Epilogue
Winter
“Hear me out,” Micah said, coming down the stairs and pausing for dramatic effect. “A cruise to the Bahamas actually sounds perfect right now.”
John leaned back in his chair, pushing the headphones that had already been off one ear down his neck. “You explicitly said if you ever went on another cruise again, it would be too soon.”
“That was the first night,” she said, dropping into the chair next to him. “You can’t hold anything I said the first night against me. How are you handling this winter thing so much better than I am, Florida boy?”
John laughed, taking her bare feet in his lap and rubbing them until she could feel the warmth start to tingle back into her toes.
“For one thing,” he said, “I’m wearing socks, which I would highly recommend.”
“Mmm. It’s too bad, because I love your feet.”
They’d enjoyed her L.A. apartment in the limited time they’d had it, hanging out and listening to records and having sex and finishing packing up all her stuff.
And then they’d led a somewhat nomadic existence for a while, traveling around and spending a couple weeks back in Orlando with John’s housemates.
He wasn’t wrong that Asa had already moved some art supplies into his old room, but the bed was still there and it wasn’t a bad place to crash.
Micah had felt so shy about meeting everyone, knowing how important they were to John.
But they couldn’t have been more welcoming, and she quickly felt like part of the group.
They’d discussed going back to L.A. or staying in Orlando, and they’d even discussed moving somewhere else entirely, but in the end, it had seemed inevitable that they’d find their way back to Ohio.
Micah wanted to be closer to her family, and John joked that it wouldn’t hurt to be closer to a reliable, hard-hitting drummer.
They’d bought a house only twenty minutes away from Steve and were renovating the basement to be a recording studio and rehearsal space.
Now John was sitting in front of the monitors they’d set up for playback, leaning forward as he adjusted something on one of the scratch tracks he had up on the computer.
She still had her feet in his lap, close enough that she could look over his shoulder at whatever he was doing.
He’d unplugged his headphones and taken them off so that the music played in the room for both of them to hear.
“Isolate that one,” she said. “The backing vocal.”
He muted the other tracks until the only one still playing through the monitors was the harmonies she’d recorded a couple days ago.
“That note isn’t right,” she said. “I’m flat.”
“It’s your timbre,” he said, scrubbing back to play it again. “I think you’re on pitch, actually, it just sounds off.”
“Well, if it sounds off, then it’s off.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, leaning forward like he was suddenly excited by something. “It adds a little depth to it. Hear that?”
He’d added back in her lead vocal, playing them together until she could hear the way it was more interesting, actually, for that subtle feeling of something being a little strange.
John had such a good ear for those kinds of things, and she felt like she got better at appreciating them, too, the more time she spent listening to him talk.
She loved the way his eyes lit up when she really nailed a take, when she played him something new on the piano, when they finalized the arrangement of a song.
They had more than enough demo tracks for a full album and were starting to record parts for final versions.
Whatever they’d end up doing with them still remained to be seen.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll call it an innovative new sound instead of me being flat as shit. I guess I should be happy to have a complete take—that day felt like all I was good for was fucking up.”
“Hey,” John said, squeezing her foot. “Don’t talk about my wife that way.”
That had been their most impulsive move, although it also felt like the most deliberate thing they could’ve done.
“Hey,” John had said one morning while they were waiting for their café order.
“Do you realize that today is the twentieth anniversary of when we first met?” Micah’s tea was still hot by the time they’d come up with the idea and booked a quick weekend trip to Vegas.
They’d found a twenty-four-hour wedding chapel that boasted the Strip’s best Elvis impersonator, and were married before the clock struck midnight.
Micah didn’t know if the middle-aged man wearing a crooked wig and a too-tight white jumpsuit was the best , but then he’d crooned a pretty decent “Can’t Help Falling in Love” while Micah and John slow-danced under a ceiling dotted with twinkle light stars and she’d thought it was all perfect, actually.
She still got a thrill, seeing the ring around John’s finger when his hands were on her like this, when he was playing guitar, when they were at the sink doing dishes together, when he reached for her first thing in the morning when they woke up.
She couldn’t believe he was hers, that she got to live this life.
She rubbed her foot in his lap, gratified when she felt him getting hard beneath her.
“Steve’s going to be here in fifteen minutes,” John said. Their old bandmate had agreed to record drums on their songs—he’d been charmingly excited about it, had said a lot about how good it was to have a music scene again, as though two people could possibly be a scene.
“I can be quick,” she said.
He’d gotten up from his chair to lean against hers, his hands braced against the arms of the chair as she tilted her chin up for a kiss.
“I know you can,” he said, kissing down her jaw. “And it certainly would be one way to get you warm…”
“See,” she said. “These are healthy choices. Don’t you want to make healthy choices, John?”
But just as she’d started to pull him down onto her, they heard the doorbell from upstairs, followed by Steve’s distinctive shave-and-a-haircut knock.
“Fuck,” John said.
“Why does he use the doorbell and knock?” Micah said. “I never get it.”
“No idea,” John said. “For a drummer, he also has the worst fucking timing. But we can’t just leave him out in the cold.”
She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck for one more kiss, then pushed at his chest. “Go,” she said. “We survived all those years of will-they-won’t-they sexual tension, I suppose an extra few hours aren’t going to kill us.”
“Says you,” John said, but he pressed a kiss to the top of her head. And then he went to answer the door.