2. Geo
— ? —
Geo
I stop waiting up on the second night.
Harrison and Vivian go into the studio mid-morning and don’t come out until long past midnight, and the whole house has quietly rearranged itself around the two of them and the door they keep shut.
On the third day I stop leaving the coffee outside the door.
I don’t decide to be brave about it. I’m just tired, and my hands are full, and I nudge the studio door open with my hip and carry the tray in like I used to, back when this was a room I was allowed in.
Neither of them looks up.
Harrison is at the piano. He’s showered, which he does before sessions now, hair styled instead of sleep-wrecked, and there’s cologne in the air, the good one, the one I bought him three birthdays ago and haven’t smelled since.
Vivian is on the bench beside him, close enough that when she leans in to read off the same page her hair falls against his arm, and she says something I don’t catch and he laughs.
The belly laugh. The one that starts somewhere under his ribs and takes his whole face with it. I stand in the doorway holding two coffees and try to remember the last time that laugh was aimed at me, and I can’t, and the not-being-able-to is worse than any answer would have been.
“I brought coffee,” I say.
“Thanks, babe,” Harrison says, to the piano. He doesn’t turn around. His hand is already drifting back to the keys. “Just leave it.”
I leave it.
I set the tray on the amp by the door, the way you’d leave an offering for a god that has stopped noticing you, and I walk back out, and neither of them registers the door closing any more than they registered it opening.
I’ve become furniture in my own house. Useful furniture. Furniture that makes coffee.
The quiet is what undoes me. I keep waiting for the fight, the confrontation, the movie-scene moment where I throw something and demand to be seen.
But you can’t demand to be seen by people who have simply stopped looking.
There’s no scene to make. There’s just a woman in a hallway with an empty tray, learning the exact shape of her own disappearance.
The memory surfaces unbidden while I’m folding laundry, Val’s small socks paired and stacked, Harrison’s shirts hung with military precision because he used to care about wrinkles before he stopped caring about anything that wasn’t the music.
The night he proposed.
We were at Theo Ibarra’s release party. Theo, who would become a producer I’d work with years later, but back then was just another name on a guest list at a venue in Silver Lake. The kind of party where everyone was either about to be famous or pretending they already were.
Harrison was the most charming man in the room.
I watched him work it from across the bar, nursing a drink I didn’t really want, wearing the gold dress, because he’d told me to wear the one that made me feel like a star.
He was surrounded by people, always surrounded, but every few minutes his eyes would find mine across the crowd, and he’d smile like we were sharing a secret. Like everyone else was just filler, and I was the main event.
He kept steering conversations back to me.
“You should hear Geo sing,” he’d say to whoever had cornered him. “She’s got this voice.” And then he’d trail off, shaking his head like words weren’t sufficient. “Just wait. You’ll see.”
I’d never sung professionally. I had demos no one had heard, a voice I used in the shower and the car and nowhere that counted. But Harrison talked about me like I was already somebody, like my success was inevitable, like he was just waiting for the world to catch up to what he already knew.
At midnight, he dragged me onstage.
“Harrison, no. Absolutely not.”
I was laughing, mortified, my face burning as he pulled me toward the microphone where the house band was taking requests. “I’m not, this isn’t-”
“Trust me,” he said, and his eyes were so bright, so certain. “Just trust me.”
The band knew one of his songs. He sat at the piano and played the intro, and I stood at the microphone with my heart trying to escape through my throat, and I thought: I can’t do this. I can’t do this in front of all these people who actually belong here.
But he was looking at me like I was the only person in the room.
So I sang.
I don’t remember the performance. I remember the feeling, the terror dissolving into flight, into being exactly where I was supposed to be.
His face at the piano, watching me, grinning like he’d won.
I remember the applause when we finished, genuine and surprised, and the way he crossed the stage in three strides and kissed me in front of everyone.
“Marry me,” he said against my mouth, loud enough for the front row to hear. “Marry me, Geo.”
He didn’t have a ring. He didn’t have a speech. He just had that look in his eyes, the one that made me believe I was extraordinary, and I said yes before he finished asking.
That’s the version I tell people. That’s the one that fits in a sentence at a party.
Here’s the one I don’t tell.
