Le sigh. That look. That face. With his smoldering intensity so singularly focused on me, my knees buckled even though I was sitting. His magnetism was undeniable, and I knew I would relent to whatever he asked of me, every . . . single . . . time. “It was Christmas Day, and I couldn’t find a taxi to save my life. I stepped into a phone booth in search of a cab company, picked up the receiver, and it switched over to an operator who, for some reason, gave me your address instead.”
He shook his head, clearly mystified. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He stayed quiet for a moment, lost in his own recollection. “And what’s even stranger is I had just been thinking about you literally that very day, and then poof, there you were, standing in my doorway after almost seven years of radio silence.”
I put my hands up to emphasize my own defense. “Gabe, I swear, I didn’t come looking for you that night. I was just as surprised to see you standing on the other side of that door as you were to see me. I can’t explain it. I wish I could. I was going to pretend like it never happened, but then you sent me that text, and I don’t know, I wanted to see you again.”
He grabbed for my hands and tucked them into his own. They were warm and comforting and familiar. “I wanted to see you again too,” he said, his admission intoxicating.
His phone rang from inside his bag, cutting through the words he left hanging in the air between us. He let go of my hands to scramble to find it amid his notebooks and papers, but instead of answering, he quickly hit the silence button and tucked it away, before promptly turning his attention back to me.
Surprised, I couldn’t help but ask, “Did you need to get that?”
“Whatever it is can wait.”
Who was this person? He certainly looked like the same Gabe. About a head and a half taller than me, wild dark hair and that beautiful face . . . from his scruffed chin to his familiar hazel eyes fringed with thick lashes any woman would envy. But now, the tension he used to carry in his jaw and shoulders had given way to a more relaxed posture that conveyed a sense of ease he never had before. The old Gabe would have never let a work call roll to voice mail. This was brand-new territory.
“There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you over the years,” he continued, “but you’d moved on, and I figured maybe it was all better left in the past. Then there you were on my doorstep, and I thought maybe I was being given the chance to say all the things I never did.”
Though it was the last thing I expected, I couldn’t keep my heart from swelling at the idea that he’d left things unsaid too, and that after all these years, we were somehow getting a chance to lay it all out on the table.
He continued, “I was a different person then. I didn’t appreciate what we had, not in the way I should have. You were my best friend, and I let you walk right out of my life. I’m sorry, Avery. I was so consumed with my own ego to believe I could somehow fix the world for everyone around me, all the while hurting the one person who mattered the most in mine.”
His finger crooked under my chin and gently lifted it so I could look into his eyes. His voice was soft, almost a whisper. “But don’t think for a minute that I walked away completely unscathed.”
Before I could exhale, he rubbed his thumb over my cheek. His expression radiated a hurt I wasn’t aware I’d caused. And after the disastrous Wicked audition and our subsequent breakup, the last thing I ever imagined was that I’d be sitting across from him in this small café, a bistro table, two steaming coffees, and seven years of silence between us.
I stared into his apologetic eyes and could tell he was truly sorry that he hadn’t appreciated our relationship more. Hearing Gabe lay out his regrets so openly had been the last thing I expected when I agreed to meet him today. Over the years, I’d managed to convince myself Gabe was fine with our breakup—one less thing to distract him from his social crusades. Now, finding out he’d been as heartbroken as I was shook me to my very core.
At the beginning of our relationship, it was Gabe’s unwavering passion that drew me to him. Growing up with a single mother, always just skirting the poverty line, he committed himself to doing his best to even out the playing field for everyone else. I couldn’t help but be impressed by his altruism, the same way everyone was. But there was a good reason most superheroes stayed single. Turns out, when you’re all consumed with saving the world, there’s very little room for much else. After all this time, I couldn’t help but wonder if Batman had finally hung up his cape, or at least tucked it into the drawer?
I shifted my gaze, after realizing I’d been staring at him for a few seconds too long, and said, “So, I have to ask, you mentioned you were thinking about me on Christmas. About what, exactly?”
He flashed a grin and nodded. “Yeah, I was trimming the tree with some old ornaments in my new apartment thinking about that ridiculous hovel we shared—”
“The one in Hell’s Kitchen with the bathtub in the living room! We had roaches so big we named them and almost bought them their own stockings.”
“That’s the one! Yeah, I was thinking about that apartment, and that first Christmas Eve we spent there. Remember, you came home with all those bags of groceries after a particularly lucrative shift at Mimi’s,” he reminisced.
“People couldn’t seem to get enough of my Auntie Mame, and it was the holidays so maybe they were feeling extra generous.” I smiled at the memory.
“We cooked a feast, remember?”
“All I remember is every time you stuck your finger in the pot to taste what was cooking, you’d yell out—”
“‘It’s a Christmas miracle!’” we both shouted in unison with our pointer fingers thrust toward the sky.
We laughed at the recollection, and for as much heartache and time that had passed, it didn’t take long for us to fall back into our natural rhythm.
“You’ll be happy to know that before I took this new apartment, I insisted that my bathtub actually be in my bathroom—no ‘half bath’ situation,” he said with a wink and smile.
I clasped my hand over my mouth to stifle a laugh. “Remember how excited the super was to show it to us in that first apartment? Exclaiming something like, ‘It has a half bath . . . half of the bathroom just so happens to be beside the couch. Pretty great, right?’”
He flashed a mischievously sexy grin. “It was pretty great.”
I thought back to our Sunday night wind-down ritual. Gabe would draw a warm bubble bath, and we’d climb inside the tub with a box of pizza and a cheap bottle of pinot noir to watch Game of Thrones, staying curled against one another in the water through the whole episode, not even caring how much the temperature dropped over the sixty-minute show. When it was over, we’d hop out of the bath, water puddling at our feet onto the hardwood floors, and flop onto the couch wrapped up in terry-cloth towels with every intention of watching whatever show followed. But . . . we rarely made it past the opening credits before we lost the towels and then ourselves in each other.
I blushed. “Who would have thought a bathtub could actually be better than a couch? Unless you count that time we watched Titanic.”