“What do you want to hear?” I ask him as I poise on the living room settee, looping the strap of the Yamaha acoustic over my head. Alex is across from me on a leather pullout chair, but Jerry and Dad are still cleaning up in the kitchen—because they know me, and they know I will positively freak out if I have a whole captive audience for this.
“Whatever you want.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“It’s been a while,” I warn him, tuning the guitar. But the instrument is familiar beneath my fingertips, like the edge of an old photograph or damp beach sand. Holding one of these will always make me feel like a kid again, with a grief I didn’t know where to put because I wasn’t even old enough to name it. For a while, I put it here, in loving something my dad loved—the thing that bound us outside of Mom.
Alex smiles softly at me. “Then play something you know by heart.”
I go with “American Honey” by Lady A. It’s sweet and melodic, and I’ve played it so many times that the words are tattooed inside my mind. It’s also the first song I ever played all the way through without stuttering.
I don’t look at Alex once, just sing and play very softly, focusing on the chords my hand remembers, the words I’ve never forgotten. It’s an indescribable kind ofgood—paying homage to my dad, this band, the song’s creators, even myself. Coming back to this is fucking cathartic.
The last time I was in Nashville, I was afraid of getting stuck in the past. Miriam was right to say I had a tunnel vision for my future, and Dad was right to worry he’d chased me away. Because isn’t that exactly how I was acting? Like a runaway? Like Mom? Was I trying tobeher in that way?
I want to tellallof them—Dad, Jerry, Miriam, even Lance—that it was never about running away from them. I was running from the version of myself I’d backed into a corner years ago, a girl who was so insecure about everything she wasn’t that she’d never bothered to learn all of what shewas.
I’m running fromher.
Alex is the one who figured it out for me:I think there are parts of yourself that you don’t fully know yet.And that’s probably true. But it doesn’t mean I don’t know who I am. And it doesn’t mean I can’t also love the girl I used to be.
I can love this—playing guitar for someone I brought home to meet my parents—and I can love my parents without needing tobethem. I can love my hometown, and my job, and whatever city I choose to live in. I can drag my past into the future.
When the song ends, Alex doesn’t applaud. He comes over to the settee and kneels in front of me, like I knelt in front of him last night in my apartment. When I finally let myself look at him, his eyes are twinkling back at me. His hand brushes my cheek and comes away wet with tears.
“You have literally brought me to my knees,” he jokes.
I laugh snottily. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
“I do,” Alex murmurs. “You finally let yourself come home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I fall the rest of the way in love with him the day after Christmas, in between my third interview and my fourth.
It doesn’t hit me like a wrecking ball, or slap me in the face, or anything like that. The full weight of my love for Alexander Harrison settles over me like misty fog, a slow build. One minute I don’t notice it and the next, it’s more certain. The day after that, even more certain. Until the fog is everywhere, and you can’t see a thing. You have no idea which way is north unless he’s the one giving directions.
Two days ago, for his birthday, Jerry baked a cake and scrounged up twenty-six candles while we went to the park and played soccer in our sweatshirts. Dad played “Happy Birthday” on the guitar after dinner, and we sang, and Alex blushed furiously. He got a couple of phone calls—presumably from Freddy and his aunt and cousins—but only an email from Robert. I saw the name pop up on Alex’s phone while he chewed his lip swollen, reading very seriously.
He hasn’t told me how Robert reacted to the BTH news. Hasn’ttold me if they’ve communicated about it at all. But after twenty minutes of watching him listlessly read the same two-sentence email over and over, I took him into our room and got on my knees, looked up through hooded eyes and put my mouth on him while he whispered encouraging expletives.
And the whole time, I silently begged him to just love the people who love him back.
Christmas morning, when the house was rich with the scent of coffee and vanilla and pine needles, the windowpanes blurred with frost, I was still half asleep when my eyes peeked open to find him watching me from his own pillow. I yawned and blinked, tracking the muscles pulling his mouth into traces of amusement.
“There’s a joke in here somewhere,” I croaked, “about an older man watching his lover sleep.”
“I’m eleven months older than you,” Alex said, his voice raw, like it always is first thing in the morning. “Besides, do you really want to compare me to the man who supposedly climbed down half the world’s chimneys last night to creep around unawares?”
My nose wrinkled. “But the presents.”
“Just askme,” he said, his voice evening out the longer he spoke. “Fuck that old man. I’ll buy you the things you want.”
“Finally planning to tap into that trust fund?” I joked, because the alternative would be letting the arousal of what he just said build until I jumped him.
Alex rolled his eyes. “You mostly shop at thrift stores and Trader Joe’s. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to go anywhereneara trust fund to keep you happy.”
“Alex,” I said. “Did you get me Tide Free & Gentle from the Cape Cod Target for Christmas?”
“Give me a little credit, Simba.” He rolled on top of me. “I did so much better than that.”
