Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
LOU
“ B odyguard,” Patty and I say in unison.
I’m not sure whether I should be relieved or offended at how quickly Patty removed the “fake boyfriend” option from the table.
Well, I definitely should be relieved. Not sure why it’s a pebble in my boot that he was a beat faster than me saying it, though.
“All right,” Manny says. He looks at Ron. “We’ll have you ride with the crew from now on. Patrick’ll take your spot as primary security on the bus.”
“What?” Patty and I blurt in unison—again.
Manny holds out his hands in a “what’s done is done” gesture. “In four hours, this picture will be trending on every platform.” He points to the picture, to how close Patty’s mouth is to my ear. “If this guy isn’t your boyfriend, he’s your personal bodyguard. Anything else is going to add a whole lot of speculation and a whole lot more questions. Is that what you want?”
I look at Patty and hold back a sigh. His dark brow is deeply furrowed, and with the way his shaggy hair is falling in his face, he looks part menace, part mess.
All hot.
Wait, no. Not hot. Nothing about Patty is hot. No one anywhere is hot. I don’t care about attractive men or mysterious men or frustrating men who never give me a full answer.
I care about crushing this tour and writing a follow-up album that’s even better than my debut.
That’s. It.
I shrug and lean back into the soft tan leather couch. “Fine by me,” I say. “Patty, you comfortable taking Ron’s spot?”
“I already got a job,” Patty says. “I can’t be your security guard when I’m running sound for every show.”
“In low-risk situations like travel, sure you can,” Manny says. “We’ll make sure we have more people around in higher-risk periods, but between you and the ex-military driver, I’m not worried.”
Patty frowns. Him expressing actual emotion—whether it’s frustration, annoyance, or concern—is new. And it makes me want more. We don’t know each other well, but I trust Rusty implicitly, and Patty is one of Rusty’s oldest and closest friends in the world. No endorsement could be stronger. And seeing how well he managed the crowd back in the parking lot, he’s clearly comfortable picking up on threats and keeping me safe from them.
“I guess I don’t have much choice,” Patty says. “But no photos.”
I chuckle. “We can’t control that, clearly.”
His nostrils flare. “I’m not saying we can stop fans, but I don’t want to be included in any pictures from the tour photographer, no behind-the-scenes footage, nothing. If it comes from this tour, my face ain’t on it, or I walk.”
I swap looks with Manny, whose eyes widen as he nods. Meanwhile, mine sharpen. I know the guy likes staying in the shadows, but this is a little much, even for him.
“I’ll make sure the appropriate parties know,” Manny says. “Pat, we’ll have your stuff moved to one of the bunks. Ron, why don’t you go up to the front and sit with the driver till we get to Charleston.”
Should Ron look so happy to get to hang out on his cell phone for the next hour and a half?
When he passes, Patty looks at Manny. “Ron’s gotta go,” he says before I can. “You can’t have someone so useless on security.”
“Agreed,” Manny says. Then he adds, almost apologetically, “He’s my cousin’s kid. I’ll have someone new in a week.” His phone vibrates, and I know he’s warring with himself to answer or keep talking to us.
“Manny, you’re good to get back to work. Pat and I need to go over sound, anyway,” I say.
He nods, and I stand up and gesture to Patty.
“My studio’s in the back,” I tell him. “Your gig bag is already there.”
We walk past the kitchenette, a bathroom, and the bunks—separated by thick noise-dampening curtains. My assistant and driver both have one, but that leaves four extras. Two are for guests, should the need arise. One is for Manny, whenever he needs to travel with me between cities.
The last is for my bodyguard.
Patrick O’Shannan.
I open a sliding door to get to my suite, where a lofted queen bed stands, accessible by a ladder. Rustic wood paneling frames the bed, and soft string lights cast a warm glow. Beneath the bed is a small closet, as well as a bench and a couple of instruments, including my guitar and fiddle. Running perpendicular to the bed is a compact desk with a digital piano, mounted monitors, a laptop, and a small guitar rack. Acoustic panels line the room, creating a haven of comfort and (I hope) inspiration. Beneath my desk, my walking pad treadmill is acting as a footrest, while above it, a cork board boasts Polaroids of me with my sisters, my parents, and the Janes, as well as the covers of the two albums that had the biggest impact on my dreams: Momma’s first one and Connor Nash’s.
