7. The Re
THE REUNION
I change my outfit four times.
First attempt: black jeans, grey turtleneck, the blazer from a hundred work meetings. I look in the mirror and see someone who could go to a Belladonnas concert as an office assistant.
I change at once. The crop top is too revealing. The jeans are too tight. Maybe I’m trying too hard.
Third attempt is better: cropped jumper, dark jeans, boots that add an inch and a half to my height. I stand in the bathroom mirror and think about what Rhonda will see.
I change one more time. Same outfit, different earrings. Small silver hoops instead of the longer dangles.
I land Friday night and Jani hugs me at her, then makes me eat instant noodles at midnight and talks about the tour until I fall asleep on her actual couch.
Saturday she takes me to a diner two streets over—laminated menus, a waitress who calls everyone hon—and we do the thing we only manage a few times a year: be sisters in the same room.
“You’re staying here tonight, right?” she says, stealing one of my fries. “I’ve already inflated the airbed.”
“If that’s okay.”
“Obviously it’s okay.” She narrows her eyes. “What are you doing tonight, though? You’ve had a look since you landed.”
“Oh nothing much, I’m meeting a friend. So there’s a show tonight and we’re going.”
“A show.” She waits and raises her brow. I don’t fill the silence. “A mysterious show and a mysterious friend. Fine. Keep your secrets.” She points a fry at me. “But text me so I know you’re alive. And don’t wait up—I’ve got studio till late.”
The venue is a converted warehouse with exposed beams and a sound system pushed to its limits. I arrive early enough to get a spot near the side of the stage—the semi-private pocket where you can watch without being watched.
The room fills. Hundreds of bodies. The energy shifts. People recognizing friends. Buying drinks. The kind of anticipation that happens when people know they're about to see something good.
The Belladonnas take the stage.
They open with "Missing you" and the bass line drops and the world rearranges itself.
Rhonda. Ten feet away. Bass slung low, stance wide, hair pulled back so her face is fully visible. Just her and the bass. The tattoo sleeve catches the stage wash—music notes and flowers intertwining.
The low end rumbles through the floor and into my feet and up through my legs and into the place where my ribs meet my spine.
Months of her voice in my ear and a name on my screen. And now she's ten feet away. She plays the bridge, the one she changed because of my critique. She looks up looks straight at me and smiles. My chest is tight.
I want to take a photo but my hands are shaking and I don't want to be the person hiding behind a screen, and I can't post about this anyway—Ravita would know that I lied about the family thing, Marnie would ask questions, and this feels too much like something that isn't meant for public consumption yet.
The chorus hits and the entire room moves as one organism. Rhonda's bass line carries them. Carries me.
The lights come up and my phone buzzes against my hip.
Rhonda: Go through the Stage door, left of the bar. Tell the guy in the beanie you’re with me.
Backstage.
She's leaning against a road case with a towel around her neck and a water bottle in her hand, and she sees me and the grin arrives before she can stop it.
"You came!"
"I said I would."
"You also said it depended on whether I'd spill soda on you again."
"I'm willing to take the risk."
She’s close enough now that I can see the sweat at her hairline and the exact shape of her mouth, and I catch myself looking at it—at her mouth—a beat too long before I make myself look at the road cases instead. My face goes hot. I study a coil of cable like it’s fascinating.
"Did you like it?" she asks.
"Maybe." I smile.
She scoffs. "What does that mean?"
"I loved it. I also noticed you changed the arrangement for the bridge."
"You noticed that?"
"Yeah, I notice everything. It's my best quality and my worst one."
She laughs. Short and surprised.
"I cut a bar," she says. "Your critique from month three was right. I meant to tell you. I kept meaning to."
"Did you just say I was right?"
"I said your critique was right, not you."
“That's the same thing!”
“No, its not.”
"I'm going to screenshot this conversation in my memory and frame it."
She laughs.
The sound of it feels surreal, now that I can hear it in person.
She smells like stage sweat and underneath it something warm—vanilla, or sandalwood. The scent that lives in the collar of a hoodie. The kind of thing you can only know by being this close.
"You know what's funny?" she says. "I've been thinking about that critique for months. Playing the cut-bar version in my head during every single show. And it makes the build work so much better. The way the bass and the drums line up now—it's cleaner. It's what you said it could be."
"You're different today," she says. "Quieter."
"I'm really a shy person."
Rhonda snorts. “No, you’re not.”
“Okay, yeah. I’m not but promise you won’t laugh.”
She looks at me, with her brown eyes.
"Okay I won’t."
“I’m terrified.”
“Of what?”
"That this physical reality is going to ruin it.” I point between me and her. “I think we text so much that you’ll see that I'm not the person I am in texts. That I'm just a total scam."
"Oh, Lena." She steps closer. The backstage chaos is still moving around us but it feels far away now. "I came to your apartment when I was dying. I was vulnerable and scared and you looked after me. That's not ruining anything."
“Come back to mine,” she says, and the invitation is careful, like she isn’t sure she’s allowed to want it. “It’s across the city. It’s small. Nobody knows where I live. I’d like you there.”
