Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
KELSEY
The stage door is a fire exit that opens onto a narrow strip of sidewalk between two buildings.
I push the door open with my hip because my bag is on one shoulder and my tap shoes are slung over the other.
There are sometimes people out there wanting autographs on their playbills, but tonight it’s raining.
Not a dramatic rain, just the steady low-key kind that makes everything smell like wet concrete and exhaust.
Francine and Mia come after me. Mia pops open her umbrella. “Wait here!” She goes out to check the street for our Uber while Francine and I wait under the overhang, out of the rain.
And suddenly Bruno’s standing there, and my heart leaps.
He’s soaked through. His hair is dark in the rain, barely a hint of the golden brown. The wild little cowlick is probably flat. An unopened umbrella dangles from his wrist.
“Bruno, what are you doing?”
“I need to talk with you.”
Mia’s back, and she and Francine watch me, waiting, ready to drag me off or flip their bitch switches or whatever else.
“Uber’s out there,” Mia says.
I try not to look directly into his eyes, because I might not have strength then. He had me investigated. He dumped me without explanation. He’s not worth it! “We’ve got nothing to say, Bruno.”
I head for the waiting car. Mia and Francine follow. We pile in the back and shut the door. The rain drums hard on the top of the car.
“We’ll drop you first,” Mia says. She leans up and gives the grizzled old Uber driver the address.
“Yeah, just as soon as this lunatic gets out of here.” He honks his horn a few times.
“It’s Bruno!” Francine says. “What’s he doing?”
“You know this guy? Is he dangerous?”
“No,” I say.
“But she doesn’t want to talk to him,” Mia says. “He was a jerk to her.”
“Can’t you back out?” I ask. “Or just go around him?”
“No room.” He rolls down his window. “Hey, you! Get the hell out of there!”
“I need to talk to her,” Bruno yells.
“Why does he want to talk to me so badly?” I say, feeling like maybe I want to hear what he has to say. “Bruno usually isn’t impulsive like this.”
“Can’t you go up on the sidewalk?” Mia says.
“Two minutes,” Bruno says. “Please. It’s important.”
My pulse races. “He’s just out there getting drenched.”
“Good,” Francine says. “Builds character.”
“Look, this guy needs to move out of the way, or you ladies need to get out,” the driver says.
“Maybe I should hear him out,” I say.
Mia turns to me. “Do you feel like you should hear him out, or do you actually want to hear him out? Because if it’s just that you should, we’re not letting you out of the car.”
Francine leans forward. “Driver, do you have a child-lock thing up there?”
“Not doin’ that,” the driver growls.
“I want to hear him out.”
Mia and Francine look at each other.
“We’ll wait.”
The driver grumbles as I pull up the hood of my poncho and get out onto the sidewalk. “What the hell, Bruno!”
Not worth it, not worth it, I remind myself.
My blood races. “Come under here.” I pull him under the overhang. I’m not ready for the feel of him near me again. How natural and good it feels.
“I am so sorry, Kelsey. I panicked. I panicked and I couldn’t think of anything else...” His voice breaks slightly. “I… I thought you were in danger.”
I’ve never heard Bruno stammer before. “In danger of what?”
“Me! In danger of me!”
“Bruno—why?”
“You were there, didn’t you hear how my mother described my father? The strict, obsessive silence he demanded? The fanatical control because he needed everything perfect? How he suppressed life around him—doesn’t that remind you of somebody?”
“I see where you’re going, but that’s so simplistic.”
“It felt like she was telling me the future. It felt like she was telling me your future if you stayed with me. And I love you, and I couldn’t bear the thought, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
The ground beneath me seems to tilt. “So you dumped me?”
“I know. I was panicking. I told myself to end it in one clean move. And then the report...listen, whether you ever take me back or not, I need you to know that using that report to make you think I didn’t trust you was a terrible thing.
I never ordered it because I didn’t trust you. I ordered it because I did trust you.”
“I don’t get it.”
He fixes his gray gaze on me, brows perfectly level with concentration. “I ordered it that day in the hotel bar, right after you told me about the tiara. I wanted to punish your family for what they were doing to you.”