Oh, and somehow, Beary—the stuffed animal my dad won for me at the state fair when I was seven—has fallen from my bed and is face down on the floor, showing his faded and worn brown backside.
“I didn’t realize my mom put that on board,” I say, scooping Beary up and tossing him onto my bed.
“Sure,” Patty says, like he believes me, even though we both know he doesn’t.
The suite is big enough not to be cramped but too small to be anything but cozy. And as we sit together on the small bench at my desk and Patty pulls open his gig bag, I can hear him breathing.
Do you know how intimate hearing someone breathe is?
Weirdly so. Very weirdly so.
While he opens his laptop and starts connecting the new earpieces he got from Dr. Reed to his Bluetooth, I throw on a fluffy cardigan.
“Are you cold?” he asks, looking surprised.
“Always. I have terrible circulation. I think it’s why I have headaches all the time.”
“Huh,” he says. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s lame,” I agree as he pushes his laptop all the way against the cork board, covering Nash’s album.
Was that … intentional?
“Let’s try out the interim earpieces,” he says, handing me the first set. I fit them in, and he turns on the music on his laptop.
“How’s it sound?”
I give him a thumbs-up, then open my jaw wide, and one falls out. I roll my eyes at him, and he gives me a weary look.
He tinkers with them for a moment, his fingers soft and careful against my skin. But whenever I open my mouth, they fall out.
“Next,” he says, and we go through the same thing two more times.
The third of the four pairs he got from Dr. Reed feels much better than any of the others. Patty presses play, and I start singing as I make exaggerated movements with my mouth. It isn’t till I start jumping around that they get loose, but that, I can understand.
I sit next to him at the desk. “These’ll work for now,” I say.
“That’s all I’m asking,” he says. “Now let’s listen to the mix and get you more used to it.”
He presses play, and the music swarms me.
“It’s awful,” I say, wincing.
“That’s helpful.”
I kick his leg with my stockinged foot. The low hum of the engine vibrates through the seat, a quiet rhythm that charges the space between us.
“It is helpful. Your job is to give me a mix I can work with.”
“And your job is to give me feedback I can actually use.”
“No, my job is to give my fans a great show.”
“How are you gonna do that if you don’t tell me how to improve the mix?” His eyes flash with challenge.
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe you could ask some clarifying questions? Play around with levels and see if they’re better?”
He closes his eyes in what looks like pain, but the set of his mouth tells me it’s for show.
“Is this really how the next ninety minutes are gonna go, Queenie?”
“Sugar, this is how the next six months are gonna go.”
He stands, but I grab his wrist and pull him back down with a laugh. “Oh, sit down, you big baby.”
He snorts. “Big baby? Are we on the playground? I must have missed the recess bell.”
“Ooh, that gives me an idea,” I say, scrambling to grab a pen and my notepad.
One look at you and I’m the girl in the back of the classroom.
I tap my pen on the notebook, thinking. Still thinking.
“Try ‘back of class,’” Patty says, his voice low, just loud enough to snap me from my reverie.
My eyes shoot up. “Beg your pardon?”
“You’re stuck, probably because ‘classroom’ is a clunky word. ‘Class’ is smoother.”
“It’s not clunky, it’s stylistic. Also, ‘room’ is a lot easier to rhyme with than ‘class.’”
His eyebrows flatten. “Really? What are you rhyming with ‘room’?”
I look away, irritated. “Broom. Doom. Gloom.”
“You forgot ‘flume.’”
“And what would you rhyme with ‘class’?” I give him a once-over. “Other than the obvious.”
His smirk pulls up his scruff, giving me a quick glimpse of a puckered scar beneath his jaw that almost makes me gasp. I stop myself, shaking off my curiosity, holding back the ache in my chest.
What kind of accident could have done that?
“Let’s see,” he says, “‘tracing hearts with my eyes as the hours pass.’ Or ‘writing our names on frosted window glass.’”
“Window glass? Redundant much?”
“A window contains more than glass, Queenie. It’s specific, not redundant.”
I open my mouth to argue, but then I flap my pen against my cheek, making a soft popping sound.
“Fine. I’ll admit that ‘class’ has some potential. But this—” I point between us—“isn’t how I brainstorm. My first drafts are allowed to suck.”
His gaze looks almost studious. “That surprises me.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“It ain’t a condemnation. From what I’ve seen, you demand excellence.”
“So?”
“So you seem to have a … high bar for yourself.”
