Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was one in the morning, and everyone was dancing in the woods lit up with camping lanterns and ropes of string lights. It looked like a pagan ritual.
If one more person told me I looked exactly like Nicky, I was going to pummel them over the head with my Docs.
“I know you’re not Nicky,” Jeremy slurred, weaving on his feet.
He was tall and gangly with a longish bowl cut that made him look like a friar.
“You just look like him s’all. I couldn’t do what he did, man.
They called me the worst front man in rock history.
Can you fucking believe that shit? The British press is brutal. ”
He took a drag of his cigarette, his face pensive.
After Nicky died, Jeremy tried to take over as front man, but it never really worked out. The band split up and they all went their separate ways. Ian launched a successful solo career, and Curtis started a new band, while Jeremy bounced around to different bands, never quite finding the right fit.
“I wanted to keep it going, you know?” Jeremy continued. “We didn’t want it to end. One minute you’re on top of the world and the next thing you know it’s all gone.” He stared off into space and I took that opportunity to make a hasty retreat.
I wandered through the party in the woods searching for Gabriel. The last time I saw him, we were getting drinks from the makeshift bar when a girl in a leather mini dress spilled her drink down the front of my dress.
Gabriel was coming back to the house with me so I could change when Ian and Curtis whisked him away to “talk music.” He’d earned their respect after jamming with them for an hour and singing like a “fucking rock star destined for greatness.”
“Hey, Cleo.” Mandy popped a strawberry into her mouth, wrapped her arms around me and danced to The Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored.” She smelled like patchouli and sweat and strawberries. “You’re all tense. You need to loosen up.”
“I’m not much of a party girl.”
She pulled back but kept dancing, her purple glitter eye shadow shimmering in the darkness. “Why not?”
“I don’t know.” It stemmed from my childhood, but we didn’t need to get into all that. It was, after all, a party and everyone else seemed to be having a blast, if the shrieks of laughter from the group behind me were any indication.
“Okay, I’m going to help you,” Mandy said, taking my hands in hers.
“I want you to take deep, cleansing breaths. In through the nose and out through the mouth,” she coached, squeezing my hands and releasing them.
Squeezing. Releasing. “Keep breathing and focus your mind on where you want the energy to flow. In. Out. In. Out.” She breathed in and out to show me how to do it.
“I think I’m okay but thanks. Have you seen Gabriel?” I tried to pull away, but she held on to my hands.
“Who?” Her brow furrowed.
“My boyfriend.”
“Oh! Jimmy? I saw him a little while ago. He was hanging out with Ian and Alice over by the Airstream.”
“Well, thanks for the…breathing exercises. I’m just going to look for him. See you later, Mandy.” I turned and walked away.
“Okay. But, Cleo…” I looked over my shoulder. “Try not to hold on so tight. Trust the universe.”
I walked all around the vans and Winnebagos and even stuck my head inside one of them only to slam the door shut and hurry away. I did not need to see that guy’s hairy ass.
Gabriel was nowhere to be found so I walked back to the cabin where I found him and my mom sitting on Adirondack chairs. “There you are.”
When I climbed the porch steps, my mom stood up and gave me a hug. “Take care of him,” she whispered in my ear.
I watched her walk back to the party then turned to Gabriel. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.” He tugged me into his lap and buried his face in my hair.
“I was looking everywhere for you,” I said. “I thought maybe you were…” Doing shrooms. I lifted my head and studied his face. He looked pale in the dim porch light. I leaned over and picked up the glass next to him. Water, not vodka. “What happened?”
“Just a headache. It’s mostly gone now.”
“A headache?” My brow furrowed. My mom made it sound like something more than just a headache and she wasn’t the type to overreact. “Do you get headaches a lot?”
He pulled me close, tucking my head against his shoulder and ran his hand over my hair in long, soothing strokes. “Stop worrying. I’m fine.”
“I can’t help it.” I burrowed my face into the crook of his neck and breathed him in. “I love you.” My voice was muffled so it came out garbled.
“Say it again.”
I lifted my head and kissed his stubbled jaw. “I love you.”
He smiled, but I thought it looked strained. “My twin flame.”
