27. Geo
— ? —
Geo
The reprise goes out at midnight.
I wake to my phone exploding with notifications, the screen lighting up again and again with texts and alerts and the flat chaos of the internet finding a new toy. For a moment I just lie there, watching the glow, feeling Harrison’s arm heavy across my waist.
“It’s out,” he says, voice rough with sleep.
“I know.”
“Do you want to look?”
I think about it. About the reviews and the streams and the comments that’ll tell me what to feel about my own art. About the year I spent letting other people define my story.
“Not yet,” I say. “I want breakfast. I want to take Val to school. I want to live my life before I let the internet tell me how to feel about it.”
We have breakfast, the specific chaos of a kid her age insisting on helping. We take Val to school, walk her to the door, wave until she disappears inside.
We come back to an empty house.
“Now?”
Harrison asks.
“Now.”
We look together. Sitting on the couch, his phone between us, scrolling through the numbers and the reviews and the comments.
“Golden Hour (Reprise)” debuted at number one.
We do one interview. Rolling Stone again, which spent a year turning our marriage into content and now wants to hear us tell it ourselves.
“The song is remarkable,” the journalist says. She’s younger than I expected, with kind eyes and a recorder she keeps glancing at nervously. “How did you write it together?”
“We lived it together,” I say. “It made sense to sing it together.”
“And you’re comfortable with how raw it is? The lyrics don’t leave much room for interpretation.”
“That’s the whole reason we made it.”
Harrison leans forward. “We spent a year letting other people tell our story. This is us telling it ourselves.”
“What do you want people to take away?”
Harrison and I look at each other. After a year of learning to read each other again, the communication is wordless.
“That it’s possible,” I say. “To break something completely and still put it back together. Stronger.”
“And that it’s work,” Harrison adds. “Every day, for as long as it takes. But worth it.”
The release party is small, which is exactly what we wanted.
Family, close friends, string lights tangled through the backyard trees like a dream I stopped letting myself have years ago.
The air smells like eucalyptus and the expensive wine Mom brought, and somewhere inside the house our song is playing on repeat because Val figured out how to work the speakers and nobody has the heart to stop her.
Mom is here, crouched in the grass helping Val untangle a knot of lights that keeps getting worse the more they work at it.
My mother-in-law is teaching Harrison’s father to dance on the patio, their shadows swaying against the sliding glass door, and I can hear her laughing at something he said, that full bright laugh that Harrison inherited.
Friends mill around with drinks in their hands, the ones who saw the ugly middle and stayed anyway, who fielded my 2 a.m. phone calls and didn’t judge and never once said I told you so.
Dad isn’t here.
He sent flowers. White roses, expensive, arranged by someone who charges by the stem. The card tucked inside said only: Proud of the music. Give Val a kiss from Grandpa, R. Civil and finite. A door cracked open but not walked through.
Val runs between groups of adults like a hummingbird that got into the sugar bowl, showing off her new sparkly shoes to anyone who will look, spinning so the sequins catch the light.
She’s high on attention and cake, with no idea how close she came to losing this.
To weekends shuttled between two houses.
To parents who couldn’t be in the same room.
To a family held together by custody agreements instead of love.
I drift to the edge of the party, past the string lights, into the quiet dark where the music fades to background noise and I can breathe without performing happiness for the people who came to celebrate.
Unhappy isn’t the word. I’m overwhelmed, which looks similar from the outside but feels completely different from within.
Harrison finds me there.
“You okay?”
“More than okay.”
I lean into his side, letting his arm come up around my shoulders, letting myself be held. “I was thinking about how different this could have been.”
“I try not to think about that.”
“I think about it all the time.”
The admission comes out quiet, almost lost in the distant music. “About what we almost lost. About the version of tonight where you’re at some hotel bar and I’m putting Val to bed alone and we’re both pretending we’re fine.”
His arm tightens around me. He doesn’t say anything, just holds on.
“I’m glad it wasn’t,” I say, turning to look at him. The string lights catch his face, softening the angles, making him look younger than he is. Making him look like the boy I fell in love with before either of us knew how much damage we could do to each other. “I’m glad we’re here.”
“Me too.”
The music from the house comes to us thin and far away, and I make myself do the thing I’ve been not doing for four months.
“I love you.”
He goes so still that I feel it happen against my shoulder. He doesn’t rush to answer, which is the correct response, and probably the hardest one available to him.
“Say it again.”
“Don’t get greedy.”
“Geo.” His voice has gone somewhere unsteady. “I have heard that sentence from about nine thousand people this year and not one of them was you. Say it again.”
“I love you,” I say. “I’ve loved you the whole time. That was the entire problem.”
He presses his mouth to my hair and keeps it there, and I stand in the dark at the edge of my own party and let a man hold me for as long as he needs to.
Inside, someone puts on the song. Our song.
