Riley pulls on the sweats and hoodie draped carelessly over the couch. I put my clothes back on. We’re silent. We’ve played our encore. All that’s left now is to go home.
Riley pours herself a glass of water. “Did you have a good trip?” she asks.
It’s small talk. Stiff, impersonal. It’s how I know this is really, really over. In the past decade, we’ve swung from the soul-exalting heights of passion to silence so huge it swallows years. It’s almost impossible to remember that her lips were just pressed to my chest, that I was touching every part of her, writing love songs like frantic scribbles on the map of my heart.
“I did,” I say. Gathering my resolve, I press on into the quiet. “I’m sorry for how I left.”
She drops into the chair near the door, farthest from me. The way she moves is unfamiliar to me, her limbs slack with exhaustion. I want to pretend it’s only from the epic concert she just played. Deep down, I know it isn’t.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised,” she says hollowly. “I honestly didn’t expect you to return to finish the tour.”
I wish I didn’t deserve the stinging shot. “Well . . . ,” I begin, shifting on my feet, facing down the message I decided in Harcourt Homes’ dark dining room I needed to deliver. “I think it would be best if I dropped out.”
Riley puts her glass down. “There it is,” she says. Her sarcasm is humorless.
“Riley.” I hear the plaintive strain in my voice.
“What? You’re bailing on me just like you did ten years ago.” She’s angry, but I can hear how beneath her anger, she’s hurt and trying to cover it. The last thing I want is to hurt her. It doubly breaks my heart.
“Can you honestly ask me to stay when you’ve practically said we can never be more than another breakup song?”
She stares straight forward, her dull glare fixed on nothing. Her silence says everything, the one answer she’s able to give. I feared it no less for knowing it was coming.
It makes me reach down into myself, ripping up something rooted deep. “I love you,” I say. Words I haven’t spoken to Riley in so long. I can’t decide if they sound like dissonance or utter clarity.
She looks at me. “Don’t,” she warns. “Don’t say you love me in the middle of breaking up with me. It’s not fair.”
I flinch, feeling racked with urgency. “You think I want to do this?” I reply. My words pick up speed, the unique momentum of downward spirals. “I don’t. Of course I don’t. I’ve spent every waking moment of this week trying to talk myself out of this, to believe if I just . . . gave myself to you, if I let you break my heart, I would still be happy to have however many days, weeks, years with you.”
Her eyes have gone wide. I know I’m not one to share my every feeling. Right now, though, I can’t manage to stop.
“But I don’t know if that’s true,” I continue, staring into the center of my words. “I think I have to live my life on my terms. Until you believe what we have is strong enough to last, it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Riley replies instantly. Her voice crackles with dark charge, like while I was speaking, she carefully seared the exhaustion out of every corner of her. “You. Us. It’s everything to me. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see the fact that I would risk even more pain just to be with you is proof of how much I love you?”
The declaration she’s snuck into her question cuts the conversation clean open. Everything stops until she goes on. Her voice is different. Where she was protesting, now she’s pleading.
“I love you, Max,” she says. “I never stopped. Every song. Every fucking note I sing is inspired by you.”
They’re the words I’ve yearned for. It makes them deadly now, dreams sharpened into daggers.
I don’t know how to explain to Riley why they don’t fix what’s wrong with us. In the end, the question isn’t whether you love someone—it’s how you love them.
“Then I’m giving you what you want, right?” I ask. “Just write the breakup song now.”
Riley wilts, wounded. “I didn’t— That’s not what I meant. You’re more than a song to me.”
I shake my head, hating how everything in the room is imprinting itself on my mind. In some ways, I feel I’ll never leave this trailer. Heaven changed into purgatory.
“It’s not me you don’t believe in,” I reply. “It’s yourself. You don’t think you deserve a love that lasts. I feel like you’ve told yourself the same story too many times not to believe it. You’re the Breakup Queen.”
Riley’s rearing up to cut me off when I continue.
“But I wish you knew you write incredible breakup songs because you’re you,” I say, “not the other way around.”
Her expression closes up. The light in her looks fragile. I understand why, I do. Hearing yourself mischaracterized hurts—of course it does. Hearing yourself described exactly right, down to the flaws whose painful costs you can’t escape, hurts worse.
It’s why I keep my voice gentle. “You could write anything, Riley. You could be anything. I really hope you see that one day. I’ll be listening until you do.”
I fall silent, having reached the end. Not just of my speech. Of . . . everything. I wait, not knowing why.
Riley watches me, steeliness resolving in her eyes. The unrestrained conviction that makes her her. She’s not going to give. She’s not going to promise something she can’t uphold.
I love her for it. I really do.
At the end of the conversation, I start to notice sounds outside, like I’m returning to the world. The pounding of the music from festival parties still going in the late-night tents. The security staff outside. The cars on the city streets not far from the grounds.
The surrealism of it, the improbability, is overwhelming. I’m having the most important, most painful conversation of my life in the middle of Coachella, in the headliner’s trailer.
She stands up, holding her hand out to me. Impossibly, her lips curl in a small smile. “Thank you for playing with me, Max Harcourt.”
I take her hand, knowing it might be the last time I touch her. It splits my heart into pieces. But I’ll hear her voice on the radio, or on my record player whenever I want. It’s something. A torture I’ll relish forever.
The idea of her releasing my hand, severing the connection, is unbearable. I don’t let her, not yet. Instead, I pull her into one final hug, crushing the sob in my chest into her frame.
She strokes my back. “You’re going to have the happiest life,” she says. The quiet whisper is nearly unrecognizable from the woman whose voice could fill the world. “You deserve it. You’ll find someone who’s everything I’m not, everything you need her to be. You’ll be okay.”
My body shudders. They’re words I know she’s spoken to herself in the depth of other nights, ones she’s lyricized like no one else could. She isn’t just saying goodbye. She’s singing me the purest song she knows.
Her voice is choked when she continues. “It’s an honor to have my heart broken by you.”
I laugh wetly. It’s strange, this feeling of searching for the last things I want to say to her. I find one. “You taught me what love is, too, you know. It’s why I couldn’t listen to ‘Until You.’ I didn’t want to remember that,” I confess. “I won’t forget it now.”
Riley smiles sadly. “Would you rather I’d written you something unmemorable?”
Whether knowingly or not, she’s hit on the question I’ve struggled with since the day I found out I was the song’s inspiration. Would I rather she not have spun our fleeting love into the pop charts’ greatest heartbreak hit?
“No,” I say with the deepest honesty. “It’s perfect.”
In the smallest shift of her body, I feel it—her relief.
I pull back. “Take care, Riley.” Every word, every second, is effort. When I walk toward the door, I feel like I’m ripping myself from her. If I didn’t, I would never leave. She’s my siren, even when she’s not singing.
I have to concentrate on every movement my legs make as I move to the door. With only the night waiting for me, I walk out of Riley’s life for the last time.