I stroked his brow and cupped his cheekbone. “If you go out, I go out.”
What Gabriel had failed to mention was that he’d blacked out.
Thankfully, my mom and Ian had been there. They said he wasn’t drunk, and he hadn’t, in fact, touched any of the mushrooms. But he’d completely zoned out for a good thirty seconds and it had taken him a couple of minutes to remember where he was.
I was no doctor but that didn’t sound like a good thing.
So as soon as we’d returned to the city, I nagged and cajoled and even threatened to kick him out of the apartment, until finally, he agreed to go and see a doctor.
When he got home from his appointment, he was fuming. “I hope you’re happy.” He yanked a beer out of the fridge and flipped the cap off with his key. “I just wasted good time and money for nothing.”
He grabbed his notebook and climbed onto the fire escape. I abandoned my stir-fry and charged after him. “I can’t believe you’re pissed off at me for caring about you.”
“I told you I was fine but no, you pushed, and you pushed?—”
“Because I don’t want anything to happen to you,” I yelled. “It’s not normal to black out?—”
“I asked your mom to keep that between us,” he gritted out.
“Oh, don’t you dare blame this on my mom.” I stabbed my finger at him. “You should have told me yourself.”
He shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh. Then he completely blanked me out and started writing in his notebook like I wasn’t even there. He looked all moody and sulky sitting out there on the fire escape, and I knew he wouldn’t answer my questions, but I asked anyway.
“What did the doctor say?” I prodded.
Gabriel took a swig of beer, shot me a warning glance, and went back to scribbling in his notebook. I let out a strangled scream and marched back into the kitchen to finish making this stupid dinner for him.
Chicken and broccoli stir-fry was the only thing I knew how to make, and he probably wouldn’t eat it anyway with the way he was acting.
When it was done, I turned off the burner and retreated to my design studio, slamming the door shut behind me. Two could play this game.
Unfortunately, with the door closed, I didn’t have a cross breeze and it was baking hot in this room even with the fan turned on full blast.
A little while later, I heard the front door slam shut and flew into the living room. I was about to chase after him and scream at him to come back and discuss this like an adult when I saw his open notebook on the coffee table.
Across the top it said: Read this while I’m gone. I’m going for a walk to clear my head.
Sure, just run away, Gabriel.
But curiosity got the best of me, so I carried the notebook out to the fire escape and sat in the spot where he’d been sitting.
The sky was a buttery yellow and the railing was warm against my back as I read.
When Gabriel was in his teens, he used to get a lot of headaches. His dad took him to see doctors who all said pretty much the same thing. They were psychosomatic. Stress-induced.
They’d insinuated that Gabriel had brought them on himself. Finally, his father got fed up and told him he wasn’t wasting another dime or another minute of his time catering to Gabriel’s histrionics. He’d called him a nutcase, an attention seeker and a hypochondriac.
The summer after he graduated high school, he had a really bad headache and hallucinations. Not drug-related, he’d written.
He said he had no memory of what he’d said or did, but his father had him locked up in a psych ward.
The psychiatrist evaluated him and diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. They put him on a cocktail of drugs. Antidepressants and anti-hallucinogens and a load of other “shit drugs.” Some made him nauseous; some made him feel like a zombie, and he said he was in a “really dark place.”
When he was finally released, he ditched the prescription drugs and took off to LA with the band. Music, he knew, would save him. While out there, he got another evaluation from a psychiatrist who said he did not display bipolar tendencies.
Now he was done listening to doctors’ opinions regarding his headaches.
At the very bottom, he wrote: Now you know all my dirty secrets.
Oh, Gabriel .
When I finished reading, I hugged the notebook to my chest. Maybe it was uncharitable to hate a dead man I’d never met, but I detested Gabriel’s father. How could he have treated his only son so horribly?
My heart ached for Gabriel.
If I’d known all this before, I never would have pushed so hard. No, that’s not true. I still would have worried, and I still would have insisted that he see a doctor.
I thought he needed to see a specialist. He needed to advocate for himself and not give up until he got a proper diagnosis.
But I already knew that he would stubbornly refuse to see any more doctors.
Gabriel returned a little while later and joined me on the fire escape. He sat opposite me and looked out at the rooftops while I looked at him.
