After she told them about the Globe critic, she went upstairs and texted Ben. Rohan got the Globe and Mail critic to come to the show Saturday!
He wrote back right away. That’s amazing! Congrats!
It was only later, as she was drifting off to sleep, that she realized how odd it was that when she’d had good news, the impulse to text Ben and tell him about it had been automatic.
What was going to happen to them when she won the grant?
Or when he did?
Chapter Twenty
When Maya woke up several hours later, it was to a series of texts from Holden proclaiming in increasingly urgent tones that he needed to talk to her.
And then there was a soft knock on her door. “Maya?” It was Eve. “Holden’s downstairs saying he needs to see you. I tried to send him away, but he’s being really insistent.”
“Yeah, okay, tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes.” Maya sighed and heaved herself out of bed. She’d been looking forward to a few days off—it was Monday, and the last two shows didn’t start until Saturday—the traditional matinee before the parade. Which was supposed to mean a break from Holden. But apparently it wasn’t to be.
“What’s up?” she asked as she entered the little parlor off the lobby.
He blew out a breath and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter?”
“You remember that audition I told you about?”
“The Ryan Alexander movie?”
He nodded. “It’s on Saturday.”
“This Saturday?” The Saturday the theater critic was coming?
Another nod, but he was looking at his feet now.
“Well, it can’t be. We have shows Saturday and Sunday.”
“Right, well, this is a huge opportunity for me, see. A chance to take things to the next level, careerwise.”
No. This wasn’t happening. “Holden, you made a commitment. You can’t just bail on me!”
“I know, I know. But this offer…”
“We signed a contract.” Dread took root in her gut. This whole thing with Holden had seemed too good to be true—and look, it had been.
“You have to understand,” he said. “You’ve got a real cute theater company here.”
Okay, no. The dread that had been growing in her gut was pulled out by the roots and replaced with anger. “A cute theater company?”
“And I have to thank you for this opportunity,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “My agent said Ryan was really impressed I was doing live theater. He said Ryan said the movie is going to have the same kind of battle-of-the sexes vibe as Much Ado.”
Oh, hell no. “Don’t you dare compare my play to anything Ryan fucking Alexander is touching.”
His eyes widened. It was true that she didn’t swear a lot. If you believed Ben, she was known for her hooboys. But honestly. She might not be a big, fancy Hollywood director, but she didn’t want to be. And more to the point, she wasn’t an asshole. And her theater company might not be powerful and prestigious, but it sure as hell wasn’t cute. At least not in the condescending way Holden meant.
“You don’t have to get all pissy about it,” he grumbled. “I was doing you a favor anyway.”
“No, Holden, you were doing a job. A job I hired you for that you are now apparently bailing on.”
He stopped staring at the floor, stopped fidgeting, and looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
Maya flattered herself that she was a pretty decent actor. She’d had good training, anyway. One of her main teachers had said actors use themselves as vessels for emotion. Talked about cultivating an emotion and letting it in—but then letting it out. That last part, he’d said, was key to not taking the emotions of a character home with you.
She had done that here, to a point. She’d cycled through bewilderment, disbelief, dread, and anger pretty quickly, one emotion sliding away to make room for the next so fast she almost didn’t feel them.
Until Holden left.
Everything poured out of her to make room for a wave of despair. She was going to have to cancel the last two shows—and lose the exposure the Globe and Mail article would have provided.
She’d had a huge opportunity handed to her today, and now it was being snatched away.
“Everything okay?” Eve popped her head in. “Holden took off like a bat out of hell.”
“He’s leaving.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to LA. He’s bailing on the rest of the run.”
“Oh, honey. You want me to—”
No. She didn’t want Eve to do anything. She didn’t want Eve at all, surprisingly.
She wanted Ben.
It was a quiet Monday afternoon at the bar. Things were always quiet early in the week before festival weekends. It was like people were saving up their party mojo. There were only a handful of customers in the bar, and they were all looked after, so Law was using the opportunity to forge ballots in favor of Pearl for mermaid queen. Not having been successful in his quest to find a willing volunteer, he’d decided to resort to fraud. The old folks stopped at nothing to get what they wanted, so what was one little detour to the dark side on his part?
He had a stack of ballots and a bunch of different kinds of pens and pencils, and he was huddling next to the cash register. PEARL, he wrote in red ink using block letters. Pearl B, he wrote in pencil in what he hoped were kid-like bubble letters. Then, in blue cursive: Perl Bruneda—this particular imaginary person was a bad speller.
He wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to sneak his pile of fake ballots into the ballot box, which was kept under Karl’s watchful eye at the hardware store, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Karl was being weird, anyway. Usually he and Pearl and Eiko made a big deal of announcing the king and queen the weekend before the parade, but for some reason this year they’d decided to keep the voting open to the last minute—which suited Law and his scheming ways just fine.
