Chapter 13
DOG’S LIFE
‘Dog’s Life’ is when you have given someone so many chances and they keep coming back for more and more and more.
This wasn’t about me or anything I’ve experienced.
This one was for Jess. Not that she knows that.
But that girl gave Henry more chances than I can count.
He had to be on the dog’s life by the end.
‘You don’t have an overnight bag.’ I bury myself under a sofa cushion, emailing Jess Luc’s Instagram handle alongside a few photographs from pottery painting to post to my Story and one for the feed.
Luc had the last glass from a Pinot Gris in the fridge, while I opted for a new red burgundy from the wine rack. I swill my wine around the glass.
Luc sits in his jeans and shirt, while I’ve changed out of mine for some leggings and a huge t-shirt.
I’ve removed my make-up and put on one of those invisible pimple patches over a small whitehead which has started forming between my nose and my top lip.
I try not to care what Luc thinks while I’m sitting in front of him like this.
That prickling feeling over my skin when he looks at me like that, even while I look like this… I’m in dangerous territory.
He shrugs. ‘I’ll know for next time that I have to bring stuff with me.’
‘I’m really sorry about Mimi,’ I apologise. ‘She’s really dragged you into this.’
‘Sie.’ Luc puts his hand on my ankle and my body instinctively moves closer to him, heat spreading from my chest down through my back. ‘You don’t need to apologise. I’m happy to help.’
I smile and lean back, my head resting on the top edge of the sofa for a few seconds before realising I can’t drink my wine from this angle and sit back up again. I yawn, trying to silence the air escaping my body.
‘I’ve emailed Jess the photos. Are you going to post on your account tomorrow?’
Luc nods. ‘I’ll do it in the morning.’
‘A word of advice for social media,’ I start, and my eyes flutter closed.
I force them open. ‘Never post a photo when you’re out.
Someone always figures out your location.
’ My eyes flutter closed again, and I let them stay like that, my body slipping down the sofa until my head lands on Luc’s shoulder.
‘It’s for your safety that you always post later. ’
Luc laughs. ‘I don’t really use social media, but that’s good advice.’ A beat passes and then he rests his head on mine.
‘I’m really worried about my voice.’ About how it still hasn’t improved, about how the doctor could tell me in two days that I’ve damaged my vocal cords forever. And who am I without music? ‘Maybe my life is about to become a whole lot more normal,’ I sigh.
‘Let’s not worry until the doctor has given us something to worry about.’ Luc gives me that classic advice that only someone who has never lived a day with anxiety could give. The steady answer.
‘I guess if I end up not being able to go on tour, you don’t have to do this whole arrangement anymore,’ I say quietly.
‘I’ll be around for however long you let me,’ Luc whispers and kisses the top of my head. ‘Whether part of this arrangement or not.’
The alarm bells I usually need are now dulled. The wine and the normalcy of the date washes over me in a warm haze. Our faces are inches apart in the same way they were in the pottery studio, and I search his eyes, following his gaze when it brushes over my lips.
It would be so easy to fall back into old patterns. To reach up now and press my lips against his, that coffee scent and the sea breeze washing powder cloaking me in a cloud of comfort.
Will either of us be brave enough to close the gap?
‘We’re friends now, aren’t we?’ I say quietly.
‘Of course,’ he smiles. ‘I think you should go to sleep, Sienna.’
I shake the feeling, coming back to my thirty-year-old self and leaving behind the desires leftover from my early twenties. Harmful memories rising the acid in my throat.
‘Where are you going to go?’ I ask, my eyes wide. ‘There’s no bedding in the second spare room. You could take Jess’s room but I’m not sure when I last changed the bedding.’ I shake my head.
‘I’ll stay on the sofa, don’t worry about me.’
I open my mouth to protest.
‘You’re not taking the sofa,’ Luc warns. ‘Go on, go up to bed.’ A gentle push on my shoulder. ‘This sofa is bigger than my bed, I’m fine.’
I reluctantly agree, fetching him a glass of water, the shame of reverting back to my previous life drowning me. I tell him to text me if he needs anything before saying goodnight.
In bed, I close my eyes and imagine Luc doing the same thing on my sofa downstairs.
He’s so close and so far, all at the same time.
The following morning, I lean against the kitchen island, watching the comments on my Instagram photos rush in as soon as Jess has posted them. A text pops up on the top of my phone from Mauve.
MAUVE
Why lemons?
You should’ve done the oranges and pinks of Your Email Didn’t Find Me Well
I swipe them away and go back to Instagram.
