Chapter Text
“Here’s fine,” he says, handing too much cash to the cab driver. “Keep the change.” The car hasn’t even come to a full stop before he’s climbing out, bag in hand, and calling to her.
There’s a split second before she turns that has him wondering if he’s mistaken, but of course he isn’t. Her hair, her gloves, the coffee cup she’s clutching that almost certainly contains a triple-shot vanilla latte – it’s all there.
She smiles like she’s glad to see him. Her hair is longer now, blow-dried straight, and his fingers itch to fix the strands blowing across her face.
“Danny,” she says, and no one’s called him that since she left because she was the only one who ever really dared and it’s comforting and cruel to hear it again now in her low, too-familiar voice. Like finally finding your way home only to discover the locks were changed while you were gone.
Instead of asking how she is, because he isn’t sure he could bear to hear the answer, it’s easier to launch into an explanation of what he’s planned for this moment, revised in perfect detail on the cab ride over.
She’s unimpressed. Her initial expression of pleasant surprise quickly switches to one of irritation as she looks down at him from the doorway.
She hates him.
“I’m not your assistant anymore.”
She hates him and she thinks his hair looks stupid.
He knows he’s rambling as he follows her up the stairs but he can't stand the silence. Years of being haunted by all the things he should have said and the best he can do is pretend he hasn’t been following her career ever since she left him.
He should’ve offered to carry her bag and then just shut the hell up.
And then, because this is quickly becoming one of the top five Worst Days of His Life, they reach the top of the stairs and find Merritt fucking McKinney standing there. Charmingly, he immediately fires a few shots at Danny before shamelessly flirting with Henley, who’s so clearly uninterested.
But then again, what does he know?
He probably could have picked the lock on the door. Henley, too, could have made short work of it. But the coil of jealousy threading itself between his ribs makes it impossible to concentrate.
“We were never a couple,” she says.
They were never a couple.
He’d made sure of that. Always saying the wrong things. Stomping out the embers of her attempts to get to know him. Treating her like she was replaceable and then daring to be shocked when she finally walked away.
Merritt’s staring daggers at him now and Danny can hardly blame him. How stupid would someone have to be to spend years in the orbit of Henley Reeves and decide to drive her away?
“Still up for a drink tonight?” She was back in her street clothes, leaning against the doorframe of his dressing room.
“Sorry, something came up.” He focused on packing up his gear instead of looking at her.
“So you’re not even bothering to make excuses now?”
“What the hell does that mean?” He turned to find her looking at him, arms crossed and unimpressed. He slung the duffel over his shoulder. “I’m busy, okay? I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Maybe I want you to be honest for once. Did you consider that?”
“Look, I don’t have time-”
“Daniel,” she said coolly, and it’d been so long that he was thrown off for a second. He stopped trying to squeeze past her into the hall.
“If you don’t want to spend time with me,” she went on, “just tell me. We’re adults. I promise you I can handle it.”
“Henley, don’t.”
Don’t. Please.
His heart pounded as he glanced past her into the hallway, gauging whether or not to make a run for it.
“Don’t what? Expect anything remotely like respect from you? Expect you to treat me like an actual person?” She laughed, disbelieving. “You’re so right. I should know better.”
He took a breath, set his jaw, and pointedly kept his gaze away from her face as he spoke. “You’re my assistant. It was a mistake for us to try to be friends, or anything else. Let’s just...forget about all of that.”
“Okay, fine.” She put her hands up. “If you want to pretend nothing happened, I can’t stop you.”
“Great. We’re on the same page. Can I go now?”
Too far; too much. Too late.
“You can do whatever you want, Daniel Fleischman. Just like always.” Her dark eyes searched his face. “You can drink my wine and eat takeout on my couch and fuck me whenever it’s convenient and then walk away as soon as it’s too much for you. But it’s a damn lonely way to live. And I promise I won’t be here when it all comes back to bite you in the ass.”
“I’ll replace the wine.” He stepped out into the hallway, finally. “Goodnight, Henley.”
"Now you don’t."
He looks up from the card and Henley has a white rose in her gloved hand. She holds his gaze as she recites, “A rose, by any other name.”
“Romeo and Juliet? Really?” he says, before he can think better of it.
She drops the rose into the glass vase at her feet. “Would you have preferred Anne Brontë, Danny?”
Okay, yeah, he walked right into that one. One point for Henley.
“I-”
“Can we focus up, you two?” Merritt says. “Plenty of time for marital spats once we figure out what’s going on.”
“Fine.”
Fine. He can pretend that whoever set this up isn’t playing some awful joke at his expense. Henley hardly has a monopoly on white roses. They'll never mean anything else to him.
Their last show together, at least from the perspective of the audience, was excellent. More than one critic praised their onstage chemistry; the level of comfort they had with each other; their synchronicity. He hardly remembers any of it. He only recalls meeting her eyes across the stage during the show’s closing and finding them so cold it sent a chill through him.
He searched the back rooms for her as soon as he was off the stage without even knowing what he could say to change her mind. She’d already vanished. There was no sign that she’d ever even used her dressing room; he found it empty and perfectly clean.
And of course the end hadn’t come with a grand reveal or a firework show. She would never give him the satisfaction of having the last word. There one moment; gone the next; no trace left behind. An escape artist through and through.
At least she’d stuck around until the end of the season.
He found very little comfort in the thought. A new weight rested on his shoulders as he returned to his own dressing room to pack up.
There’s no shortage of just-starting-out magicians who’d jump at the chance to take her place. There’s no one out there who could replace her.
Something on the table caught his eye. A long-stemmed rose with perfect ivory petals. Beside it lay a note in Henley’s looping handwriting:
he that dares not grasp the thorn
should never crave the rose
He left both on the table, untouched, and prepared for the too-long, too-quiet flight home.