Chapter Thirty-Four
Over the next several weeks, Micah texted John every day.
She sent him pictures of stuff she saw on her walks—the reservoir, her favorite lemon tree, a typo on an ad printed on a street bench that made the slogan something really unfortunate.
He’d sent her a picture of him with all his housemates, so she could know who they were, and sometimes he said stuff like Kiki said we’re both clowns for our pineapple-on-pizza opinions or Elliot has been listening to So Much Promise and says there are a lot of bops .
It always gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling, just to think that he was talking about her with his housemates, that she was able to be a part of his life even in some small way.
They also sent each other things in the actual mail.
It started when Micah asked John for some music recommendations, and he’d mailed her a mix CD just like they’d made each other back in middle school, the tracks labeled on the shiny silver surface in his bold, familiar handwriting.
He asked her to send him a CD to get him into Elvis, and what had begun as her just trying to figure out a way to even burn a CD anymore had somehow led to her spending hours narrowing it down to fifteen tracks, designing and printing a zine to go along with the CD, making a bespoke friendship bracelet she could slip into the package, Chicken Tender spelled out in tiny beaded letters.
She’d been obsessively tracking the package since she sent it, so when he called one night just as she’d climbed into bed, she knew he would’ve hopefully had time to listen to the CD and read through the zine earlier that day.
“Hey,” she said, a little breathless.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry—did I wake you?”
It was late for him—one o’clock in the morning—but relatively early for her. She’d been trying to regulate her sleep schedule a bit more, both because she liked being up more of the day when John would be, but also because she knew it was healthier for her.
She assured him that he hadn’t, and they spent the next hour talking about Elvis and then veering off into other topics, karaoke song choices and the time one of his housemates had done an emotional rendition of “Blue Christmas” and whether ElectricOh!
had never played in Louisville or if that was a fever dream.
They’d talked on the phone before since the cruise—he’d call her when he was running errands, or she’d call after she’d woken up and was watering her plants.
But they hadn’t talked like this, late at night before bed, and she wondered if that had been on purpose.
The sound of his voice, the low intimacy of it directly in her ear, did dangerous things to her.
“Do you still think about the cruise?” she asked at one point, where what she meant was Do you ever think about being with me? Do you think about it as much as I do?
“I think about all of it,” he said. “I think about it every night.”
“Just at night?”
She could hear him smile over the phone. “Sometimes in the morning.”
“I—” She knew they were talking under something, over it, around it. They were tracking on multiple channels, and she wanted to turn certain ones up in the mix but she didn’t know how, or maybe she was just incapable. “I really miss you.”
John’s long exhale was audible. “I miss you, too.”
She swallowed, was trying to gather her courage to say more, to say whatever it was that had felt like a weight on her chest since she’d gotten back from the cruise, that wasn’t going away no matter how many lighthearted text exchanges she had with John.
On the other end, she could hear rustling, like he was moving around, and when his voice came it sounded a little far away at first before landing close to her ear again. “It’s late,” he said. “I should probably get to bed.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”
“Good night, Micah.”
After that conversation, she’d wanted to go to sleep, hadn’t wanted to risk falling back into her old insomniac patterns.
But she’d found it difficult to settle down, and so something had made her dig out a copy of So Much Promise she kept in a box under her bed.
It wasn’t like she couldn’t have listened to the album any time she felt like it—it was available on streaming platforms, there were music videos on YouTube, there were no shortages of ways she could’ve revisited the album. She’d just never wanted to.
But now she put it on, sitting in the middle of her living room holding the Discman she’d bought just so she could listen to John’s mix CDs, letting the music wash over her through her headphones.
In a way, it didn’t sound like her. She could almost appreciate it like it had been someone else, could better hear the places where the music was pretty good, actually.
In another way, she could hear every bit of pain and sadness in her voice, melancholic artifacts in even the most upbeat, dance-y songs.
Maybe that was why the album hadn’t taken off, maybe it had been too strange.
But she was proud of that aspect of the record now. It felt like the most honest part.
She fell asleep on her couch and woke up to black-and-white reruns playing on her TV, the Discman discarded on the floor next to her, popped open to show the CD inside.
She didn’t even bother to pick it up before going to her closet to retrieve the guitar case that John had given her when they’d left the cruise.
It smelled like him, somehow, which didn’t make any sense—it probably just smelled like wood and strings and guitar polish.
He’d always taken exceptional care of his instruments.
Truly, she was glad he’d had custody of this one as long as he had.
There were still a bunch of the suggestive guitar picks hidden away in one zippered pocket, and she smiled when she saw the one she pulled out. Give Me a Lick. She used it to strum down the strings, which were woefully out of tune.
She ended up getting so involved in what she was doing that she was jolted by a knock at the door.
It was just past noon—well within her sanctioned hours with Mr. Li downstairs, and she’d been playing the guitar without an amp—so she didn’t think it could be him.
Then she remembered, and set the guitar down on the floor, wincing at the thud and buzz from the vibrating strings.
“Shit,” she said. “Sorry, sorry, I’m coming.”
She opened the door to see Tatiana Rivera standing on the other side of it, a pair of giant sunglasses on her face.
“I tried to text you,” Tatiana said, holding up her phone. “We’re still doing lunch, right?”