I think about the airbed at Jani’s, aggressively inflated, and my sister’s late studio night, and the cover story I’ve already built. I think about how much I don’t want this evening to end.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Yeah.”
“I’m out,” she tells the room—Jeremy coiling a cable, Ana on her phone, Sandy long gone. “Long day. Jeremy, can you run load-out and the merch count? I’ll owe you one.”
Jeremy gives her a look that says he knows exactly something is up and has decided not to ask. “Go,” he says. “I’ve got it.”
Rhonda transforms at the venue’s side door—hat tugged low, black mask up over her nose, collar flipped, bassist to rumour in under ten seconds.
She scans the street twice before the cab pulls in, then holds the door for me anyway.
She gives the driver an address I don’t know, somewhere across the city, and it lands on me all at once that I’m about to see where she lives.
Her left knee comes to rest against my right as the car pulls away.
Denim to denim. Neither of us moves. The streetlights sweep orange across our laps, and I count three of them before I trust my voice.
“You know the mask makes you more conspicuous, not less,” I say. “You look either famous or sick. There’s no third option.”
Her eyes crease above the fabric. “Says the woman who wore a masquerade mask to the Siren’s concert.”
“Mine was art.”
“Yours is in a drawer in pieces,” she says.
“And whose fault is that?”
I laugh loud enough for the driver to check his mirror.
She pulls the mask down to her chin, and in the dark of the cab it feels ceremonial, one more layer coming off. “Sandy vanished the second we finished the set,” she says. “An after-party. I didn’t ask where. I’ve learned not to ask.”
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is. But it's her thing. I can't control her thing. And honestly? I'm glad she's happy, even if it's a mess. At least she's not pretending."
The cab moves through traffic. City sounds filter through the window.
"The mix between Jo's voice and the instrumental arrangement," I say. "It's changed. It's sharper now. When did that happen?"
"A month ago. I was thinking about what you'd said on a voice note—about how Jo's vocals could shine better if we gave it more space. So we stripped back the organ line in the first verse. Let her sit more forward."
"That’s a big change."
"Yeah. I wasn't listening to you before. Or I was listening but I wasn't really hearing. Now I hear you. Everything you say, I'm thinking about it in the studio, thinking about it on stage, thinking about you when I should be sleeping."
I feel my face warm and hope it hides in the dark. “I—yeah me too.”
"Really?" She says as the cab turns down a street I don’t know.
"Yeah, I think about what you say all the time."
"We’re the same then.” She looks away, and looks outside the window.
The cab stops outside a building I’ve never seen. Rhonda pays before I can, unlocks a street door, and I follow her up a narrow stair into the place where she lives.
Her apartment is smaller than I expected and more full of her than I could have guessed—a wall of records, a bass on a stand like a houseplant, a single good armchair worn into the shape of one person. There’s no guest couch here. There’s just her life, and me standing in the middle of it.
“This feels weird,” she says, filling the kettle.
“Me being here?”
“No you’re fine. I mean you in my room.” She makes two mugs—hers black, mine with milk, because somewhere in a year of texts she filed that away—and hands me one so our fingers overlap for a half-second neither of us hurries.
“It’s weird, we’re talking in person and not on a phone. It’s a good weird.”
There’s nowhere to sit but the armchair and the edge of the bed, so we end up on the floor with our backs against the bed frame, shoulders not quite touching, mugs going cold on the boards.
“I was scared you wouldn’t come,” she says.
“Really? I was scared I would.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Now,” I say, “I’m just scared.”
“Me too.” And then she leans in and kisses me. It’s slow and certain, and when we come apart she keeps her forehead against mine—for about four seconds, before I pull her back in, because I’ve spent a year wanting this and I’m done being patient about it.
We don’t make it far. The kettle goes cold on the counter, forgotten. She kisses me like she’s reading me—slow, then not, learning what changes my breathing and filing it away the way she files everything about me. Her hands find the hem of my jumper and stop there, a question.
“Yes,” I say, before she can ask it aloud. “Yes. Please.”
She takes her time, and that’s the thing that undoes me—not urgency but attention, the same focus she brings to a bass line, turned entirely on me.
She learns me by degrees, checking with her eyes and her hands and a low “this okay?” against my throat that I answer by pulling her closer.
On the too-small bed, in a city where nobody knows my name, she takes me apart with a patience that feels like being memorised.
I’m not quiet. She taught me across a year of voice notes that words matter, that precision is a kind of respect, so I tell her what I want and she gives it to me and says my name back like it’s the only word she trusts.
When it breaks over me it’s with her hand laced in mine and her mouth soft at my shoulder and my whole careful, compartmentalised life narrowed to the single fact of her.
Afterward she doesn’t let go. She pulls me back against her, her arm heavy across my waist, and presses a kiss to the top of my spine, and I feel her breathing go slow and even against my back.
Somewhere in it I remember to text Jani—staying at a friend’s, don’t wait up—and she sends a question mark, then a heart, and I turn the phone face down and don’t think about it again.
There’s one bed and no pretending otherwise, and I’m too wrung out and too happy and too thoroughly undone to make it a thing. I fall asleep before I mean to, mid-sentence, wrapped in sheets that smell like her, the most dangerous and least lonely I’ve felt in years.