6. Mateo
MATEO
“Paris?” Eddie echoes, his brows lifted in surprise. He pulls the drumsticks he always keeps in his back pocket, twirling one between his fingers.
I blow out a breath. “Yeah. Fucking Paris.”
We’re in the greenroom, backstage at tonight’s show in Nashville. Our opening band, Sugarcoated Lies, is on now, the muted sound of the last song of their setlist filling the air around us.
“Is her husband going with her?” Silas asks from where he sits on the couch across from me.
I nod. “The company he works for has a branch in Paris, so he’ll be able to work while they’re out there.”
After Talia dropped the bomb of her photography agency moving to Paris, it took a good five minutes for me to say a word.
Millions of questions ran through my head, trying to make sense of the logistics of her moving to Paris and me still with just under eight months left of this tour, and how the hell we’ll make this work for Crew.
Once I remembered how to string together enough words to make a sentence, she explained that even though the agency is now based in Paris, she won’t have to be out there permanently, and that helped settle some of my anxiety about what the fuck we were going to do.
“When is she moving?” Theo, our guitarist, asks between mouthfuls of the miscellaneous snacks the venue left out for us.
“The sooner she goes, the sooner she can get everything settled out there and come back to run the agency from Milwaukee,” I explain. “So the agency booked her a flight for next week.”
“Damn,” Eddie says, running a hand through his hair. “And how long does she need to be out there?”
I twist the silver rings on my finger, my leg bouncing a mile a minute with the nervous energy I’ve had since last night. “At least a year.”
“A year?” Theo and Silas say at the same time, and I let my body fall back into my chair, pressing my palms into my eyes until I see stars.
Last night at Lenny’s, Talia had explained that part of her agreement with the current owner was that she wanted to be based in Milwaukee, so the compromise is a year cramming in as much training as possible as they prepare the agency for the transition of leadership.
“What about Crew?” Eddie says, asking the question that caused all of my anxiety in the first place.
“Is he going with her?” Theo asks, coming over to sit down on the couch next to Silas, a bag of chips in his lap.
When Talia said she didn’t know how she was going to find childcare for Crew in Paris, I immediately told her that she didn’t have to worry about it.
Talia has spent years being the one who makes our custody arrangement work with my weeks on the road, so I don’t go more than a few days without seeing Crew.
I owe everything to her.
When my parents died and I became Mia’s guardian at eighteen, I had to grow up quickly.
Love and relationships felt so trivial when I was the one helping my eight-year-old sister with her homework and dropping her off at school.
Between being her guardian and managing night classes to get a computer science degree, I didn’t have time to date.
It wasn’t until she was much older that I even considered it.
And that’s when I met Talia.
Meeting her, falling in love with her, was like a breath of fresh air after feeling like I was taking in smoke for years.
And while somewhere along the way we got comfortable—having followed the steps you’re supposed to until we realized that it had been years since we felt that spark we did almost a decade earlier—I would do it all over again.
Because now, instead of marriage and a wife, I have a lifelong friend and my son.
She’s been the most amazing co-parent for years, and I figured it was my turn to support her.
It’s the least I can do—give her this year where she can focus on her career and know Crew is taken care of.
We can FaceTime and do visits whenever we can.
I’ll figure it out—she doesn’t have to worry.
I told her that adamantly. So many times that I started to believe it myself.
But then Talia and I went to pick up Crew from my sister’s house, and I said my goodbyes to them all before starting my drive back here to Nashville.
And the entire drive, I realized that having two more legs of this tour, traveling every other day, and bringing my four-year-old son along for it all was next to impossible to do all by myself.
Granted, I know the guys and our crew would help—Mia too if I need her—but we are all out here to do our jobs. I can’t expect any of them to pick up my slack.
“I haven’t figured it out yet,” I tell them, rubbing my hands against my pants, my body rocking back and forth. “Aside from the fact that he’s coming on tour with us.”
This prompts a plethora of reactions from the guys—widened eyes from Eddie, a “damn” from Theo, and a “hell yeah” from Silas.
All three guys are married, but the reactions prove that Silas is the only one without kids—Theo and Eddie immediately understand what it means being on tour with a child, and Silas is none the wiser.
“What about school?” Theo asks.
I run a hand through my hair. “He starts school full-time next fall, so I need to make sure he’s ready for Kindergarten by then.”
“What’s your plan for that?” Eddie asks, but before I can say more—or admit that I have no fucking clue—we hear footsteps coming down the hallway just outside the greenroom, the music no longer sounding from stage as the guys from Sugarcoated Lies peek their heads in the way they always do after they finish their set.