“That’s why you ordered it?”
“Yes. Later I understood why you wouldn’t care about an investigation or ever even want one.
I reached out to nix it, but as it turned out, the thing was already complete.
I told Sadie to trash it. But she’s a digital hoarder.
So I reached out after New Mexico. I convinced myself that it was the kindest thing.
A totally clean break. So you’d have no doubt of the monster I am. ”
“It wasn’t kind at all! How could you do that?”
“I wasn’t thinking. Whatever happens, know that I see you. I see your beautiful heart and your wild embrace of life and your… Just everything. I even love your embodiments. I look at that picture sometimes. Remember the picture I took on the veranda? At the hotel?”
My heart skips a beat. He sits around looking at that picture? “Bruno. I mean, of all the pictures...”
“I love that one.”
The rain splashes down around us, catching the streetlights, bright against the gloom. “You’re not like your father. You know that’s ridiculous, right?”
“You’ll be happy to know that my brothers agree with you one hundred percent on the ridiculous part. Though their words were less kind.”
“You went and talked to your brothers? Did you tell them about your mother?”
“Of course I did. They deserve to know. You were right about that.”
The Uber horn honks.
I hold up a finger. “How’d they take it?”
He gives me the outlines of their meeting.
“Wow,” I say. “Good for you.”
“Good for me? No. That was you.”
“Was it hard?”
“It was. They were pissed. But I needed to do it. You showed me how to move through life with trust instead of armor and control. You showed me that love is real and not a scam or a performance. You changed my entire world.” He gazes into my eyes, his face wet from the rain. “You are the love of my life.”
You’re mine, too, I think.
I hug my arms around myself.
“I would do anything to have another chance,” he says. “I don’t want to be without you.”
I look up at him. I want to jump into his arms and kiss the rain off his face and walk everywhere together like old times and then snuggle into bed together.
“You didn’t communicate with me. You just made this decision for us. I can’t have that.”
“I know. I heard you, and the last thing I wanted to do is put pressure on you with your friends there...glaring out the window. I want you to know that I will be waiting for you. I will always wait for you.”
Is it too impulsive to say, “fuck it” and take him back, just like that? As if everything can repair? This is a man who spent his whole life locking things down, controlling his world down to the millisecond. He wants to change, but will he?
I look over at the Uber. The rain is coming down in sheets, now. “I need to think about this.”
“Of course. Here—this rain is crazy.” He pulls at his umbrella and opens it above me.
That’s when I see the flash of red. It’s a watchband. A red watchband on his wrist.
“What the hell is that on your wrist?” I grab his coat sleeve, and there it is. The Roadrunner watch. “What are you doing wearing this?”
He seems unhappy that I noticed it. “I don’t know. I just...wanted to.”
“The overlord of time and all watches? Wants to wear the abomination that...what did you say? It’s against everything you stand for? A symbol of disorder, a disregard for time itself? What happened to your North Star? Your life’s goal of making the perfect watch keep exact time forever and ever?”
“That was a goal I created to survive childhood, to give me the illusion that I could impose order on an unpredictable world. That’s not my goal anymore.”
My pulse races. I touch the side of his face, stopping the roll of a rain drip. “What’s your goal now?”
“It’s all a work in progress.”
I look at the poor Roadrunner, frozen in mid-sprint, running after something he’ll never quite catch. “It must plague you to wear that thing.”
His eyes meet mine. “Every time I check it.”
I feel a smile split my face.
“But I like how it reminds me to let go of everything I was trying to lock down. I like how it reminds me to be okay with a little bit of disorder. I don’t have to control time.
I have two brothers and a mother, and people who have my back, and for a while I had you, and I know now that that’s what’s valuable.
” He pauses. Takes a breath. Then, more quietly, “And obviously it reminds me of you. How I felt when I still had you.”
“Had me? No.” I pull him to me. “You still have me,” I say into a kiss.
“Kelsey,” he says in a great gust of emotion. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you so much.” He tips his forehead against mine.
I say, “You are such a geode, so surprising inside.”
He cradles my face like it’s the most precious thing on the planet. “You fucking light my world.”