Chapter Thirty
Thirty
Grayson doesn’t look too good under the pool of stark parking lot light. He’s sliding his phone into his pocket, face coated in a sheen of sweat, eyes glazed.
“Could ask you the same thing,” I say, standing up.
“Those drinks are strong .”
“Looks like it.” When he saunters toward me with a stumble, I ask, “You okay? That was kind of rough. With Jen.”
“Yeah.” His vodka breath fans over my face and I realize how close he is. “I should’ve seen it coming.”
I back away a foot to avoid nausea.
“Actually.” He swivels on his heel. “I’m not really okay.”
My instinct to offer help is immediately stanched by the hard edge in his voice.
There’s a meanness to it. A petulant whine like a kid bully who didn’t get the lunch money he had his eyes on.
I’ve been a petite blond woman living in a near-rural town all my life.
I know this feeling better than I’d like to, and I turn on my heel to hustle back to the bar.
But Grayson grabs my wrist with enough strength I can’t pull free. “Don’t you want to hear why I’m not okay, Clementine?”
“Let me go.”
“He gets everything, doesn’t he? And he’ll just keep getting everything.”
“Grayson—”
“Every fan, screaming his name each night like they’re coming for him. Every article. Every interview. Every song, just popping into his mind, fully formed.”
I try to pry his fingers from my skin but he’s got me in an iron grip.
“At least I got the women. But not you. I never really did it for you, did I?”
“I said, let me go .”
“Why should he get you, too? Look at me and tell me if you think I’ve ever had a woman say no to me. Just look at me and tell me what you think.”
My heart speeds against my ribs. My mom taught me to throw a punch when I was nine. I make sure not to tuck my thumb and let my fist fly, but he catches that wrist, too, and pushes me back into the wall.
“You’re gonna hit me?” he barks. “Are you insane?”
“You’re hurting me—”
“You must be to let that gangly loser fuck you.” He says it mostly to himself, his grip on my wrists tightening. I try to wrench free but only succeed in tugging him closer. “Clementine,” he begs. “I could make it so good for—”
Grayson is yanked backward before he can finish the thought. In the flickering lamplight Tom holds Grayson by his collar like a litter runt held by the scruff of his neck. He towers over him. I’ve never seen anyone as livid. “What is wrong with you?” he thunders.
I’ve hardly caught my breath before Grayson swings at him.
His punch lands with a sickening smack and his second one is wet and crunching.
I’m going to be sick. But the third blow is Tom’s and it sends Grayson down flat onto the pavement.
He heaves for air on all fours before scrambling up to tackle.
A gasp lodges in my throat before they go careening into the wall beside me.
Tom’s longer arm span gives him an advantage and with another hard shove, Grayson lands on the asphalt again.
This time Tom’s foot drives into his rib cage to keep him down.
Someone is screaming and I realize a minute too late that it’s me.
Grayson twists to his side, coughing.
When Tom whirls on me, his nose is streaming red, his eyes bright with—worry. He’s… worried . “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say, reaching for him. “I’m fine. Your face—”
My words are swallowed up by the sound of thudding feet echoing from the alley.
“Back here,” someone yells. “I heard screaming back here.”
“That’s his voice!” another calls out.
A cacophony of snapping, clicking, and shouts for Halloran. Paparazzi. Swarming for us.
I don’t take a single moment to think. “Follow me.”
With Tom’s hand in mine, I take off through the parking lot and cut our first left through the alley next to Dime a Dozen.
The seven or so paparazzi follow us but we don’t let up, not for a second.
I can’t allow Tom’s busted nose and bloodied knuckles to be splattered all over the internet tomorrow morning. This whole awful evening is my fault.
But the alley leads to a chain-link fence and we stop cold. The photographers can’t be more than thirty seconds behind us. “Shit.”
Tom runs his eyes over me once. Then he scales the fence and throws his long legs over, hopping down the other side with ease. “You turn,” he says. His voice is calm, even as his nose gushes blood.
“I’m half your height. I’ll land on my ankle or something.”
“You think I’d allow anythin’ to happen to you?”
