“You’re quiet,” he said.
Manning had to be able to trust me, too, which was why I couldn’t tell him what he needed to hear, even though I wanted to. I would once I was certain beyond any doubt that he would come back to me. “I’m sorry.”
“I understand,” he said. “But there are two things you can trust me on, so can we start there?”
I raised my eyes back to his. “What are they?”
“I’m moving to New York. Don’t worry about how I’ll do it or whether I’ll like it. You’re going to show me around, and I’ll love it because—here’s the other thing you have to trust—I love you. Nothing matters more to me now than being where you are. I realize I’ve fucked up huge. I know I made mistakes. If you can tell me you believe that I love you, and if you can understand that nothing will keep me from coming to New York or wherever you are, then I’ll work my ass off to earn your trust back. And to be worthy of you, support you, make you happy. I can’t expect any of that without working for it, I just need you to understand those two things.”
“That you love me, and that you’re moving here.”
“Yes.”
For what felt like the hundredth time in days, I wanted to cry, but I sucked in a breath and focused on his words. Manning loved me. It wasn’t a shock to hear it, because I’d known it for so long. Maybe over the years I had doubted it or tried to convince myself otherwise, but I had always known. Certainly he’d known it, too, that he’d loved me, and me him, for a while.
I ignored the feeling that this, being in his arms and hearing these things, was too good to be true. We’d weathered the worst of the storm—now we got to live in the sun. There were hard times ahead, but it wasn’t too good to be true because we’d worked for it. We’d suffered and struggled and tried to stay away from each other and if none of that could keep us apart, then nothing ahead of us could, either.
“I understand,” I said. “I can’t just forgive it all because you’re finally here, but . . .”
He slipped his hand under my hair, warming the top of my spine. “I would never ask you to. If the roles were reversed, I don’t think I’d ever get over it. Not ever.”
If I thought too hard about it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over it, either. Would that mean I could never forgive him? If the answer was no, would I get out of this bed right now? That was one answer I did know. Wild horses couldn’t tear me away from him tonight. These few days were about us and it was time we deserved. If I went too far down the path of our past, I’d risk ruining something I had begged, fought, and sweat for, so I pivoted in the opposite direction.
“What will you do when you get here?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. The good thing about construction is you can do it anywhere.”
“You won’t stay in sales?”
He blew out a sigh. “Depends. I will if it’s the first job I find. New York is expensive, and if I’m going to support us—”
“I’ve supported myself for this long,” I pointed out.
“There’s no scenario I can dream up in which I’m not working as hard as I can to keep you comfortable. It’s what I need as a man, no argument. I know you can support yourself. It makes me proud that you do. It’s important to me, though.”
“Is that why you do sales?” I asked. “Because of the money?”
He seemed to think. In the corner of my eye, the digital clock by the bed changed to eight on the dot. “In jail, and after I got out, I was helpless. I worried my future was nothing more than hard labor. I don’t ever want to feel that way again.”
“Will it be hard to find work as a felon?”
“Of course, but this job I have now, it’ll help. I can show them my salary, my capabilities, and hopefully that’ll be enough.”
“But in sales, you never create anything. You sell other people’s ideas and things.” My leg began to sweat between his, but I kept it there. “Don’t you still want to help people like you used to?”
“You know I can’t.”
“I don’t mean as a cop. You can help in other ways, like building homes. Homes are important. You spend most of your life in one. I’d trust you to build my home.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and pinched my bottom. “Well, that’s not all that flattering. After this apartment, a clown car would be a step up.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “You’ll be surprised how quickly you get used to it.”
“Yeah? I thought maybe we’d get our own place when I come.”
I shook my head. “I like it here. You can do what you want with your money, but I’ll pay my share of the rent, and this is what I can afford.”
“Well, then . . . a few repairs are in order. You won’t begrudge me that, will you?” As if Manning had planned it himself, my faulty radiator groaned in the next room. “Tiffany and I are remodeling, and I’ve hardly touched a tool. I’m too busy sitting in an office earning the money to pay for all the nice things we can’t seem to live without.”
“Manning.” I couldn’t bear it. I tried to separate his old life from this one, but I couldn’t. I hated that it meant I didn’t get to know about who he’d become over the past few years, but it was too much. “I don’t want that office job for you. I don’t care about money. I’ve lived the past few years without it. Do something you love.”
“I love work that gives me the means to make you happy.”
“And what would make me happy is to see you building homes or making furniture or whatever it is that satisfies you.”
He lifted his head to see me better. “Furniture?”
“You made that coffee table with Gary. The one I saw in the back of your truck? Remember, it was my eighteenth birthday?”
“Your eighteenth birthday,” he repeated, laughter in his voice. “Did you throw that in for good measure or what?”
I also smiled. Since the moment I’d met Manning until June ninth 1995, turning eighteen had been front and center of my world. “It was a big day,” I said.
“Yeah it was. I’ll make something small now and then, but mostly I’m too busy for furniture. Gary, he’s doing the same old thing he always was. Except that he got married. Did you know?”
