Chapter Thirty-Six #2
“I don’t think I’ll be retiring to the South of France anytime soon, but it’s enough to at least cover the therapy and wardrobe change I’ll need for leveling up,” I joked.
We made our way to the table and took our usual places and began building our walls, two rows of nineteen, carefully arranged.
“Cathartic and capitalistic?! Girl, you are livin’ the dream!” Jada joked as she arranged the tiles on her rack.
“Don’t get me wrong, the money is . . . well, it’s incredible, but more than that, they liked the show. The numbers and ratings were the highest ever. Can you imagine? People actually enjoyed my unraveling!”
“The unraveling was the show,” Marin said, raising her glass. “That’s why people listened. You stopped performing and were just authentically you.”
“I didn’t even mean to be. It all just kind of spilled out,” I admitted, eyes misting despite myself. “I was just . . . tired. Of pretending. Of acting like I had it all figured out. Of building my whole brand around this version of myself who was so guarded.”
I took a sip of champagne and settled into the familiar hum of clinking tiles and the warmth of the friends who had stitched themselves around my life in spite of my former walls.
We started the Charleston, passing unwanted tiles back and forth until we each settled into our individual hands. Marin made the first move, quickly discarding a North tile, which Stella quickly snatched up, revealing her pung before discarding a Five Dot.
I guessed Stella was going for a Wind hand. No surprise there. She always played it safe, building her line steadily instead of chasing flashy combos.
The game went on like that for a while, each of us picking up and throwing out in turn. Me, more focused on trying to decipher their hands based on what they put down rather than on my own strategy.
But then I remembered what Mom said to me that day on the beach about why I rarely won. I was always playing defense, too guarded, too afraid to take risks because I was so busy worrying about how other people’s moves might affect my own.
I wasn’t putting together my own hand. I was just reacting, protecting myself from every possible threat.
I glanced down at my rack, a jigsaw of combinations and possibilities.
But if I was going to win, if I was even going to try, I had to pick one.
Pick one and, despite what might come my way, try to build on it, make the best of what I got, and see what happened.
The game went on, each of us snatching the suits and pieces we needed, with Stella hoarding the Winds, Jada seizing a Joker, and Marin taking forever whenever it was her turn, weighing each decision like her life depended on it.
And suddenly I could see it, move by move, my hand coming together, until all I needed was one last tile to win.
Then Stella threw out a Two Crack, the singular tile I needed to finish my pair and declare victory.
“Mah-jongg!” I cried, seizing the last piece of my puzzle.
Marin leaned over to check the hand against the card. “Yup”—she nodded—“you got it.”
“El, your first win, huh? Nice!” Stella smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “You should go play the lotto or something. Today is most definitely your lucky day.”
I used to think staying a step ahead meant staying safe. Reading the room, anticipating moves, protecting myself—that was how I got through it all unscathed. But in mah-jongg, like in life, playing defensively hadn’t just held me back from seeing my hand, it kept me from truly playing at all.
And I knew now it wasn’t about luck or skill. It wasn’t about having the perfect tiles or making the smartest moves. It was about being brave enough to commit fully, without holding back.
Like Leo had with me.
Love doesn’t survive in halves. Eventually, it needs a whole heart.
I floated home from Marin’s high on sugar, laughter, and the heady buzz of my first mah-jongg victory.
The evening air was crisp in that early-spring-in-New-York way, and for the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t bracing against it.
My skin hummed with something close to joy. Something earned.
The new show, the contract, the freedom to be me on air—it should’ve been enough.
And it was, mostly. I was standing taller, breathing deeper, and actually letting people in without flinching.
I had rewritten the narrative I used to cling to like a childhood blanket.
But as I pushed my apartment door open, Leo’s absence hit me.
It wasn’t a sharp ache or some gaping hole in my heart, more like the absence of a song I hadn’t realized I’d been humming along to until it stopped playing.
I dropped my keys, kicked off my shoes, and flopped onto the couch, pulling a throw over me.
My fingers acted on their own, opening Instagram before my brain could stop them.
I tapped onto Leo’s profile, still unfiltered and perfectly him.
I flicked through a few of his pictures from Morocco and other countries he’d visited until I reached the posts from our summer weeks together in Greece.
A candid shot of him laughing, shirt half buttoned, sun glinting off his sunglasses.
I remembered that moment. I’d taken the photo.
He’d just made a terrible joke about how emotionally complex baklava was, given all its layers, and I’d rolled my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a headache.
Picture after picture of us on crystalline-blue-water beaches, tipsy on ouzo and the delirium of our chemistry together.
I scrolled. Our cappuccino-foam mustaches.
One with our snorkeling masks on. One of a heart he’d drawn in the sand with our initials in the middle.
My vision blurred with mist and memory, and I swallowed hard past the tightness in my throat.
Blinking away the tears, I realized I’d fought so hard to be whole without him, and now I knew I was.
But standing here, confident and self-assured in my own strength, I also realized I missed the hell out of him. Not to fix me. Not to complete me. But just because I very much wanted him in my life.
I stared at my phone for a long minute, Stella’s words from earlier echoing back to me: You should go play the lotto or something. Today is most definitely your lucky day.
Then, without giving myself the chance to back out, I found his number, tapped the call button, and held the phone to my ear.
It rang once.
Twice. My heart was beating fast, my stomach full of butterflies.
And then—
“Hello?”
His voice was comforting, like a perfect cup of tea. Warm and familiar.
I swallowed hard, then smiled.
“Leo? Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”