He was so immersed in his subterfuge that he was startled when his phone buzzed with a text from Eve, which was a bit unusual. They were friendly enough but didn’t have much occasion to text each other directly. Holden is bailing on the play. There was a shouting match. He left, and Maya ran off.
Law: What? But the Globe guy is coming on Saturday.
Eve: Exactly.
Oh shit. He clattered to standing, but then he didn’t know what to do. His limbs were vibrating with the need to move, to find her, but he wasn’t sure where she would have gone. If Holden had really left town, maybe to her apartment?
He was still frozen, mind racing, when the door opened. It was Maya. Standing there in all her mermaid queen glory—in all her Maya vulnerability.
He looked at her, and suddenly he knew that whatever else happened, she was his.
If he could talk her into having him.
That feeling of rightness that he’d had trouble making sense of? He knew what it was now. He understood what Sawyer and Jake had been trying to say.
She came right to the bar, right to him. She looked so sad.
“Holden’s leaving,” she said, her voice quavering. “I have to cancel the last two shows.” Her eyes started to fill.
“Aww, sweetheart.” He had no one to cover the bar, but he did not give one flying fuck. He fished out his apartment keys, handed them to her, and stuck his fingers in his mouth and let out an ear-piercing whistle. “Sorry, folks,” he shouted, “bar’s closing.”
There was a murmur of disbelief and, as people started realizing he was serious, grumbling.
“Ben!” Maya exclaimed. “Don’t close the bar.”
He shot her a quelling look and made a shooing motion toward the back. “Go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”
The line echoed in his head. I’ll be right behind you. He wanted to say more. I’ll help you. I’ll hold you up. Or maybe even, more pragmatically, I will go to wherever Holden fucking Hampshire is, an
d I will drag him back here by his sorry little ass. But this was not the time for that.
This was the time to get these people out of his goddamn bar. He clapped his hands to move them along. “Take your drinks with you. On the house if you haven’t settled your checks.”
Carol Dyson, who owned Curl Up and Dye, the beauty salon that functioned as a kind of satellite gossip node in town, secondary to the hardware store, eyed him as she gathered her things. This was going to be all over town in a matter of minutes. Interestingly, that was another thing that should have bothered him but about which he could not currently find a single fuck to give.
Five minutes later, he was locking the bar and bounding up the stairs. He paused outside his apartment and fished his wallet out of his pocket.
A person of words and not deeds is a garden full of weeds.
He’d kept the fortune from the night Maya first kissed him—well, from the night she first kissed him and didn’t claim she’d thought he was someone else. He looked at it for a long moment before shoving it back in among his credit cards and pushing the door open.
She was sitting on the sofa staring into space—and she was crying.
“Oh, hey now.” He crossed the room quickly.
She remained slumped on the sofa, looking up at him as she spoke. She didn’t even bother to try to hide her tears, which, frankly, alarmed him. She was usually so unflappable. And if she had any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, she didn’t show them, especially to him.
Although she was here, wasn’t she? She’d come to him instead of Eve or Nora or her family.
“Holden’s leaving.”
“I heard.”
“I don’t know why I’m so upset,” she said. “It’s not like I had to cancel the entire run. It was a longer run than usual, and I did really well on the shows he was here for.”
“I think you’re so upset because—” He stopped himself. She didn’t need him telling her why she was upset.
“Because of the guy from the Globe,” she finished.
“Yes, but…” That wasn’t what he’d been thinking.
“What?” she said quietly. “What were you going to say?”
He paused for a moment and searched her face. He still wasn’t used to this new Maya who wanted his opinion. He lowered himself to sit, but as always when they sat together on this sofa, he kept some distance between them. He mirrored her position, letting his head fall back and looking at the ceiling, so they weren’t looking at each other. He didn’t know if that move was to protect her or him. “Well, Holden was a big deal. Mind you, he was also a big dick.”
She snuffled a little, like maybe she was laughing through her tears, which would feel like a huge victory. So he rotated his neck and turned his head to check. She had done the same. If the topic weren’t so serious, they might have made a funny picture, plastered against the sofa with their heads turned, like tortoises stretching their necks toward each other.
If that had been a laugh, there was no evidence of it now. She was still crying. Or, rather, tears were still falling. She made no noise. It was like her eyes were leaking. They were unnerving, these silent tears. Maya was, in most respects, kind of dramatic. If he’d imagined her crying, it would have been different. Not so dejected.
She was looking at him expectantly, though, so he plowed on. “It was a pretty big coup to get Holden. You sold a lot of tickets based on his name. And now you’re saying you have to cancel shows. That’s a big deal. And it’s on you. It’s not your fault, but you’re the one left wearing it. And that’s aside from the fact that one of the shows had the goddamn Globe and Mail coming to it.” Anger was electrifying his voice, making it raspy with emotion, which was not normally something he would allow. He didn’t generally like Maya to know she was getting to him. But she was letting him see her cry, so he let his voice continue to telegraph the disgust he felt. “You’re the one left with the fallout, while he swans off to do whatever the fuck.”
