Act Eighteen
Baylee Wright
I’m incredibly nervous. More nervous than every first date I’ve ever been on. Usually I can articulate myself fine, but I feel like I’m one second away from stumbling over my words and feelings.
I sit tensely across from Luka in a tattered booth of an alien-themed diner. Stuffing peeks out of the ripped, midnight-blue vinyl seats, and UFO cardboard cutouts swing from stained ceiling tiles.
I kind of love how odd it is.
The sole waitress took our drink order and has been chatting up the only other customer, a mustached man at the bar. She’s not really attentive towards Luka and me, which gives us more privacy.
I observe Luka, mostly. He stacks all the sugar packets together, a cigarette between his fingers. He hasn’t lit it yet, but I think he wants to. I don’t mind if he smokes in front of me; I never really have. But maybe he’s not sure if that part of me has changed.
His eyes flit up to mine, a charismatic smile twinkling in them. “You still do that thing.”
“What thing?” I almost smile off of his, but instead, I spin a silver ring on my pinky finger, anxious.
“Watch your surroundings. In this case, me.” Luka stares so deep into me. As though he’s reaching for the person I am—or rather, the young girl I was. The girl he knew.
I stop fiddling with my ring. “Would you rather stay invisible?”
His smile envelops his whole face. “I want to be seen by you. Everyone else, it doesn’t really matter to me.”
I bring my foot to the seat, knee bent. It’s getting hard to look at him directly. Partially because we’ve been forbidden to stare at each other for years—and partially because he’s so much older. And hotter. I didn’t think that’d be possible.
As his smile slowly fades, the weight of everything we lost compounds and stretches taut between us.
“You look older,” I say the obvious—but I’m not taking it back.
“So do you.” He skims me.
I skim him, the table separating us.
Both of us wondering what else is different. What stayed the same. My style hasn’t really altered. Outside of work, I wear a pair of spandex pants and a long-sleeved Nike top.
He’s similarly dressed down like he used to be: jeans and a plain navy tee.
Luka runs a hand through his tousled, dark brown hair. Troubled lines form across his forehead, and then he eyes my floral-printed journal that I set by the salt shaker.
He hasn’t asked what it is, and I haven’t surfaced the list yet.
Luka nods to me. “Maybe we should start at what you planned to say.”
“Back at the hotel?” I just remember being cut off mid-sentence.
“Yeah.” He leans back, but then leans forward. “Or, you know, we can talk about how you are.” The intensity in his gaze speaks that question: how are you doing, Bay?
“How I am,” I repeat, thinking for a hot moment. I watch his fingers pause on the sugar packets. “It really depends on what area. Like work?”
“I work with you.” Luka begins to smile again. “I know how you are at work.”
“Then personal, health, financial, romantic—”
“All of it,” he interjects and spreads his hands out. Sitting close, I wonder if he wishes the table disappeared.
I lean back—almost afraid of taking the risk. He’s always been the one to plunge first. I rest my arms loosely on my knee. All of it. “I want to know the same about you.”
“Trust me, my life has been boring.”
“You’re so far from boring, it’s ridiculous.” I smile off of his smile again. It seems so unbelievable how easily he can flood me with warmth, but reality claws behind us. Ready to tear us apart, and my smile lasts two-point-two seconds before deteriorating completely.
Luka checks his canvas wristwatch. “Practice is at five a.m.”
“And?” Is he…saying what I think he’s saying?
“And we have six hours until then.” Yep, he is. “Want to pull an all-nighter with me, krasavitsa?”
I try to stifle my reaction at krasavitsa. It means beautiful in Russian. “Stop,” I say into another smile.
“What should I stop, krasavitsa?” he teases. The old term of endearment seriously does a number on me.
I put my hand to my face to hide this uncontrollable giddiness—that I’ve only felt from him. “You’re terrible.”
He laughs into the most gorgeous smile. This is where he’d hug me.
Kiss me.
As our cold reality bites us, the lightheartedness drops very abruptly. We’re not those young kids anymore. Being careless and fun on our free days.
He’s not dribbling a basketball between my legs and taunting me to steal it. I’m not whacking my bat at machine-sputtering balls while he announces, “Bases are loaded. She’s 5-and-0. No one can strike out the indomitable, undefeatable Baylee Wright,” all behind the fence. He’s not hollering baseball chants like “pitcher’s gotta big butt”—and I’m not buckled over laughing with my face in my hands.
New York with Luka—it seems like ages ago. Like a different lifetime.
Our gazes search one another. For hope that I’m not sure exists.
I cut into the silence first. “Is it sad that six hours seems too short?”
“It feels like five minutes,” he agrees.
I pile a few sugar packets onto his, and I think aloud, “Marc always said that we were lucky. We got what no one else did.” A second chance. “We’re greedy, aren’t we?” Just being here, we’re taking advantage of the system when they ordered us not to.
Guilt wedges into me.
But not enough to leave this booth. Does that make me a terrible person?
The chiseled lines of his face overtake the angelic. “We’ve been selfless for five years, and Corporate is the one that put us in the same show together.”
“Corporate,” I repeat, the word carrying so much weight.
Luka Kotova is the only one that calls Aerial Ethereal by that generic name. It was always his way of bastardizing a company that set rules he said he could never tolerate.
The familiarity is like stepping into an ice bath. Waking me up to the past and present. Now it’s my turn to stare straight into him.