Sometimes Micah thought that her rediscovered closeness with John was the most surprising thing that had come out of the cruise, but then that didn’t feel right.
In many ways it didn’t feel like a surprise at all.
It felt almost fated, like of course that was why they’d been on the cruise in the first place, of course they were going to find their way back to each other.
In which case, maybe the most surprising outcome of the cruise was her newfound friendship with Tatiana Rivera.
It had all started when Micah had reached out to her on social media, worried that she’d somehow been so distracted by her insecurities and jealousies on the cruise that she’d come off as rude.
But Tatiana—true to form—couldn’t have been kinder about the whole thing, and said she was hopeful that they could hang out before she had to leave for a film shoot next month.
Since then, they’d gotten together a couple times, and Micah found that it was really nice, having a reason to get out of the apartment, sitting across from someone way more famous than she was in a public space where Micah could realize it didn’t have to be that big a deal, actually, if people recognized them or came up to talk to them.
“Come in,” Micah said. “I just need a couple minutes.”
Tatiana seemed to take in the whole scene—the guitar lying in the middle of the floor, the stereo, the notebook of scribbled lyrics. “We can reschedule,” she said.
Micah didn’t want to do that when she knew Tatiana would be out of town for so long.
But at the same time, she truly did feel like she was in the middle of something magical, and she was afraid that if she stepped away she’d lose it.
“I can take a break,” she said. “But would you mind if we just got something to eat here?”
They ordered burritos from Micah’s favorite local place, and while they waited for the delivery to arrive Micah played Tatiana a tiny bit of the song she’d been working on, too shy to share any more of it.
When Tatiana indicated toward the notebook, obviously asking for permission to take a peek, Micah pushed it toward her, chewing on her thumbnail while Tatiana read over the words.
“My handwriting’s terrible,” Micah said.
“It’s fine,” Tatiana said. “Your handwriting, I mean. The song is really good. Have you shown it to John yet?”
Micah was still debating whether she wanted to let John hear it at all.
Of course she did—it was the entire reason she’d written it in the first place.
But it had also been so long since she’d written any music, and the idea of sharing this felt almost painfully vulnerable.
She was worried her lyrics were stupid and obvious.
She worried they weren’t obvious enough, when she had so much that she wanted to say.
“He told me he was in love with me,” Micah said. “On the cruise. He told me that he’d loved me since we were kids.”
Tatiana didn’t look surprised. If anything, she looked…oddly pleased , like she’d had something to do with it. “And? What did you say?”
“I said…” Micah thought back to that moment between them.
She’d thought about it a lot, in the weeks since.
She thought about the intimacy of that darkness, the way she’d been extra conscious of the heat of John’s body, the sound of his breath, every single nerve ending where he touched her.
She thought about everything he’d said, how he seemed to see her in a way that she worried wasn’t true, that she wanted to be true in the worst possible way.
She thought about that overpowering, overwhelming orgasm—she could still get herself close thinking about it, even now.
She thought about how, afterward, she’d broken down and cried, too overcome by emotion to do anything else.
“Nothing,” Micah said finally. “He told me he loved me and I said…nothing.”
“Why?” Tatiana asked. She said it like the most obvious answer— because I don’t love him back —was off the table, and weirdly Micah appreciated that.
It was off the table, although she could of course see how John had no reason to know that, how much she’d hurt him by not being able to express how she felt.
“I think I’ve just always been so afraid of failure,” Micah said. “In the past, when I’ve put myself out there…every time, I fuck it up somehow.”
Tatiana looked down at the notebook still in her hand. It was basically what the song was about.
“You’re not afraid of failure,” Tatiana said. “You’re afraid of success.”
That didn’t make any sense. When Micah thought back to the biggest accomplishments in her life—the record deal, when “If Only” had gone platinum, that final performance on the cruise—she felt good about them. Sure, that feeling got complicated, even warped sometimes, but she still chased it.
“Maybe I need some exposure therapy,” she joked. “Once I’m successful at something again, then I’ll see how I feel.”
Tatiana gave her a look like You’re making my point for me .
“You’re not afraid of failure because you expect it.
If anything, it makes you feel like the universe is working as it’s supposed to.
The success part scares you because you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You’re so convinced that it will drop that you don’t want to allow yourself to even go for it, because then you think you’re setting yourself up for inevitable disappointment.
You play games of what if what if what if , but like, what if everything was just…
good. What if it did actually work out. What if you allowed yourself to accept that John loves you, what if you allowed yourself to love him back. ”
Micah sat back against her couch, legitimately struck completely silent by Tatiana’s speech.
“I’ve been in a lot of therapy, if you couldn’t tell,” Tatiana said. “And what are friends for if not to swap around each other’s therapeutic insights until we can cobble together something close to comprehensive mental health care.”
Micah laughed. “I’m in therapy, too, believe it or not. But yeah, my guy is…not very good, because you just did more for me in two minutes than he ever has. He’s really fixated on my dreams. He always makes me describe my dreams to him.”
“I can refer you to my person, if you want,” Tatiana said.
Micah picked up her guitar, idly strumming a few chords while she thought about that.
She was starting to feel in her gut like she wouldn’t be sticking around L.A.
long enough to make switching therapists worth it.
“Thank you,” she said, meaning for the offer but for everything else, too. “I’ll let you know.”