The one we wrote together in the studio above the garage, the one that poured out of us like blood from a wound that was finally starting to heal.
A cheer goes up from the living room, and I can hear Val’s voice above the rest, shrieking that this is Mommy and Daddy’s music, actually.
“Val’s going home with your mom,” Harrison says, his voice dropping lower. “Linda offered to help.”
“Strategic.”
“I have no idea what you’re implying.”
But he’s smiling, that crooked half-smile that still makes my stomach flip after all these years, and I’m already pulling him toward the studio above the garage.
The studio’s lamp glows in the corner, casting warm shadows across the mixing board and the instruments and the piano bench where we’ve spent a hundred hours this year putting ourselves back together note by note.
Through the window, the string lights in the backyard look like fallen stars, and if I focus I can still hear the distant murmur of the party continuing without us.
He locks the door behind us. Turns.
I’m already pulling my dress over my head.
Black, simple, nothing underneath because I planned this hours ago, standing in front of my closet weighing the odds.
I let the fabric pool at my feet and I stand there, letting him look at me.
The soft of my stomach that never went flat again after Val.
The silvery stretch marks she left behind like a map of what my body sacrificed to make her.
The body that’s changed and aged and isn’t what it was when he married me the first time.
I used to hide from this. Used to angle my body away from the light, used to keep my shirt on, used to believe the silence meant he was comparing me to someone younger and firmer and less marked by time. I don’t hide anymore.
He looks at me the way he used to before I trained myself to stop needing it.
“There’s a freckle on your left hip I forgot about,” he says, and his voice is already low, already rough with want. I can see him straining against his pants, already hard just from looking at me. “One under your breast I used to trace with my tongue.”
“Then remind me.”
He walks me backward toward the piano bench, his hands warm on my bare skin, and sits down with me standing between his spread knees.
Then he pulls me into his lap facing him, fully clothed against my nakedness, and the contrast makes me shiver.
The wool of his pants scrapes my bare thighs.
His belt buckle digs into the soft skin of my stomach.
I grind down once, just to feel him through the fabric, and we both hiss at the friction.
“This is the shoulder you cried into when you still wouldn’t stay the night.”
He kisses my shoulder, slow and reverent. “This is the wrist you bit so we wouldn’t wake Val.”
His teeth find my wrist, gentle, sending sparks up my arm. “These are the hands that packed the suitcases and then carried them back through my door.”
He turns my hands over, kisses each palm like a benediction.
I’m already wet when he finally gets his clothes off, fumbling with buttons and zippers while I lift my hips to give him room. I feel how wet I am when I sink down onto him, slow, deliberate, my forehead pressed to his as I take him inch by inch. Every bit of him is a claim. A yes. A stay.
“Don’t move yet,” I whisper when he’s fully seated inside me, when I can feel him twitching with the need to thrust. “I want to feel this. You under me. The song playing outside. How full I am.”
He holds still, shaking with the effort, his jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise, fingertips digging into the soft flesh like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his hold.
I clench around him just to watch his jaw go slack, just to hear the sound he makes, and he groans my name like it’s the only word he has left.
When I move, it’s a slow grind. Small, deep circles that keep him buried inside me, that drag him against every sensitive spot until I’m gasping. I let myself feel everything. The stretch. The fullness. The impossible rightness of his body in mine after everything we’ve survived.
We shouldn’t still be this good together.
After the drowning. After the tours and the distance and the gold dress ignored.
After Vivian. After the toast that shattered whatever we had left.
We shouldn’t fit together like a song that only works in two-part harmony, like two voices that found their way back to the same key.
“I used to think you looked through me,” I gasp, my hips rolling faster now, chasing the building pressure. “In rooms. On stages. Like I was furniture. Like I was already gone.”
“I’m not looking away again.”
His hand fists in my hair and draws my head back until my face is all he can see, until he can watch what he’s doing to me. “I’m not going to last. You feel like coming home and getting away with something at the same time.”
His voice breaks on my name. “Geo, baby, I can feel you dripping down me.”
I come first, silent, open-mouthed, my hand slamming down on the piano keys so a crash of discordant notes covers the sound I almost make.
He follows because of that, because of the music I made by accident, spilling into me with a groan that gets lost in the discord.
His hips jerk up hard, filling me with heat while the keys still ring their chaos into the quiet room.
We stay on the bench until the song outside ends and someone starts it over. He’s still inside me, softening, and we don’t move to separate. The piano keys have settled into silence. My thighs are shaking. His forehead rests against my collarbone, his breath warm on my skin.
“Okay,” I say finally, my voice hoarse. “That one’s a keeper.”
“The piano bench is never recovering.”
“Worth it.”
I clench once more just to feel him twitch inside me, and he laughs against my throat, wrecked and happy and mine. Outside, through the window, the string lights still glow like earthbound stars, and our song plays on.