by Brooks, Abby
Something was wrong with Harry’s eyes. Like a huge barrier had been raised, closing her off from him. “It’s really no big deal.” He shrugged. “Tell me more about your day.”
Every single cell in Willow’s body sounded the alarm.
Something was very wrong.
“Nothing between us,” she said, her words pleading him to open up. Begging him to explain why she suddenly felt so cut off from him. “Remember?”
Irritation flashed in Harry’s eyes. “This isn’t between us.” There was a finality in his voice that sent a series of cracks running across the surface of her heart.
I thought everything was between us. I thought it was you and me against the world and here I come to find out that it’s you and it’s me, standing together, but separately.
“How’s your roommate?” Harry asked, focusing on her for the first time since the call connected.
The fine web of cracks continued to spread across her heart. “Not good.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at the camera. “The sprain was bad. And it irritated her tendonitis. I’m afraid they won’t renew her contract if she can’t get back to class soon.”
“That sucks.”
No. This sucks, Willow thought.
She waited a few seconds for him to say something else and when he stayed silent, still fiddling with the something she couldn’t see, she sighed heavily.
“Do you need to go?” she asked, when she would so rather ask him again what was going on. The question was on the tip of her tongue, ready to slip out at any second and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or bad thing. She wasn’t sure if it might finally get him to give an honest answer or if it would only make him mad because he’d made it pretty clear he didn’t want to talk about whatever was bothering him.
And there went those cracks in her heart, spreading and widening, the rumbling of an earthquake shattering the pavement, great fissures appearing in what had once looked so permanent.
He closed his eyes and sighed. Held up a hand and wrestled with something for a second before he opened them again. “Are you happy?” he asked.
“What? Yes. God yes,” she said without hesitating.
“Think about it long and hard. Think about the way we’re living. About your job. About the distance. About the way it feels to miss me. Really think about it, Willow.” Harry paused and his mouth tightened into a thin line of tension. “Are you happy?”
Fear mingled with exhaustion from the day and the world zoomed in and out of focus. “You’re not happy, are you?” she asked, certain that was what the whole conversation was about. He had finally grown tired of trying to make long distance work.
“Damn it, Willow. Answer my question.”
Tears sprang into her eyes and she promised herself she wouldn’t cry. “When I’m with you, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
“But right now. Today. Are you happy?”
“Actually, I had a really fucking great day up until this conversation. Now I’m a nervous wreck. Please just tell me what the hell is going on.”
Harry looked so solemn, so defeated, all Willow wanted to do was wrap him in a hug and tell him everything would be okay. But in that moment, she wasn’t sure everything would be okay.
“I’m afraid I’m ruining you.” His words were gruff and harsh and grated across her soul, leaving bruises in their wake.
“Ruining me? By loving me and making me happier than I’ve ever been?”
Harry frowned and shook his head. “Let’s forget today. Just wipe it off the map. Since you’ve been back in New York, how many good days have you had?”
Willow thought hard. Thought about the frustrations she’d been having in rehearsal. The soul-aching way she missed him every time she climbed into her too-big bed. The huge, Harry shaped hole in her heart that kept her from feeling satisfied at the end of the day. She didn’t want to say any of that, though.
“I had a great time when you came to visit,” she answered.
“And since?”
She didn’t want to tell him how hard it had been. Didn’t want to tell him that she hadn’t been truly happy since she came back from Bliss because somehow, she sensed that was exactly the answer he was waiting for. “Harry…” Her voice cracked.
“Fine. If you won’t say it, I will. You aren’t happy, Willow. You’re not. You’re up there, living your dream, checking things off your bucket list, and you can’t even enjoy them. And it’s all my fault. You haven’t been okay since you came to Bliss. I showed up in your life and knocked the bottom out of the block tower you’d been building for years and it’s all tumbling down around you.”
“Nothing was tumbling down around me until now. Tonight. This conversation. I was completely satisfied with my thoughts of finishing up this year and coming down to be with you. For good. Like…” She flared her hands, her words pouring from her mouth without thought. “Just today, I realized that I love you more than dancing. That no role will ever hold a candle to me being with you. I stood in that rehearsal and coached that dumbass on how to touch me like he loved me, and realized that after I finish this ballet, I’ve done everything on my list. There’s nothing else I want to do except be with you.” Tears flowed freely down both cheeks. “And then you sit here with this bullshit about me not being happy. About you ruining my life. You didn’t ruin anything! You made it better!”
Harry sat back, his eyes drawn under the tight line of his eyebrows. He opened and closed his mouth several times, trying to say something only to clamp his lips down against it. He studied her through the camera and it felt like he was really seeing her for the first time that evening.
“I love you, Harrison Moore,” she said. “I really fucking love you.”
“I really fucking love you, too.” There was still a parade of mixed emotions tangling up his face.
