Page 104 of The Encore’s Crown

I love you.

I closed my eyes. There were a hundred things I could have said, a hundred jokes, a thousand exits. Instead, I reached back until I found her hand and threaded my fingers through hers.

“Huh? I think I've gone deaf from all the powder. I've got some stuck in my ear.” I teased.

So she said it again.

And for one single night, in that insane house, wrapped up together in a massive bed with color fading on my skin, I wanted to be the kind of man who stayed.

For the first three months after India, I believed love had changed me.

Maybe Holi had done it. Maybe Radhika had.

I came back to Los Angeles with color still trapped beneath my fingernails and red dust buried so deeply in the seams of my boots that it followed me into rehearsal rooms for weeks. Every time I found another streak of it, I remembered her laughing in my arms. Blue across her face. Tears brightening the pigment beneath her eyes. Her mouth against mine when she told me she loved me too.

Something inside me had settled. For the first time in my life, I looked at the distance between us and thought we could beat it. We would make it work. We loved each other, after all. That's all it took, right?

Those words had meant everything to me because I had held onto them for my entire adult life. Saved them like there was only one person in the world worthy of hearing them from me. Radhika was the first woman I'd ever said them to and, as far as I was concerned, she'd be the last. How could anyone come after her?

She was beautiful enough to make people stop speaking when she entered a room. Smart enough to make me feel like I should start reading books with fewer pictures. Talented, funny, stubborn, generous. She could argue with me for an hour, leave me furious, then make one face and have me fighting not to laugh. I had no idea how I had gotten so lucky.

For all three months, I walked on a cloud. Radhika became part of the band so naturally that I couldn’t remember what it had been like before she was there. She flew to Seattle while we were recording the next album and sat cross-legged on the studio floor at three in the morning, eating fries from a paper basket while Rafe replayed the same vocal line until everyone wanted to kill him.

“That last word is wrong,” she told him.

Rafe turned slowly from the mixing desk.

“And what would be the right one?”

“You’ve played it fourteen times. I don't know the right one, I just know the last one is wrong.”

Rithy pointed at her without looking up from his guitar. “You don’t get a vote for being beautiful.”

“Neither do you,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “The lyric is Rafe’s.”

“I’m protecting the artistic process.”

“You’re protecting him from discovering a thesaurus.”

Ronan leaned back behind the kit. “Oh she's grand. Finally someone getting onto you two geniuses.”

“You rushed the second chorus,” Radhika said.

Ronan stared at her. She smiled sweetly.

“I take it back,” he said. “She’s banned.”

We ended up at a diner after recording, all of us crowded into a booth beneath lights too bright for four in the morning. Emily sat tucked beneath Rafe’s arm, wearing one of his jackets and looking more rested than any of us had a right to be. He had finally settled down with her and bought a place in Seattle, something he had sworn for years he would never do until he was thirty. Radhika sat beside me with one hand wrapped around a coffee cup and the other beneath the table, resting on my thigh.

The guys argued about the album. Emily stole bacon from Rafe’s plate. Rithy declared all critics intellectually bankrupt. Radhika laughed until she nearly spilled her coffee. I looked around the booth and thought, This is it.

Everything we were supposed to feel once we had money, success, and more people knowing our names than we knew what to do with. I was making an album with my brother and my best friends. We could afford to order whatever we wanted without checking the price. I was in love with the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen and at least some of the time, I got to wake up with her tangled around me.

Nothing could touch us.

Then Radhika got the film.

It was the kind of role people waited their entire careers for. The kind of script that came with awards talk before anyone had shot a frame. She would be in nearly every scene, filming across India, Europe, Morocco, and whatever other country the production decided could stand in for somewhere magical. They expected filming to take close to a year.