14. Audrey
— ? —
Audrey
Ruth picks up Lily at four o’clock on a Saturday, which is strange.
“Sleepover at Grandma’s,” she announces, sweeping in like a woman on a mission. “We’re making lasagna and watching that princess movie she won’t stop talking about.”
“Since when do you do spontaneous sleepovers?”
“Since I decided my granddaughter needs quality time with her favorite person.” Ruth winks - actually winks - and starts gathering Lily’s overnight bag.
“You and Rowan should have a quiet evening. Order pizza. Watch something mindless. Try to remember you’re human beings and not just crisis managers. ”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Did he put you up to this?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She’s a terrible liar. She’s always been a terrible liar. “Lily! Grandma’s here!”
Lily comes thundering down the hall, already chattering about which pajamas she wants and whether Grandma has the right kind of popcorn. She hugs me hard, kisses my cheek, and disappears out the door without a backward glance.
The rental goes quiet.
Too quiet.
“Rowan?” I call out.
No answer.
I find a note on the kitchen counter, written in his terrible handwriting:
Living room. 7 PM. Dress code: pajamas.
I stare at the note for a long moment. Then I look at the clock. It’s four-fifteen.
What the hell is he planning?
I try not to think about it. I take a shower. I do laundry. I answer work emails and reorganize the pantry and do all the mindless tasks I’ve been putting off.
At six-forty-five, I put on pajamas - my comfortable ones, not the sexy ones that burned up with the house - and pad toward the living room.
The door is closed.
There’s a hand-drawn sign taped to it: HARBOR CINEMA - ADMIT ONE.
I push the door open.
He’s transformed the space.
The pullout couch has been folded back up and draped with a dark sheet.
Christmas lights - where did he even get Christmas lights?
- are strung along the ceiling, casting the room in a warm glow.
The TV is positioned at the far end, and in front of it, two folding chairs sit side by side, facing the screen like actual theater seats.
On a card table nearby: a bucket of popcorn, a box of Milk Duds, two cans of grape soda, and a stack of napkins printed with little movie cameras. Did he drive to three different stores for this? Did he plan this for days?
And there’s Rowan, standing in the middle of it all, wearing his oldest sweatshirt and holding two hand-drawn paper tickets.
“Welcome to the Harbor Cinema,” he says, his voice slightly unsteady. “Your feature presentation begins in fifteen minutes.”
I don’t know what to say.
“I know it’s not-” He gestures around helplessly. “It’s stupid. It’s probably stupid. But I was thinking about those ticket stubs, and I thought maybe-”
“Rowan.”
“If you hate it, we can just order pizza and pretend this never-”
“Rowan.”
He stops talking.
“What movie?” I ask.
His face breaks into that crooked smile - the one that’s been undoing me since I was seventeen years old.
“What do you think?”
Midnight in Monaco is exactly as terrible as I remembered.
The acting is wooden. The plot makes no sense.
The romantic lead - a supposedly charming jewel thief named Rafael - has all the charisma of a damp paper towel.
Every dramatic moment is undercut by bizarre musical choices, and there’s a car chase in the middle that defies the laws of physics, gravity, and basic narrative logic.
It’s magnificent.
“Wait, wait-” Rowan leans forward, pointing at the screen. “Did he just backflip off that yacht? We’re supposed to believe a man in a tuxedo backflipped off a moving yacht?”
“He’s a jewel thief, Rowan. They’re known for their gymnastics.”
“No. No, I reject this. The yacht was going at least thirty miles an hour.”
“You’re bringing physics into this?”
“Someone has to!”
I throw popcorn at him. He catches a piece in his mouth and looks so pleased with himself that I laugh - really laugh, the kind that comes from my belly and shakes my shoulders.
“God, this movie is bad,” I say.
“It’s the worst movie ever made.”
“We watched it twice that summer.”
“We were seventeen and stupid.”
“We were seventeen and broke. It was the only thing playing at the dollar theater.”
He grins at me. “Worth every cent.”
On screen, Rafael is delivering a monologue about destiny and diamonds, his eyebrows doing more acting than the rest of his face combined.
I reach for my grape soda - grape soda, because that’s what we drank at seventeen, before we discovered that adults drink wine and coffee and things that don’t taste like purple candy.
“I can’t believe you remembered the grape soda,” I say.
“I remember everything about that night.”
