Chapter 8 #2
I stare at the screen. Mum can read subtext through a phone the way seismologists read tremors—subtle shifts in language that most people would miss, picked up instantly and filed away for future interrogation.
Me
People, Mum. Plural.
Mum
Mm-hmm. Are you eating? You’ve been looking thin lately.
Me
I literally just ate two bizarrely delicious burgers.
Mum
Good boy. Come home safe. Love you to the moon and back. And a few more trips. xx
Me
Love you, Mum. Call me if you need anything.
I sit with the phone in my hand and think about the conversation that just happened, the one that looks identical to every other exchange we’ve had for years. Her pretending she’s fine. Me pretending I’m fine. Both of us fluent in the same warm, careful lie.
After what seems like an entire season of random TikTok videos of food-eating competitions, Celeste finally finishes her shower. The bathroom door hinges release a nearly imperceptible sigh as it swings open, releasing a cloud of lavender-scented moisture into the room.
Celeste emerges wrapped in one of the hotel robes—white, enormous, swallowing her frame so completely she looks like a very elegant ghost. Her face is scrubbed clean.
No makeup. No jewelry. No armor. Without the foundation and the mascara and the architectural precision she applies to her appearance like structural engineering, she looks different.
Not younger, exactly. Unguarded. Like a rough sketch where all the essential lines are visible but none of the polish.
Her eyes are red but she’s steady. The crying is finished. Tucked away in whatever compartment Celeste stores the things she doesn’t want anyone to witness.
She cinches the robe higher. “Do I look like I just escaped a hospital ward?”
“A very exclusive, fancy hospital ward.”
“Thank you. That’s exactly the energy I was going for.” She peers over at the kitchenette. “Please tell me there’s wine.”
I investigate. The minibar is stocked like a small, curated liquor store—the kind that charges by the adjective.
I find a bottle of something French and red and pour two glasses, feeling mildly fraudulent because I couldn’t tell you the difference between a table blend and a Malbec if my life depended on it.
Celeste accepts the glass, settles into the far corner of the sectional, and tucks her legs beneath her. The robe fans out around her like a wedding gown. She takes a sip, closes her eyes, and lets out a breath that seems to originate from her toes.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, taking the opposite end of the couch. “Or do you want to not talk about it?”
“I want to not talk about it. But if we sit in silence, I’ll spiral, and spiraling in a bathrobe feels especially bleak.” She opens her eyes. “TV?”
Mounted above the fireplace, angled toward the sectional, lies the perfect distraction. I find the remote on the coffee table and click it on. A streaming menu appears.
“What are we watching?” I ask.
“Something with zero emotional depth. Something where the biggest problem is whether the popular girl gets asked to prom.”
I scroll, and with the enthusiasm of a toddler receiving a popsicle, she suddenly shrieks.
“Stop. That one.”
My thumb pauses on the down arrow. “This one? She’s All That?”
Celeste’s face transforms. The grief, the exhaustion, the worry lines that have been etched into her forehead since approximately six o’clock this morning—all of it vanishes, replaced by the expression of a woman who has just been reunited with something she loves.
“Oh my God. Yes. You’ve never seen She’s All That?”
“No. Is it an older movie?”
“Not that old,” Celeste answers. “It’s a masterpiece of American cinema. Freddie Prinze Jr. in overalls at the prom? That is a cultural moment. That transcends generational divides.”
I shrug as I flip over to the button that says, more information. “It was released in nineteen-ninety-nine. The year I was born.”
Celeste’s smile collapses through a series of reactions.
Her jaw drops, eyes widening with the stunned recognition of someone who’s just been ambushed.
Then her features contort into something more visceral—eyebrows pinching together, mouth twisting sideways—as if she’s just discovered an uncomfortable truth about herself that can never be unlearned.
“Right. Ninety-nine,” she muses.
“Okay, Celeste, tell me the truth. Do you think I’m too young for you, or do you think you’re too old for me? Because those are two different things.”
She locks onto my gaze, challenge dancing in her eyes, her smirk guiding me to the metaphorical edge of my seat. But “let’s watch the movie” is all she says.
I press play. The opening credits roll and I realize immediately that this movie is exactly as dated as advertised.
The fashion alone is a time capsule. We enter the realm of chunky highlights, cargo pants, platform sandals.
The soundtrack sounds like the inside of a store that went out of business.
I have no idea what’s happening and I am deeply invested.
Celeste provides context. It starts as quiet observations on culture, as if she’s a historian trying to walk me through a different era.
“Back then that haircut was considered sexy, by the way” is just the beginning.
Eventually, Celeste’s commentary escalates into full narration.
She knows every scene. She mouths certain lines before the actors say them.
When Freddie Prinze Jr. removes his sunglasses and does the slow-motion head turn, she clutches her chest like a woman receiving medical news.
“This was it,” she whispers. “The swoon.”
“He took off sunglasses. Indoors.”
“Yeah.” She shoots me a look. “And it changed my life.”
I’m laughing. Not the measured, strategic laugh I’ve trained myself to deploy at work events and client dinners.
The real kind—the one that starts in my stomach and ambushes me like an intrusive thought, the one that sounds like it belongs to someone who laughs all the time, which I don’t.
