Chapter Thirty-Three
Originally, John had thought they’d hang out at the prom a little longer, find Steve and Frankie, enjoy the music.
But Micah was a woman on a mission, and all he could do was follow her as they made their way up to the top deck of the ship.
The weather was the most mild it had been on their trip, but it was still a little chilly, and he wished he’d thought to wear a suit jacket if for no other reason than to be able to offer it to Micah. She had to be cold in that dress.
She didn’t seem like she even noticed the weather, though, as she turned to him once they’d found an isolated spot by the rail.
“Come to L.A.,” she said. “You can stay with me, however long you want to. I don’t want this cruise to be it for us.”
He didn’t want the cruise to be it for them, either. But he also couldn’t help but fixate on her word choice. What did that mean— stay with her? Like she wanted him to move in? Like she thought of him as a guest, a friend crashing on her couch while they saw the sights?
“It would be fun,” she said. “I’ve missed you, John, and I don’t want to miss you anymore. And I know you have your own thing in Orlando, but it seems like you might be ready to make a change. Am I wrong? This could be your change.”
He ran his hand through his hair, trying to even imagine it.
All he’d ever wanted was to be with Micah.
He’d always thought he’d take her in any capacity she’d give him.
But he did have a life he’d built for himself, very carefully and very thoughtfully, and it might not be perfect but it was his .
He was scared to leave that behind for something so uncertain, when he still didn’t even know how Micah felt about him.
Micah was watching his face, something desperate around her eyes. “Say something,” she said. “And I know you always think before you speak, but don’t think, it makes me nervous when you think. Just say it.”
“I want to make music with you,” he said, because that was truly the first thing that came to his mind. He hadn’t even fully realized it until he said the words aloud, but he knew immediately that they were the right ones.
“Is that what we’re calling it?” she said, giving him a flirty smile as she reached out to touch his wrist.
“Don’t do that,” he said, his voice tight. “You know what I mean. I want to write songs together, and I think I want to actually try to put them out. I want to play shows with you again. Separate from anything to do with ElectricOh!. Something new.”
She withdrew her hand, tucking her hair behind her ear. Her fingers brushed against the rose, which had started to droop a little, sliding down until it was hanging in her hair rather than pinned up into it.
“I think I’m done with that part of my life,” Micah said. “But you know I’d support you in anything you wanted to do. L.A. would be a great place for you, actually, if you wanted to get back into the scene—”
“I don’t care about the scene,” John said. “I want to do this with you .”
Something sparked in Micah’s eyes, and she took a step back, crossing her arms over her chest. “So those are your terms,” she said, then gave a little laugh, looking up at the sky.
“This is exactly why mixing music stuff with relationship stuff never works. They get too tangled up in each other, and then you can’t pull on any of the threads without it all coming undone. ”
“That’s not fair.” John knew she was referring back to Ryder, which—if she couldn’t see the ways that this would not just be a repeat of that debacle, then there was no point in continuing to have this conversation.
“I’m not trying to set terms with you, or rules, or whatever else.
We’ve done the all-or-nothing thing before and I don’t want that, because I don’t want nothing with you.
But I’m also all in, Micah. I do want all of it—the relationship stuff and the music stuff.
If that’s not what you want, then tell me that.
I’ll still be your friend because I’ll always be your friend.
I’ve never liked the phrase more than friends because your friendship is already a lot, it’s the most precious thing in the world to me.
And music has always been precious to us, I think you need it the same way that I do.
So yeah, I do want more. I can’t do this in-between, where we’re friends with benefits, I can’t live in the liminal state of this cruise ship forever. I want everything. What do you want?”
She just looked at him, and if it made her nervous when he thought before speaking, then this silence was absolutely crushing.
He knew Micah cared about him. He knew she was attracted to him—god knows if nothing else had come out of this whole experience, it had proven to him that sexual tension had never been their problem.
But either she wasn’t capable of committing to him, or she just didn’t want to.
She’d also started to shiver. He stepped closer to her, rubbing his hands down her bare, goose-fleshed arms.
“This is a lot to figure out on a cruise,” he said. “When we’re still under the influence of all those virgin pina coladas.”
She laughed, leaning into him, her forehead resting on his chest. “I’ve been buzzing since that first sip of fruit punch.”
“We don’t have to have all the answers right now,” he said. “Maybe we just go back to our real lives and see how things go.”
“Ugh, our real lives,” Micah said. “Do we have to?”
He stroked his finger down her spine, from the base of her neck all the way to the dip of her dress, until he felt her shiver again from the featherlight touch. “Not until tomorrow,” he said. “We still have tonight.”
She turned her head to kiss his throat, looping her arms around his neck until it was like they were slow-dancing, even though their bodies barely swayed. “Then I say we make the most of it.”
—
They had to separate the next morning to pack their stuff in their respective rooms, sign off on where some of their larger gear was being shipped back to.
John saw the couple he’d gotten the masks from down in the disembarkation line, and he thanked them again, taking several pictures and getting their address so he could send them something from the band since they hadn’t connected at prom.
He stood with his luggage, not wanting to leave until he’d had his chance to say his goodbyes, scrolling through the number of notifications on his phone that had stacked up in the time he’d been away from cell service.