We’ve been touring with them for a few months now, but I can still sense the nerves coming from them—like they don’t quite know how to act around us yet.
“How’d it go?” I ask Liam, the lead singer, giving him and the three other guys a chance to come in, putting a pause on the current conversation as I stand up to join them by the door.
“Great,” he says, sweat lining his forehead, his blonde hair damp and cheeks red. There’s a huge smile on his face, the same way there always is when the kid gets off stage.
“There were a couple people out there singing along to some of our songs,” Kai, the guitarist, says from over Liam’s shoulder.
The same eager smile on his face, like he can’t contain his excitement.
Eddie, Theo, and Silas join us, their lips all curved in smiles like proud dads, and I know my face shows the same.
“Damn, that’s awesome, guys,” I say, lightly bumping Liam's shoulder with my fist as Eddie squeezes Kai’s shoulders and Theo and Silas give the other two band members high fives.
I couldn’t help the mentor role I fell into with these guys, ever since I was at Lenny’s one night last year, getting a drink and catching up with Mia and some of her friends, and I saw Sugarcoated Lies performing.
They were on the same makeshift stage Cross My Heart used to perform on, and they had a sound that instantly spoke to me—telling me that they had something special.
Their sound seamlessly blended glossy pop-rock hooks with emotional weight that you hear in Midwest emo bands.
There was something raw about the way they fused together this confident energy with something that was distinctively theirs.
After their set, I introduced myself and was honored to hear that they were inspired by Cross My Heart’s sound. It only took a couple meetings with the label and the rest of the band seeing them perform for us all to know that they were perfect for our last tour.
The guys all fall into a conversation about the crowd and the stage when I feel my phone buzz a few times in my pocket.
Talia
Hi! I know you’re about to go on, so feel free to ignore this until after the show!
The agency wants to change my flight to Monday
I’m sorry it’s sooner than we planned
Are you guys still set to be in Atlanta by then? I can see if they can fly Daniel and me out from there after dropping off Crew with you?
Good luck tonight!
She sends a picture of Crew in his Cross My Heart T-shirt, smiling at the camera so big that his eyes are closed, and it momentarily helps me forget what her other messages entail.
Four days doesn’t make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but now I only have tomorrow and Monday to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do.
Thanks for the photo
Give him a kiss goodnight for me
And yes, we’ll be there—I’ll send you the hotel info tomorrow
I let out a sharp exhale, one loud enough to get the attention of Liam.
“Everything okay?” he asks as I slide my phone into my back pocket.
I nod, clearing my throat. “Yeah, it’s just my ex-wife.”
“Does that mean the little man will be at the next show?” Liam asks, gathering the attention of the rest of the guys.
“Crew’s coming to Atlanta?” Eddie asks, his tone a little concerned.
“Yeah, Tal is meeting us there before she flies out,” I answer. Turning to Liam and the other Sugarcoated Lies kids. “Crew will be traveling with us for the rest of the tour.”
“Damn, that kid is cooler than me,” Asher, the Sugarcoated Lies drummer, says, and the other guys echo similar sentiments.
Just like Silas, these twenty-somethings don’t have kids, meaning they don’t realize tour life isn't just venues and setlists when there’s a four-year-old joining us.
It's avoiding meltdowns, navigating picky eating, and figuring out how to do bedtime when it’s at the same time I’m supposed to be on stage.
A dry laugh escapes my throat, and it takes a lot of effort to appear nonchalant.
“Are you going to have a babysitter or someone with him?” Liam asks just as someone from our crew knocks on our door, giving us a ten-minute countdown until it’s time for us to go on, and my body immediately goes into autopilot.
The air shifts—charged in a way that only happens before I go on stage. It’s like the edges of my vision blur, and I can only focus on getting into the right mindset. I feel the drum of my pulse go steady, opening and closing my fists to allow the tension in my body to settle.
The Sugarcoated Lies guys wish us luck as we leave the green room, but I barely hear it over the buzz of the backstage light and the distant noise of the crowd. I inhale deeply, unbothered by the hushed, hurried voices of the crew as Eddie, Theo, Silas, and I head to the stage.
Rolling my shoulders, I taste the faint nerves in the back of my throat before swallowing them down as I take one more deep breath, the lights on stage going down and the crowd going wild.
I feel the confidence I only ever get onstage click into place, and it’s like nothing else matters.
And at this moment, aside from Crew sleeping soundly in his bed, nothing else does.