“Aren’t you?” Mikayla asks.
“Is that what you think of me? That I’m eager to perpetuate lies about myself? You of all people know how much I hate the … thecostume… that I have to put on for my music.”
“Right, but that hasn’t stopped you from playing along all these years. Why should now be any different? I’m not saying it’s your fault. I know it’s complicated, that you don’t feel like you have much of a choice.”
“Harmony and I met at a party and we hit it off,” I say clearly. “Then we had a misunderstanding, which led to us writing afew songs about each other. All of that was a hundred percent authentic.”
Mikayla gets pensive, playing with her glass again. “You … you really hit it off?”
“Yeah. We had a nice time. She was great.” Mentally, I reflect on the conversation Harmony and I had, all the random things we talked about, the cute way she would gesture when she got especially animated about a topic.
“It seems like that was short lived though, if you ended up in a song right after.”
“Yeah, but even when we were fighting, it was sort of like a tennis rally, you know? Fast paced, suspenseful. She’d fire at me, I wasn’t sure I could get to the ball in time, but then I’d send it back and she’d have to scramble for it. Making her scramble was really satisfying. Then again, so was watching her surprise me with backhand that nearly took me off my feet.”
Thinking about “Mr. Five-Foot Ten,” I’d have to say that was the equivalent of a solid backhand swing in Harmony’s favor, no matter how it stung.
“Wow,” Mikayla says. “Sounds like quite the … whirlwind romance.” By her tone, I sense she doesn’t approve.
That reminds me of my own lyric, “She’s the eye of a hurricane,” and I say, “‘Whirlwind’ is pretty accurate.”
“Then tell me this: How did you go from diss tracks to … whatever you’ve got going on now?”
“Well we … talked it out … obviously. Realized we’d been too harsh. Apologized, all that.”
She scoffs. “Sure.”
“What do you mean, ‘sure’?”
“I don’t know.” Mikayla shrugs. “It just seems a little too easy to me. A little too … convenient. You’re both releasing new music soon, you already have the nation’s attention from the feud.”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘serendipitous.’”
“Maybe.”
“Why is it so important for you to poke holes in my relationship?Youbroke up withme, remember? You knew I was dead serious about you, but I wasn’t what you wanted.”
Mikayla takes a ragged breath and slides her hand on top of mine. “What if I told you I only came to this party because I heard you were going to be here? If you believe in serendipity, then my job at Ultracityserendipitouslyallowed me this opportunity, although the choice to accept was a calculated risk on my part. I felt like I needed to see you.”
I shake my head. “What? I don’t—”
“The night I ended things, I knew you had the ring. I’m sorry—you’ll never know how sorry—but I couldn’t let you ask what you wanted to ask. You had started talking about how serious you were, on and off for months, how sure you were about us, and every time … I didn’t know what to say, how to tell you that I wasn’t quite there, or that I wasn’t confident we were a good fit long term.”
“So you were fully aware …” My stomach lurches.
She nods. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t love you. Or that I … don’t … still.”
I gape at her, speechless for a long moment before I manage to say, “You … could have talked to me any time. You could have asked to see me, or called. Instead you waited for an excuse, at a place like this?”
“I needed to see for myself.”
“See what?”
“Whether you were happy with her. Whether it was real.”
“And if I hadn’t started dating Harmony? If you hadn’t seen everyone freaking out about it online? Would you have tried to talk to me then?”
“I …”
