28. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
the most beautiful girl in the world
THIS CHAPTER HAS A SOUNDTRACK
U Send Me Swingin’ by Mint Condition | Diamonds & Pearls by Prince | The Most Beautiful Girl In The World by Prince | A.D.I.D.A.S. by Ro James
alyssa
I asked Simone and Raschad to keep Micah for me, and sent Julian a text.
come over tonight?
He responded inside of thirty seconds.
JULIAN
What time?
Seven-thirty.
JULIAN
I’ll be there.
He was at my door at seven-twenty-eight on the dot. His face was composed, but his eyes looked tired. I stepped back and let him in.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He came in and stood in my foyer with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
“Will you come sit?”
We sat on the couch. Not close — the careful distance of two people who had not been in a room together in seventy-two hours and were not yet sure how the room was going to behave.
He looked at me and waited.
“Julian.”
“Yes?”
“I owe you an apology.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t look away. He didn’t say no you don’t. He let me have the room.
“I reacted badly.” I looked at him. “I’ve been thinking about it for three days. The words I used. The way I used them.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Julian. You did a thing that maybe scared me, and I responded to my fear and not to you.
When the car appeared, the part of me that’s been protecting me for years grabbed the wheel before the part of me that knows you could get there.
And I’ve been sitting with what I did for three days. ”
He looked down.
“I’m sorry you’ve spent days thinking I see you as the kind of man who handles women. That your motives are anything but loving. Because I don’t think that.”
He took a deep breath. “Alyssa.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for that. For what it’s worth, I didn’t handle it well either. I said something I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry too.”
“It stung. But the truth is, you weren’t wrong.”
“There were better ways to have said it. So again — I’m sorry.”
“Julian. This is my apology, not yours.”
“You want to argue with me about an apology, too?” Something eased at the corner of his mouth. “You really are a piece of work.” He pulled me against him and my face went into his neck. “My piece of work, though.”
I closed my eyes and let him hold me.
“I should not have walked away,” he said quietly. “That wasn’t fair to you either. I wasn’t all right that morning.”
“It’s okay.”
“It is not okay, Lyss. I’m sorry too.”
“Okay.”
After a while I pulled back, just enough to look at him. I reached over to the coffee table. The keys to the Genesis were in the dish. I held them up between us, dangling.
“You want to go for a ride?” I smiled.
His face softened — the lines at his eyes, the set of his mouth, the whole of it easing into something I had not seen in three days. I watched it happen, and for the first time since Saturday morning I felt that the man I had hurt was going to be all right.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to go for a ride.”
We walked out to the car together.
Sleek. Beautiful. Mine. I still couldn’t quite look at it like it was mine. We crossed the garage side by side, holding hands, the keys in my right hand. When we reached the driver’s side, he put his hand out for them, palm up.
I looked at his hand. He looked at his hand. I held the keys against my chest.
“Julian.”
“Hm?”
“What are you doing?”
He stood there a second with his hand still half-out, looking from the keys to me, and I could see him running math in his head, the way he did when something he hadn’t planned for walked up on him.
“This is my car, Julian.”
“I know it is.”
“You bought me this car.”
“I did.”
“So why are you about to drive my car?”
He was quiet for a beat. He had the look he got when he was being asked for something he didn’t have a counter-argument to. I’d seen it maybe twice before. I enjoyed it.
“Habit.” He stepped back from the driver’s side and took a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite not one. Then he walked around to the passenger side.
I watched him do it. His shoulders were tighter than they’d been thirty seconds ago.
I opened the driver’s door and got in, and the first thing I did was move the seat forward six inches, because he had clearly sat in it at some point when he’d parked it. I adjusted the mirrors. Put my hands on the wheel.
Julian closed the passenger door and pulled his seatbelt across his chest, and he didn’t slouch. He sat upright, both hands on his thighs. He didn’t look relaxed, and he didn’t look like he was about to be.
I started the car and drove.
And he let me. He sat in the passenger seat of the Genesis he had bought me and let me drive his three-day argument around Lennox Falls in the dark, and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and after about a mile he reached over and put his hand low on my thigh — the careful, possessive weight of a man who needed his hand on me — and I didn’t flinch.
I drove out of town.
I took the long road past WadeHouse and the long road past the high school and the long road that wound out toward the lake.
I let the car do what it was built to do — quiet, steady, the low clean hum of an engine that wasn’t going to give me any trouble.
I hadn’t realized how much energy I’d been spending on the noise of my Accord.
After a while I turned on the radio.
I knew the bass line before I knew the song.
Anybody alive in the nineties knew that bass line — the slow patient strut of it, the small click of the snare underneath, Stokley already in the room before he’d opened his mouth.
U Send Me Swingin’ came up out of the speakers and I made a small sound that was almost a laugh, because of course.
“Mint Condition.” Then it landed. “You set my radio?”
“When I picked the car up.”
I let the song play, and I felt something I had not felt in three days — the small clean drop of being okay.
The fight was over. He had come. I had said my thing and he had said his.
The hand on my thigh belonged to a man who had been hurt and wasn’t hurt anymore, and the song was one I’d been singing along to in cars since I was sixteen, and I was driving the car he’d bought me through the town I’d decided to make mine, and the part of me that had been holding three days of breath finally let it go.
I sang the way you sing in a car — under Stokley’s lead, on the background harmonies, on the chorus when it came around. I knew every part of that song the way you know the ones you loved at sixteen and never stopped.
