Work Text:
“It’s no Chicken on a Stick.”
Sebastian’s head turned in her direction as she said it, the dim blue light illuminating only part of his face. He chuckled. “Don’t I know you?” he asked, tilting his head slightly to the side. “You look so familiar. Oh!” he said, snapping his fingers. “You’re on that billboard.”
Mia stepped further into the room, closer to where he sat with a tumbler of scotch on the rocks. Funny how all these years later she still knew his order. Funny that it was still the same.
“I like your place,” she said, taking a look around her.
Sebastian kicked out the barstool next to him in invitation. “Old Fashioned,” he said to the bartender who still lingered. The place was nearly empty now, with only the last few employees milling around and closing up. Being famous came with its benefits, one of which was that you could show up at a jazz club after closing and be let inside, no questions asked.
She sat in the seat that Sebastian had offered up and an Old Fashioned dropped in front of her.
“I’d ask what you’ve been up to, but it would be disingenuous, of course,” he said.
Mia put a finger to her chin. “Have you been following me?”
“Physically? No. But,” he said, swaying his head to the side with a little frown, “let’s just say, I’m familiar with your body of work.”
“You are?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
She ignored that little dig to take a sip of her drink. “I didn’t know if you would, I don’t know. Avoid me.”
He shook his head. “Every one of your movies I’ve seen in the theater. I go alone, and I just watch you. Like its just you and me.”
“You do not.”
He let out a small laugh. “I’m serious!”
“So that’s what you do. You sit in a theater, my huge body on screen-”
“Not huge.”
“-and watch. Watch me cry, watch me laugh, watch me screw up my lines and cover it up, and dance to silly music that wasn’t there until they dubbed it in, watch me pretend to fall in and out of love?”
He waited a beat, like he wasn’t sure if she was finished. “Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.” She picked up her drink and took another swig of it, bigger this time.
“You don’t believe me. No?” he confirmed as she shook her head.
“Mm-mm. No.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to believe me. The fact is that, yes I do, I do go to the theater, and I do watch your movies, and I do eat a whole bucket of popcorn, all to myself, and drown in my regret, and then I get up, and I walk out, and I get on with my life. Once every couple of years when one of your movies comes out, I have regrets, and then I don’t. It’s very simple. And cathartic, I have to say.”
“Regrets?”
“Yes. Regret.” He shrugged. “A small amount of regret.”
“A small amount of regret. A small amount of regret about you and me?”
“Yes.”
“Hm,” she said as she sat back. She drained the rest of her drink and he did the same.
“One more,” he said quietly to the bartender who was at the other end of the bar, pretending not to listen.
She folded her hands on the bar. Her delicate bracelet brushed across the surface of the bar. “And what are these regrets?”
“What are the regrets?”
“Yes. I’d like to hear them. Enumerated, please.”
“You’d like me to list them out?”
“Yes.”
He was silent for a moment, and watched her. He would never say, but in the unspoken game of one-upmanship that they had always played, she gave herself a point.
“Well, what about you?” he said finally. “You’ve never had a regret in your life?”
“I’ve had regrets.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me.”
“Right now I regret walking into this bar.”
“It’s a club.”
“This club.”
“Fair enough.”
“At some points I’ve regretted giving up something that could have been great. That was great. Then I didn’t.”
“Then you didn’t regret anymore?”
“Off and on regret.”
He nodded and took a drink. “What about your husband?”
Mia pushed her barstool back. “I’m leaving.”
Before she could fully stand up he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t.” His thumb grazed across her skin as they both looked down at it. “I want to know,” he said more softly.
She sat back down and she told him. She told him about how they met, and how he was kind and steady. That she had gotten pregnant by accident, and he had proposed, and she’d said yes. How they had the baby and settled into life together. Settled into consistency and dependability. And sometimes she thought, just settled. She told him how she loved her life, how devoted she was to little Maeve. That she was happy, most of the time, and content. His hand stayed on her arm. “What about you?” she asked. “Is it what you wanted? Are you fulfilled?”
“Fulfilled?” he asked looking around. “It’s what I always wanted, isn’t it?”
The bartender cleared his throat, so softly that she almost didn’t hear it.
“You can go,” Sebastian said. “I’ll finish up.”
The bartender didn’t wait around to be told twice.
“Your song was beautiful,” Mia said, looking over at the now closed piano on the stage.
Sebastian looked over there, too. “I wrote it a long time ago. I’ve never played it in public before.”
“Why not?”
“Too personal,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her up from her stool. “Come on.”
He led her to the piano and they both sat at the bench. He opened the cover and just looked at the keys for a moment before he started to play. A familiar melody engulfed her.
“You remember the words?” he asked.
“Of course I do.” A song they had worked on together for weeks, his music, her lyrics. It was a strange thing to have a song in your heart, that only you knew, with no way of playing it or holding on to it, really, except to sing it to yourself so you wouldn’t forget.
They sang it together, their voices harmonizing in the emptiness as if they had never stopped. City of stars, are you shining just for me? When the song was finished, Sebastian kept playing, adding a new stanza she had never heard before. City of stars, there’s so much that I can’t see. Who knows? Is this the start of something wonderful and new, or one more dream that I cannot make true?
In the silence he reached over and touched her chin. He kissed her, soft and unapologetic.
“We can’t do this,” she sighed into him.
“I know,” he said, but he pulled her closer and kissed her deeper, and she let him, hungrily closing the distance of the last few years without him.
When they pulled back he brushed a tear from her cheek. “Was it a mistake, what we did all those years ago? I still think about you, Mia. All the time. I knew that I’d always love you, but I didn’t know I’d never get over you.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered honestly. She laughed a little as she sniffed and wiped her eyes. “We got what we wanted, didn’t we?”
Sebastian closed the cover to his piano and ran his hand over the wood. “Yeah. I guess we did.”
Mia put a hand on his cheek, wanting to wipe away the melancholy in his face. “I should go,” she said, getting to her feet.
Sebastian stood, too, and walked her to the front entrance before the stairs. “How long are you in town for?” he asked.
She leaned in the doorway when she paused. “I live here now. Again. Calabasas.”
“Oh. I didn’t- I didn’t know that.”
Mia nodded. “Only a few months.”
“Mia,” he said, just as she turned to go and started up the stairs.
She stopped and turned to him.
“Come see me again sometime.”
Mia smiled as she continued on her way. “Count on it.”