He slammed the microphone down onto the side table next to him, standing up abruptly. It rolled off and hit the ground with an overamplified thunk. He leaned over Nora, who looked stricken, and murmured something in her ear. Her microphone picked up his voice, sending it echoing through the room: Are you happy now?
He straightened back up and looked directly at Grey. She had jumped to her feet without realizing it. Their eye contact only lasted for a split second before he stalked offstage. The crowd erupted in confused chatter, as the moderator struggled to maintain order.
Grey grabbed her purse and darted toward the hallway, racing down the back stairs and out the emergency exit onto the street. She spotted Ethan instantly, his broad back moving away from her.
“Ethan!” She barely recognized her own voice, shrill and tight with panic. He slowed for a second, so she knew he heard her, but quickly picked up the pace again. She broke into a full sprint, grateful she’d eschewed high heels for the night as she dodged pedestrians to catch up with him.
He didn’t stop and look at her until she’d reached his side and placed a desperate hand on his arm. When she got a good look at his face, contorted and stormy, her heart plunged into her stomach.
“Where are you going?” she panted.
He shook his head, refusing to look at her. “I can’t.”
“What? You can’t what?” People had started to notice them now, to stop and gawk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw phones poised and ready to capture whatever was about to happen. Of fucking course. Even the buffer of anonymity provided by seen-it-all New Yorkers was no match for an impending celebrity meltdown.
She grabbed Ethan’s hand and pulled him off the curb, using the line of parked cars as a temporary barrier between them and the gathering crowd. Mercifully, an empty cab drove by, and she flagged it down and hauled him inside.
“Third and Bowery, please,” she instructed the driver, stabbing at the obnoxiously loud Taxi TV screen until she finally found the mute button.
She sank back into the seat and turned to look at Ethan. He was already staring at her, his eyes glazed and dull. “This is what you were waiting for, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“An excuse to bail. To leave me again. Just like Palm Springs.”
Grey’s mouth fell open. “Palm Springs? What the fuck are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything?”
It didn’t seem like he’d heard her. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, muttering to himself. “I fucked it up. I fucked it all up.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “You just need to get some help. We can fly back to L.A. tonight. I’ll call Nora, or Audrey, and we can figure out somewhere for you to go. Will you do that? Please?”
He shook his head violently, pushing himself upright in a lurching, unsteady motion. He spoke forcefully, spit flying. “You can’t fix me, Grey. Nobody can. This is me. The real me. This is who I am, this is who I’ve always been.”
Grey fought to keep her voice from trembling. “It doesn’t have to be. You’re in control.”
He shut his eyes again, his face a mask of despair. “No. I’m not.” The agony in his voice was a blunt object, knocking the wind out of her.
Grey paused to gather her thoughts, trying to keep herself as composed as possible. “I don’t believe this is the real you. I’ve seen the real you. I’m in love with the real you.” He didn’t move. Didn’t even open his eyes. “But it doesn’t matter what I think, if you don’t believe that.”
He opened his eyes, his gaze blank. “I wanted to be him, for you. I tried. But…I can’t. I told you. I warned you. I’m fucking defective.”
Grey expected herself to cry, but instead, rage flared inside her, white-hot like a sparkler in her sternum. She threw her head back and dragged her hands over her eyes, groaning in frustration. “Jesus Christ. You’re almost forty years old, Ethan, take some goddamn responsibility for yourself,” she spat, dropping her hands back into her lap with a dull thud.
Ethan seemed taken aback by her lacerating tone, but raised his voice to match hers, practically snarling. “I do. You think I don’t know how fucked up I am? You know how much I fucking hate myself?”
“No. Fuck that. Blaming yourself, feeling sorry for yourself, hating yourself is not the same as accountability. It doesn’t help anyone unless you do something about it. You need to get it together and step the fuck up.” Grey hoisted her knee onto the seat and shifted so she was fully facing him. “People care about you. People need you. Your kids need you. I need you.”
“For your career, you mean.”
Grey recoiled. “Is that what you think?”
He shrugged, unable to meet her eyes. Bile rose in her throat. “Just because you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have to work for anything—” She stopped herself before she said something she’d regret, sinking back into the seat and raising her hands in surrender. “No. No. I’m not doing this with you.”
He turned to face her again, the look in his eyes sending a chill down her spine. “I guess that’s that, then.” They were deep in midtown traffic at this point, and the taxi had slowed to a halt. He groped for the door handle and Grey’s eyes widened.
“What are you doing?”
He ignored her. She lunged across the seat and grabbed hold of his arm, bringing her face to his until they were practically nose to nose. His breathing was ragged and unsteady, bloodshot eyes darting back and forth across her face. The man she loved was in there somewhere, but she was running out of chances to reach him. She unclenched her jaw and lowered her voice.
“You think you don’t have a choice. You have a choice right now. You can either come back to the hotel with me and we deal with this like adults, or you can get out of the cab and it’s over.” Her voice was thick with tears by the time she finished, but she successfully kept them from spilling over. He wouldn’t walk out on her now. He couldn’t. Not if he really loved her. She prayed desperately to any deity that would listen for the taxi to start moving again.
Ethan had turned away from her as she spoke, looking out the window again. When he looked back, it felt like her heart stopped. She wasn’t sure when he’d started crying. He hadn’t made a sound. Even now, she thought maybe she was imagining it, his expression controlled and impassive to the extent that she could even make it out, cloaked in shadow in the darkened cab. But he turned his head again and a streetlight caught his cheeks, slick and streaming with tears. Her lips parted in a silent gasp. She was speechless.
He leaned forward, grasped her jaw in both hands, and kissed her—salty, brief, harsh. He released her and she gaped at him, dumbfounded, as he opened the door and stepped out into the street without another word. Her body was frozen, her brain in denial, unable to do anything but watch helplessly through the window as he wove his way through the stopped traffic and disappeared into the night.
Back at the hotel, she cried until her eyes swelled shut. She tried to get some sleep, but tossed and turned for hours, floating in and out of tormented dreams, half hallucinating that Ethan had come back, pliant and contrite, pledging his eternal devotion to her and prepared to do whatever it took to turn his life around. But of course every time she opened her eyes, she was still alone in that obnoxiously large bed.
When dawn broke, she booked the first available flight back to L.A. After she finished packing, she picked up a pen and poised it over the hotel notepad, then hesitated. At last, she scrawled: I’m not the one who ran away. She immediately tore it off the pad and crumpled it into the trash. Justified or not, it seemed too petty, too melodramatic. She’d already gotten the last word, and it hadn’t made her feel any better.