Page 96 of Always Been His

She stops.

The terminal keeps moving around us, rolling luggage and departure announcements, while between us everything goes completely still.

“Grayson came to Boston,” I say, and my voice has changed now, the measured quality cracking at the edges into something rawer and truer. “And you walked him out of the building with a fan tote bag and a smile, and you told him I’d already left.” My chest is going faster now, the anger that has been sitting beneath everything for months rising up through it. “And then you walked into my dressing room and told me he left before the song finished. You looked me in the face, and you lied to me, Nicki. You decided that he was a distraction, and you removed him without asking me whether he was something I wanted to keep. For two years, I believed he didn’t want me, and he thought I didn’t want him. We lost two years of our lives because of a decision you made in a venue hallway without my permission.”

“You couldn’t be a pop star with a boyfriend,” she says. “You’re selling a fantasy.”

“This is not a fantasy. This is my life. You manipulated two people who loved each other because it was inconvenient for your tour schedule. You lied to both of us and called it management.” I shake my head slowly. “Do you understand what you took from us? I wrote an album about it, Nicki. You were on the album credits. You got ten percent of the royalties from an album I wrote about the grief you caused, and you cashed those checks without batting an eyelid.”

Nicki sniffs, folding her arms over her chest. “I did everything to protect your career and raise you into the star you are, and you never even thanked me.”

“I’m done with you.” I hiss, poking her in her chest. “The star I am is because of me and my talent. Not you.”

Something flickers across Nicki’s face that, in a different life, might’ve been a smile. She picks up the handle of her carry-on, the rollers hitting the floor with a sharp click. “You’re going to regret this.”

“Take care, Nicki,” I say, my voice even and sure.

She turns and walks toward the TSA line without looking back, her blazer straight, her posture perfect, and her carryon rolling behind her. And I watch her go until the line swallows her and she disappears into the crowd.

I signed with a label when I was eighteen years old. I had a manager the entire time. A tour schedule, a content calendar, a press team, a stylist, a driver, an earpiece, Bow sending itinerary updates at midnight. I’ve been Echo since I was nineteen years old, and Echo has always been me, she has never not been me, but the machine built around her was never mine, and now there is no machine.

There is just me. Sienna.

I turn around.

Grayson is exactly two steps behind me, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on my face, and he is smiling. “Okay?” he murmurs.

I exhale. “Yeah,” I say. “Really okay.”

Something in his face does the warm thing, the unhidden thing, the thing he stopped locking down that night in the rain.

“Good,” he says, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Because we have a flight in forty minutes.”

“We have a what?” I scoff.

He just looks at me. Calm. Unbothered.

“You never got to Bali,” he says. “You wanted to go, right?”

“Grayson…”

“Private terminal.” He turns me in the opposite direction. “Douglas Aviation. Forty minutes.”

“But… I have no luggage.”

“Two bags already on the flight,” he says. “Iris packed for you.”

I press both hands flat against my mouth.

The laughter that comes out is real, the surprised kind that gets out before I can do anything about it, and Grayson stops and turns to look at me. I close the distance between us in two steps.

I cup his face with both hands and I kiss him in the middle of Boston Logan Terminal B departures, in sneakers and a flannel, with no luggage, no contract, and no machine, with everything that happened between Penn Station and this airport sitting warm and permanent in my chest.

He kisses me back.

His hands find my waist and pull me in, and I think about the night at Penn Station when I turned off my phone and got on a train without knowing where I was going except toward something that felt like home. I think about walking into his kitchen that first morning, the alley, the rain, the oak tree and the lupine field and the ring and the music room, every single piece of everything between that train and this terminal, and I think, as clearly and simply as I have ever thought anything in my life, that I love this man more than anything I have ever loved.

More than the music. More than the stage. More than the version of Echo I built or the version of Sienna I almost lost or the songs that lived in the space between the two of them.