‘Okay, I’m starting to believe this is real now,’ a few say, while others gush about how we’re a gorgeous couple.
I’m glowing, apparently, but I don’t feel like it.
I’m exhausted from all the planning, with tour rehearsals, wondering whether we’re getting results and the worry about whether tickets will sell out.
We’re not splashed across the newspapers but we’re pretty high up in the digital editions for our ‘normal’ date night.
‘I put some of your toothpaste on my teeth,’ Luc tells me when he leaves the downstairs bathroom. ‘I hope that’s okay.’ The weirdness from last night’s almost kiss lingers in the air.
I nod. ‘Coffee?’
‘You keep coffee in the house now?’
‘I have a cafetière and sometimes I drink it.’
Luc’s jaw drops and holds his hands to his face like he’s a children’s entertainer.
‘Shocking, I know,’ I add.
‘Please,’ he requests politely. He gestures to my notebook open on the kitchen island. ‘What are you working on?’
‘Oh, nothing really. Either a song for the next album, or maybe something for someone else to use.’
‘You never slow down, do you?’ Luc’s eyes crinkle in the outer corners. ‘You work so hard.’
‘That’s why you’re currently here,’ I point out. ‘Because of me trying to elongate my career now I’m a geriatric popstar.’ I push the stick down on the cafetière.
‘Will you sing it?’ Luc asks. ‘If it’s not going to hurt your voice too much.’
It’s been a long time since Luc was with me in the early stages of writing, where I would sing snippets of early versions of songs from Sweethearts Inside at Night. A fever dream of Luc suggesting something from a line I was struggling with, and it would work.
‘Sorry, I didn’t want to push boundaries,’ Luc apologises, and my mouth goes dry.
I pour two cups of coffee and walk towards the kitchen door.
‘Where are you going?’ Luc asks.
‘To the piano, you coming?’
He jumps up and follows me out the door. We stride up the stairs to the piano in my music room. ‘It’s a piano song! Sie, are you going to break my heart?’
‘With the song, or…?’ It’s a bad joke, and we both know it.
I sit at my keyboard. ‘This tune has been going around my head in a loop,’ I tell him.
The song’s melancholy tune plays through the room and the hairs on my arms stand on end.
‘Especially in, erm…’ I trail off. ‘Especially in those early hours after Mimi told me…’ I stop speaking and take a deep breath, the tune continuing in the background. ‘That I needed to stop living my life the way I wanted to live it.’
My fingers caress each key, playing the tune softly, slowly, sadly. It doesn’t escape my notice that this set-up is exactly how we worked on songs for Sweethearts Inside at Night together: Luc on one side of the room, me at the piano.
I shake off a chill and close my eyes. My voice joins the mix with the chorus, a hollowness, a kind of gapping where I’m not really sure of my own song yet, where I’m trying to preserve my voice. I mess up a few notes and grumble an apology under my breath before starting the bar again.
When I open my eyes, Luc is staring at me, mouth agape. He hesitates, mouth wobbling, seemingly unable to find the words. He shakes his head. ‘Sienna, that was incredible.’
‘As my friend, you have to say that.’ I’m vaguely aware that the word stings somewhere deep in my stomach.
‘No, as your friend, I have to be honest,’ Luc insists, a glassy look washing over his eye. ‘And, as your friend, I am telling you that is going to be one of the best songs you’ve ever written when it’s finished.’
How do I explain how much it hurts when he uses that word to describe what’s between us? Friend. I’m not as comfortable with being his friend as I want to be. And I think I do want to be, after all this ends.
My fingers find the piano again, and I play through the rest of the melody, the second verse, my voice joining for the chorus again. The tune meets a crescendo, an emotional climax, and then shows down for the outro. ‘It’ll be something like this. Just needs the words now,’ I explain.
‘The fact you are writing songs for your ninth album is wild.’
‘Honestly.’ I pause and we sit in a small silence.
I hit a key on the piano. ‘It was album three when I met you, wasn’t it?
’ I say like I don’t think about it all the fucking time.
Luc taking me upstairs to my dressing room for Eric Lancaster’s Laughs for the first time.
It was like a cupboard that year, nothing like the suite they gave me this year.
‘Infinite Ghost,’ Luc nods and then laughs. ‘I can’t believe you told Eric Lancaster that Infinite Ghost was about “someone who keeps blowing in and out of your life”.’
I gasp a small breath, but it lingers in the room. ‘Okay – two things.’ I hold up one finger. ‘Firstly, how could you remember that?’ A second finger. ‘Secondly, it is!’