And I say, “That hasn’t changed.”
He tries to edge closer, but with the table—it’s impossible.
I notice the cigarette in his fingers. “You can light it. I’m not grossed out by smoking.”
Stiffly, he procures a tiny box of matches from his pocket. After lighting the cigarette and blowing smoke upwards, he says, “What’s with the journal?”
I straighten up. “It actually ties into one of the areas I mentioned before.”
He scans me, head-to-waist, like the answer is written on my body. “Which area?”
“Romantic…” I trail off as the waitress returns with our coffees. “Thank you,” I say and she asks if we’re ready to order.
Luka flips open his plastic menu and spontaneously chooses the first thing he sees. He used to do this all the time.
My lips almost pull upward because I love that he still does.
“The extraterrestrial experience,” he tells the waitress.
“I’m good with a coffee,” I say, and as she leaves, I lean over the table and peer at his menu. We both read the description of the food called extraterrestrial experience, and I start laughing loudly.
“Fuck,” he laughs with me. He just ordered a deep-fried Moon Pie.
“I know you’ll still eat it.” I laugh harder, not wanting to lean back just yet.
“Will I?” he teases. “I could be a picky eater now, and you wouldn’t know it.” He meant it to be lighthearted, especially since I’ve seen him eat the same stuff he used to: candy, pizza, huge hamburgers, you name it—all in the past ten days. But an undercurrent of sadness clings to his statement.
“That’s true.” I lower my ass to the seat.
“That was stupid. I’m the same,” he says, more serious. “I promise, I’m the same.”
He’s had nearly half a decade without me. After what happened to us, how could we both be the same? Parts of us did change, but if I could choose anyone to let discover me and for me to be able to discover them, I’d choose Luka.
So I pick up my journal. With a deep breath, I start, “You were my first everything. And then, it just…ended.”
“You were my first too,” he reminds me.
This is going to hurt. “Did you have a second?” I ask outright.
Luka leans back like he got kicked in the stomach. He snuffs out his cigarette in an alien-head ashtray, and then he rakes another hand through his hair.
Yes, his silence says. He did.
My limbs are achingly strict.
“A third? A fourth?” I pause for him to interject, and my throat nearly swells closed. “A fifth? A sixth—”
“It was five years.” He shakes his head repeatedly. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to look at you or even say your name. If I knew we’d be here, right now, I’d have…” he trails off, because it’s too painful to rewrite history like that.
“I’m not admonishing you.”
“Admonishing.” He laughs into a smile. We shouldn’t be able to go from severity to mirth this quickly, but we do. We did.
All the time.
I try to restrain another smile, and then I groan because it won’t stop growing.
“You still look at that thesaurus, don’t you?” he asks, good memories illuminating his features. We both sucked at Aerial Ethereal’s version of high school English, and they gave us thesauruses because we kept reusing the same words in essays. I was actually more interested in mine than Luka ever thought I’d be.
“I like looking at your doodles,” I say seriously. He drew all over the margins of mine. Mostly of stick figures doing cartwheels and backflips. Some of us holding hands.
Sappy teenage moments that I wouldn’t even consider erasing.
“You’ll have to show me them sometime.” He glances over his shoulder like he gathers his thoughts or strength, and when he looks back, his face is stoic but still breakable. “Did you have a second?”
“I tried dating. A lot in the past couple of years.”
He cringes like it’s hard to hear.
I know the feeling. I open my journal so I can explain better.
Luka shifts in the booth, and his gaze narrows at the frosted window. A green neon sign blinks open from inside. “Did you fall in love?”
That’s what he’s really worried about? If I fell in love? “No,” I whisper. “Did you?”
“No,” he says. “You’re the only one.” He licks his lips. “You’re single?”
I nod.
“No friends-with-benefits?” he asks what I asked him in my suite.
“None.”
He tries to relax, and he glances at my journal, noticing my handwriting. It’s not a funny list.
It’s not a joke or surface-level emotions. What I wrote is intimate. It’s something I haven’t even shared with Aunt Lucy. And I definitely wouldn’t show this to Brenden.
My stomach clenches. I’m really scared, but I don’t want to back out. “I meant to show this to you earlier today, but you were late and things just spiraled in a weird direction.”
“I was trying to get my brother off the roulette table.”
“Timo?”
“Yeah.” Luka nods. “I pulled him away when he was four-hundred down.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s not the worst,” he tells me.
It’s just another indication that I haven’t been fully a part of his life recently. I want to be. I want to be so badly, and I ache for him to be a part of mine again.
My list inside the journal is a step towards something more. It’s opening a door that’s been slammed shut. It’s not exactly hope since the contracts still remain fixed, but it’s a hand reaching out to him.
Luka fiddles with the sugar packets. “What is it? The journal, I mean.”
“It’s a list.” It needs more context so I add, “I’ve wanted to move forward, but every time I try, I just…something happens. I’m having trouble in an area—”
“Romantic,” he states.
“Yeah…” I draw out the word to bide my time. “And I think you can help me fix it. You may be able to, you might not. It just feels like my only shot at healing. So I can move on.”
“Move on from me?” he asks tightly.
“I don’t know, maybe.” I would’ve said yes before this season. Before the Infini shakeups. But I feel myself clinging to him more now than ever. “Can you just…?” I hand him the journal, my pulse out of control.
I sweat and overthink. And I scrutinize his focused eyes as they absorb my list.