Chapter 4 Carissa
Chapter four
Carissa
This is the most insane, terrifying, horror movie shit show of a thing I’ve ever done.
I’m a shit liar, so I can’t just laugh this off. I’ve been imagining this moment for years, and it never played out like this.
“What is this?” His head snaps up from the journal too fast, and he blinks to clear away what are probably black spots. He keeps his breathing even, but grinds his teeth hard. His jaw clenches repeatedly.
I’ve never been so nervous. Ever. I could throw up, but then we’d both be barfers, and we don’t need that. I’ll just have to breathe heavily and get through it.
His eyes drop to scan the page again, and then he turns it and reads the next one and the next. He knows what they are. “Songs,” he says with reverence.
They could be poems, I suppose, but when you give writing like that to a musician, they’re always going to be songs.
“I wrote them, but they never felt like they were meant to be just mine. I want you to have them.” Half of them are about him. Erm, actually, most of them are about him, but there’s no way he can ever know that.
“Why?” he asks. But it’s not a rude question. Not when his hand strokes the page reverently, tracing over my writing. “I write my own songs.”
Gah. The way he says that when he raises his eyes, like he’s open to changing his mind because he sees something he likes in the book, hits me hard.
In all the wrong places.
Well, right places, but they’re wrong for wrong reasons. Or right reasons?
“They’re for inspiration,” I mumble. “If you want them to be. Or for the future. In any capacity. Or none at all.”
“You told me years ago that you don’t play any instruments.”
“That was quite a while ago.” I hope he doesn’t remember the rest of that conversation we had right after I was hired.
He didn’t like the idea of me being around, but he didn’t really get a say in it.
He asked me tersely if I played, and I said I didn’t.
It was true at the time. Then he asked me if I was a fan of Wilder’s Peril.
I knew what he was really asking. He was asking why I was truly there and what motivated me to take the job.
I may have received the message about ulterior motives, and I might have said something along the lines of Wilder’s Peril not being the sort of band I enjoyed listening to.
I didn’t lie. I wasn’t a fan before I took the job.
A job was a job, and it was a great opportunity, and that was the sole reason I applied. I never thought I’d get hired.
I was between jobs. I’d worked privately for a family, taking the night shift for years.
They were the sweetest old couple with the nicest kids.
Only one daughter lived close enough to help when her dad was diagnosed with dementia, and when it progressed, they needed to hire private help.
I worked the job until Mr. Gregor passed.
I was still pretty heartbroken when I came across this posting. I wasn’t even going to apply.
Now look at me.
Hopelessly in unrequited love.
His face is giving me a whole lot of I definitely remember how the rest of that conversation went, and I like you more for it.
“I learned how to play,” I explain, my face flushing. I can play, but not the way Matt or Wilder can. “I taught myself with a few of those apps.”
“When?”
“When you weren’t touring. At home. When I wasn’t on the road with the band, I needed to be on call at all times for you, so it was not like I could go out and take another job.
I volunteered a lot, mostly at animal shelters, and hung out with my mom, our cats, and the dog.
I also gardened, did other hobby stuff, and learned to play guitar. ”
“And wrote me a whole notebook of songs.”
My face is like tea that’s left to brew for too long. Like hibiscus tea. Always delicious, but if steeped overnight for cold brew, it goes from pretty pink to bright red. That’s me. A mortifying shade of tea that’s ready for the addition of lemonade for the perfect drink.
“I didn’t… I wasn’t writing them for you. It only became clear later that you were meant to have them.” That’s partly true, if you count the play of words on the words for you. I never meant for the notebook to see the light of day.
“They should be heard,” he murmurs. His finger whispers down the page, tracing my writing again.
My stomach does something I’ve never felt it do before. It’s part crap, part butterflies, part sick feeling.
“Would you play one for me?” he asks.
I leap up and start pacing the small area by the bed. “No. Never.”
“You should put them online.”
I’m not sure what “No. Never” means to Wilder if he thinks I would ever do that.
I’m not shy, and I’m not going to say they’re not good.
It’s not that I can’t play or sing. It’s that I don’t want to.
The thought of putting my face on the internet is what literally just about gets me going straight into a gagfest.