Aside from Henry, Manning’s father figure, I guessed Gary was probably Manning’s closest friend. As proud as I was that I’d introduced them at that first camp meeting, I couldn’t help the way my heart pinched remembering that other life. “I haven’t seen Gary since the last day I saw you. The wedding.”
Manning put his big, bear hand over my hair and his lips to the top of my head. I let him kiss away the memory because tonight, in his arms, was possibly the best moment of my life and I didn’t want to ruin it.
“I did get to make a couple pieces for the house,” Manning said, “and I try to refurbish things on weekends, but it can be tough.”
“Then you can do it all here. Make furniture or build homes or fix my apartment, whatever,” I said. “It’ll be a fresh start.”
He grunted, thumbing the corner of my lips. “That’s my girl. Keep living in the clouds, and I’ll take care of the rest. What’s cold?”
I was all warmed up, but I wasn’t about to pass up an invitation to be touched. “My butt.”
He grinned, then took a handful of my backside. “Do you miss the warmth? The beach?”
I tried not to show that I did. I didn’t want Manning to think I regretted my decision to leave. I didn’t—it was what I’d needed to do at the time. Watching him marry Tiffany, going through the motions of giving a maid of honor speech, receiving congratulations, watching them dance at the reception—it’d been clear there’d been no other choice.
But at times, I did miss Orange County, more than I wanted to admit. My family, my past, my youth, were all there. I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, though. “No. I’ve had an amazing time here, and now that I’ve graduated, I’ll get to devote all my free time to finding work.”
“Tell me about the acting. Is it everything yo
u wanted it to be? Do you love it?”
“It’s . . .” I chose my words carefully. Again, I didn’t want him to think I’d made any mistakes, but if I expected him to be honest about his work, I had to be as well. “I want to be able to tell you, Manning, but you can’t get upset or overprotective about it like you did with my job.”
He took a deep enough breath that I felt it through my whole body. “That means it’s bad.”
“No, not bad. It’s just so different from what I was used to. From what I thought it would be. It’s competitive and you have to have thick skin. Sometimes I’m outside in the cold waiting in line for hours or I’m running on nothing but coffee all day or I’m up until four in the morning memorizing lines. That’s just the start since I haven’t even been auditioning long.” The sad thing was, I enjoyed it. I was living a fantasy I’d started to develop my first year in college, when actors would come to our classes and talk about the struggle of their early days. And since I’d suffered for my craft with others who were in the same boat, I’d become close to my classmates fast. It wasn’t like the high school friends I’d had in Orange County. I hadn’t spoken to Mona or Vickie in a couple years. These were real friendships, like what I had with Val and Corbin, only my classmates and I shared the same weird, deep desires I did. I wasn’t going to feel bad about my career choice just because it worried Manning. “If you come here,” I said to him, “you have to be able to let me do my thing without getting upset.”
I felt his silence more than anything. When I checked his expression, he was looking at the ceiling. “The graveyard shift really bothers me, Lake. I don’t like the idea of you walking home in this city at that time. The rest of it, I don’t know, we can work it out. I can bring you food and blankets while you’re waiting. I can run your lines with you.”
“You won’t always be able to, Manning. Sometimes you’ll have to work or sleep or I’ll need to run to an audition right when I hear about it, even if we’re in the middle of something.”
He nodded a little. “I hear you. I’ll work on it. If your skin is thicker, I guess mine will have to be as well.”
“The city will do it for you.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “Is that what it’s done to you?”
There were plenty of memories to choose from, but there was no failure like the first. I’d moved here heartbroken, penniless, and lost—I must’ve ridden the subway to every borough at least once by accident—but the icing on the cake came right before my first semester. “You already know I’d been accepted to NYU. I deferred a semester. But I also had to apply for the drama school and undergo an artistic review. I was denied.” In high school, I’d always been so focused on the core classes like science, math, and English. Dad had never allowed me to consider my drama elective as anything more than a hobby. “I took general education courses my first semester and at night, I attended these acting classes in some basement. It was enough to get me in the following semester, but not enough to turn me into an actress.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“We had to do these workshops where we’d learn and practice technique. Well, at the end of my second semester, one of my professors kept me after class to tell me I was getting a ‘D’.”
“Excuse me?” Manning teased. “Lake Kaplan got a ‘D’? Have you ever scored a grade lower than a ‘B’?”
“No.” I smiled. “I was devastated. I could handle the written work and book study, but when it came to theater, I wasn’t a natural.”
“She who excels at everything,” Manning said.
“Apparently not. I’d never had a teacher criticize me, and here the professor had ‘firmly suggested’ I change majors.” I crossed my arms over his chest, resting my chin on them. “Not only that, but nearly everyone around me had been acting since they were children. The closest lessons I’d had were piano. I was the slow one in the class, and that was true up until graduation a few days ago.”
“Did you switch classes?”