His voice has gone soft. I don’t look at him.
“The popcorn was stale,” I say instead. “The real popcorn, at the real theater.”
“And the Milk Duds were from a box that expired three months earlier.”
“And we didn’t care.”
“We didn’t care about anything.” He shifts in his chair, and I can feel him looking at me. “I spent the whole movie trying to figure out how to hold your hand.”
“I know.”
“You knew?”
“Rowan, you were about as subtle as a freight train. You kept fake-yawning and stretching your arm.”
“That’s a classic move!”
“It’s a move from a 1950s dating manual.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
I finally turn to look at him. The Christmas lights catch the silver at his temples, the lines around his eyes that weren’t there when we were seventeen. But the smile is the same. The way he’s looking at me is the same.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “It worked.”
The theater was nearly empty - just us and a couple making out in the back row and an old man who fell asleep before the opening credits. The seats were threadbare velvet, sticky in places I didn’t want to think about, and the whole room smelled like fake butter and ancient carpet.
Rowan kept fidgeting beside me. Adjusting his position. Clearing his throat. Running his hands through his hair so many times it started sticking up at weird angles.
“You okay?” I whispered.
“Fine. Great. This movie is really... something.”
“It’s terrible.”
“So terrible.” He laughed, that surprised bark of a laugh that always made me feel like I’d won something. “Why did we pay money for this?”
“Because you said you wanted to see it.”
“I lied. I just wanted an excuse to sit next to you in the dark.”
I felt my face heat up. Thank God for the darkness.
On screen, Rafael was stealing a diamond the size of a baby’s head from a museum with security systems that apparently responded to backflips.
I wasn’t really watching. I was too aware of Rowan’s arm next to mine on the armrest. The warmth radiating off his skin.
The way he smelled like cedar and something minty.
And then - the yawn. The stretch. His arm landing across the back of my seat like it had just happened to end up there by accident.
“Smooth,” I said.
“Shut up.”
But he was laughing, and I was laughing, and then somehow my head was on his shoulder and his fingers were playing with the ends of my hair, and I thought: this is it. This is the moment everything changes.
After the movie, he drove us to Miller’s Point.
We sat on the hood of his truck - that ancient Chevy he’d inherited from his grandfather, more rust than metal - and watched the last light fade from the sky. The water was steel-gray and restless, and the wind off the Atlantic smelled like salt and possibility.
“Audrey,” he said, and his voice was shaking.
“Yeah?”
“I really want to kiss you right now.”
“So kiss me.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Neither do I.”
He turned to face me, and I could see how terrified he was - this boy who acted so confident, who cracked jokes and charmed teachers and seemed to glide through life without effort. Up close, in the fading light, he was just as scared as I was.
“We could figure it out together,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He leaned in. I leaned in. Our noses bumped. He laughed nervously, adjusted the angle, tried again.
His lips were soft and tasted like grape soda and Milk Duds, and the kiss was clumsy and perfect and over too quickly. When he pulled back, his eyes were shining.
“Was that okay?” he whispered.
“That was everything.”
He kissed me again. And again. And by the time the stars came out, I knew - with the absolute certainty of a seventeen-year-old who’d never had her heart broken - that I was going to love this boy forever.
“Hey.” Rowan’s voice pulls me back. “Where’d you go?”
I blink. The movie’s still playing - Rafael is now dangling from a helicopter, which seems impractical - but I haven’t been watching for several minutes.
“Miller’s Point,” I say. “After this movie. The first time you kissed me.”
His expression shifts into something tender. “You remember that?”
“I remember all of it. The terrible kiss-”
“It was not terrible.”
“Our noses collided, Rowan.”
“That’s called passion.”
“That’s called inexperience.” But I’m smiling. “You tasted like grape soda.”
“So did you.”
“And you asked if it was okay. After. You looked so worried.”
“I was terrified.” He shifts his chair closer to mine - just an inch, but I feel it. “I spent two years working up the courage to talk to you. And then I finally got you alone in the dark, and I thought: if I screw this up, she’s never going to speak to me again.”
“Two years?”
“Since freshman year. You walked into English class and started arguing with Mr. Patterson about the symbolism in Lord of the Flies, and I thought: that’s her. That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”
“You did not think that at fifteen.”
“I absolutely thought that at fifteen.”
“You didn’t even talk to me until junior year!”