My jaw tightens. “I do have a high bar for myself. I worked for years to get where I am without ever using a single connection. Now that people know I’m Winona Williams’ daughter, you have no idea the pressure I’m under.”
“That’s true.”
“So what does that have to do with letting myself write a crappy first draft? You can’t fix something that doesn’t exist.”
I expect Patty to argue, to come up with some clever retort. But instead, he looks down at my notepad, his jaw clenched as if he’s mulling over my words.
“Huh.”
That’s all he says: Huh.
It’s wildly unsatisfying.
“And anyway,” I say, turning back to my notebook. “I don’t co-write with anyone, so I’m gonna jot down these ideas before they’re gone.”
Patty gets up and disappears, and I spend the next five minutes staring at that first line, trying desperately to think of any way to make ‘classroom’ work.
After five minutes, I scratch out “-room.” Rhymes come freely to my mind, and I jot them all down, but none of them are as good as the two throwaway lines Patty spat out. I tear out the page, toss it in the trash, and stomp out of my suite and into the kitchenette, where Patty’s making himself a cup of coffee.
I hate coffee. I hate the smell so much, it makes my stomach roll. The only reason I even consented to have it on the bus is because my assistant and driver would mutiny if I didn’t.
I fold my arms in a huff. “You have some nerve critiquing my writing like that. I know you’re not just anyone on this tour, but you’re also not my consultant or co-writer.”
“You’re right,” he says, pouring coffee into one of the flowery teal mugs Momma stocked the cupboards with. “And you’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“I am just anyone on this tour.”
My eyelids flutter as I roll my eyes hard. “Oh my stars. Turn the self-deprecation down a smidge, will you?”
He pours so much vanilla creamer into his mug, it’s barely brown anymore, and then he adds five pumps of caramel syrup.
He takes a sip and then adds one more pump.
I’m about to say something snarky—because that is a disgusting amount of sugar for a twelve-ounce cup—when he tips his head back to take a long drink, revealing more of the scar I noticed earlier. A lot more. Long and thin, it stretches along his jawline, blending in with the contours of his face. His scruff mostly hides it, but it’s patchy in places, and I can see for the first time that his jaw is asymmetrical.
And when he brings his face back down, I notice his jaw is wider even than Sean’s. It’s got that Zac Efron post-accident feel, which makes me wonder what Patrick O’Shannan looked like before.
And how bad that must have hurt …
“What?” he asks, holding his coffee between us like a shield. He must know exactly why I’m looking, so I don’t deny it.
“Your scar. What happened?”
“I have no idea.”
I put my hand on my hip, pushing the rising curiosity—and sympathy—away. “Come on.”
He sets down the mug and folds his arms. “I ain’t lying. One minute, I was in a hotel room with some buddies. Next thing I knew, I was in a hospital room, hooked up to a dozen tubes, recovering from surgery after a head-on collision with a concrete lane divider.”
I try to keep the skepticism from my voice. “And you don’t remember anything ? Do you have some kind of amnesia?”
“Nope. Too much drugs and rock and roll.”
Disgust ripples beneath my skin like a chill. “You drove high?”
“Not knowingly, I didn’t.” His words have a hard edge to them, but it’s nothing compared to my outrage.
“You expect me to believe someone roofied you?”
“I don’t care what you believe, Queenie. I care about making amends for the way I hurt my family. My dad’s accident happened only a couple of months before mine. My momma left. And then I found out my brother gave up his dreams so I could do a terrible job living mine. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and getting wasted seemed as good an answer to my problems as any other.” He grabs his mug and takes another slow drink. “I chose the wrong people over the right ones. I deserved what happened to me.”
Deserved?
The word hangs heavy between us, dampening the whirr of the engine and the sound of Manny chattering in the nearby lounge. The wheels beneath us rumble, the rhythmic hum of the road adding weight to the silence. I cross my arms, trying to figure out whether I’m more annoyed or intrigued.
“I genuinely can’t tell if you think that accident was some kind of … karmic absolution—the universe taking its pound of flesh—or if you’re taking responsibility for a bad choice.”
His laugh is as sharp as a knife. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Queenie.”
“Patrick O’Shannan. You think you deserved to nearly die because you didn’t return home to take care of your dad?”
“Yes.”
His blunt words hit like a blow, except the blow isn’t aimed at me but at himself.
“That’s not how it works.”
“Who’s to say it ain’t?”
