Chapter Thirty-Six
HE'S AT THE STAGE DOOR on opening night, and I walk right past him.
I've earned a play, somehow. A real one, a black-box theater with good bones and eight shows a week and my name down in the program, and every single night when I come out the back into the alley, he's there.
He never rushes me, never grabs my arm or steps into my path or does one single thing I could hold against him.
He just stands across the alley in the cold with his hands in his pockets, and he says my name, once, like a question, and I get into my cab like the question was in a language I don't speak.
I do that for two weeks.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and I've had my chest sawed open on an operating table, so I know the field.
Every single night my whole traitor body wants to cross that alley.
Every night the girl who forgives too fast, who forgave a mother who chose the stepdad, who forgives everybody for everything, stands at the mouth of a dark alley and makes herself get in the cab instead because forgiving him fast is exactly what wrecked me the first time, and I promised the heart in my chest I'd be braver with it than that.
It doesn't get easier. It gets to be a thing I survive one cab door at a time.
Then it rains.
Not the pretty kind. The mean kind, the kind that means it, and I push out the back door already digging for my umbrella and there he is, standing in the middle of it.
No car. No umbrella. Soaked clean through, hair plastered to his head, looking like he's been standing in that alley since long before the sky opened, like he intends to keep standing there until the weather or the wanting finishes the job.
And the thing in me that's held for a year, for two years, for a whole loud lonely life of holding, finally just...lets go.
I stop.
I turn around in the middle of the alley with the rain hiding my tears in it, and I look at the most stubborn man on this earth standing in a storm for a girl he threw away, and I say the first words I've said to him in a year.
"You're going to catch your death out here." "Then I'll catch it here," he tells me, not moving an inch. "Outside your door. I'll catch it right here, Jassy, every night, for as long as it takes."