“Because I was terrified!” He’s laughing now, and so am I, and the room feels warmer than it should, smaller than it should. “Every time I tried to approach you, I’d panic and pretend I was walking somewhere else. You probably thought I had a bladder problem.”
“I thought you hated me!”
“I was obsessed with you. In a respectful, non-creepy way.”
“There’s no non-creepy way to be obsessed with someone.”
“There is when you marry them.”
The words land between us. The laughter fades.
On screen, Rafael finally kisses the leading lady - terrible cinematography, worse music - and I’m suddenly very aware of how close Rowan is sitting. How easy it would be to lean in. How much I want to.
“Audrey,” he says softly.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not asking for anything. I just-” He reaches over, and his scarred fingers brush against mine. Not holding. Just touching. “I wanted you to remember. Who we were before I ruined everything.”
“You didn’t ruin everything.”
“I ruined a lot.”
“You did.” I don’t pull my hand away. “But this - tonight-” I gesture at the Christmas lights, the popcorn, the terrible movie still playing in the background. “This is who you were too. The boy who spent two years working up courage. The boy who fake-yawned to hold my hand.”
“I’m trying to be that guy again.”
“I know.”
“Is it working?”
I look at him - really look - and I see it all.
The seventeen-year-old who kissed me on a cliff.
The twenty-three-year-old who proposed in that same spot.
The man who broke my heart and is sitting here now, in a cramped rental living room decorated with dollar-store Christmas lights, trying to remind me why I fell in love with him in the first place.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s working.”
His breath catches. His hand turns, and suddenly we’re palm to palm, fingers interlacing. His thumb strokes across my knuckles - slow, deliberate - and I feel it everywhere.
“Audrey.”
“I know.”
“I want to kiss you.”
“I know.”
“Can I?”
The word yes is right there, pressing against my teeth. I want to say it. I want to close the distance between us and taste grape soda on his lips and pretend we’re seventeen again, before everything got complicated.
But we’re not seventeen. And I’m not ready.
“Not yet,” I whisper.
I feel him exhale - disappointed but not surprised. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t pull away. He just holds my hand in the flickering light of Christmas decorations and a movie about backflipping jewel thieves.
“Okay,” he says. “Not yet.”
“But this-” I squeeze his fingers. “This was good. This was really good.”
“Yeah?”
“The grape soda was a nice touch.”
“I had to go to three different stores.”
“I figured.”
He laughs softly. On screen, the credits are starting to roll - that cheesy saxophone music that made us giggle at seventeen. Outside, the night is quiet, and somewhere across town, Lily is probably still awake, demanding Grandma make the popcorn exactly right.
We sit there, hand in hand, not kissing, not talking, just existing in the same space the way we used to before everything fell apart.
I think about the girl I was at seventeen. How certain she was. How fearless. How completely convinced that love would be enough to carry them through anything.
That girl was naive. But she wasn’t wrong.
Love isn’t enough on its own. But it’s the foundation. It’s where you start rebuilding.
“Rowan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For tonight.”
“Anytime.” He lifts my hand, presses his lips to my knuckles - gentle, reverent - and sets it back down. “I’m going to keep trying. You know that, right? I’m going to keep fighting for this. For us. Every day until you either take me back or tell me to stop.”
I don’t tell him to stop.
I don’t take him back either - not yet, not tonight - but the wanting is there, urgent and terrifying, pressing against the walls I’ve built.
And that scares me more than anything else.
Because if I let him back in, and he breaks me again, I don’t think I’ll survive it.
I need to know he’ll fight. Really fight. Not just grand gestures and grape soda, but the hard stuff. The boring stuff. The “choose me every day even when it’s not romantic” stuff.
I need to know he’ll stay.
And I don’t know how to test that without risking everything.
“Goodnight, Rowan,” I say, standing up.
“Night, Aud.”
I walk to my room on unsteady legs, close the door, and press my back against it.
My heart is pounding. My lips are tingling like he actually kissed me instead of just almost-kissed me.
I want him. God help me, I still want him.
But wanting isn’t the same as trusting.
And I’m not ready to trust - not until I know what he’ll do when I push him away one more time.
Prove it, I think, staring at the ceiling. Show me you’ll stay even when I make it hard.
I don’t sleep well that night.
But for the first time in months, the reason isn’t grief.
It’s hope.
And hope, I’m discovering, is almost scarier.