Chapter Twenty
I reached out and took Ollie’s hand, swallowing hard against the lump in my throat that formed the minute his fingertips curled around mine, like even in sleep he knew it was me, knew that he wanted me nearer. I watched him breathe, our hands clasped lightly, until he slowly blinked himself awake.
“Hey, you,” he said, smiling softly at me, dark eyes heavy with sleep, curls a riot on the pillow.
“Hey yourself,” I said back, squeezing his hand once. “How’d you sleep?”
“Okay. I was having weird dreams…”
“Oh yeah? What kind of dreams?”
“Like I was…this big rock star? Which, I know, it sounds silly, but it was so… boring if that makes sense? Like most of the dream was me talking with my manager about tour date logistics. It felt real in the most unexciting way possible.”
“Listen, Ollie, rock star life can’t all be cocaine and groupies.”
“Dammit, why am I only learning this now?” His smile curled a little higher, then he rocked himself up to a sitting position, dropping my hand and kicking his legs over the side of the bed. As he rooted around on the floor for a T-shirt, he half-turned, not meeting my eyes. “Did you…want to talk about last night?”
“What about it?” The sunlight catching the curve of his jaw, scattering over the stubble like a wave on a rocky beach. He was so beautiful it made my lungs ache. How had I let myself stop seeing this for so long?
“Do you know what you’re going to do?” His shoulders tensed up around his neck.
“I already did it. Emailed Maren to tell her to ignore the application, I mean.” Tentatively, I reached out, laid an arm on his back, exhaled relief when he didn’t flinch away. “I’m sorry. For not asking first, I mean. That was incredibly selfish.”
“I mean…I know it came from a good place.” He turned to flash me a tired half-smile, then shrugged into a T-shirt.
“Yeah, but intentions aren’t the only thing that matter. Hell, they might be the least important thing. I should have told you.”
“Thanks, Lo…and anyway, it’s not like we tell each other everything the second it happens. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do think moving cross-country is something we should at least, like… discuss first. But I could have reacted better.”
“I think maybe that was about more than just the application,” I said, heart twisting preemptively. He glanced down, eyes narrowing slightly, the look I’d come to recognize as him carefully sorting his words, finding a way to form his thought clearly but gently, so it wouldn’t feel like an attack. I gulped as my heart twisted another degree. I’d missed all of this, taken it all for granted, and in just a few minutes it would all be gone. It had to be gone.
“You’re not wrong. I think…no, I know. I’d be willing to follow you anywhere. That’s been true from minute one. But I guess…I thought that the trade-off was that you’d do the same for me. That you’d take a big risk on me, too, when it really mattered.”
“Like marrying you,” I said. Ollie nodded slowly.
“Sure. I mean, you know I want that. But really…it doesn’t even have to be that. We could…I don’t know, move somewhere new just because we want to. And talk about it, obviously. Or…I don’t know, go off-grid and see if life’s better hacking it out as artisanal maple syrup makers. Or you could be okay with cutting back or moving somewhere cheaper so you could do the writing thing. But we’d be in it together, you know? Not you doing a thing and I follow, or I do a thing and you tolerate it, we really do something as us .”
“Those all sound like things that could only happen if I wasn’t working for Pixel anymore,” I started tentatively.
“I mean…not necessarily.” Ollie’s brow furrowed, jaw jutting slightly. “But…do you even like that job? And before you answer, I know you like killing it. I know you’re a fucking boss. But you’ve been throwing around this idea of writing romance novels for years now and like…what’s stopping you from doing it?”
“Fear,” I whispered. Because why pretend anymore? What was the benefit of refusing to see the things I knew were there? “I think…I think there are a lot of things I’ve been afraid of, Ollie. The writing, sure, but really…me and you is the biggie.”
“So stop. Being so afraid. Or at least…stop letting that fear make the choice, Lo.”
“I want to. I will. But I think maybe…” This was it, the moment to do it, to step into a life that I might not want, but that I had to be willing to accept.
And not just because of the program. Staying in this world mattered, but it wasn’t the only thing anymore, and the fact that Ollie was my person wasn’t the only thing I’d finally woken up to. He’d been sacrificing everything for me, for years now, and I’d let him. Let myself believe it wasn’t really a sacrifice at all.