At four in the morning we ended up in the parking lot of a diner on Sunset, because the party had emptied out and neither of us wanted to go home and be normal about it yet.
He bought two coffees we didn’t drink. He sat on the hood of a car that didn’t belong to either of us and wouldn’t stop talking.
“I had cards,” he said.
“You had what?”
“Index cards.” He wouldn’t look at me. He was looking at a streetlight with tremendous focus, like the streetlight had asked him a question. “I wrote it out. The whole thing. I’ve had them in my jacket since March.”
“March.”
“There’s a lot on them.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Six cards.”
I laughed so hard I had to put the coffee down on the asphalt. “Six index cards, Harrison. That’s not a proposal. That’s a deposition.”
“They were double-sided.”
“That’s worse. You understand that’s worse.”
“I know it’s worse.” He dragged both hands down his face. “I’ve known it was worse for four months. That’s why they’re still in the jacket. That’s why I got up on a stage instead, because up there I can’t read anything, so I can’t chicken out and start reading.”
“So where are they now?”
He patted his jacket. He patted the other side. He stood up and patted the whole thing like a man being frisked by himself, and then he said a word my mother would have had feelings about, and I understood before he did.
“They’re in the venue,” I said.
“They’re in the venue.”
“They’re in the coat check in the venue.”
“Geo.”
“Somebody is reading them right now. A stranger is reading your six double-sided index cards about me under a fluorescent light.”
“Okay.”
“They’re going to make copies.”
He was laughing by then, the ugly kind, bent over with a hand on the car, and I remember thinking that nobody in that room tonight had ever seen him do this. All those people who’d been arranged around him like he was the good weather. Not one of them got this.
Then he straightened up and said, “Fine. Do it live,” and did the entire speech from memory in a diner parking lot at four in the morning.
He got maybe a third of it. It was terrible.
It had a section about the ocean that never arrived anywhere.
He forgot a whole card in the middle and had to go back for it, and he told me he was going back for it, out loud, like a tour guide.
Somewhere in the fourth minute he called me a sure thing in a stupid business, which he swore was the best line on the cards and which I’ve never let him forget.
And then he tore the paper band off one of the coffee cups, and folded it, and tied it around my finger, and said he’d fix it later.
He did fix it. Six weeks later, a real ring, in a box, over a dinner he’d booked in advance like an adult.
But I kept the paper one. It’s in a drawer somewhere, in whatever box the drawer got packed into, gone gray and soft the way paper goes.
For years afterward, any time he made a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep, he’d hold up two fingers and say, “Bread tie,” and I’d know he meant I mean it, I just don’t have the good version yet.
He hasn’t said it in a long time.
I fold another pair of Val’s socks and try to remember the last time he looked at me like that.
The next day, my phone buzzes with a text from Vivian: Coffee tomorrow? I really want to catch up. Miss you! ??
I let the message sit there, my thumb hovering over the keyboard.
Part of me wants to ignore it, to let the silence speak for itself.
Part of me wants to type a sentence sharp enough to shatter the easy warmth of that heart emoji and force her to see what she’s doing, what they’re both doing, what I’m becoming in the negative space of their collaboration.
But another part of me, the part that remembers braiding each other’s hair at family reunions, the part that stayed up until 3 a.m. watching terrible horror movies and laughing until our stomachs hurt.
That part wants to believe there’s nothing to confront.
That this is just what it looks like: two musicians making music.
A stepsister visiting from out of town. Nothing sinister.
Nothing worth the paranoia that’s been crawling under my skin for days.
I type back: Sure. 10 a.m.?
Maybe coffee will help. Maybe talking to Vivian directly will dissolve the cold weight in my chest and let me breathe again.
Or maybe it’ll make everything worse.
I guess I’ll find out.
The coffee shop is halfway between the house and Vivian’s Airbnb, a carefully neutral territory that neither of us had to suggest. She’s already there when I arrive, two lattes on the table, waving from a corner booth with the same bright, uncomplicated smile she had in the studio.
“I got you oat milk,” she says as I slide in across from her. “You still do oat milk, right? I remember you switched a couple years ago.”
She remembers. This small detail, this tiny piece of evidence that she’s been paying attention to my life even from a distance, makes my throat tight.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Of course.”