With his arms folded across his wide chest and his once-broken jaw clenched tight, Patrick looks as immovable as a mountain. But why isn’t he stopping me? Why isn’t he marching away, joining Manny on the couch or rolling into his open bunk and shutting me out?
He wants to talk about this.
No, he needs to talk about this.
And I think he needs to talk with someone who can get people to open up.
I have a lot of sides to me, like anyone does. But part of living a secret life means compartmentalizing. I put away Lucy Jane, the musician, and push past the Lou Williams Patty knows through our friends. Instead, I pull out Lucy Williams, attorney at law.
I take him in, studying him like I would a witness on a stand. His folded arms make him look guarded, like he’s hiding more than he’s hinting at. His expressionless face speaks volumes, too. It doesn’t indicate a lack of emotion to me anymore, but rather more emotion than he can contain.
“You said you deserved it,” I say, switching to a neutral tone, not giving away how much his words trouble me. “What does that mean to you?”
He looks out the window, as if it’s a casual move instead of a deliberate way of avoiding my eye. I get the sense he’s both hoping I’ll drop it but afraid I will, too.
“My dad didn’t impart wisdom the way some dads do. He was a living example. If someone needed him, he was there. If a guy stumbled into the bar and had no way home, Dad let him sleep it off at our place.
“Part of being a real man is putting other people first, he always said. Balancing duty with desires. The way I see it, a man should be where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there. When he ain’t, bad things have a way of happening.”
“Was your dad where he was supposed to be when he was in his accident?”
Patty’s amber eyes flash red. “He was on his way home from fixing the church roof.”
I nod slowly. “Interesting. So it sounds like he was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. So why did something bad happen to him? You don’t think he deserved it, do you?”
His throat bobs hard. “Never.”
“What if you found out he was fumbling with the radio? That he looked away for a split second when the other car veered? His eyes weren’t where they were supposed to be. Would he deserve it then?”
“Of course not,” he growls.
“Then can we both admit your theory holds no weight? If this was karma, then it’s done. You’re off the hook. If this was God or the universe exacting revenge for being a young, selfish idiot, then you have no reason to beat yourself up anymore. You’ve paid your dues. The scales have been righted.”
“That ain’t how it works, and you know it.”
“Of course I know it! And you do, too! Saying you deserved it doesn’t make sense, and it sure doesn’t make it better! It doesn’t fix your pain or your dad’s. It doesn’t help Sean. If anything, it makes it all worse.
“You made a mistake. You were grieving. Even if you were selfish and reckless, trusting the wrong person isn’t the same as choosing to crash. It’s his fault. Or … her fault,” I add, not liking the way the word feels on my tongue.
Patty shakes his head. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop expecting your first draft to be flawless. You screwed up! Own it, erase what’s written in pencil, and work with what’s written in ink. But don’t throw away the page because there are mistakes on it.”
Instead of answering me, he takes a sip, completely unfazed, as if he hasn’t just committed a crime against his own body by drinking that coffee.
I watch him. Watch the mug. Him. The mug.
He doesn’t even blink.
That’s it.
I reach forward, calm, deliberate, and take the mug straight from his hands.
He doesn’t stop me. Just watches, like he’s waiting to see where this is going.
You won’t have to wait long.
I turn to the sink. No rush. No words. No hesitation.
I tip the entire thing over and pour it out in one slow, satisfying stream.
The silence between us is deafening.
I place the mug in the sink, wipe my hands on a dish towel, and finally turn back to face him.
He’s just staring at me.
Blinking.
Like he can’t decide if he’s annoyed, impressed, or deeply concerned.
“Don’t you dare criticize my page before I can scribble out my own mistakes,” I snap.
His gaze has a weight to it. “You done?”
My eyes narrow to slits. “No. Eat a vegetable, already. Your coffee is giving me a toothache.”
I huff and puff into my suite like the Big Bad Wolf, then drop onto my bench, fuming.
I’m so angry, I don’t even hear Patty come back until he’s sitting beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I demand.
He pulls out his laptop and puts in his IEMs before handing me mine.
“You know, it’s hard to take you seriously when you’re dressed like Mr. Rogers.”
I laugh in disbelief, and somehow, the smile stays while my anger cools.
“Let’s take it from the top, Queenie. I want you to focus just on the guitar and tell me how it sounds.”
I put the earpieces back in, giving him a wary but willing look.
“Whatever you say, Sugar.”