A lengthy honk interrupted my ode to the road not traveled. Summer released her hand from the horn and flipped off the BMW merging into our lane. I grinned, relieved to have some semblance of normalcy back inside our vehicle.
“You got a text,” Summer said, eyeing my brightening phone sitting on the console between us.
I held my breath, bracing for the worst as I peered down toward my phone like it was a horror movie. I exhaled relief, seeing it was a text from Asher.
Not NOT thinking about you xx.
My heart fluttered and a silly smile broke across my face. The finish line was coming into view. I could live without the object in the rearview. Not just live without—I could soar without it. For the first time in so long, the what is was better than the what-if.
39
THIRTY-FIVE
I HID BEHIND A CONSTRUCTION pole, my eyes scanning the area around my tiny, charming, five-story walk-up. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t one paparazzo in sight, but just in case, I sprinted toward the building like I was running to rescue someone from a fire.
I spent the entire week back in my apartment, watching the sun rise and fall as I sped to finish the rest of the tracks for the movie. By Thursday night, I hated both the final song and the ending of the movie, and I knew exactly why I’d turned on my heroine—my heart was just too delicate to unpack it. Asher stayed patient with me on FaceTime—and I think he could tell I was losing it, as I pushed back on his character arcs and creative choices, something no one should ever do to a writer/director who has a studio-locked script. My fingers were swollen and nearly bleeding from the guitar strings, and my mind felt the same way—inflamed from the music and lyrics swirling around it.
“You’ve lost perspective,” Asher said over FaceTime.
He wasn’t wrong. I had gone from championing our movie’s protagonist, Yael, to going to war with her decisions. Yael longed to move planets for a man who wouldn’t commit one crime to be with her. She wanted to turn her life upside down for someone who was too afraid to meet her in the middle. Heartbreak historically fueled my art. Garrett almost fucking me at his own engagement party should have birthed some of my best lyrics. Instead, it had stifled me. I built a panic room inside my brain, where only Maggie Vine and good vibes! were allowed to exist inside the padded walls. To cling on to a bright future with Asher, I couldn’t muse over the moment where a taken man’s body trembled hard against me as fireworks lit up the night. But I was holding a brushstroke, being paid to use someone else’s color palette. It was my job to paint hopeful bright hues for a future I didn’t believe in. Not everyone ends up with their Garrett. Giving Yael that kind of happily ever after required me to grieve one of my ugliest endings. Yael was supposed to end up with this man, her Garrett. He eventually becomes worthy of her plight, and the movie’s climax made complete sense the first time I read the script. I even ugly cried, clutching my chest. But rereading the script after the engagement party, I hated Yael for clinging to hope—I likened it to worshiping a false God.
I sat on my bed tugging cold sesame noodles out of the to-go container, shoving them into my mouth, and washing them down with room-temperature coffee while I sneered, listening to my voice sing the final song back to me on my phone. Suddenly, I heard a knock at my door. I furrowed my brows, twisted my hair into a messy topknot, and hopped off the tiny bed, edging my body past the gap between the bookshelf of records and the bed frame. I opened the door and nearly choked on the sesame peanut noodles in my mouth.
Asher stood in my doorway looking like a goddamn movie poster. He had the audacity to lean on one side of the doorframe, tucking his aviators into his fitted V-neck.
“Hey there,” he said.
My heavy eyes blinked him into focus, not 100 percent certain if he was a mirage—a combination of my lack of sleep and caffeine consumption—or if this beautiful man standing in front of me was, in fact, real.
He was real, and I was a real hot mess. I quickly wiped sesame paste off the corners of my lips, horrified as I scanned the messy dishes piled up in the sink.
“I—I thought you weren’t due back until tomorrow,” I said.
He fought a grin, watching as I non-stealthily grabbed a stray bra from the floor and tucked it under the messy duvet.
“I’ve come to save you from yourself.”
I crossed my arms over my oversized wine-stained T-shirt. “Is that so?” I asked, playfully.
“I’m worried that if I let another day go by, you’ll declare that you don’t know how to write music anymore. I’ve been where you are right now: too deep into the material. What you need is to get the heck out of your bubble.”
I smiled for a long moment, taking in his soft smile, his perfect cheekbones.
“Are you going to kiss me, or what?” I asked.
Asher raised his eyebrows and the corners of his lips, and then filled my grinning mouth with his tongue, the taste of fresh peppermint thankfully overpowering the taste of day-old Chinese food. We spun together onto the bed, our mouths barely parting as our shoulders hit the mattress. All at once, I felt something cold and wet on my cheek. I lifted my hand to my face, finding half of my hair swimming in a bed of sesame noodles.
“Fuuuck,” I groaned, pulling a handful of noodles out of my hair.
I turned to frown pitifully at Asher. He picked a noodle off my cheek and stood up, offering two hands out to me. Begrudgingly, I let him tug me upward. Asher stepped back with a grin and took his shirt off. Then his jeans. Then his briefs. Naked, he walked right into my bathroom. I craned my neck to see him turn on the shower.
“You coming, or what?” he asked.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, I GOT dressed, letting my beachy waves air-dry and my naturally flushed face count as makeup. Asher told me to bring my guitar and my writing notebook, and so with both those in hand, I curved my neck out of the town car as we rolled up to a gate at Teterboro. Asher rattled off a tail number into the call box, and a minute later, I was ascending the stairs of a sleek private jet.
A bubbly flight attendant handed Asher and me cold glasses of champagne as we sat alone, side by side in a plane meant for eight humans. I studied the light taupe leather seats and cream-colored wood accents, with Hermès blankets on the backs of each seat. For a moment, I tried to keep my jaw attached to my cheeks—to act like I’d been there before—but I had never been here. I gave way to reveling in fuck-you money, my mouth open to the thick fog on the floor （water vapor, caused by the humid outside air mixing with the cool AC）。 The jet door closed, and after flashing our IDs at our two pilots, we took off. I gaped at Asher, and he grinned back with a sly smile.
“Flight time to PDK is one hour and fifty-nine minutes,” said the flight attendant, as she handed us warm lavender towelettes for our hands.
I turned to Asher and leaned into his ear. “What is PDK? And what is happening?”
“Peachtree-Dekalb. Atlanta,” Asher answered.
“Atlanta?”
I had never been to Atlanta. And as far as I knew, Asher had little ties to the Peach State. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how one minute I was eating stale noodles in my hot studio apartment, and the next minute I was learning about the curious mist coming up from the floor on a private jet. My usual air travel experiences involved a thorough pat-down from an unamused TSA agent, sharing space with the worst of the worst on a plane: a screaming child with a newly diagnosed ear infection, a man who didn’t understand that the armrests belonged to the middle seat holder, people who thought that taking off their shoes in public was acceptable, and That Guy who decided to belly laugh to his favorite episode of The Office without headphones on.