Page 85 of Take Two

Last night, Jamie and I fell asleep on FaceTime again. He was coming to the end of another week-long road trip and I was finally back from another twelve-hour combat rehearsal, both of us run down to the wire in different time zones, the kind of tired that gets into your bones and stays there. We’d exhausted our steam somewhere between his recap of the game and my attempt to describe how much my shoulders ached, and eventually the conversation just dissolved into mutual yawning and the comfortable quiet of two people who no longer needed words to fill the space.

I propped my phone against my pillow at some point, watched him sleep for a while in the small rectangle of light on my screen, adjusted the angle when it slipped sideways and nearly cut him out of frame entirely. Somewhere deep in the middle of the night I finally drifted off myself, listening to the steady rhythm of him breathing through the speaker, that sound the last thing I registered before sleep took me.

Whoever came up with the phrase absence makes the heart grow fonder can fuck right off with that nonsense.

Every single day I spend away from Jamie doesn’t make me wiser about it or more philosophical. It just makes me want him more. Absence doesn’t build character, it builds ache. It makes me yearn for the man I love the way an addict craves a fix, low and persistent and impossible to reason away no matter how many times I remind myself that the distance is temporary.

For the first time in years, I don’t want another script, another interview, another awards campaign, or another headline with my name and some carefully chosen co-star attached to it. I don’t want the opening weekend projections or the profile pieces or the carefully worded statements from my publicist’s office. I just want Jamie. I want to sit across the kitchen table from him in the morning without a screen between us and watch him drink his protein smoothies.

Over the last four months, work stopped being the thing I loved most. The soul searching is real when you’re lying awake in bed wondering what it all means and if any of it’s worth it anymore.

Work became the thing I did between the moments that actually mattered, the calls with Jamie, the texts that made me smile in the middle of interviews, the stolen hours when we could video chat and I could pretend the distance wasn’t eating me alive from the inside out. Everything else felt like going through the motions, hitting my marks, delivering my lines with the same precision while my heart was somewhere else entirely.

My heart beckons for me now, calls out for me to return to it like a siren song, and I’m such a sucker for the sound that it’s almost embarrassing. I’d swim the Pacific in a heartbeat if I could, fight every current and wave between here and Seattle just to collapse onto that shore and find my way back to him. The geography between us has become my enemy, every mile a personal insult, every time zone a reminder of what I’m missing.

The Bluetooth chimes through the speakers, pulling me from my own ridiculousness.

I tap the button on the steering wheel, my spidey senses already tingling before so much as a syllable comes through. I know exactly who it is.

“Hey,” I call out, reaching forward to lower the volume on my radio. Brea Brookes-Masters had been serenading me quietly with her acoustic guitar for the last twenty minutes, the kind of music that suits this stretch of highway perfectly.

“Hey, Cy.” My brother’s voice fills the cabin, warm and familiar and immediately followed by the sharp sound of a horn blaring and Julian cursing under his breath at whatever driver had apparently offended him. Leave it to my big brother to be navigating midday Los Angeles traffic with the energy of a man who considers every lane change a personal contest of wills.

“About twenty minutes,” I reply, tapping the steering wheel.

“Same,” he sighs, and for a few seconds all I hear through the speaker is the familiar click of his blinker as he changes lanes, the ambient noise of the highway, and the particular silence of someone collecting their thoughts.

“You ready for this?” he finally asks, breaking the quiet.

I let out a slow breath that takes more effort than it should. “Honestly? Not even a little.”

He laughs, quietly and without mockery. “Yeah. Me neither. I’m still a little surprised she actually reached out. But when Mave Reed summons us, we come running, even after all this time.”

I snort. “Even after all this time. I guess it’s a start. Dad’s been encouraging it for months.”

“True,” Julian says, his voice carrying a hint of measured skepticism that I understand completely. “We shall see.”

The silence that follows is comfortable. It always is with Julian. We’ve spent enough years standing side by side. We can read the weight of a silence without having to name it.

“So,” he says eventually, and I can hear the shift in his tone, the ease of it, “how’s Jamie?”

A smile comes before I can think to stop it, my head shaking slowly at the inevitability of it.

“Good. The Vipers are in Chicago. He called after the game last night. They won four to two.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Dad mentioned they’re looking good this year. He’s apparently hoping for another Cup win and, more specifically, tickets.” Julian laughs, warm and fond, and the sound of it pulls up the memory of my dad texting me with barely contained excitement, wanting to know if I was truly, actually, definitively dating the Jamie Maxwell. As though any other Jamie Maxwell existed. Well, Dad, I want to do considerably more than just date him, I think, and the need to say all of this out loud, to put it somewhere outside my own chest, is damn near overwhelming.

“I’ve got a confession to make,” I blurt out.

Julian laughs immediately, which only confuses me for a beat before he settles into it and exhales. “I knew this was coming. All right. Give it to me, Cy.”

“Wait. You did?” I ask, shifting lanes as my exit finally comes into view. “What exactly did you know?”

“I told Malik it’d only be a matter of time,” he chuckles, still not spelling it out, even though I’m fairly certain I already know what he means.

I shake my head, disbelieving. “You two were betting on me?”

“We weren’t betting against you,” he says, and there’s something genuinely warm in the amusement coloring his voice. “We were rooting for you, baby brother. Malik just owes me dinner now. A very expensive one. I’m thinking Japan.”