Chapter 6. #2
“Of course you gotta work the crowd,” he says back, “I get it, it’s part of your appeal. But you can’t keep going off-script every time a feeling hits you. Look at Wily, switching up bass lines now. Is Fiona about to throw a key change at you mid-show? The others look at you to set a standard.”
“And I think the standard’s fantastic,” I come back at him not unkindly. “Freedom is where we thrive. It’s where we’ve always thrived. ‘Hate Me For a Reason’ came from a sarcastic rant I went on in the recording studio. It was perfect.”
“It was a fluke.” He fidgets. “An amazing fluke, give you that, but you can’t build a serious music career on flukes.”
“Isn’t every career built on them?”
He takes my hand across the old, scratched-up table stained with water rings and clenches shut his eyes. “Chase … Please. I’m begging you. We are so close. We … we are so, so, so, sooo close …”
“Didn’t it make you feel good?” I keep staring at his cramped-up face.
“I know you saw the whole thing from the wings. Ain’t that exactly the kind of moment that can go viral?
Take fire? Put us and my name in front of a million new eyes?
We’re on a College Country Crash tour, Ian, I thought the whole point was gettin’ the younger listeners. ”
Ian nods, eyes still closed. “I know it felt good. That moment you had with her. Affecting a fan like that. You give, give, give. Ever since we began this whole thing and you and I creamed over having a crowd of barely fifty or so packed into the Saltshaker …”
“Those were the times.”
He pops open his eyes. “And I want you to keep having that human connection. But forget one Esmeralda. How about touching ten thousand of them? Making ten million of them cry?” He lets go of my hand, fingers returning to his glass.
“I can get you that. I can get you all of that. But you’ve got to trust me. ”
“Of course I trust you.”
“And don’t give in to your impulses.” He glances back at the others, then leans forward and lowers his voice. “Chase, I haven’t forgotten. Our first year. Your recklessness … it … sure has a funny sense of timing. It damned near cost us everything.”
First year. He’s talking about when I got my heart broken.
And I went onstage hours later. And I twisted up every one of my songs with anger and petty resentment, these songs that are supposed to be about carefree love.
That was back when Cam was in the band, our first drummer, and he about jumped me after the show in a rage, furious that I’d be so selfish to do that.
I couldn’t help it. I gave my everything to someone, and then I was betrayed. My career was on the rise, everything happening for us. I haven’t let anyone near my heart since, despite singing it out every night in front of roomfuls of longing eyes.
Timothy isn’t near my heart, for the record. That’s not what happened in Spruce. This isn’t a love story.
Timothy is … something like a muse.
Sort of.
“I wasn’t running off on you in a rental car,” I start.
“You needed the day, of course, it’s fine. No one’s begrudging you that.” Now it’s Ian who’s finger-drumming his glass. “But it’s clear that … whatever you did with your day … changed you.”
I was going for a drink. I stop, glass at my lips. “Huh?”
“Like a whole new Chase came back. Glow on your skin. Zing in your voice.”
“Zing …?”
“Then you come back with this welt on your head.” He frowns as he looks me over. “Did you get laid and rammed your face into the headboard or something?”
I spit my drink back into my glass to save it being sprayed all over Ian’s face. “Say what now?”
“You meeting up with fans in secret?”
“No!”
“Or just one special fan?” Something must give it away in my eyes, because he leans forward at once. “Chase. Is there a special guy I don’t know about? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I haven’t told you anything.”
“You’re saying it with your face.”
“I’m sayin’ nothin’ with my face.”
“That would explain everything,” Ian decides, almost tipping his drink over as he pushes it aside to lean in even more and lower his voice. “That new song at the other show. Your behavior.”
“My behavior? I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to a woman who I …” Don’t wanna throw Dee under the bus, just in case. “… had heard about from one of the house staff. And as for the song I wrote on the fly, that was inspired from an … an unexpected encounter.”
“An unexpected encounter with a beautiful guy who ran away with your heart?”
“Barely got a look at him,” I lie through my teeth.
Ian sits back, arms folded, certain about something. It bothers me how quickly he picks up on some things and is slow about nearly everything else. “We’ve had this talk before—” he starts.
“I’m not secretly seein’ someone, damn it.”
