Chapter 27 Wreckage
Colt
She finds me in the crowd.
I'm standing at the back wall. Not in a seat. My legs won't hold me through this sitting.
The music ends. She walks downstage. The lights come up halfway. She holds her hand over her eyes against them and she looks. She finds me where I am, where I've been standing my whole life, which is at the edge of every room she's in.
She holds my eyes. One second. Two.
Then she goes to Sam.
She steps offstage and into his arms and the part of me that's been preparing to lose her takes the blow. I lose sight of them both in the wings. I don't need to see it. She fits there. She's been fitting there for months.
I've had four weeks of preparation for this.
I've been getting used to it. I've been telling myself I'll stay in Chicago either way.
That I'll do the work. That I'll tear down Sonny whether she comes back or not.
That I owe her the demolition independent of the outcome.
The part of tonight I'm proudest of, in this moment, is that I don't move.
She's not mine to cross the room and claim.
She goes into his arms because she wants to.
They are friends and this is not something I get a say in.
I keep my feet where they are and my face quiet so she doesn't feel me watching.
The crowd starts to move and I head backstage.
I'd told myself I would not wait. I told myself I'd leave through the front door and go to the apartment in Logan Square and let her have her night.
I go backstage anyway. The corridor is concrete.
I can feel the bass. The dressing room door is closed.
Through it I can hear Marisol and Autumn.
Autumn is half-shrieking, half-crying, which is what Autumn does when she's overwhelmed and trying to be funny about it.
I stand in the corridor with my hands in my pockets and my heart trying to climb my throat.
Sam comes out first.
He sees me.
We've done this once already, three weeks ago at his bar. We've both gotten quieter about it.
"She'll come find you, if she wants to. I'm telling you so you don't ambush her in the corridor."
I nod.
He nods once. He looks at me for a beat longer than the average man would and there's no aggression in it. Just measurement. Two men who've agreed without speaking what the rules are.
He goes the other way.
The door opens and she comes out alone. She's changed, her stage makeup is gone and her hair is down.
She is wearing jeans, a soft black sweater I've never seen before.
I'm going to think about her in this every time I see her in soft black anything for the rest of my life.
She's got a canvas bag over her shoulder that I assume is the costume.
She stops abruptly in the corridor when she sees me, and I don't move.
"I told them I'd find my own way home." Her voice is hoarse from the show. "They argued. I overrode them."
"I'm glad you did."
Her eyes are still bright from the stage. She's standing differently than she was at the lake. Like whatever she went out there to prove, she proved it, and she isn't carrying the question anymore.
"Walk with me?"
She smirks, shrugs her shoulder and says "Yes."
My heart jumps in my chest and I can't help but feel something like hope float to the surface. The club spits us out a side door onto the street. The night is cold. The kind of blue that means the cloud's cleared off the city. Streetlights every twenty feet. Her face in and out of them as we walk.
I keep my hands in my pockets. If I take my hands out of my pockets I don't know what they'll do. Three weeks of sitting across a coffee table from her has taught me how much restraint costs and I'm running low on the supply.
We don't speak for two blocks.
There's a kind of silence that's hostile and there's a kind of silence that means two people are working up to something. We're in the second category. The air is loaded with it. My ears are humming with whatever blood is pulling itself toward my chest.
She speaks first.
"You were standing in the back."
"Yes."
"You stood the whole time."
"I couldn't sit."
She's quiet a beat.
"I saw you about twenty seconds in. I almost lost the count. I had to keep going."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I needed to know you were there."
The line hits somewhere behind my sternum and I keep walking because if I stop I'm going to take her face in my hands in the middle of the street and I don't get to do that yet.
"Summer."
"What?"
"Whatever you're about to say to me. You don't have to."
She stops walking. We are lit up under a streetlight and she turns to look up at me. The makeup's gone but her eyes are still sparkling.
"You don't get to tell me what I have to and don't have to say to you."
I smile at her. "Okay, Summer. Okay."
She turns onto her street. I've left things on her doorstep, but I haven't been inside. She stops at the door and turns to me. The seam I've been holding together for four weeks is right here.
"Come up."
I look at her.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Summer."
"Don't make me ask twice."
"I'm not. I just need to know you know what you're asking."
"I know what I'm asking."
"Summer..."
"Colt. I've been thinking about this for an hour. I've been thinking about this for four weeks. I've been thinking about this since I drove out of Charleston. I'm not confused. Come up."
She turns and unlocks the door. I follow her in and she doesn't look back.
The door clicks shut. I'm in her apartment.
I'm in her space that she's been living in without me.
I have a half-second to register it. Her laptop is closed on the kitchen table.
A coffee cup beside it. Sticky notes scattered around.
A vase with sunflowers on the counter. My sunflowers.
She put them in water. My breath hitches.
I stand in the entryway with my hands in my pockets and I take in her life and I try to keep breathing.
She sets the canvas bag on the table. She turns and looks at me.
"Why are you still by the door?"
"I'm trying not to scare you."
"You're not going to scare me, Colt."
"I'm scaring me."
She walks across the room to me. She stops a foot away.
She's small. I'd forgotten how small. The stage and the lights and the queen who walked across the floor had made me think she'd grown two inches.
She hasn't grown two inches. She's grown bigger inside a body that's exactly the same.
She reaches up and places her hand on the side of my neck.
The exact place I've been imagining for weeks. Her thumb at my jaw.
"Breathe."
I breathe.
"Again."
I do.
"Look at me."
I look at her.
"I'm here. You're here. We're doing this. Are you with me?"
"I'm here. I'm with you. I'm scared I'm going to break something."
"You can't break me by touching me, Colt. You broke me by everything else. You won't break me with this."
I bend down and put my face in her neck and I don't move for I don't know how long.
She holds the back of my head. Her hand at the base of my skull.
Her other arm around my shoulders. She's small and she's holding me up and she did this once before, when she was twenty and I lost the first deal I ever lost and I came home and put my head in her lap on the couch and didn't speak for an hour.
She didn't speak for an hour then. She isn't speaking now.
I'm crying. I don't know when it started. I'm crying and I'm holding her against me and she's letting me and she isn't flinching and she isn't pulling away and she's doing what she did at twenty which is hold the parts of me I can't hold myself.
After a long time I lift my head.
I'm wet-faced. I don't wipe it. She takes my face in both of her hands.
"I'm not sure of anything yet, Colt. I let you in the door. That's the only sure thing I've got tonight."
"That's enough."
"It isn't. But it's what there is."
She steps back. Her hands come off me and the cold comes in where they were. She looks at me for a long time, the queen from the stage and the girl from the diner in the same face, and whatever she's deciding she takes her time deciding it.
"You can stay," she says. "The couch is right there."
"Summer."
"Don't. Don't make it more than it is." A breath.
"Here's what you're not getting tonight.
You're not getting me. I let you cry on me.
That is not the same as letting you back in, and I need to set that boundary before you lie down under my roof and start writing yourself a better story than the one you're in. "
"I know the difference."
"Do you?"
"You held me up. You didn't give me anything back. I'm not going to mistake one for the other."
Something crosses her face. Small. Surprise, maybe, that I heard the whole sentence and not the part I wanted.
"Okay," she says.
She gets a blanket and a pillow down from the closet and drops them on the couch with no ceremony.
She turns off the lamp. She goes into the bedroom and she does not close the door or leave it open, and the half-inch she leaves it at is the loudest thing in the apartment.
I lie down on her couch, in her life, with my sunflowers going dark on the counter and my wife just feet away from me for the first time in months.
I can't even bring myself to fall asleep. I don't want to miss a moment of this.