“Ha. No. Seriously no.” I put up my hand and make a fist, but then uncurl it and give him a finger. No, not that finger. My index finger. “That’s my one condition. That you never tell anyone who wrote these if you do use them. Or even if you don’t.”
He frowns, looks down at the journal and back up at me, then down and back up. “Do you hate your voice?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Are you shy about playing in front of people?”
“I’ve only ever played anything for my mom, but I was fine then.”
“You don’t want your songs to be consumed? To have your gift given away for the masses to devour and constantly demand more, more, more?”
Wilder really struggled with that concept in the past, but not me. “I wouldn’t mind if people heard them. If you want to sing them, record them, and put them out there, you’re welcome to do that.”
His frown deepens. At least he’s not thinking about the IV as it slowly drips steadily downwards, giving him the hydration I hope will have him back on his feet by tomorrow. He’s trying to process this and sort it out.
“It’s a fame thing,” I say. And he does get it. Though maybe not fully, because most people want it. They want recognition. They want the accolades. They want the money, the lifestyle. The assurance that your name won’t be forgotten after you’re no longer here.
“I’d like to hear you play.”
The head shaking gets more vigorous, but so do the waves in my stomach. “Also no.”
“Just one?”
“Hard no,” I say.
“But you haven’t written the music. I don’t know how they’re supposed to sound.”
“They’re yours. If you want them, you decide.”
“I’ll give you writing credit at least.”
Despite myself, my heart rate picks up. It’s already hammering, but it goes into heart rate overdrive. I should use a more technical medical term, but right now, my head is scrambled.
Tachycardia.
Thanks, brain.
Just the thought of Wilder taking something I’ve written in my darkest moments, in full joy, with all my heart and no small amount of myself, with endless longing, sometimes no longing at all because I found satisfaction in myself, with angst, desire, grief, sorrow, and laughter…
it ties me up inside. And not just one knot but hundreds. Thousands.
Half the world would kill to hand this man a single note, let alone a whole journal full of songs, and to have him look them over and tell them that what they wrote is worthy of being sung.
“No,” I rasp. I force my voice to come out as more than a squeak. “Thanks, but no. I’m a nurse. Not a musician.”
“I see.” His jaw clenches, and a muscle jumps in his temple.
“Do you?” I’m somehow brave enough to ask. I don’t want him to see. If I play for him, he’ll hear me. He’ll know. Music to this man is the communication from one heart to another. I don’t need to crack myself open and let him peer into the uncharted depths of my deepest secrets.
Even if I know secrets are stored in the brain.
He’ll still freaking know.
My breath unspools out of me like a ball of yarn dropping to the floor and rolling away haphazardly.
“It’s not that I don’t like people,” I try to explain.
I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. Wilder adores people.
There’s one single word that perfectly describes why Wilder does this.
Humanity. “I just like my privacy. I like being able to dictate my life. I don’t want to be online.
I don’t want people saying anything about me, good or bad, and I don’t want people to know me when they don’t.
I just don’t want to be in that position. ”
“Fame can be exhausting, but so can loneliness,” he murmurs.
My throat aches, becoming all shards of glass and thorny thorns.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t have any family left.
” The band is Wilder’s family. So is his fanbase, all the people he works with, and all the friends he’s made along the way.
And he’s made so many of them. “You have the whole world, though. People want to know you not because of what you can do for them, but because you’re an incredible person with the purest heart and the sweetest soul.
You’re good shit. Funny. Kind. Witty. And entirely and unapologetically who you are. ”
“Careful. Don’t fall in love with me.” He has the grace to laugh a real laugh that causes him to shoot his hand out and clutch his stomach. He groans under his breath.
I stumble forward a step, ready to help him, but he waves me off. He gives me his signature crooked grin that has melted hearts and caused emergency fire-extinguishing measures in panties all over the world. Probably. Most likely.
And then he resorts to straight-up bribery, the same way I did for the IV.
“Please? If I tell you that it would make me feel better?”
“Still no chance.” Actually, there’s a chance. My eyes flick to the corner where Matt’s guitar rests safely in the case.
“You’re staring right at Matt’s guitar. Some part of you wants to play for me.” This is exactly the kind of rogue boyish charm that got Wilder a record deal in the first place.