“—and I guess we’re having it again.” Despite the noise of the bar, his voice becomes nothing but hisses and air.
“Relationships are out of the cards. All your horny fans want you single. And you know why. We want them all to fantasize their lives with you with every heart-aching song you sing up there, like it’s meant just for them.
Men and women. You’re the broken, tortured heart throb.
Everyone wants to fix you. They’re dying to be your one and only.
Let them all be your one and only. The second that illusion breaks, your career goes poof!
” He accentuates that last word with a funny wiggling of his fingers in the air.
Then he returns to speaking. “We all gotta make sacrifices while we’re climbing up this mountain.
” His eyes go off, probably thinking of his own wife and daughter.
“You, most of all. But once we’ve hit it, once we’ve finally hit it and you’re all the way up there, sitting on top of that mountain, that’s when you have time for love. ”
“You done?” I ask sweetly.
He actually, seriously, literally thinks it over, eyes wandering.
“Yeah,” he decides with a nod, going for his drink.
Then just as I’m about to speak, he sets his glass back down.
“Oh, one more thing. Next time you want to take a fieldtrip, maybe let me know? Just to save me from having a coronary before I turn forty? I’d appreciate being alive for my daughter’s fifth birthday, and hopefully many, many more.
” Then he goes for his drink at last, and I forget what I was going to say.
Probably just repeating in one way or another that there ain’t no special guy in my life.
And it’s true. Timothy is just someone I’m getting to know.
Someone who still hasn’t called.
Or texted.
Or hit me up at all since our adventure in his ice cream shop.
And what do I do with that? Assume he’s not interested? Don’t return to Spruce? Maybe I creeped him out by running into him in his hometown. Crossed a boundary I should’ve known was there.
Guess I lost my mind.
Too much touring. Too much isolation.
Feels like cabin fever. Except I’m not in a cabin, always on the move, never technically trapped, yet suffocating still.
But something was definitely happening between us in that ice cream shop.
I’m not imagining it. I saw the way he was looking back at me—and sometimes trying not to look at me.
It was twenty times more intense than what we shared in that hallway where we first met, when something unexpectedly intimate happened, how he was vulnerable and split right open in front of me, and I was on my own, lurking in shadows, trying to offer some part of myself to the venue before we played.
Didn’t expect the venue to offer something first.
We both felt it. I know that for certain. And if I’m right, he’s craving that closeness again about as much as I am.
It’s about three in the morning when I’m pretty sure everyone else is asleep and, no surprise, I’m wide awake and wandering the lobby of the hotel, as if it’s just another venue I’m looking to offer something to.
I brought my guitar with me. Played a few chords in the stairwell.
Played a tune by the swimming pool in the back.
The front desk clerk is gone, probably watching TV in the back office bored out of their mind. I don’t blame them.
I step outside and into the night, where I find myself a spot on a picnic table and sit on top of it, feet on the bench, with Glorious hugged to my chest. “Sorry, pal,” I tell him sweetly, “but if my ass can’t sleep, neither can yours.”
Few minutes later, I’m lying back on the picnic table, Glorious on my chest, and I keep dancing back and forth between A major and C major.
I love how major chords a third apart play off each other.
They share just one note, the rest of them strangers.
The C# settles to C, like a tiny sigh of the heart, then brightening again when I switch back to A.
There’s never really a resolution, either.
I trade chords with a parallel world every strum, but there’s no telling which world each chord calls home.
A bittersweet lift, a hopeful drop, over and over.
Maybe it’s the stars I have something to offer to tonight.
I start threading a melody between the chords, as if stitching those parallel worlds together somehow.
Is it my world and Timothy’s I’m trying to unite?
Which one of us is A major?
Which one of us C?
Does it matter?
Both chords are beautiful on their own. But the moment you play them at the same time, together, they clash, fight each other, sound wrong, fall apart.
I stop strumming, bothered by that.
Maybe I shouldn’t pursue Timothy at all. I’m doing nothing but chasing dreams when I think of him. I’m pretending I know a star just because I can see it in the night sky, because it seems right there within reach, as close as an eyelash.
But it’s not close at all. It’s light years away.
None of those stars out there belong to me. The night can’t lend its treasures any more than Spruce can let go a guy like him.
A cow moos in my ear. I turn my head, confused.