“I know they say that if you love something, to set it free, but if that’s what you’re trying to do here, I will hunt you down and knock some sense into your stupid ass. I don’t want to be free of you.” Willow shook her head and closed her eyes. “I want to be free of this,” she said, flaring her fingers and looking around her cramped apartment. “So I can be free to be with you.”
“Really?” he asked. “Do you really mean that?”
“With my entire heart.”
All the worry from Harry’s face washed away in an instant. “Good.”
Willow sucked in a deep breath. “You were going to do it, weren’t you? Leave me because you thought I’d be better off without you.”
Harry lowered his eyes. “All that matters to me is your happiness.”
“I’d punch you if you were here, you know that?” She waited for him to look up so he could see how much she meant what she was about to say. “If you really want to make me happy, then you better prepare yourself to spend a whole lot more time with me. Like years and years and years of time with me.”
“I think I can handle that.” A slow smile stretched the corners of Harry’s lips and he started fiddling with whatever it was he had just far enough offscreen so she couldn’t see.
“Good. You still coming up this weekend? You know, to be with me while I debut in the most important role of my life?” As excited as she was for the curtain to go up on Romeo and Juliet, she was even more excited to know he would be in the audience when it happened.
Harry nodded and all the chaos that had been in his eyes started to recede. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Willow
Willow sat in front of the wall of lighted mirrors and smiled through the reflection at the woman doing her hair. The role of Juliet required an intricate set of braids woven into her bun and that meant she had to spend more time in hair and makeup than she was used to. Warmup class had gone well, despite the nerves and excitement jangling in her system. Not only was she about to debut as Juliet—a role she had dreamed about her whole life—but Harry’s flight had landed an hour ago
and he’d sent her a string of happy texts while she was warming up.
Just knowing they were in the same city had done amazing things to her mood. Knowing that he was at her apartment, moving around in her space, getting ready to come see her perform was exhilarating. Ever since their awful conversation a couple days before—the awful conversation that might have actually ended up being wonderful, she still wasn’t sure—she’d been desperate to see him.
She needed to touch him and make sure he really heard what she was saying. She needed to look into his eyes and be confident he understood that leaving her wouldn’t make her happy. That she’d shatter into a million pieces without him. That her heart was forever bound to him, and as long as they were together she’d be okay, but that if he left, it would destroy her.
Part of her still worried that Harry believed she’d be better off without him. Being the kind of guy he was, the kind of man who would put her needs above his own day in and day out, she knew if he decided she’d be happier without him, then he would leave. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on him, look him in the eyes, and show him how much better she was with him.
She had accomplished what she wanted to accomplish and couldn’t think of a better way to go out than on the high of finally performing her dream role. That night, after the ballet, after she looked into his eyes and made sure he knew that she was for him and he was for her and there was no other way for their story to end—then she would tell him she wanted to finish the season and move to Bliss to be with him, if he would have her.
She smiled at her reflection in the mirror. She couldn’t help herself. That’s what Harry did to her. He kept a smile on her face at all times, for no good reason other than the fact that he was in her life.
The hairdresser caught her eyes through the glass. “Excited?”
“Very.” She didn’t go on to explain the ins and outs of why. She didn’t share that she was more worked up about her evening with Harry than she was about the ballet. That was her own private happiness and she didn’t feel like sharing.
“You’re going to be great. Everyone says you’re built for this role.”
Willow thanked her and closed her eyes, spending the rest of her time in the chair doing her best to put Harry out of her mind while she visualized her performance. She slipped in a pair of earbuds and listened to the music she already knew by heart, thanks to a lifetime of listening and months of rehearsal—Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
She imagined herself doing the choreography as perfectly as anyone she’d ever seen. Imagined Juliet’s feelings into existence and claimed them as her own. Despite her best efforts, her thoughts kept returning to the first night she spent at Harry’s, the night they had listened to the same music together.
She took the feelings the memories of that night created in her and wove them into her visualization of her performance. Created a great tapestry that was both Juliet Capulet and Willow Tamran.
That night, she wouldn’t be Willow dancing Juliet, falling in love with Romeo.
She would be Willow, telling the story of falling in love with Harry through Shakespeare’s timeless plot.
The hairdresser tapped her on the shoulder and Willow opened her eyes. She took out her earbuds and twisted in her seat.
“You’re all done.”
Willow looked in the mirror and smiled. “It looks great! Thank you.”
“Look at you,” said the woman behind her. “Even without makeup on, you’re just glowing.”
She considered telling the hairdresser it was probably still the sweat on her face from warmup class, but there was a level of happiness etched into the contours of her skin that couldn’t have come from the class alone.
