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Max stares at the table for a long moment before finally speaking. “I listened to your voicemail at least twenty times after I left your flat.”
I blink. “What?”
“I kept replaying it because I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it so badly the first time.” His voice is rough now.
I grip the edge of the table.
“I heard how happy you sounded.” His jaw tightens. “And all I could think was Eros’ opening lines.” His voice cracks slightly on the last word. “I hated myself for that.”
The café around us seems to blur into the background.
“That’s the thing about becoming your own worst enemy,” I say after a moment. “You don’t realize how small your world gets while it’s happening.”
He nods, looking away. “I also forgot that people would still want me if I wasn’t executing everything perfectly.”
His words settle heavily in my chest.
Suddenly, the last month clicks into place. The over-rehearsing. Pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. The obsession with proving himself worthy of the role before he’d even started it. He wasn’t chasing perfection because he thought he was better than everyone else. He was terrified of failure.
“I wish you’d trusted me with your worries,” I whisper.
Max finally looks up at me again and slowly nods. “I’m trying to learn how now.”
The waitress arrives a moment later, setting the towering bowls of shaved ice between us with a cheerful smile that feels wildly out of place against the heaviness sitting in the booth.
Condensation slides slowly down the side of my glass while I trace the edge of my spoon through the melting strawberry syrup. “I guess the question is . . . where do we go from here?”
Max is quiet for a long moment. He runs his hand over his jaw and leans against the back of the booth. “I don’t expect everything to magically go back to normal,” he says at last. His gaze drifts briefly toward the window before settling back on me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking. I don’t want the people I love paying the price every time my career gets stressful.”
His voice stays calm, but I can hear how much effort it takes to say the words out loud. “There are always going to be opening nights, reviews, auditions, and contracts. I can’t promise I won’t spiral like that again.”
His honesty catches me off guard.
“But,” he continues, “I can promise I’m done trying to shut you out when it happens.”
“I don’t need you to be perfect, Max.”
“I know.” His lips twitch. “You fell for a dance captain who lives primarily on caffeine and whose main coping mechanism is overworking himself. Your standards clearly aren’t that high.”
I roll my eyes, but the tiny flicker of humor helps break some of the tension knotting between us. “What I need,” I say more seriously, “is to feel like we’re on the same team. Not like I’m standing outside, knocking on the door.”
Max goes very still. “You shouldn’t have had to feel that way,” he says.
I hold his gaze across the table. “If we’re going to do this, we need to make sure we’re communicating. I don’t care if it’s a text, a five-minute phone call, or just sending me a stupid meme at two in the morning. We don’t disappear on each other.”
He chuckles. “I can manage stupid memes.”
“Good. Because if something’s wrong, I need us to deal with it before it snowballs.”
“Agreed.”
“And one more thing . . .” I glance down briefly before looking back up at him. “No more shutting ourselves away when things get hard. I get that your rehearsal schedule is going to be brutal. Mine will be too once the tournaments pick up.”
Something soft and almost painful flickers across Max’s face. “If there is one thing I’ve learned this week it’s that there’s not much point in chasing success if you don’t have anyone to come home to afterward.”
He reaches farther across the table, giving me more than enough time to pull away if I want to. For the first time all night, he looks hopeful instead of exhausted. His fingers curl carefully around mine and squeeze. “I love you,” he says gently. “And I don’t ever want to lose you.”
And somehow, hearing it now—here in this tiny shaved ice shop with strawberries between us and London rain streaking the windows—means infinitely more than if he’d said it perfectly the first time.