He’s dead serious. And we have no time to debate it. I climb the wobbling metal quickly, though not as fast as him, and swing my leg over the top. One, and then the other. Every part of me is shaking. This is so much higher than it looked from the ground.
“I’ve got you,” he says, arms out.
And I don’t think twice. I drop down and land snugly in his arms. He doesn’t even grunt.
My hands are still shaking on his neck when he releases me, slow and steady. For an instant, we breathe the same air. I can smell the blood on his face and the clean soap of his skin. Even with a broken nose, he is so ridiculously attractive I want to lick him clean.
Then the horde finds us. “There!”
“This way,” I say, because I know this city somewhat well from all the field trips and concerts and mall excursions Everly and I have taken over the years.
Most importantly, I know where she’s working tonight.
We sprint two straight blocks, my short legs fighting to keep up with Tom’s extended ones, his long hair bouncing like a warrior’s as he charges into battle, clicking cameras only ever a breath behind us, until we reach the Ladybird Playhouse.
“Hide there,” I tell him, pointing to a copse of shadowed trees out of range from the streetlights.
“Clem, you don’t—”
“Trust me,” I say.
Everly has worked front of house at the local Austin theater every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday since she moved back from college. I say a little prayer of thanks that she didn’t bail on her shift tonight to come see our show.
“Ev.” I’m pushing past patrons. “Everly!”
Everly’s red hair whirls as she scans the playhouse. Her expression warps from shock to delight to confusion in rapid succession. “Clementine? What are you doing here?”
I squeeze in between the couple that was about to hand over their tickets. “I need your car.”
“Yeah, okay—” She fishes through her pockets, her eyes wide with worry. “What’s happening?”
The couple behind me is getting restless. Whatever the evening’s late show is—some raunchy comedian based on the brightly colored poster behind Ev’s head—it’s starting soon. The man grunts. “Excuse me—”
“There’s been an emergency and I need to borrow it just for tonight but I’ll leave it at your apartment later. Can you get another ride home?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” she says.
She hands me the keys just as the house lights dim, denoting five minutes until showtime. An image of Halloran strangling men with cameras around their necks flashes in my mind.
“Text me when you’re settled,” she says. “I want to know everything’s all right.”
“You’re a lifesaver. Missed you.” I kiss her on the cheek and sprint from the theater.
Everly’s 1980s Chevy Citation is a relic and takes two tries to start, like it has ever since she and I crashed it in high school avoiding a raccoon.
I yank it around from her parking spot and whip the thing in front of where I left Tom. Not a moment too soon, too. He slams the passenger door shut right as three stumped paparazzi clock him and hightail it after us.
The gas pedal hits the carpeting and we take off, their blinking lights a starry haze in the rearview.
For a moment, our labored breaths and the groans of the old car are all I hear.
“Let me see it,” I say, as we merge onto the freeway.
Halloran’s used his Trinity hoodie to stanch the bleeding, leaving him in a boxy crewneck T-shirt that does something marvelous to the length of his arms. When he removes the sweatshirt from his face, his nose is twice the size it should be, with a deep split cracked across the bridge.
Not a moment later does the bleeding start up again, spilling over his lips.
“We need to get you to a hospital.” I step on the gas.
Tom grunts as he tries to compress the faucet of blood. “Calm down.”
“It’s broken. It’s broken for sure.”
“Fuck the nose,” he grits out. “The nose is fuckin’ fine. He fuckin’ touched you, Clem.” Tom rolls down the window and spits. “He laid his hands on ya. Fuckin’ spanner, he is. Fuckin’ tool.”
“Okay, somehow you’re getting more Irish.”
“I coulda fuckin’ killed him.”
That shuts me right up. A tense silence hovers between us.
After a moment I say, quieter, “You wouldn’t have.”
“Nah, but I wanted to.” He tips his head back, his deep voice muffled under the cotton of his hoodie. “He fuckin’ deserved it.”
“Tom…” I don’t even know what to say. It’s like a nightmare my own pessimistic brain couldn’t even dream up.
