The Comeback(35)
“Remember that I know your limits better than you do. Mandy needed to know how easily you can become overwhelmed, and how that affects your processing and judgment, and how it can make you hostile to the people around you. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a part of who you are, but I knew you would never tell her if something was wrong.”
I sat very still in my seat as a warning signal went off somewhere inside my brain. I pushed it back down into the depths of my subconscious and nodded, knowing what he wanted from me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“How did you find working with someone else anyway?” Able asked casually as he pulled to a stop at the traffic lights on Crescent Heights.
“It was the worst,” I said, and Able smiled next to me. “Mandy didn’t care about any of it, and Elon . . .”
“What about Elon?”
“Elon said I was . . .” I started, but I couldn’t finish. “He said I was a horrible actor.”
Able froze, and even though he didn’t say anything for a while, I could feel his rage fill the car around us. When he did speak, his voice sounded thick with emotion.
“Look at me, Grace,” Able said, turning my face toward him. I looked at him, my eyes finally meeting his. “That person isn’t even worth the ground that you walk on. He’ll be working in a parking garage by the time he’s twenty-five. This will be the last film set he ever works on, trust me.”
I smiled slightly and Able smiled back at me, bathing me once again in his pure light. It always felt so much warmer when he looked at me, I didn’t know how I’d forgotten.
“You know I’d do anything for you, don’t you?” he asked then, changing tack and catching me off guard again. I sat up a little straighter as the traffic light turned green and he pulled off, the engine murmuring gently.
“Yes,” I said carefully.
“Well, you understand that works two ways, Grace. And now you need to earn back my trust.”
I felt a thrum of dread deep in my stomach, but when I sneaked a look at him, Able was still smiling. I wondered if I’d got everything confused in the past: maybe Able was right and my useless, burned-out mind meant I couldn’t process information like everyone else around me.
“I mean that if our partnership is going to work, we’re going to need to trust each other with every single fiber of our beings. There can never be so much as a flicker of doubt between us again. Do you understand that?”
I nodded slowly.
“I trust you.”
Able pulled into the driveway of my hotel. He turned the engine off and turned to look at me.
“Now, how about I walk you up to your room, and I wax lyrical about jazz music until you fall asleep and forget this night ever happened. Does that sound good to you?”
I nodded, and as we got out of the car, I felt myself relax into his presence once again, and the decision to do so felt soothing, familiar—as if someone had finally thrown a heavy blanket over a frenzied birdcage.
* * *
? ? ?
Able settled in the armchair next to my bed in the hotel room. He picked up a magazine from the floor and flicked through it while I locked myself in the bathroom to change into my pajamas. Once I’d brushed my teeth, I climbed under the cool covers of the giant bed. It felt strange having him there next to me, but, as promised, he played me music from his phone, and, as I lay with my eyes closed, listening to him talk softly about Miles Davis and John Coltrane, I felt lucky to have someone looking out for me again. And this was always how it worked with us—for every time Able took something irreplaceable from me, there was an equal and opposing moment where it felt like he helped me to become more myself. There was never one without the other.
Able’s voice rose and fell like a wave that night, and a warm sense of contentment spread through me as I slipped over the line between reality and dreams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The sound of screaming water fills my ears, and my shoulder scrapes against something sharp on the bottom of the ocean. I twist, and when I see the sun above the surface of the water, I think that maybe I will stay here forever, until something inside me snaps, like it did that night in the bathroom. I kick my way to the surface, my lungs burning as a surge of adrenaline spreads through me. When I surface I spit out some salt water and let out a shuddering breath, my vision distorted by the brightness of the real world.
I emerge twenty feet further away from the shore than when I started, and the water is as placid as a lake again. I rub my eyes. Someone is shouting my name. I squint at the shore, and somehow both Esme and Blake are standing there, waving their arms frantically. I wave back and, for some reason, I feel borderline euphoric to see my sister again, as if I can make everything up to her right now. I start to swim toward them, and as each measure of oxygen expands in my lungs, I feel lucky for the reminder of how vulnerable we are to depend on anything so much at all.
When I climb out of the water, my clothes are heavy, my jeans sagging on my hips. I wring the hem of my T-shirt out onto the sand as I approach the girls.
“What the actual fuck?” Esme asks, and now that I’m closer I can see that I’ve misunderstood, that her cheeks are wet with tears.
I pause, unsure of how to respond. I look at Blake but she averts her eyes, embarrassed for me.