Julian was looking at me.
I caught it from the corner of my eye. Not the road. Not his phone. Me. His hand on my thigh had gone all the way loose, and the small smile at the corner of his mouth had turned into something fuller.
I kept singing. The song ended. The radio rolled into the next one, and I knew the first three notes before I knew the song.
Prince.
The unhurried piano of Diamonds and Pearls came up out of the speakers and I let out a small laugh — the surprised kind, the oh my goodness kind — and Julian’s thumb moved on my thigh, and I started to sing.
I was suddenly singing Prince in front of Julian, except the night had unlocked something and Mint Condition had pried it wider and the man next to me had been watching me with soft eyes for ten minutes, and I got through the first verse without thinking.
Then, very quietly, he started to hum.
I didn’t turn my head. I kept singing. Julian was humming the bass line under my voice — low, the way you hum when you don’t want to interrupt someone but can’t help it — and it got slightly louder at the chorus, and when the second verse came, he came in.
Soft. Below me. The harmony line.
I almost stopped. I kept going, because if I stopped he might stop.
So I sang the second verse and Julian sang the harmony underneath me, his voice low and easy and competent in a way I hadn’t expected, and when we hit the chorus we sang it together — me on the lead, him on the harmony — and something moved in my chest that I hadn’t had words for in years.
We finished the second chorus. The bridge came. Julian took the harmony up — one phrase, the line at the top of the bridge — and he hit it higher than I’d expected, and it came out clean. Held. The voice of a man who had clearly done this before.
I turned my head.
He was looking at me. Smiling.
“Julian Wade.”
“Mm.”
“You can sing, Julian.”
He laughed. “I run a record label, Lyss.”
“I know you run a record label.”
“My father was an award-winning artist. All four of us learned. Just because I don’t sing doesn’t mean I can’t.”
“You’ve been keeping this from me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t sing for people.”
I looked at him so long I almost drifted out of my lane, and I had to pull my eyes back to the road, and Diamonds and Pearls was ending, and the radio was rolling into the next song, and I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car my man had bought me with the small flush of having just been sung with, and I did not know what was about to happen.
Then another Prince song started. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
I kept driving, and the air in the car changed. I felt Julian watching me, and then he started to sing — low, in a deep register, not Prince’s falsetto but a register below the lead, with it, somewhere between harmony and counter-melody. He sang the first line like he was trying it on.
It fit.
His voice filled the lower half the way Prince’s filled the upper, and the two of them were singing this song to me. Prince and Julian.
I had to keep driving. I gripped the wheel and kept my eyes on the road, and I felt the first tear come up in the corner of my eye and refused to let it fall, because I was driving, and because if I cried now he might stop, and I did not want him to stop.
I glanced over at him. He was watching me try to keep the tears in as I gripped the wheel tighter, and his eyes lit up.
He looked younger. Not younger in age — younger the way a person looks when they stop holding themselves up for a minute. Nothing in his face was carrying anything. His shoulders were loose. For the first time since I’d known him, he was unburdened in a way I could see from the outside.
He smiled into the next line, embellishing a word in the chorus, singing it straight into my face.
I almost had to pull over. I wanted to pull over and climb across the center console and into his lap and put my mouth on his — but I couldn’t, because if I pulled over he would stop singing, and I needed him not to stop.
So I drove.
He lifted my hand. Brought it to his mouth. Kissed the back of it without breaking eye contact or missing a word, and held it against his lips for another beat of the chorus before he set it back on the wheel.
I made a small sound. It came out like a laugh that didn’t quite make it.
I had never been sung to in my entire life. I wanted more of it. I wanted to find every excuse to put this man in cars with me forever, to learn what else he could sing. I wanted to see his face look like that more often.
The song ended and he kissed my hand one more time.
I was going to cry. I’d held it the whole song. I felt my eyes go.
He saw it. “Alyssa? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine, Julian. Drive my car. I mean — let me drive my car.”
He squeezed my thigh. “Pull over for a second.”
“I’m not pulling over. I’m fine.”
Then the radio rolled into the next one. I knew the opening. The slow synth, the patient build, the dirty soft pulse of it underneath.
A.D.I.D.A.S. by Ro James. I looked at Julian then looked back at the road.
Ro James started in, spelling out exactly what those five letters stood for, and I had to laugh. Julian chuckled too.
“Julian. Is this on a preset?”
“It is.”
“Did you know what was going to come on after Prince?”
“The shuffle picks.”
“The shuffle is messy.” I laughed.
“Alyssa. Let’s go home.”
I made a U-turn in the empty lake lot and pointed the car back toward town — but I didn’t pull out. He sang along to one line under his breath. Just the one.
My whole body was pointed toward what was waiting for me on the other side of the front door.
He looked at me. He didn’t say anything.
He turned in the seat so he was facing me, and reached over with the hand that had been on my thigh and put it on the back of my neck, and pulled me toward him across the center console, and kissed me.
Soft. The kind of kiss that wasn’t going anywhere and didn’t need to.
When he pulled back, his forehead was against mine.
“Thank you for the ride.”
“Thank you for the car.”
He smiled into my mouth. He kissed me again.
We sat in the lot at the lake overlook for a long time, engine off, music low, windows cracked to let the night air in, and after a while I started the car back up and drove us home.
His hand stayed on my thigh the whole way, and I drove the car he had given me through the town that had become mine.