Everything between us

CHAPTER 4:Same time tomorrow

She was there at seven-fifteen.

Of course she was. She had told herself, in the cab uptown, that arriving at seven-fifteen meant nothing it was the time she always arrived, had always arrived, would always arrive regardless of what had or hadn't happened over burned eggs and three inches of sofa and a man saying same time tomorrow through the narrowing gap of an elevator door. Seven fifteen was professional. Seven fifteen was routine. Seven fifteen was the time written in the terms of her employment and the habit of eighteen months and had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she had been awake since five forty two and had spent the intervening hour and a half sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee she forgot to drink, thinking about the particular way he had looked at her when she laughed.

She let herself in. The penthouse was quiet. The city outside the windows was doing its grey November morning thing flat light, low cloud, the park below stripped nearly bare now, the last holdout trees clinging to a handful of leaves with the determination of things that know they are losing. She dropped her bag. Hung her coat. Pulled out her tablet.

She did not start the coffee.

She stood in the kitchen for a full thirty seconds not starting the coffee, which was an act of such deliberate insignificance that she immediately recognised it as the most significant thing she had done since taking off her coat the previous evening. Then she started the coffee, because not starting it was not a statement she was prepared to make, and she was in the middle of measuring the grounds when she heard him.

Not the piano. Footsteps his specific footstep pattern, which she knew the way she knew his silences and his voices and the difference between his thinking face and his decided face and the sixteen other things she had catalogued and filed and told herself constituted professional familiarity rather than something more precise and more dangerous. He was moving from the bedroom toward the living room, which meant he was already up, which was unusual enough that she checked her watch. Seven-twelve. He was never up at seven twelve.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway. Dressed dark trousers, a charcoal shirt not yet fully buttoned, barefoot as always. His hair was damp. He had showered, which meant he had been awake for some time, which meant he had slept as badly as she had, which was information she received and stored and did not remark upon.

He looked at her. She looked at him. The morning did its quiet, particular work around them.

"You're here," he said.

"Seven fifteen," she said. "As discussed."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile more the precursor to one, the thing that happened in his face before he decided whether to let it become the real thing. "As discussed," he repeated, with a flatness that was not agreement and not disagreement but something that held both simultaneously, which was a thing he did frequently and that she had spent eighteen months pretending not to find devastating.

She turned back to the coffee. "You have a call at eight thirty with the European promoter about the tour routing. After that Diana wants twenty minutes she has press questions ahead of the album announcement that she wants to run past you before they go to the label. I'd recommend approving the Rolling Stone request and deferring the morning television until we're closer to the release date."

"Alright."

"Lunch is clear. I've kept the afternoon light you've got the session booked at Electric Lady from four, which I can push if the Diana meeting runs long."

"It won't."

"It always does."

"Not when I decide it won't."

She almost smiled at that. She did not let it become a real smile because real smiles, she had established firmly in the last twelve hours, were a vulnerability she was not prepared to deploy before eight o'clock in the morning. She poured the coffee. She held out his cup. He crossed the kitchen and took it and this time, unlike every other morning, he did not immediately step back. He stayed where he was, close enough that the space between them was no longer professionally neutral, holding his cup in both hands and looking at her with that expression she still did not have an adequate category for, though she was building one.

"Did you sleep?" he asked.

"Adequately," she said, which was the answer she had given yesterday and which was, today as yesterday, not a yes.

"Ava."

"The Rolling Stone request

"Will be there in ten minutes." He said it without impatience, without edge. Simply. The way he said everything that was not negotiable as a fact, delivered gently, that the world was expected to accommodate. "Can you stop for ten minutes."

It was not a question. She had noticed that his not questions had a different quality from his actual questions a different weight, a different expectation of the space that followed them. She had been noticing this for eighteen months and had always, until now, been able to meet them with her tablet.

She put the tablet down on the counter.

He looked at it. Then at her. Something in his expression settled, as though she had confirmed something he had suspected but had not been certain of.

"Last night," he said.

"We don't have to

"I know we don't have to." Still even. Still unhurried. "I want to." A pause, and then, more quietly: "I've wanted to for a long time. Say things, I mean. To you. Directly. Without the buffer of the schedule."

She was quiet. Outside the windows the city hummed its constant low note and the coffee between them sent up a thin curl of steam and she was acutely, uncomfortably aware that she had put down her tablet and that there was nothing between her and this conversation now except herself.

"Last night was she started.

