Her hands tighten in her lap. Watching it happen, her fingers press together, then release deliberately, the conscious effort of a woman managing a reaction she hadn’t been prepared for.
“Mexico?” The word comes out as a question, as if she’s hoping she heard wrong.
“Yes.”
A longer silence.
“Has it got something to do with the El Pasos?” she asks, looking out at the canyon walls.
“Please,” quietly. “Don’t ask me any more questions… I don’t want to have to lie to you.”
She turns then. Her eyes are direct and clear, carrying something that registers before the brain catches up with it.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she says. “I’ve already lost Ryan. I can’t…” her voice catches. “I can’t lose you, too, Tate.”
She leans forward, her arms come around me, and she holds on.
Without realizing it, my arms come around her.
Her face is pressed against my neck, and her hair is against my jaw. The warmth of her, real, specific, and entirely hers, the canyon is ahead, and the wind is moving through everything. She’s sitting there holding on and letting the thing that has not been examined for a month exist in this moment, without looking directly at it.
Then she pulls back and looks up, her face so close, her eyes clear and direct, and my gaze drops to her mouth for a moment before the thought arrives fully formed.
What are you doing, Tate? She’s not yours to kiss.
I look back out at the canyon before she can read it.
She breathes out one long, slow exhale, and when she looks at me again, her eyes are clear.
“I’m coming back, Soph.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Don’t promise me something you can’t keep,” she says quietly. “Just…” she pauses. “Just tell me you’ll do everything in your power to come back to me.”
I look at her. At the steadiness of a woman who has already learned the hard way that promises don’t protect anyone, asking instead for the only thing that is actually true.
“I’ll do everything in my power to come back to you.”
She holds my gaze. Then nods, once, small and certain, and looks back out at the canyon.
Neither of us says anything else.
The afternoon light moves slowly across the ancient walls, and sitting beside her, I let this much in and not one thing more.
***
The show is at nine.
Eating first, Sophia finds a restaurant off the Strip on her phone and orders with the confidence of a woman who knows exactly what she wants. Whatever she chooses is considerably better than anything I would have picked, as demonstrated by finishing everything on my plate and then eating half of her dessert without being invited.
She pushes it across without looking up from her wine glass.
She talks about The Ember project over dinner, Victoria Chen, the signage brief she’d finally cracked that afternoon, the problem she’d been circling for days, and the moment it clicked.Her hands move when she talks about it, gesturing slightly, and her eyes are alive in a way that is different from every other version of her. She’s lit up from somewhere genuine.
Leaning forward slightly without meaning to and asking questions I actually wanted, the weight of the canyon, Mexico, and everything still waiting, lifts, just for an hour, just for dinner, and it is good. Simple and genuinely good, two people at a table with a bottle of wine between them, the evening doing what evenings do when you stop bracing against them.
Living in Vegas your whole life means you stop seeing it. The Strip is just the Strip, familiar, loud, and always there. But the moment the lights go down, and the first performer appears, the reason people pay what they pay for this becomes clear.
Extraordinary, the human impossibility of it, bodies doing things bodies weren’t designed to do, the scale, light, and music filling the space whether you want it to or not.