I stood there, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand. I did not want him to see me suffering. I anticipated it: the great big “I told you so.”
But instead, he wrapped his arms around me and held me close. It had been so long. I found myself searching for something familiar.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
When he got into the BMW, he still had the envelope in hand.
“I have to give that to the detective.”
“I’ll hold on to it. I don’t want this reminder in your house. It’s disturbing as hell.” And with that, he flung the package into the backseat and pulled out of the driveway.
I arrived in Osaka Monday evening. I did not have a plan other than to love him as profoundly as I could. And then let him go. It seemed to me my only true option.
We lay in bed that first night in our suite at the Imperial Hotel. Close, clinging, postcoital, my fingers tracing his face. We were not talking about it. Us.
“So this is the new nose…”
“It’s the old nose. Just 2.0.” He smiled.
I held his chin in my hand, tipping his face in one direction, and then the other.
“Well?”
“It’s pretty perfect.”
“Botticelli?”
“Botticelli.” I smiled.
“He actually made it one percent more symmetrical than it was before. He could have gone for a whole three percent, but we weren’t sure if it would visibly affect the symmetry of the rest of my features.”
“You realize how ridiculous this conversation sounds, don’t you?”
He smiled, his lips curling, his hands at my waist pulling me on top of him. “You mean when there are still girls missing in Nigeria? Yes, I absolutely do. But you yourself said it was art, so…”
I kissed the tip of it, delicately. “It’s art. All of you is art.”
“That’s why you love me,” he said, soft. As if he were reminding me.
“That’s why I love you.”
Tuesday afternoon following the boys’ sound check at the Osaka Kyocera Dome, Hayes and I slipped out of a service entrance at the back of our hotel with Desmond in tow, and strolled through the adjacent Kema Sakuranomiya Park. Whoever scheduled theWise or Nakedtour was brilliant enough to coordinate their Japanese dates with peak cherry blossom season, and our hotel happened to abut the Okawa River and the blossom-laden promenade that lined it.
We walked hand in hand, with Desmond a few paces ahead of us. Feigning normalcy. Hayes in a gray fedora and Wayfarers, almost unrecognizable.
“So there are a few big producers who are interested in meeting with me,” he said after we’d been walking for several minutes, drinking in the scenery, the canopies of pink. “To discuss potentially collaborating. Partially because of the Grammy nom, but also the TAG Heuer campaign.”
“That’s great. Who?”
“Jim Abbiss, who’s done a ton of brilliant stuff. Paul Epworth, who’s tremendous. Both have worked with Adele. And Pharrell…”
“Seriously?That’shuge. And you’re just telling me now?”
“Well, they didn’t specify meeting with August Moon. Just me. Which is a little awkward.”
“Hayes.” I stopped walking then. “That’s a big deal.”
“I know,” he said. I could see it in his eyes, the excitement.