Mostly it was his housemates’ group chat that had been popping off, and he saw a few choice messages— JOHN YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING LEGEND!
!!!!!! was one from Kiki that made him smile—before he slid his phone back in his pocket to deal with later.
He really did miss his housemates, he realized, and was excited to see them again after these days away.
“Hey,” Micah said from behind him, and he turned.
He already missed her , even though there she was standing right in front of him.
For a second he wanted to rewind back to the night before, wanted to just say, Yes, I’ll come to L.A.
, I’ll stay with you for as long as you’ll have me .
But he knew it wouldn’t fix any of their problems. It would just delay the inevitable conversation, and he didn’t want to engage in delay tactics anymore.
She had her silver suitcase and her bag, together with her guitar case, which he presumed was empty unless she’d used it to pack more of her clothes. Which, come to think of it…
“That’s my shirt,” he said.
She glanced down at her T-shirt, black with white jagged letters spelling out the band name Final Revelations , before glancing back up to grin at him.
“I underpacked for this trip,” she said. “And you seemed to have shirts to spare. I figured it was the least you could do for keeping my guitar so long.”
“You should take it,” he said, sliding the case off his back.
He meant it—the guitar had been a gift for her, he’d always wanted her to have it—but he still expected her to turn it down.
She had an expression on her face like she was about to.
Then she reached out, grabbing onto one of the straps and hefting it on the opposite shoulder from her purse.
“If you think this means I’m going to whip your shirt off and give it back to you, I’m not.”
He twisted his hand in the hem of that shirt, pulling her closer to him.
He still couldn’t believe that he could touch her that way, much less so publicly without worrying that someone would catch them out.
He still felt dizzy with it, although some of that might be the sensation of standing on solid ground again after five days on the sea.
“Damn,” he said. “That’s too bad.”
He wanted to say more to her—he had so much he almost didn’t know where to begin—but then Steve and Frankie walked up, dragging their own luggage behind them.
“The gang’s all here!” Steve shouted, leaning in to snap a quick selfie of the four of them together with his phone. “That was some performance last night, mate. Didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Yeah, I don’t sing much,” John said, deliberately misunderstanding him. He didn’t really want to get into the kiss now.
“You sounded good,” Frankie said. “You both did. Micah, that bridge—I got chills, for real.”
“Thank you,” Micah said. “And thank you all, for…” She seemed to be having trouble gathering her words, and John stroked his thumb along the warm skin of her waist where he’d left his hand.
“Thank you for sticking up for me with Ryder. I know I’m the one you were angry at, I know I deserve it, but it meant a lot to me, you all having my back like that. ”
“That shit was a long time ago,” Frankie said.
“And Ryder was being a dick right now, in the present, in a way he just did not need to be. I’m sorry if we didn’t have your back more when he was a dick to you in the past. I just didn’t want to get involved in whatever that all was, but I never meant for you to think you were alone. ”
“He was bad vibes,” Steve said. “But that punch was some Street Fighter shit. I’ll remember that every day for the rest of my life.”
He mimed like he was setting up some jabs into a right hook. Micah laughed, but John could also see her rub the knuckles of her right hand as if in memory, and he knew that she wasn’t ready quite yet to treat everything as a joke. Maybe one day.
Something caught her attention, and she glanced over before looking back at the group. “My ride is here,” she said. “To take me to the airport. So I guess…”
John felt panic rise into his throat. She couldn’t be leaving already.
She couldn’t be leaving like this , when they didn’t even have a private moment to themselves first. He watched her hug Frankie and Steve, saw her look at him uncertainly before he finally snapped out of it and set down his own luggage so he could grab the handle of her suitcase.
“I’ll help you to the car,” he said.
He spent an almost inordinate amount of time settling everything in the trunk of the car, waving away the driver as he worked to make sure the electric guitar was on top and nestled in enough not to slide all around during the trip.
And then he closed the trunk, and there was nothing else to do but say goodbye.
She looked at him, and he could see that her eyes were a little shiny.
And then she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her in a hug.
If he’d thought the one she’d given him onstage had been tight, this one was tight —it knocked the breath right out of him, but maybe that was all of it, everything about the last five days, not just the hug.
It felt so good just to hold her, to have that full-body contact, and he wrapped her up, too, like he never wanted to let go.
“Johnny,” she said into his ear. “Don’t be a stranger.”
He kissed her cheek, the corner of her mouth, which tasted a little salty, like maybe she’d started to cry. His mouth found hers then, and he kissed her with all the feeling of a last kiss, even though that couldn’t be what this was. He refused to believe it.
“My number’s the same,” he said. “I never changed it.”
She kissed him again, and then she climbed into the back of the car, and he shut the door behind her, giving her a wave. He was still watching it leave when his phone vibrated in his back pocket, and he pulled it out to see a new message from a 213 area code number.
M: Hi 3
He grinned before typing his response.
J: New phone who dis
The three bouncing dots appeared for only a second before her text came in.
M: You’re such an asshole
He wondered if she’d still had his number programmed in her phone, or if she’d memorized it from all those times they’d talked. Even now, he could rattle off the phone number to her dad’s house, had thought about calling it several times over the years just to see if the number still worked.
J: Sorry, autocorrect. I meant to type: hi 3