But I couldn’t pretend anymore. Not now that I knew what he could be without me. I couldn’t be the person blocking the light for him and calling the shade I was making “love.” Because I did love him. I loved him so much that it felt like my heart was just one pulsing open wound, the emotion too big to be anything but painful— but if that was true, didn’t I owe him a chance at the life he’d always wanted? The one I’d taken from him, so focused on my needs, my path, that I hadn’t even considered that Ollie might have been the person I was walking over as I traveled it?
He was staring at me, patient, those huge dark eyes fixed on my face. I closed my eyes, unable to bear that beautiful, gentle gaze while I did this.
“I think…actually I’m pretty sure you’d be better off without me.”
He laughed and my eyes shot open. When he saw the look on my face his amusement slowly morphed into frowning confusion.
“You’re serious. Listen, I know what I said last night sounded pretty dire—”
“No, it’s not about that. Or not directly. It just got me thinking. What if your life had turned out better if I were never in it?” Ollie opened his mouth to speak but I raised a hand, needing to get this out before I lost my nerve. “Haven’t you ever wondered what might have happened if you’d gone on that tour?”
“I’d have developed scurvy from living off fast food for a month?” Ollie waggled an eyebrow, but I plowed ahead.
“I’m serious. What if that was the moment it was supposed to happen for you? You didn’t go because of me, and I’m sure there are a hundred other moments like that, where you didn’t do what mattered to you because of me. Because of this.” I gestured between us.
“What if I found the chemical compound that turned water into wine? Things would look pretty different in that scenario too. And frankly, it sounds more likely than being ‘discovered’ or whatever it is you’re talking about.” He laughed, but gently, clearly at the idea that musical success was even possible in this life, not at me. It twisted the corkscrew in my stomach another turn. That jadedness, giving up on even the possibility that his dreams could ever succeed…that was my fault, too.
“Hear me out, please? What if your whole life would have been different if you’d just put yourself first for once? If things had been about your goals, not mine?”
Ollie rolled his eyes, still ready to laugh this off, but when his gaze hooked on mine again, his expression turned serious. Clearly this wasn’t just some thought experiment for me. God, if I never heard about another “thought experiment” in my life, that would be just fine with me. Fucking Schrodinger.
“You really believe this, don’t you? That I’d have been better off without you somehow?” Ollie’s eyebrows tented, lips parted slightly as he gazed at me. “You know I don’t, right? Believe that?”
“I get that ‘making it’ is unlikely, but it’s a hell of a lot more unlikely if you’re stuck in Boston instead of touring,” I said, voice flat.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe that . Even though it’s fucking ludicrous.” The barest hint of a smile, an afterimage of happiness instead of the real thing. “But that doesn’t mean I’d be happier.”
“Really. You wouldn’t be happier if you were full-on famous for your music.”
“I mean, I’d be gratified . I’d be proud of myself. But that’s not the same as happy. Like…are you happy about the hours you pull at your job? Or does it give you something…happiness-adjacent? Genuinely asking, by the way, not trying to tell you what to feel,” he added, one hand up to ward off the very notion.
“That’s not…that’s who I am . This is who you are. Music is your life.”
“Music is a huge part of me, but it’s not all of me, Lo. And killing it at your job scratches some itch in you, but that specific job isn’t you, either. I just fundamentally don’t believe that.”
“But if you knew—forget the likelihood, let’s just say it’s an absolute guarantee that you would wind up a famous musician if you’d gone on that tour…”
“I’d be someone else, and I wouldn’t have you in my life. I’d have a lot of things—satisfaction, more money probably—but that doesn’t mean I’d be happier. I guess I could be, but why wonder about that?” He shrugged. Like it was that simple. I blinked at him, too stunned to speak. What would it be like to not have to ask what if ? To not worry the possibility of something better so constantly that it opened up an abscess in the right now?
Ollie bit his lower lip, gaze dropping to the span of comforter between us.
“Is that what you want?” His thumb and forefinger started circling each other rhythmically, endlessly, the rest of his body preternaturally still. “Are you trying to say you’d be happier if we weren’t together?”