He was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt with plaid shorts that he called his old man shorts and beat-up Converse high-tops with lyrics he’d inked on the canvas and soles back in high school.
And I loved him so.
I crawled to him across the fire escape and climbed into his lap, straddling him. Wrapping my arms around his warm neck, I kissed his lips and he kissed me back.
Butterflies .
His tongue swept into my mouth, and I tasted him. Sunshine and the strong Spanish coffee from a little café on Avenue C. He always ordered in Spanish. Two coffees and cake for the “muchacha bonita.”
I cradled his face in my hands and pressed my forehead against his. “I love you.”
His hands were in my hair, and we breathed the same air.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Our faces were so close together that I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. His heartbeat so strong and steady. His strong, calloused hands holding the back of my head. His abs and hard chest pressed against my stomach and breasts.
The flutter of his lashes as his eyes drifted shut. The warm skin at the nape of his neck and the sun-warmed waves of his hair sifting through my fingers.
Two bodies pressed flush against each other, trying to erase every sliver of space, and get as close as humanly possible.
I wanted to unzip his skin, crawl inside and make a home for myself.
Love was such a beautiful thing. It was also the most horrible thing imaginable.
There was always that fear in the back of my mind that I could lose him tomorrow. If I ever did, I already knew it would destroy me.
I pulled back and he gave me a smile that was so beautiful I wished I had a camera readily available.
I turned around and sat between his legs, leaning my back against his chest and made a mental note to take more photos.
I wanted to preserve a memory from every day we spent together so that when we were old and gray we could sift through them and chart the dizzying highs and crushing lows and all the in-betweens of our beautiful love story.
Gabriel wrapped his arms around my middle and rested his chin on my shoulder. “Chopin.”
“What,” I said.
“The piano music. It’s Chopin. ‘Prelude in E minor.’”
I listened to the haunting music coming from an open window. “No wonder it’s so melancholy. That’s my key.”
“You’re beautiful.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “And I lied.”
I tensed. “To the doctor?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not sure if that’s ‘Prelude in E minor.’”
I laughed, relieved. “Well, good thing you’re not a classical musician then.” We were quiet for a while, listening to Chopin’s melodic beauty. “Why couldn’t you just tell me what you wrote in the notebook?” I asked quietly.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“The only people who should be embarrassed are those doctors and your father.”
“He’s just as dead as the prophet.”
We laughed. We had the same dark humor.
“Were you always Cleo Babington?” he asked.
I knew what he meant. “No. I was Cleo Babington Ashby until I was thirteen. But I didn’t want to go to a music and performing arts high school with the last name Ashby, so I dropped it the summer after 8 th grade.”
“You wanted to live on your own terms.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did you play any instruments? Sing in talent shows?”
I laughed under my breath. “Just because I’m a musician’s daughter doesn’t mean I inherited his gift.” Gabriel’s arms tightened around me like he somehow knew I was withholding information from him.
After a weekend with my mom and “the Rogues,” he probably knew everything about me.
I sighed. “I played acoustic guitar and sang ‘Landslide’ in the 8 th grade talent show. My dad promised he would be there, but he never showed up. I was only doing it for him. I guess I just wanted his approval.” I shrugged. “It wasn’t that good anyway.”
“Still pretending to be so tough,” he said, nuzzling his nose against the side of my neck. “Drop your guard, Baby Blue. I’m your soft place to fall. Your safety net. I’ll always catch you.”
My eyes drifted shut and I relaxed into him, every ounce of tension draining from my body.
I felt safe with him, and I felt more like myself than I ever had with anyone. The real me, with all my flaws and weaknesses and insecurities on full display.
No man could ever love me the way Gabriel did. No man had ever understood me the way he did. With him, I had nothing to hide.
I prayed that he would always be here and that nothing would take him away from me.
“Hey, I got you something.” He pulled a peach out of his pocket and fed me.
Juice dribbled down my chin and he licked it off and kissed my lips and I forgot all about my fear of losing him.
He was right here, feeding me a sun-ripened peach on a summer’s evening with Chopin music floating out of the open window and soaring up to the sky.
It was beautiful, this life of ours.