“I met the man of my dreams,” she said, realizing in an instant that she was talking to a stranger about the part of her she held most dear and then, in the very next instant, realizing that she didn’t care who she told because she actually wanted people to know. She needed people to know. “He’ll be here tonight and I’ll be dancing with him the whole evening. It’ll be Giuseppe doing the heavy lifting, but my heart will be dancing with Harry.”
The woman wrapped Juliet in a hug and then let go, looking sheepish. “I’m sorry, I don’t normally hug strangers.” A blush colored her cheeks. “But it looked like you needed that.”
Willow smiled and popped her earbuds back in as she walked down the hall to her dressing room to start on her makeup. She couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she couldn’t get her mind off Harry. On one hand, she had so many emotions swirling inside her that if she could channel them onstage it could be one hell of a powerful experience. But on the other, if she couldn’t get her head in the game because she was busy thinking about Harry, she might miss a step or lose the choreography or some other terrible thing.
Besides, the fear that Harry was going to leave her after the show kept trying to raise its ugly head. Just thinking about the fact that there was a possibility he might still be considering leaving made her stomach lurch.
She needed to stop worrying about it all.
She had enough going on without all that.
She’d be better off stepping onstage naked than stepping onstage with those poisonous thoughts in her head.
Willow stopped just outside her dressing room. She closed her eyes and took a breath—knowing she needed to put all thoughts of Harry to rest until after the show. She opened her eyes and slowly exhaled as she pulled open the dressing room door, freezing when she saw bouquets of flowers covering every possible surface.
Roses of all colors. Lilies. Tulips. Daisies. Orchids. Sunflowers. Peonies. And several others she didn’t know the names of.
A dancer stopped behind her and peered around her into the room. “Yeah, those came for you a little while ago.” The girl laughed. “It took three delivery guys like five trips to get them all in. There’s a card on your makeup table.” She leaned around to meet Willow’s eyes. “Someone sure loves you,” she said with a smile before walking away.
Willow stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind her. The scent of so many flowers in the small space was heady, like springtime in heaven. The card was propped up on the table in front of her mirror and for some reason she was nervous to open it. Afraid to see what it said, suddenly certain that Harry was warming her up so he could leave her later without feeling bad about it.
But that was ridiculous. A man didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on flowers after spending hundreds of dollars on plane tickets just so he could leave the woman who loved him.
Right?
After a few heart-pounding seconds, Willow walked over to the card and picked it up. Inside was a handwritten note in Harry’s tidy script.
I never thought to ask you about your favorite flower. Rather than choose the wrong one on such an important day, I bought them all.
Nothing between us.
A scrawling H stretched across the bottom of the card. Willow pressed it to her chest and spun in a circle, taking in the dozens of arrangements filling the room.
“Nothing between us,” she whispered, then sat down to start applying her makeup and getting ready for the stage.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Harry
It was killing Harry not to see Willow before the show. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and draw her body into his.
Kiss every single inch of her neck and tell her that he loved her more than anything.
That he would move heaven and earth for her.
Sitting in the theater, surrounded by the conversations of strangers and the discordant sounds of the orchestra warming up, while knowing he was in the same building she was and couldn’t be with her was torturous. Somewhere behind that red velvet curtain covering the stage, the love of his life was preparing to dance in front of thousands of people.
Pride surged in his heart.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out to find a text from Willow, a picture of wha
t must have been her dressing room totally hidden under flowers.
Willow: Lilies are my favorite.
Another text, this time a picture of her, her hair piled on her head in intricate braids, happiness gleaming in her beautiful blue eyes. He read the words she sent a second later and smiled.
Willow: Nothing between us.
His love for her surged and he wanted to show the picture to the woman seated beside him. To watch as she realized that the woman on his phone was the very same woman whose picture she was studying in the program.
That’s right, he would say. That’s my girlfriend.
Except girlfriend was such a cheap word. It was too small to communicate what she was to him. Instead of flashing the phone at strangers, he smiled to himself and sent a text back.
Me: Nothing between us. :) I love you, my angel.
That was exactly what he wanted.
Nothing between them.
Just a few days before, he’d talked himself into leaving her. Talked himself into giving his grandmother’s ring back to his mom with some lame excuse as to why it should go back in her jewelry box rather than on Willow’s finger. He’d decided he would tell Willow he didn’t want to be with her because there was no way in hell she would let him leave her if she thought he still loved her. No way she would let him sacrifice himself for her.
But, he knew if he claimed he didn’t love her…she wouldn’t fight it. She’d be hurt at first, but she was strong. She would move beyond it and get her life back on track, in time. She’d be free to get the promotion she deserved. Find a new ballet she wanted to perform. Keep gaining more and more fans. Continue growing and changing and setting new goals and creating the best possible path to success.
After the conversation a few days ago—the one where he had finally decided to call it off, and where she called him on it and told him that he was it for her—he realized he couldn’t leave. Not with her already in the middle of planning their future. Together.