“Are you kidding? No. God no.” I threw my head back, blowing my breath out as I stared at the ceiling. “I just can’t live with myself knowing that I’ve been holding you back. And knowing that…like, okay, you’re happy with me now, but what if I’m still not ready to get married in a year. Or two. What then?”
“Then we’ll deal with that then.”
“Sure. No big.” I rolled my eyes, laughing once.
“I mean it, Lo. Obviously I think we should get married. That’s not a secret. But just because I want that, it doesn’t mean I’m na?ve. I know it doesn’t always work out. You know I had serious girlfriends before you, right?”
I blinked, startled. I knew about his exes, of course, knew that he’d moved in with one of them—Rachel—but I’d never really considered those relationships as important to him.
“So yeah. Things end sometimes, I get that. But I don’t want to throw away something good because there’s a possibility it might not always be good.” He closed his eyes, inhaling and exhaling deeply. “But I know we’re not wired the same way. So I need you to be honest with me, okay? Do you want something else? Or…someone else?”
“No,” I whispered. I couldn’t lie to him about that —half the reason I’d been planning the breakup was to help Ollie, to give him the chance he deserved. Maybe most of the reason; guilt over knowing what he could have had without me was all mixed up with guilt over questioning what we had in the first place, the blend of it so potent it was impossible to ignore. As for the rest…I couldn’t make myself hurt him that way just for the possibility it might fix whatever was going on with me.
Other-Drew had told me this might work, but he had been pretty careful to never say it would, to note that things had progressed further than he could fully explain or correct. Without the possibility of helping Ollie achieve what he deserved, ending things was only about the outside possibility that my “create a new fixed point” plan might work…and right now, feeling closer to him than I had in as long as I could remember, that just didn’t feel like a particularly good reason to do it. Especially not if this might be the last time I saw Ollie in any life.
“Me neither. So unless you come up with a better reason than ‘Ollie might have topped the charts without me,’ you’re stuck with me.”
My aching heart exploded, the painful love filling my entire chest.
“Are you sure?”
“Didn’t you hear about my dream? That gig is way too heavy on the scheduling logistics.” Ollie grinned, inching forward on the bed to cover my hand with his. “And while we’re being honest…there’s something I should probably tell you.”
“Okay…”
“You know how I’ve been going over to Ryan’s lately?”
I nodded, the familiar vise of fear tightening around me again. I might have been half-blind to Ollie’s charms for too long now, but that didn’t mean every other woman was. But it couldn’t be that…could it?
“Is that…not what you’ve been doing?”
“No, it is,” he said. I unclenched ever so slightly. “It’s just not the whole story. The thing is, we’ve kind of been working on…something new?”
“Like a new band?” I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Ryan definitely wasn’t the frontman type.
“Actually…a video game?” Ollie’s face accordioned, gaze drifting to the ceiling. “One that Ryan built.”
“Wait…what?”
“He’s been working on it forever, and I would sometimes help out with like…ideas about the aesthetics, which I guess he appreciated? Anyway, when he got further along he asked me to score it.”
“Seriously? That’s so cool!”
Ollie bit his lip against a smile.
“It is pretty cool. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really different than the songwriting I’m used to, but there’s something about getting to tell this whole story through the music, change the entire feel for a player just based on a chord change…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It might not go anywhere, but I’m really liking it. And we have this idea for a possible second game, it’s still way too embryonic to even start laying down tracks, but the music would actually be part of the gameplay. And I know it’s premature, but I can already envision the soundscape it would need, more washy, like…music in pastels, if that makes sense?”
I laughed. He might not be Synesthesia in this life, but clearly it was nipping at the edges of his brain.
“It makes absolutely zero sense to me, but it sounds incredible. And like you’re really enjoying it.”
“I am. More than I even expected to. Honestly…it’s the most excited I’ve felt about a project in a really long time.” He smiled shyly, still unable to meet my eyes.
“That’s incredible, Ollie.”
“So see? You weren’t holding me back from my destiny as a rock star. You were setting me up for this way better destiny as a celebrated scorer of games and eventually film.”
“Oh yeah? Scorsese have you on speed-dial?”
“He will when he sees my next soundscape, Laurel.”