Chapter Twenty-Four #2
I press my mouth softly against his in answer.
He tastes like sunlight and coffee beans.
When I twine my hands in his hair, he releases a tight breath.
His hands are still supporting us on the ground, and I feel like I’ve got him trapped in a way that makes my skin hot.
Every swipe of my tongue across his draws another weak inhale from him.
These kisses are drugging—slow and decadent.
The shift of my body in his lap elicits a groan I know he didn’t intend to make.
My tongue searches his mouth for more—more noises like that one, more shallow breaths—
“Clem,” he husks, tipping us forward to bring his hands around to my middle. I assume he’s going to say more, but his eyes are heavy on my mouth. I lick my lower lip, drawing it between my teeth, and he hisses out something that sounds like he’s been kicked in the ribs.
“I swear you’re going to break me.” His grasp tightens. “We should…we—” He cuts himself off, running a hand over his mouth in exasperation. “Tell me something about you.”
My lips twist. I want to be kissing so, so much more. “Is this some puritanical issue with my age?”
“It’s not. I—” He runs his fingertips over the skin under my shirt as he thinks about his answer. We’re still folded into each other like factory-error pretzels. “Last night shouldn’t have happened the way it did.”
Clearly he notices all the blood drain from my face, because he presses a rushed kiss to my forehead and mutters, “Ah, no—Jesus, I can’t articulate for shite this morning.
Right, it was brain-altering, Clem. I’ll be thinkin’ of that night when I’m ninety.
And every single day until then. I just mean… I’m hoping to grow something here.”
This conversation is a horror movie and I am the final girl, sprinting off into the woods. I joke, “Something thwarted by kissing?”
“Somethin’ kissing is a part of, but serves not the sole purpose.”
“Oh, God,” I groan. Kissing is so much less frightening than getting to know each other. I don’t want to like him more than I already do.
His mouth turns up at the corners. “Conversin’ with me is so terrible you’re calling on your God?”
“ Fine ,” I grumble. “But you first.” Climbing out of his lap, I lie flat on the grass beside him. The gently swaying leaves of a maple tree shade the sun from my eyes but not my ankles, which warm under pale yellow light. “What’s it like back home?”
“Where to begin?” he asks, lying down beside me.
Our hair mingles in the grass. Rich auburn and pearly ash blond.
“The whole country’s wonderful, but there’s something different that hums where I live, in County Kerry.
Something very powerful—it’s a beautiful thrumming you can feel in the legs of ye. Very green, too.”
I turn on my side to face him. “Would you ever live anywhere else?”
“At one time, actually, I thought I might live here, in New York.”
“I can’t imagine that.” Tom moves like flowing water. His voice is like wind sailing through oaks. I can’t imagine him pushing past pedestrians on garbage-lined sidewalks.
“After school when I was busking in Dublin, I was doing open mic nights, gigs where I could find ’em.
” He turns his face from the sky toward me and those eyes snatch the air from my lungs.
“Car shows where you sing the jingles a cappella. The bard in heritage festivals…a real dignifying time in my life.”
“But you loved it?”
His face brightens. “If you can believe it, I did. One of the many cruelties of time. I’d thought the small gigs back then were grand, but I just wanted to have my work celebrated.
Now I’ve gone and done it, and I wish I could go back.
Wish I could walk into a pub and watch folks talk of their days and share their stories. ”
“You can’t do that anymore?”
His eyes tip back to the sky in thought. “Everyone I’m tryin’ to watch is already watching me. It’s not the same. Likely never will be again. I haunt every establishment I’m in.”
I’d never thought about it before, but now that he’s describing the constant attention, even walking into a restaurant and sitting down to eat sounds incredibly isolating. “That’s why you don’t want to do another album.”
“It’s just beginning to cannibalize the craft for me. For a long time I struggled to write anything.”
The break between his albums. Longer than anyone expected after his outrageous initial success. “How come?”
“I started to think about every song in terms of what questions I’d be asked by interviewers. How the melodies would sound played to thousands of ears, night after night, show after show.”
It strikes me as profoundly sad, the clinical, detached way he’s begun to think of his music. Music that to me, and to his fans, is the very opposite. Even when he sings about the apocalypse—the earth flooding over and burning up under a resentful sun—it’s anything but cynical.
“But what you bring to that stage, Clem…Singing with you is helping more than anything Jen or the label have offered me. Your passion—your awe—it reminds me of how I once felt. The way it was when I first started performing. The closeness of those intimate gigs. The way the audience felt like they were a part of the music.”
We stare at each other, close enough for our breath to sway the grass. “I do love it. Every part of it.”
The warmth in his voice is a drug. “I know.”
“Those small gigs…is that where you met Cara?” I can’t help the question.
“No, she and I met at Trinity. We had a poetry class together.”
“You were no doubt a stellar student.”
“The farthest from it. Cara, too. We barely graduated. Did a few of those rightly awful gigs together before I nearly gave up. Told my parents if I couldn’t make it in Ireland I’d move to New York. Give it a shot out here.”
I think about my mom, and leaving her for this tour. “Must have broken their hearts, to think about their only son halfway across the world.”
“They cried. Said I’d be fiercely unhappy and back within the week, but they’d give me their savings to go and try anyway.” A melancholy grin. “Surely they’d have been right, but I never had to find out.”
