He glanced down at his watch. “Oh shoot, yeah, I need to get going. Av, I really am sorry. I promise to give you my undivided attention as soon as we get home from the fundraiser tonight. We can talk about all this later. But really, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get a final callback. It sounds like you did great!”
I opened up my mouth to rebut—It sounds like I did great? I mooed for God’s sake!—but before I could even squeak out another syllable, he pressed a kiss to my forehead, snatched his tux from the hook on our bedroom door, and rushed out of the apartment.
“This was the final callback,” I muttered to myself, now alone in the space where I had been hoping to find support and comfort. But like usual, he was off on his next crusade.
It took me almost a full two minutes to pull my jaw up off the floor and move from the spot where he left me. I was utterly dumbfounded. Not an ounce of empathy or sign of understanding. For what felt like at least the hundredth time over these past few months, my feelings not even a blip on his radar.
Chapter Eleven
At precisely 9:59 a.m., Gabe strode into our café clutching a black-and-white marble notebook, wearing the same green canvas crossbody bag with eclectic patches he had almost a decade ago. The punctuality, however, was a welcomed change. Before finding me in the crowd of tables, Gabe placed an order with the barista and picked up two steaming mugs after tossing a few bucks into the nearby tip jar. The barista’s face lit up as she leaned over the counter to thank him, flashing a flirty smile and more than a hint of cleavage, neither of which he seemed to pay much attention to.
Gabe popped up on his toes to survey the room. Our eyes met, drawing me in like a siren song, and he made his way through the sea of people over to where I was seated. He set his bag on the ground and eased into the chair across from me.
Sliding one of the mugs over without missing a beat, he said, “Tall drip with two shots of espresso, oat milk, and one sugar.”
The thoughtfulness of the gesture was one thing, but the fact that he hadn’t forgotten how I took my coffee caught me completely by surprise. “Thank you. I can’t believe you still know my order.”
“By heart,” he responded, never breaking eye contact as he took a sip. He leaned in closer to study my face, and suddenly, I forgot how to breathe. “So, Avery Lawrence,” he said, chewing on his bottom lip, “I guess you weren’t an apparition after all. You look beautiful, by the way. I’ve always loved your hair like that.” He studied me as if trying to recognize someone he’d known a lifetime ago.
My fingers instinctively moved to tuck a wisp behind my ear. “Well, it’s a far departure from the mess I was when I showed up at your door,” I joked, inwardly cringing at the memory.
“The thing I haven’t been able to work out, though, is how you knew where I lived? It’s a sublet, and I only moved in a few days before,” he said.
“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I answered.
He raised his eyebrows, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “Try me,” his gravelly voice intensifying the challenge in his words.
Le sigh. That look. That face. With his smoldering intensity so singularly focused on me, my knees buckled even though I was sitting. His magnetism was undeniable, and I knew I would relent to whatever he asked of me, every . . . single . . . time. “It was Christmas Day, and I couldn’t find a taxi to save my life. I stepped into a phone booth in search of a cab company, picked up the receiver, and it switched over to an operator who, for some reason, gave me your address instead.”
He shook his head, clearly mystified. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He stayed quiet for a moment, lost in his own recollection. “And what’s even stranger is I had just been thinking about you literally that very day, and then poof, there you were, standing in my doorway after almost seven years of radio silence.”
I put my hands up to emphasize my own defense. “Gabe, I swear, I didn’t come looking for you that night. I was just as surprised to see you standing on the other side of that door as you were to see me. I can’t explain it. I wish I could. I was going to pretend like it never happened, but then you sent me that text, and I don’t know, I wanted to see you again.”
He grabbed for my hands and tucked them into his own. They were warm and comforting and familiar. “I wanted to see you again too,” he said, his admission intoxicating.
His phone rang from inside his bag, cutting through the words he left hanging in the air between us. He let go of my hands to scramble to find it amid his notebooks and papers, but instead of answering, he quickly hit the silence button and tucked it away, before promptly turning his attention back to me.
Surprised, I couldn’t help but ask, “Did you need to get that?”
“Whatever it is can wait.”
Who was this person? He certainly looked like the same Gabe. About a head and a half taller than me, wild dark hair and that beautiful face . . . from his scruffed chin to his familiar hazel eyes fringed with thick lashes any woman would envy. But now, the tension he used to carry in his jaw and shoulders had given way to a more relaxed posture that conveyed a sense of ease he never had before. The old Gabe would have never let a work call roll to voice mail. This was brand-new territory.
“There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you over the years,” he continued, “but you’d moved on, and I figured maybe it was all better left in the past. Then there you were on my doorstep, and I thought maybe I was being given the chance to say all the things I never did.”
Though it was the last thing I expected, I couldn’t keep my heart from swelling at the idea that he’d left things unsaid too, and that after all these years, we were somehow getting a chance to lay it all out on the table.
He continued, “I was a different person then. I didn’t appreciate what we had, not in the way I should have. You were my best friend, and I let you walk right out of my life. I’m sorry, Avery. I was so consumed with my own ego to believe I could somehow fix the world for everyone around me, all the while hurting the one person who mattered the most in mine.”
His finger crooked under my chin and gently lifted it so I could look into his eyes. His voice was soft, almost a whisper. “But don’t think for a minute that I walked away completely unscathed.”
Before I could exhale, he rubbed his thumb over my cheek. His expression radiated a hurt I wasn’t aware I’d caused. And after the disastrous Wicked audition and our subsequent breakup, the last thing I ever imagined was that I’d be sitting across from him in this small café, a bistro table, two steaming coffees, and seven years of silence between us.
I stared into his apologetic eyes and could tell he was truly sorry that he hadn’t appreciated our relationship more. Hearing Gabe lay out his regrets so openly had been the last thing I expected when I agreed to meet him today. Over the years, I’d managed to convince myself Gabe was fine with our breakup—one less thing to distract him from his social crusades. Now, finding out he’d been as heartbroken as I was shook me to my very core.
At the beginning of our relationship, it was Gabe’s unwavering passion that drew me to him. Growing up with a single mother, always just skirting the poverty line, he committed himself to doing his best to even out the playing field for everyone else. I couldn’t help but be impressed by his altruism, the same way everyone was. But there was a good reason most superheroes stayed single. Turns out, when you’re all consumed with saving the world, there’s very little room for much else. After all this time, I couldn’t help but wonder if Batman had finally hung up his cape, or at least tucked it into the drawer?