“I wanted to.” I remembered standing in the registrar’s office during winter break, ready to give up. Val and Corbin had gone home for the holidays and I was looking at a Christmas and New Year’s by myself. I’d been in New York a year, but I’d still acutely felt Manning’s absence in my life. I was used to spending Christmas morning opening gifts with my dad and Tiffany while my mom prepared a three-course dinner. I’d had a wonderful life. I’d failed at nothing until I’d failed to win Manning, and after that, things had just fallen apart. Maybe the real me was a failure, and I’d been coddled my whole life, but the alternative was eating crow and majoring in something my dad would’ve chosen for me, like business. At the last minute, I’d turned away from the office and gone back to my empty apartment. “In the end, I decided not to. All I’d had left at the time was school. So, I repeated the class the following semester.”
“And?”
“I earned a ‘B’. After taking the class twice I was hoping for an ‘A’, but at least it was enough to move on.”
He craned his neck to kiss my forehead, and I felt his smile against my skin. “I still love you if you’re a ‘B’ student.” He snickered before I could protest. One single “B” did not a “B” student make. “So what changed after that?” he asked. “Or did it?”
“The next teacher I had worked one-on-one with me. She said she could see my pain when I was off stage, but for some reason I was holding back. She coached me to tap into that.”
“Into the pain,” he murmured, passing his hand over the top of my head.
“It helped. Sometimes I think of you, and her, and all that I’ve missed out on, and I put it into the craft. I’m still not great, but at least I’m learning not to hold back.”
“Lake . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said to his chest. “I needed something, and I had that.”
“Now you have me, too.”
I nodded slowly, unsure of when it would start to feel like that was true. Like Manning was mine. With him by my side, I thought I could work in the city’s sanitation department with a smile on my face.
“I’d like to meet your friends when I get back from California,” he said.
“They’re my family.” I looked up at him again. Family. That was one thing I’d been without for years and wouldn’t get back. My dad and I were at the bottom of a mountain neither of us seemed willing to climb.
“Does he ever talk about me?” I asked.
Manning knew exactly who I meant. He moved his hand to cup my face. “He misses you.”
“He said that?”
“He doesn’t have to. We all know he does.”
I guess Manning’s hand on my cheek was meant to soften the blow. I’d gone from being constantly under my dad’s thumb to not speaking to him once in over four years. Whenever Mom and I were on the phone, Dad was either “swamped with work,” “not feeling well,” or “on his way out the door.” Mom must’ve told those lies for herself, because the truth was obvious.
“You were the apple of his eye, Lake—of course he misses you. Pride is a fucked-up thing and you hurt his.”
“I had to go. I couldn’t stay there after that night.”
His arm underneath me tensed. “I know it isn’t fair to say, but it was hard for me, too,” he said.
“It didn’t seem that way to me.” I fell quiet remembering those moments at the altar, the way Manning had shaken Gary’s hand and smiled. “You looked happy.”
“That was intentional.” He stroked my hair. “I was terrified if you thought I wasn’t, or that I had a single doubt, you’d stop the wedding. I felt so sick that I could barely focus on what was happening around me. Even when I wasn’t looking at you, all I saw was you . . . and then I did look. You were crying, and I worried I’d made a huge mistake.”
Warmth prickled my scalp and finally, I felt not a bit of cold anywhere on my body. I was even sweating a little. “I would’ve stopped it,” I said. “I wish I had. All this could’ve been
avoided.”
He shook his head. “I had to go through with it, Lake. I wanted it back then. Wanted a family, and to be accepted, and to do good and be good. I didn’t believe there was another way for me. I knew for sure I couldn’t be the man for you.”
He paused, gauging my reaction. It hurt to hear him say he’d actually wanted those things, but there was something to the idea that we wouldn’t be here otherwise.
“I figured once I married Tiffany,” he continued, “you’d go off to USC, graduate with a great job, meet someone smarter than me, more deserving, someone with the means to give you a great life. Never in my wildest dreams did I think, even for a second, I could be that man for you.”
“You were,” I said. “You are.” I angled up toward his mouth for a kiss, but he didn’t give it to me.
“Am I?” he asked against my lips.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I have a good life here, one that finally feels like my own. I’m doing what I want and having fun. That’s how I know I still need you. Without you, I could have all this and way more, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
Finally, he let our lips meet, kissing me softly at first, and then with a little more urgency. Again, the stiffness between us begged for my attention. I went to reach for him, but he caught my hand and kissed my palm. “That can wait. I’ve been dying to know everything about the last four and a half years. I want to hear all of it.”
I understood too well that craving to hear every last thought his mind had held since I’d met him, just as long as it was about me—no one else. I wanted more about him, but so much of his life in California was made up of things I couldn’t bear to hear about. I whispered my next question, not even realizing I wanted to know. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I couldn’t. It took me a year to make this trip happen.”
“And before that?”
“Parole. I couldn’t leave the state.” He looked out the window. “Your dad wasn’t able to expunge my record like I’d hoped. I think maybe he thought he could, but in the end, it was all talk.”
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