This Story Might Save Your Life(46)

“Would you mind giving us a sec?” I asked her.

“Of course. Yes. Sure. Yeah. I’ll just be…” She fluttered a hand and then shut the door.

Benny stared at me under raised brows. I closed the gap between us, meeting him on the upper landing. “What’s going on with Luna?” I whispered. It had been all I could think about through Sioux City, Park City, Minneapolis, and now Detroit. For weeks I’d waited for the right moment to talk to him about this, and for weeks it never came.

He shook his head. “No news.”

“None?”

“We said we’d talk when I got back.”

“That’s it? That’s all?”

“More or less.”

“Seriously? Vague is not a good look on you.”

He seemed to consider his options. “Her two best friends from law school are starting their own firm,” he said eventually. “They want her to be a founding partner.”

“How exciting.” When he didn’t return my smile, I said, “Not exciting?”

“They’re in San Francisco.”

“Oh.” I let myself picture it briefly, and my shoulders dropped. “Oh.”

“It’s a good opportunity for her.” His tone did not match his words.

“Absolutely,” I said with equally unconvincing enthusiasm. “But I’m confused. You said you’ve been fighting. And … reevaluating.”

He nodded. “She thinks this could be a fresh start.”

“Oh,” I said again.

The stairwell was unusually quiet, letting in only a fraction of the ruckus from the grand lobby. Our fun-loving fans were filing in, drunk and armed with reinforcements, laughing as they spilled their way to their seats, but all we could hear was a murmur, a gentle white noise.

“Anyway, I, uh…” He raked his curls. “I don’t know what to do.”

I tried to picture my life without Benny, and found it was easy to do. We’d done it before. For three years, the most miserable time of my life. In those years I’d lived as if trapped in a terrarium, defeatedly pressing my hands to the glass. Depression lies, my friends. He is a beast, and I believed him when he told me I was unlovable. That Benny no longer cared. That I was the problem. After coming out the other side, I promised myself I would never again live without my best friend.

My chest constricted and I found I couldn’t breathe. As if the ghosts of the Fox Theatre had wrapped their icy fingers around my heart.

“Are you okay?” Benny asked.

I shook my head, eyes filling with tears.

He grasped my arms. “Talk to me. Are you not feeling well? Do you need to sit down?”

“Don’t,” I managed. “Don’t leave.”

He exhaled all the air in the world and rested his forehead on mine. Our noses touched. I closed my eyes. Even when I began to calm, neither of us moved.

I opened my eyes. “Hi.”

“Hi.” His breath was warm on my lips. He ran his hands up and down my arms. “You scared me for a second there.”

We blinked at each other. Up close, his eyes expanded like deep pools, and I lost myself in them for a minute. “I don’t want you to leave.”

I was talking about long-distance moves, but I meant that moment as well. I didn’t want to leave the stairwell, the corridors covered in signatures. I wasn’t ready to go back to real life. Now that we’d survived our “survival” tour, I was already feeling nostalgic. I’d gotten used to the grind—the planes and cars and hotels and continental breakfasts and call times and coffee runs. We were all tired, and I never got a minute alone with Benny, but at least I could see his face every day.

Still forehead to forehead, he said, “I don’t want to leave either.”

My breath caught, our entire friendship passing before my eyes. Snuggling under blankets at the cemetery movie night. Scavenger hunts in art galleries. Costume parties, and bar crawls, and tacos at all hours. My insides fluttered.

“You’re my very favorite person, you know that?” I whispered. No qualifiers, no caveats. They were the truest words I’d ever uttered.

Benny’s eyes smiled. “You’re mine too.”

And this was, of course, when Xander cleared his throat.



* * *



BENNY AND I broke apart. Flustered, I punched Benny on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for the pep talk,” as if our forehead-to-forehead whispers were no more than a pregame huddle.

“Anytime, champ,” Benny said, taking my lead. His face was beet red.

Mine probably was too.

We waited for Xander to overreact, to yell, to scream the way he had when he found me in Benny’s room, but this time he kept his cool. “Ready for showtime?”

“Ready steady,” I said, widening my eyes at Benny as we all headed for the stage.

The next hour and a half went by in a blur. If asked to recall anything I said at any of our shows, I’d be at a loss. That heady adrenaline is too muddling. What I do remember is how bittersweet this final performance felt. Benny led with a story about an exotic animal show gone wrong, and I concocted ridiculous solutions for how to survive, and we laughed, and we cried, and we signed all the things. And then we were done. Our tour was over.