“If I lose,” he paused. “I mean, I don’t know, is there anything you want from me? I’m not going to lose, so it doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant.”
Frankie couldn’t think of anything she wanted from him either, though she was starting to suspect that there was plenty if she had time to wrap her head around it. She chewed her lip and pressed her hand against the back of her head to stop the throbbing. It didn’t help all that much.
“If you lose,” she said, “I want an apology.”
Ezra’s jaw twitched, and she thought (and maybe hoped) that this would ignite a fight because a fight would mean that she didn’t have to delve into the very truth of her feelings that were bubbling up louder with each passing minute.
“Fine, whatever,” Ezra said. “I won’t lose.”
“But I can’t walk there,” she said.
He spun away from her, and she thought, for a fleeting second, that he was going to leave her there, in the falling snow, on a bench in the lower campus. Then he crouched down and said, “Hop on.” And she realized that, even while drunk, Ezra Jones was going to carry her on his back.
FORTY
Ezra
JUST ABOUT MIDNIGHT
Well, good night,” Ezra said to Bruno at long last. He knew he couldn’t hide out here forever, even if the quiet, the stillness, had been cathartic. A reckoning, just like Zoe had said. “Happy New Year.”
Bruno was half-asleep by now at his security post. “Be careful out there,” Bruno mumbled, then sipped from a thermos and perked up.
“It’s just a little snow,” Ezra replied. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Bruno said.
And Ezra nodded and pushed through the revolving doors and out into the night. He’d spent so many of his years on this earth tentative and full of worry. Now, he was ready for something else.
FORTY-ONE
Frankie
Ezra, of course, did not lose. Frankie hadn’t realized how truly brilliant he was at the whole card counting or laser focus or whatever, but he just kept winning and winning. Initially, she had sat next to him at the table, occasionally resting her head on his shoulder or leaning forward and collapsing into her folded arms, but then an asshole grad student complained that she was a distraction, so she slid to the floor despite a very kind young woman (Frankie would later remember her to be Joni) suggesting she occupy a booth out front. As payback, Ezra won the grad student’s gold wedding band, and Frankie, despite lobbing a quick diatribe against matrimony from underneath Ezra’s chair, took no small amount of joy from the fact that Ezra played for keeps and without remorse and extracted revenge in her honor. (This was melodramatic, sure, but she was concussed, and it made sense to her at the time.)
Ezra slid the ring on his finger and held it up to the light,then lowered his hand beneath the chair and wiggled his fingers to show Frankie, and she laughed and laughed, and said, “Please stop, this is making my head hurt worse.”
And the grad student said, “You don’t have to be a dick,” and Ezra said, “I don’t, but sometimes it feels really great to be one anyway.”
Then, because he was drunk and emotions came and went, he remembered Mimi and his aborted plans for the proposal, and he patted down his pockets for his phone, but couldn’t find it, and his brain—loose and nonsensical—forgot about that too, and he launched into an emotional plea for his girlfriend that morphed into a long rant about being stood up by the time he was done.
Frankie listened to it with her eyes pressed closed and thought that Ezra Jones was a bit of a mess, and she found that she wanted to be the one to help him clean up. And never in her life had Frankie had the instinct to be a caretaker for anyone who wasn’t on her payroll. She didn’t mind cleaning up after her artists because there was no emotional cost in doing so: business was business, and being good in business meant being great for business. But personally? No. This was a whole new wheelhouse.
Ezra leaned over, his face hovering above hers, and said, “Well, I won.”
And Frankie groaned and said, “Motherfucking fine.”
And Ezra put his hands beneath her armpits and hoisted her up to her feet, and they lingered there, close enough that she could feel his breath, could hear his heartbeat when she laid her head against his chest. Just as she had earlier today inthe alley where he brought her Paris. No wonder. Muscle memory, even if the brain had forgotten how it had been between them.
Finally, Ezra said: “Steinway?”
That was too much for Frankie, returning to the scene of their heartbreak. Even with a foggy head and a clearer heart, she couldn’t bear that. But she had made a promise to Ezra, and this time, she was going to honor it. So she sighed and leaned into him again and said simply, “Yes.”
FORTY-TWO
Ezra
Middleton was beautiful at night, Ezra thought. It was close to midnight now, and students, those who had stayed behind for the holiday, were emerging from their rooms, from their parties, from Lemonhead or wherever they had found to stay warm, to toast to the millennium.