Celeste watches me with the satisfied expression of a woman who intended exactly this, and I realize this might be the first time I’ve laughed like this in months.
The movie plays. We drink the wine. She narrates the prom montage and a scene involving a hacky sack that she insists was “athletically groundbreaking.” By the time credits roll, she’s already queuing up the next one.
I’m so exhausted. I was hanging by a thread when I got home this morning.
Stretching out the sleep-deprivation is almost physically painful.
I most definitely should not be operating heavy machinery at this point, but there’s no way I’m going to sleep on this precious opportunity to see Celeste giggling like a school girl.
It becomes my instant life-mission to stay the hell awake.
“Ten Things I Hate About You. Nonnegotiable. Let your education on good cinema continue.”
“You mean my education on guys you thought were hot in the nineties. Is this the one with—”
“Heath Ledger. Yes. And if you say a single negative word about Heath Ledger in this room, I will make you sleep on the balcony.”
“Understood.”
Now this one I’ve seen—or at least, clips.
The Taming of the Shrew in a high school.
The paintball scene. The bleachers. Heath Ledger singing on the stadium steps, which is one of the most genuinely charming things I’ve ever watched a human being do on film.
It’s right up there with the dude holding the boombox over his head, serenading that girl from her bedroom window.
This is actually fun. A nice escape from the monotony of helplessness.
Somewhere during the second act, the geography of the couch shifts.
It happens the way shorelines change—so gradually that you only notice when you look up and the landscape is different.
Celeste started in the far corner. Now she’s in the middle, her feet tucked under the throw blanket, her shoulder three inches from mine.
I don’t remember either of us moving. But here we are.
“Can I tell you something?” she says during a quiet scene.
“Of course.”
Celeste looks at me. Her eyes are wet but she’s smiling. “Whitney would really like you.”
“I think I’d like her too.”
The credits roll. She doesn’t start another movie.
I expect her to—the third pillar, Clueless, the completed trinity as she explained—but instead she just sits there, wrapped in her robe and the blanket and the quiet, looking at the dark screen like she’s watching something the rest of us can’t see.
“One more?” I ask.
“I’d like to, but I am operating on approximately four percent battery.”
“Is that why you stopped chattering through the whole movie?” I tease.
“Yes, the commentary function has shut down to preserve core operations. Aren’t you tired?”
She’s scooted at least a few more inches closer. I look her right in the eye. “Not anymore.” And it’s the truth. For some reason, this is invigorating.
She queues it up. Alicia Silverstone appears on screen in a plaid skirt, and Celeste exhales into the couch like a woman who has finally found the one place in the world where nothing is expected of her.
Twelve minutes in, her head finds my shoulder.
I don’t move. I don’t adjust. I don’t do the thing I should do, which is shift slightly, create a buffer, maintain whatever boundary existed between us before this weekend burned it to the ground.
Her hair is still damp and smells like the fancy hotel shampoo—not the Head & Shoulders from this morning, something botanical and French—but underneath it, there’s just her.
Soft and close and leaning against me like I’m a wall she trusts not to move.
I’ve been leaned on before. Professionally, personally, physically. I have been the shoulder and the wall and the steady thing that holds while other people fall apart. That’s the role. That’s the function. That’s the reason I’m in the room.
But this doesn’t feel like that.
This feels like the opposite of that. This feels like someone leaning into me not because they need something, but because they want to be near.
And the difference between those two things—need and want, function and choice—is so vast and so unfamiliar that I don’t know what to do with it except sit very still and let it happen.
Her breathing changes around the twenty-minute mark. Slower. Deeper. Her hand has come to rest on my forearm, fingers loosely curled, and the weight of her against my shoulder is slight and warm and devastating in its simplicity.
She’s asleep.
I reach for the throw blanket and pull it over both of us without moving her.
On screen, Cher is arguing about something in a debate class and I’ve lost all track of the plot.
My eyes are heavy. The sectional has magic powers of sedation because it feels impossible to move at the moment, trapped under this cozy haze.
I should carry her to the bedroom. I should sleep on the opposite end of this enormous couch, or on the floor, or on the balcony she threatened me with.
I should maintain some version of the professional distance that stopped existing approximately nine hours ago when I ran up a set of stairs and held her while she fell apart in front of two hundred people.
Instead, I tip my head back against the cushion and close my eyes.
Tomorrow I’ll go back to Alphabet City. Back to the cramped apartment and the medication schedule and the sticky note on my nightstand with Dr. Yassa’s email that I still haven’t sent.
Tomorrow I’ll return the suit and slide back into the life that was waiting for me before this weekend—the one where I tend bar, guard doors, take bookings from Rina, and sleep four hours.
The life where I take care of everyone except myself.
But tonight, on a couch in a suite I could never afford, in a suit I didn’t pay for, with a woman who asked me if she seems maternal and doesn’t realize that the question itself is the answer—tonight, I’m not carrying anyone.
And someone, whether she knows it or not, is carrying me.
I fall asleep to the sound of Celeste breathing and Alicia Silverstone explaining something about the federal mail system, and I don’t dream about anything at all.