But then Oliver stops on the street, wrapping his hand around my wrist and tugging me gently to the edge of the sidewalk. I watch how his face searches mine, illuminated by the streetlamps and the taxi headlights and the glow of the bodega behind us, and that split second is all it takes for my whole body to reject the idea. I don’t want somebody else. I want this.
“No, I think I’m being dumb, because I must have missed something here.”
I swallow thickly.
“It’s just…” I shake my head. “You saying you wouldn’t be my manager. I just thought…”
We make a good team. We said it just a few hours ago. And maybe I shouldn’t be saying anything right now. Shouldn’t tarnish what is a pretty miraculous friendship, given everything that preceded it. But I can’t help myself. I never can.
“Well, of course I couldn’t,” says Oliver, bewildered. “I thought that’d be obvious.”
“Well, why then?”
He has the audacity to laugh. It’s not a mean kind of laugh, but this little chuckle under his breath, like he knows something I don’t.
“Do you think we wouldn’t get along?”
“No, not that.”
“That I wouldn’t take your advice?”
Oliver just shakes his head, a smile still playing at his lips.
“Then what?” I ask stubbornly, my heels digging into the cement.
For a moment he just stands there, his back to the people crowding the sidewalk, my back to the wall. Something shifts in the air, and it occurs to me that Oliver isn’t the one missing something here, but me. Something that’s curling at the edge of that smile he only smiles when we’re alone, something laughing in his eyes, something I can feel the shape of even if I can’t see it yet.
I look down at the cement, sucking in a quick breath before I do or say something more ridiculous than I already have.
“Millie,” he finally says, taking a step toward me. He waits, slowly and deliberately, until I look back up. Then his hand reaches out and settles itself on my cheek, lifting my face up toward his. “You want a reason?”
The word feels like it’s hovering in my throat, suspended in this moment with the two of us—this moment that should feel uncertain, but in a flash, feels anything but. “Yes.”
He leans in close, and I lean in closer. Our foreheads are pressed together, so close that I can’t see his eyes anymore, but can feel everything else—the heat of his skin on mine, the warmth of his breath, the pressure of his other hand that has somehow made its way to the nape of my neck. We’re both completely still, the same way we’ve always been in these few reckless moments when one of us pushes and the other doesn’t immediately push back.
But this—this isn’t one of our games. It’s the end of one. And no matter who makes the first move or who makes the last, it’s one we can both win.
“Because of this,” he says.
And then he kisses me.
My whole life I have learned to have presence. To plant my feet on a stage and anchor myself there. To learn my lines and everyone else’s so rigorously that I’m prepared for any and every possible mistake. To lead the charge, and above all, to lead myself.
It only takes two seconds of kissing Oliver for a lifetime of self-possession to undo itself. For a moment I’m not planted anywhere at all. For a moment there’s nothing to anticipate, nothing to lead. It’s perfect synchronicity. It’s thoughtless and weightless and dizzying, the way I have no idea how to do this but am doing it anyway, the way I don’t need a script or a reason or anything other than Oliver’s lips on mine, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, his hand working its way through my hair.
We pull apart, and the world comes back in phases, but the feeling stays. His forehead is still pressed against mine, the two of us just staring in the aftermath of something that is unprecedented and unexpected and at the same time so ridiculously, stupidly overdue.
“For the record,” I say breathlessly, “we can still make out and work together. Tons of theater power couples—”
Oliver rolls his eyes and cuts me off with another kiss. And then another, and another, until at some point one of us starts laughing and the other does, too, and it occurs to us that we are making quite the spectacle of ourselves in the middle of the theater district.
Before I can start to wonder what this is or what it means or how it’ll play out, Oliver answers all of it by taking my hand. This time he’s the one who weaves his fingers through mine, and this time when he squeezes them, I know what it means without having to ask.
I stop just for a second to steal another glance at his face, to kiss him just under his jaw. He pulls me in closer as we start walking, our shoulders bumping into each other, the two of us unsteady and happy on our feet.
“It’s probably too soon to start calling us a power couple, huh?” I ask merrily. “Since we aren’t industry people.”
Oliver just smiles, weaving us in and out of clusters of other people. For once I am content to let him take the lead. If he’s the one steering, I get to stare at that new smile, the one that’s all mine.
“Millie, you’re not a person,” he says. “You’re a roller coaster. My seat belt is buckled. I have no idea where you’re going, but I’m in for the ride.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When I get home, dazed from all the kissing and the hand-holding and the way Oliver tucked a lock of hair behind my ear at the door to my building and said he’d call me tomorrow, the whole apartment smells like Heather’s pasta sauce. I think my lovestruck brain is playing tricks on me until I round the corner and see Heather at the saucepan, spooning in extra salt.
There are so many things I want to say to her right now. I’m sorry. I found my mom. I don’t know what I want to do about next year, and I have to decide, fast.
Instead what comes out is “Shouldn’t you be at the club?”
“Carly’s taking care of the club tonight. Coop just went out to grab pasta.”
It’s not Sunday, our usual pasta day. I’m trying to figure out if this development is a good sign or a bad one when she turns to look at me, then laughs so hard she accidentally flings pasta sauce on the fridge. I blink at her in alarm.
“Fun night?” she asks.
I touch a hand to my face. “Why?”
“Uh.” She grabs her phone and opens the front-facing camera. My lipstick is apparently not as matte or “kiss proof”—the brand’s words, not mine—as I was led to believe. I look like one of the hookers in Les Mis.
“Oh my god.”
She’s still laughing as I leap up to wipe it off my face before my dad gets home and I scar him for life, still grinning when I come back into the room.
“So … who did the honors there?”
If kissing Oliver was the cake, getting to tell Heather about it is the frosting. The thing that cements it, sweetens it, makes it feel like it really happened and it’s not just some happy part of me floating into space.
“Oliver.”
I fully deserve to get ribbed for this after three years of complaining about him like he was the weather, but Heather is—as usual—way ahead of me.