Page 75 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
That’ll get us out of this mess, once and for all.
I don’t sleep that night, not really. Dad and I have a double queen room at a hotel on Forty-Seventh Street, and I spend most of the night tracking the soft rhythm of his snores. The heat kicks off and on from the corner of the room, ruffling the thin curtain by the window. Everyone else is staying on the same hall, and I imagine us all tucked away, lying in the dark, waiting for tomorrow.
The knock comes just after five. I blink up at the ceiling, waiting to hear it again. When I do, I slip out of bed and peer through the peephole. It’s Miller, his proportions all blown out through the lens, wearing his winter coat and the knit scarf Willow made him for Christmas. I tug some yoga pants on in the dark and grab my coat off the back of the desk chair, casting a look at my dad. He’s still asleep when I open the door and steal into the hallway.
“Hey,” Miller whispers. He smiles, and I feel the tight knot of my body unwind just a little. “I thought you might be up.”
“I slept, like, five minutes total.”
“Yeah,” he laughs. “Me too.” He reaches for my hand, nods his head toward the elevator. “Want to check out Times Square?”
I’d check out drying paint with you,I think. I’d check out anempty wall, if it meant being somewhere with Miller.
“Yes,” I say, and we go.
It’s still dark out, but in Times Square all the billboards light the street blue and red and green, like a weird planet somewhere else. When I look up I can’t even find the moon, not to mention any of the stars. There are a few people wandering around, a couple of cabs that slush by in the post-snow wet. Grayed-out piles of leftover snow line the gutters, but the sidewalks are clear.
“Looks different than in the movies,” I say, and Miller nods.
“I wonder if they thought that about us. Owen, and Alma, and the rest of them.” I look at him, his face hued blue in the light from an Uber ad on the side of the nearest high-rise. “That we’re different than we seemed on TV. Or on social media.”
“Probably,” I say. “Wearedifferent than that.”
“Yeah. Not today, though. We can finally just...” He lets out a gusting breath. “Be ourselves.”
“Scary,” I say, and he squeezes my palm flush against his.
“But you’re brave.”
“You’rebrave.” I gesture at his sling, half-tucked into his coat. “I’m just cleaning up after myself.”
The sidewalk opens into a triangular island where a bright red staircase rises in front of a billboard. Someone sleeps halfway up, hidden by a sleeping bag except for their bright-blue beanie. We sit down on the first step, and Miller puts his good hand on my knee. I hug his arm, lean my head against his shoulder, and we stare out at the brilliant, blinking light field in front of us.
“It’s selfish,” he whispers, looking straight ahead. “But I’m still glad we did all this. Next year, who knows—” He breaks off, looks down at his hand on my leg. “I don’t know where we’ll be. Or what we’ll be doing. And I’m just glad we had this.”
I lift my hand to his cheek and pull his face down to mine, kiss him right there in the cold dark in the middle of Times Square. It feels like we’re all alone in the world. Like we’re standing on the precipice of something earth-shattering.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “Where we’ll be, or what we’ll be doing. There’s no one else like you.”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His eyes move over mine, something in them like sadness that’s so familiar it threatens to steal my breath before I remember that he’s here—that we’re here—right here.
“There could never be anyone else,” I say. Miller is the constant in anything, the hand I’ll reach for in every crowd. I want to be thirty, finding his eyes over a platter of canapés at a dinner party. I want to be old and exhausted, reading with him in our living room. I want MASH to be right.
But all we have is this: five thirty in the morning, huddled in the cold before the scariest thing we’ve ever done. And for once, I don’t care what comes after. Miller’s here with me now.
“You’re the one place I fit,” I tell him. He looks at me and I know him, more than I’ve ever known anything else—all the stories between us, and the unguarded marvel of his laugh, and the way I feel him in a room before I even know he’s there. Like the whole universe sees us, the stars moving around our axis.
He takes a deep breath, and I feel it in my lungs. “I love you,” he whispers.
That’s what I understand about the world.
We’re booked for a nine o’clock interview, which means I’m in hair and makeup by seven thirty. I’m scheduled to go on alone, a five-minute conversation one-on-one with Hoda Kotb before Miller joins me for the back half. And while I’m up there, he’ll switch out the files. Get Maren’s video—Owen’s story and Alma’s and Taj’s and all the others’—up on the screen for America to see. My phone buzzes, and when I flip it over it’s Sawyer:You got this, Ro-Ro.She has all the video files, too—ready to share them on social the minute we make them public.
“That’s feeling a little dark,” Felix says, hovering over the makeup artist. I look up in time to see her eyeing him as he points to her eyeshadow palette. “How about this instead? We want her to look fresh-faced. Smoky eye feels like a lot for nine a.m.”
She clears her throat, like,Back off. Felix looks at me. “What do you think, Ro?”
“I don’t care,” I tell him. “I’m sure you’ll do what you think is best.”