"Good," he said. Simply. "It was good. You were there and it was good and I didn't want you to leave." Another pause. "I don't want to make that complicated. I just want you to know it."*

She looked at him. He was standing in his own kitchen in his bare feet with damp hair and a cup of coffee and he was looking at her with the full, unmediated attention that was she understood now, had perhaps always understood the most genuinely dangerous thing about him. Not the fame. Not the talent. Not the money or the penthouse or the way rooms changed when he entered them. This. The way he looked at you as though you were the only coordinates worth mapping.

"It was good," she said, finally. Quietly. It cost her something to say it plainly like that, without qualification or deflection, and he seemed to understand that it did, because something in his posture shifted not toward her, not yet, just a small unlocking, the way a person looks when they have been holding something carefully and have been told, at last, that they can set it down.

"Alright," he said. And then, after a beat: "Same time tonight?"

She looked at him. "I'm not your assistant after six o'clock."

"No," he agreed. "You're not."

The silence that followed was the most eloquent silence of the entire eighteen months. It held the question he was not phrasing as a question and the answer she was not yet saying out loud and every single thing that existed in the space between those two realities, which was, she was beginning to understand, the space in which they actually lived.

She picked up her tablet. She opened his morning schedule.

"Eight-thirty," she said. "European promoter. Don't agree to the Paris date the venue capacity is wrong for where the album is going to land."

He watched her for a moment. Then he picked up his coffee and turned toward the window, and she saw from the particular set of his shoulders, the quality of the silence he carried back out of the kitchen with him that he was not disappointed. He was, she realised, doing the same thing she was. Holding it. Carrying it carefully. Moving through the morning with it tucked against him like something he was protecting from the weather.

The day passed the way days passed now which was to say, on the surface, exactly as days had always passed, and underneath the surface, nothing like that at all.

The European promoter call ran long. She had anticipated this and had built the buffer. Diana's meeting ran long also Diana's meetings always ran long because Diana was constitutionally incapable of saying in one sentence what could be said in seven, a quality Ava had always found professionally maddening and today found almost soothing in its familiarity. She sat in on the meeting, as she always did, and took notes, and answered three of Diana's questions before Ethan could because the answers were logistical and logistics were hers, and at one point Diana looked between the two of them with an expression that was professionally neutral and personally very attentive, and Ava filed this under things to think about later and moved on.

The afternoon session at Electric Lady was productive she knew this not because she was there but because he texted her at seven forty-three with a voice note attached and the message: listen to this. She sat in her apartment with her coat still on and listened to forty seconds of something unfinished and extraordinary and felt it move through her the way his music always moved through her, which was to say completely, from the inside out, finding all the rooms she kept locked and sitting down in them uninvited.

She texted back: the bridge needs another eight bars.

Three minutes passed.

His reply: I know. I was waiting for you to hear it first.

She sat with her coat still on for another four minutes after that. Then she got up, hung the coat, made tea, and sat at her kitchen table with her planner open in front of her.

She looked at the three rules in the back. She did not cross anything out. But she turned the page, and on the fresh page opposite she wrote nothing, just left it blank, which was perhaps its own kind of statement a page held open, unscheduled, without rules yet, waiting to find out what it would become.

At nine seventeen her phone lit up. No message. Just his name on the screen, the call connecting before she had fully decided to answer it.

"I finished the bridge," he said, when she picked up.

"Already?"

"You told me what it needed."

She leaned back in her chair. Outside her window the city moved through its late evening frequencies horns, a siren somewhere distant, the low continuous hum that never entirely stopped. She had lived in this apartment for three years and had spent most of that time organising someone else's world. She had not, until this moment, particularly noticed how quiet her own was when she was inside it.

"Play it to me," she said.

A pause. The sound of him moving through the penthouse. The familiar acoustics of the living room she knew them, she realised, as well as she knew her own apartment. The sound of the piano bench. A moment of silence that was not empty but full, the specific fullness of a person settling into something they love.

And then he played.

She listened with her eyes closed in her small, quiet apartment, and the music came through the phone like something that had crossed a distance to reach her, and she felt it the way she had felt it that first morning through the walls completely, from the inside out, finding all the rooms she kept locked.

He played to the end. The new bridge was eight bars. It was perfect.

"Well?" he said, when the last note had finished.

She opened her eyes. The city outside her window. The blank page in her planner.

"It's the best thing you've written," she said.

A silence. Then, quietly: "I wrote it for you. All of it. From the beginning."

She did not answer immediately. She let the words exist in the space between them, across the city, through the line, without rushing to respond or deflect or redirect. She let them land where they landed, which was deep and specific and permanent.

"I know," she said, finally.

And it was the truest thing she had said to him yet.