Maya’s tears kept coming, but there was something else happening now, too. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was half fallen open in astonishment, half smiling. She was surprised by his anger, but she liked his interpretation of things. So he kept going. “And that’s not you. You are a hustler—in a good way. You put in the work. You don’t let people down. But he forced you to. And there’s no way around the fact that he’s costing you a ton of money. So yes, you might be ahead, but it’s still a loss against what could have been. It’s money and reputation all mixed up, and it’s a shitty situation.”
She let loose a little sob, but then she tried to swallow it.
Ah, shit. He didn’t know what to do with these tears. He understood where they were coming from, but Holden Hampshire wasn’t worth it. He didn’t deserve them.
He hated that she was crying, but he also hated that if she needed to cry, she was trying to stifle it.
“Shh,” he soothed.
She shook her head and started to look away, like her pride was belatedly kicking in. He’d thought before that she would never want him to see her cry, and it was as if all of a sudden she was remembering this first principle.
He was flip-flopping on first principles, too, it seemed, because he didn’t want her to look away, to lose this particular staring contest. He didn’t want to stop seeing her pain, if she had to have pain.
So, moving slowly, like she was a wild horse he didn’t want to spook, he laid a hand on her forearm. She turned back to him, her eyes still wounded. He opened his arms, knowing it was probably futile but doing it anyway. When they sat on this couch or when they lay together in bed, they always left space between them.
When she came into his arms, immediately and unhesitatingly, he suddenly had to blink back tears. It—her, the fact of her, here in his arms—felt so hard-won.
He had the sudden thought that, just like he hadn’t wanted either of them to lose the staring contest just then, he didn’t want either of them to lose, period.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” she said, her voice muffled because she’d buried her head against his chest.
Because this is what you do when you love someone. You hold them up when they need you.
He held her and let the feeling fill him up—the feeling he’d been calling “rightness” but now knew was love. It was astonishing to realize that he had loved her for a long time. There had just been an extra layer in there making things confusing, like steam on a pair of glasses obscuring his vision.
He laughed.
She pulled away, searching his face. “What’s so funny?” She thought he was laughing at her.
I’m laughing because I love you. Yeah, now was not the time for that. That would come later.
Now was the time for an apology. The real one, this time. The big one. And then a proposal. A totally obvious proposal that had been under his nose the whole time.
A person of words and not deeds is a garden full of weeds.
Time for deeds.
“I need to apologize.”
Maya studied Ben’s face. “You’re laughing because you need to apologize.” It had been hard to pull back from his embrace, which had felt like such a haven, even though, objectively speaking, she knew that a hug was not going to solve any of her problems. But now he was laughing at her?
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s confusing. You confuse me sometimes.”
She knew the feeling.
“I’m sorry I ruined Romeo and Juliet.”
She tried to pull away—all the way, this time. “We don’t have to talk about it. It was so long ago.”
He held on to her. Not hard, not enough that she couldn’t get away if she wanted to. And since she didn’t want to, not really, she let herself be held.
She let herself be held. When was the last time she’d done that?
“We do have to talk about it, though,” he said, firmly but gently.
She closed her eyes against his scrutiny. Usually her mission was to stare back at him, t
o not back down. But this was so embarrassing. That she would hold a grudge so long, that she would let it spiral so out of control.
“I did a shitty thing, and I’m sorry.”
She opened her eyes. “You weren’t in the play.” Sadie was the one who’d actually bailed on the show, so it followed logically that if Maya was going to spend years punishing someone, it should have been Sadie. And yeah, she might not be the president of Sadie’s fan club, but the woman made the world’s best pancakes.
Also, Sadie did not have all-seeing eyes the color of moss. And a stupidly impressive work ethic. And the ability to own her mistakes. And to hold her like she had the power to make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again.
Hooboy, she was in trouble.
“Yeah,” he said, “but I remember Sadie telling me she was in a play. I didn’t really even know what that meant, since that was your first play.”
“Well, how would you have known?” Why was she arguing with him? She had been marked by having to cancel that play, and she had blamed him, so why was she attempting to reason away what he was trying to say?
Because letting him apologize meant admitting how much he’d hurt her. How vulnerable she had been—and still was—when it came to him. She’d spent years sparring with him, showing him her strongest self. It was hard to just…stop.
“Well, I did know,” he said. “But I will say that I only remembered all this recently. I remember that weekend, of course—I’d won concert tickets in Toronto—but the circumstances around it had faded. It wasn’t until Rohan told me the story a couple weeks ago and it all came back that I pieced together that it was your play.” He rolled his eyes. “Which is dumb. Of course it was your play. Who else’s would it have been? Sadie was supposed to play Juliet. We argued about it on the way to Toronto. I wanted to ask her if she’d actually read the play. I was like, ‘You know you die in the end, right? Over some teenage jerk?’”
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