaze out.
I look—and my breath freezes in my chest.
All the world is visible from here. I see Chicago laid out beneath me like a wedding cake left to melt. Dark chocolate skyscrapers pooling into caramelized streets, burnt sugar traffic lights glistening, the fondant of distant clouds nestling on top of the buildings.
It’s neon. It’s black. It’s bright. It’s beautiful. Everything is soft and uncertain at the edges, the way things look when you’re crying or going blind or both.
Somewhere out there is my apartment building, that squat brick thing with the broken buzzer and the radiator that clangs all night. Bastian’s penthouse is easier to locate: a gleaming tower of glass and steel absorbing the moonlight. Even from here, even with my shit eyes, I can see it.
And my mother’s place. Way out in Humboldt Park, where the streetlights are dimmer and farther apart, where the buildings hunker low against the sky.
She’s probably asleep by now, dreaming about the future, or maybe lying awake thinking about the meeting, about Rick, about all the Dereks who came before Rick, about all the good things that might come after.
It’s a gorgeous world. I want to cup it in my hands and take a bite of it.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It is.”
I lean my head against his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Seemed like the right night for it.” He kisses the top of my head. “Big view for a big day.”
I close my eyes and just feel—his warmth, his steadiness, the flavor and texture of the city below us. So many things are changing.
But not him. Not this.
We sit there for a long time. Eventually, Bastian breaks the silence in a hushed murmur. “Can I tell you a story?”
“Of course,” I say.
He clears his throat. “I was barely a teen when I first knew cooking was the thing for me. I was working the dish pit at this shithole diner on the North Side. Used to watch the owner hand an envelope of cash to the health inspector every quarter to make him ignore a whole bunch of shit.”
I keep my head on his shoulder, saying nothing.
“We had this regular who came in every Sunday morning. Old guy, maybe seventy, always ordered the same thing: two eggs over easy, hash browns, wheat toast. One day, the cook called in sick, so the owner asked if I could handle it. I’d never worked a real line before, but I was the only person around who even knew how to turn on the stove. ”
His hand finds mine in the darkness.
“I made those eggs, and when I plated them, something just clicked. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Michelin-star shit. But it was right.”
He pauses. Breathes.
“The old guy looked up at me when I brought it out and said, ‘Now, that’s how you cook an egg, son.’ And even though it was kinda dumb—it was just a fucking egg, after all—I knew, right then, that this was it. This was what I was supposed to do with my life.”
Another pause. Another breath. He turns to look at me.
“I feel the same way about you,” he says. “You’re what I’m supposed to do with my life, Eliana.”
The city blurs even more behind a veil of my tears. “Bas—”
“I want you to come to the gala with me. Not as my employee, but as my date. My partner.” He stops himself, swallows, continues.
“I want you there as mine, Eliana. In front of everyone.” He cups the back of my neck.
“Not just for the gala, either. I know we signed a deal and that I’ve paid you a lot of money to stick around, but I’m asking you to stay past that.
I want the real thing with you. Not ninety days of it. I want all of it.”
I pull back, though the barest outline of his face is all I can see in this much shadow. “What happened to lying to ourselves?”
“Fuck lying.” He runs his thumb across my cheekbone. “I’m done with that.”
The city keeps bleeding light below us. My heart is doing a strange contradiction in my chest—expanding and contracting at the same time, like it can’t decide whether to open or protect itself.
I think about my mother holding my hand on her couch, admitting she’d spent her whole life waiting for someone else to fix her. How she finally understood that’s not how it works.
Bastian’s not trying to fix me. He’s just asking me to stay.
“I’m terrified,” I tell him.
“Me, too.”
“I mean really terrified. Like, bone-deep, existential-crisis, pee-the-bed terrified.”
“I know.” He rests his forehead against mine. “Say yes anyway.”