“What happened? ‘If Not for My Baby’?”
He nods, and something haunted flits across his eyes. It always does when he brings up the inception of that first song. “Cara and I wrote it on her porch, drinking cans, savagely miserable. Weeks later we’re peddlin’ our woeful wares across the globe. Two whole years on tour.”
Based off his music, I’ve never known a love like Tom and Cara had, but I cannot imagine writing a song together about the demise of your relationship. And then making it to superstardom off said song and performing it all over the world together. “That must have been so hard.”
Tom thinks on this one, kneading his thumb into his fingers. “At times. But I tried to be mindful. Focus on my gratefulness, not how much I missed my dog.”
I prop myself up on an elbow. “You have a dog?”
“He’s called Conry. A spaniel mix, real stand-up mutt.” He picks at a blade of grass and rips it in half. “I still hate being away from him.”
My heart becomes a puddle in my chest. “Who does he stay with? When you’re on tour.”
“My parents watch after him. I dunno if my mam would even give him back at this point. They hike together every Sunday after church. It’s like squatter’s rights. He’s hers now.”
“Joint custody,” I say.
“I’ll get my hands on the best lawyer in County Kerry.”
I snort and turn onto my stomach, inching a bit closer to him.
“I love that thing you do. When somethin’s funny, but not worthy of your roarin’ laugh.”
“Not the snort.” I moan, laying my face into the grass. Then I sneeze. “Kill me.”
Tom rolls to his side, splaying a hand over my lower back. “It’s all so cute.”
Someone needs to investigate whatever wizard magic is in those hands of his. “I have a dog, too,” I say, lifting my head to rest it atop my hands. All I smell is fresh grass. “Her name is Willow.”
“Beautiful name.”
“She’s a sheepdog. I called her that because of how her hair hangs over her eyes. She’s getting a bit older now. All three of us ladies, worse for wear.”
“Your mam…when did she get sick?”
“Almost ten years ago.”
He looks sad. “You weren’t even through school.”
“It’s okay, though, it’s not like I was going to go to college for theater .”
“That’s what you want to do?”
“Want ed ,” I correct. “The way children want to be astronauts or pony trainers.”
“You know there are astronauts and pony trainers, Clementine.”
I narrow my eyes at him. Blades of grass invade my vision. “Not more optimism, please.” I hide behind my hands. “Us cynics—we can’t take it.”
“Suit yourself. You’re a talented singer. If you can act half as well, you’re doin’ the industry a disservice not tossin’ yourself onto one of those stages.” He nods his head in the direction of what I’m assuming is Broadway.
“Even if I still wanted to, my mom can’t be alone in Cherry Grove.”
Tom’s lips purse. “She’s there now.”
“But she has help from Mike’s mom. Beth can’t be her full-time caretaker.”
Tom just nods in understanding. I’m waiting for him to say, But you should be? I can feel myself gearing up to win an argument. But he never fires that first shot.
“She gets overwhelmed really easily,” I say, deciding to plow onward with my talking points anyway.
A bull with no red cape to charge toward.
“And has had her heart broken a lot . She’s beautiful—like, so, so gorgeous.
You’re never allowed to meet her,” I joke, and then realize that was such a weird thing to say.
“So she’s always getting screwed over by guys. ”
Tom graciously ignores my overshare. “That’s a shame.”
“She’s just…she needs me, you know?”
“I don’t blame her,” he says, brushing his knuckles over my cheek. “You’re very easy to need.”
It’s such a simple handful of words. He’s flirting, he’s being charming.
It shouldn’t bring a mallet down on my heart.
But I never feel pitied when I talk to Tom.
He has this uncanny ability to lighten the load of whatever’s weighing on me.
I’ve only known him a month, but I feel more comfortable around him than I do with anyone else besides my mom.
There’s a loneliness to that mental admission—the realization of how few people I’ve let in. I’m an island—a self-imposed one, but still—yet he’s become the constant, peaceful waves lapping at my shores.
Tom pins me with that pine-dark gaze. As if he knows I’m working up to it all.
Giving me space. And though adrenaline is pulsing into my palms and making them itch, and the roof of my mouth feels funny, I almost say it back.
You are easy to need, too. So much so, it scares the shit out of me. I think I might be fall—
A robotic melody zaps between us and Tom jolts, digging his phone from his jeans. “Shite,” he curses. “It’s Jen.” He skims the wall of text before uttering, “The headliner’s had some kind of family emergency. I’m taking their place.”
“Oh, wow.” It’s all I can think to say. “What kind of emergency?”
He runs a hand over his mouth. “She didn’t say. I have to go do some press. I’m sorry—”
“No, of course,” I say, standing as I brush off grass, dirt, and emotionally wrought anxiety.
“If I can get away from a dinner I’m supposed to have with Jen tonight, could I take you to one more spot in the city?”
My eyes sweep the rolling field, rich with whirring insects and gentle tufts of wildflowers swaying in the soft breeze.
My tongue still tastes of splendid coffee in a cheap paper cup and Tom’s lips groaning my name.
He could ask me to meet him in an industrial incinerator. I’d show up in my lucky black jeans.
“Anywhere.”