“Why’s he out there anyway, talkin’ to you? He follow you? Fuckin’ gobshite.”
“He was wasted.” I wonder if he was on something—his eyes were nearly black and glazed over.
“He might’ve been buying drugs out there.
” I know I sound like someone’s apron-wearing mother, but it’s the best guess I’ve got.
Why else was Grayson trolling around the parking lot instead of inside with everyone?
I try to recall the moment he approached me. “He was on a phone call, I think.”
Tom sits up, some light bulb clicking on. “The paps.”
“No way.”
He shakes his head in sick awe. “He called ’em. He was all hyped up about the article…How else would they’ve known I was there?”
“I take everything back,” I say through clenched teeth. Everly’s poor steering wheel is taking the brunt of my anger. “Let’s tell Jen about all his ickiness and get him fired.”
Tom finally removes the hoodie, testing his swollen nose with his fingers. Plum purple and skinned-knee pink, and his knuckles, too, already blooming with bruises. He must have landed more than one punch on Grayson. The thought of him pummeling the creep is like soda through my bloodstream.
“Jen’s going to be livid, havin’ to kick him off the tour and find a new keyboardist this close to the end.”
The headlights illuminate a particularly dark patch of freeway and I squint to follow the road hurtling before us.
“It’s over so soon,” I say quietly.
“Is that why you weren’t in the ladies’ room?”
Better to admit to that, I tell myself, than to having a nervous breakdown about the ex who broke his heart so thoroughly he teared up on our second date. But I only say, “I just needed some air.”
“Clem.”
I inhale like a kid getting their first shot. I can do this. “I’m sad it’s ending.”
Tom’s palm massages my thigh and tension loosens across my body. “Me, too.”
“You hadn’t said anything, though.”
“Didn’t you know? My girl’s a bit flighty.”
My girl. My anxious heart thumps desperately at the words. “Fair enough.”
“It doesn’t have to be the end, though. For us, I mean.”
But I don’t have the stomach for that conversation tonight. To tell him how wrong he is. “Think you’ll ever do another tour?”
I see the Cherry Grove sign and click on my blinker. A few miles back, when Tom fervently rejected my hospital suggestion, I decided on this plan, and I’m not going to wimp out now. Fence jumping to homecomings—I’m all about the bravery tonight.
Tom rubs at his jaw. “I told Brad I wasn’t ready to commit to another album right now. That I just needed time. He was decent about it. Told me to call him when I had my next steps figured out. So, maybe. I’m feelin’ more optimistic about it than I had been before.”
I scope the street signs and wager I’ve got time for one last question before I spring my plan on him. “And the drinking…”
Tom’s teeth are white in the passing lamplight. “What about it?”
“Jen’s always so worried about you. But you had a beer tonight.”
It’s not much of a question, but he answers me anyway.
“When my friend died, the one I told you about…” Tom presses one hand into the other as he fishes for the right words.
But then he seems to change course. “The success of my first album came pretty shortly after that. I had a lot of guilt—I made some mistakes on that first tour before I stopped drinkin’.
Jen worries about me going off the rails again because of the image she’s hopin’ I’ll maintain.
But I’ve been doin’ well for a while now.
It was nice to share a pint with you and the lads. ”
“You let her think you’d slipped up, though. With what happened in Philly.”
“Sometimes she needs a good fright.”
He’s deflecting—he did it for me and we both know it. “Is that why you hit Grayson? Because you were drunk?”
“I wasn’t drunk,” he says, voice low. And I know it’s true. His eyes are sharp, his speech as melodic and clear as ever. He’s no lightweight.
“You don’t like violence,” I say, pulling onto my street.
“No,” he replies. “I don’t.”
I cut the engine and take a breath. Our conversation was a welcome distraction from the ludicrous choice I’ve made, but now that we’re here my palms are as sweaty as Lionel’s forehead when he’s herding us to sound check.
“I think we should stay here for the night, since the paparazzi are likely staking out the bus.”
Tom nods. “Okay. Where’s here?”
One more steadying breath. “This is my house.”