Chapter 21
GUY
The Morning After…
I’m having the same dream again and there’s no doubt in my mind that the woman I’m seeing is Lyra.
Any trace of a face before hers is gone.
I’m standing on stage, playing, singing back-up to Scott, when my chord becomes stuck.
All other music has stopped and everyone in the venue is watching me play the same chord over and over again, painfully slowly.
I open my eyes into my dark bedroom in Sunderland, and the first thing I notice is that my room smells of sex.
Better still, it smells of Lyra. The way she smelled when she turned up to the beach yesterday.
How she smelled when her perfume had mixed with the salt of the sea.
The scent of her after we’d washed each other in my shower, then she curled into my chest and I listened to her fall asleep.
The second thing I notice is the sound of that same chord from my dreams being strummed on repeat.
Folding back the blanket, I climb out of bed, pull on a pair of shorts and move in the direction of my guitars, not prepared for what I find when I reach the doorway into my lounge.
Lyra is sitting on the sofa where we made love last night. Where I got lost in a way I can’t ever remember, as if all of the other shit that kicks about in my head every minute of every day was gone, wiped out by her.
She’s wrapped in the white sheet from my bed, hair kind of mad from sleep but as beautiful as she was last night. There’s a guitar resting on her lap, her fingers clumsily making a chord on the fret board, her right thumb gently playing the bottom four strings in succession, over and over.
It’s testament to how distracting I find her that it takes me a moment to realise which guitar she’s taken down from the wall.
When I do, I brace myself against the door frame, leaning my shoulder into it for support.
Because I’m waiting for it to strike me, for the chips to fall, for the world to disappear from beneath my feet.
Unexpectedly, it doesn’t come. Nothing happens, until I take my next breath. I’m drawn to them both, pulled by the image of both Lyra and the guitar.
She glances up to me as I warily cross the lounge, but the sincerity of her gaze and the warmth of her smile keep me together.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she says as I stare at the instrument in her control. ‘I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to disturb you. I thought I was being quiet.’
Do I mind? I’m not sure yet. That guitar hasn’t been taken down from the wall or even touched since I moved in. Before that, it had hung in my London apartment, untouched.
Because… I step onto the sofa and come to sit behind her, legs either side of hers. ‘This is Scott’s guitar.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I?—’
‘It’s okay,’ I tell her, allowing my chin to fall onto her shoulder, my lips to press to her throat, and my hands to rest over hers on the fret board, across the sound box.
It’s as close as I’ve come to holding Scott’s Gibson in the way it should be played since the last time we were in a studio together, mid-recording a new album. The same day he died.
‘You’re trying to play a D,’ I tell her, repositioning her fingers, adjusting her left wrist. My own fingers touch the guitar and it’s not strange or painful, it’s fine.
She nods and I manipulate her right hand into a better strumming position, slowly moving with her, up and down the strings.
‘Better,’ I tell her, feeling her cheek rise against mine with the tilt of her lips.
I move her fingers into a C chord, then a G, and we work through the sequence until she relaxes into it, each change of position becoming easier.
‘Was he a good player?’ she asks.
‘Scott?’ I chuckle, my chest moving against her back at the memory of how Trev, Jay and I used to mock my brother when we’d play in the studio, not a song necessarily, just messing around until sometimes we came up with a record unintentionally. ‘Not at all. But he was a trier.’
‘God loves a trier,’ she says, reminding me of the times I said those exact words to Scott in jest.
‘And hopefully tambourine players,’ I tell her, surprising myself with how easy it is to talk to her about him.
She turns her head so we’re nose to nose and she’s smiling back at me, making me realise how rare it is that I sit in a memory of my brother and enjoy it. Enjoy him. Our kid.
And I think, You’d like her, Scotty. You’d like her a lot, kid.
She kisses me shortly and shifts out from between my legs, handing the Gibson to me. ‘Would you sing to me?’
I stare at the guitar across my knee and I expect myself to say no, but my fingers shift on the strings and for the first time in three years, I start to play one of my own songs.
Slowly, tentatively, uncomfortably at first, I sing through the verse of a record I wrote in my bedroom one night, long before I ever thought anyone would hear it.
When I could hear my mam arguing with my stepdad.
Scott was lying in his single bed, parallel to mine in our small bedroom, barely any walking room between us.
It was late, the shouting was loud, Scott should have been asleep, we both should have been.
He had school the next day and I was holding down a job on a market stall then, making minimum wage selling fruit and veg for a local shop.
His eyes were wide open as he lay and I sat, the street lamp outside our window the only light inside.
I sing the lyrics, as if I wrote them yesterday:
‘I’m just a local boy,
Spending my days,
Dreaming of what will never come.
Selling fruit and veg,
To people who don’t know my name.
‘Thinking, thinking one day,
I’ll stand on a stage,
And become someone.
‘We’ll shine beneath stage lights,
Sweating in the heat,
Throats croaking through each song,
Playing like no one believes we can.
‘One day.
Some day.’
At some point, I get lost in the music, playing like I would to thousands of people?—
Until someone bangs on the ceiling above us. I open my eyes to Lyra and laugh. One day. Some day. But there’s nothing bigger in my world right now than the woman standing in front of me.
She watches me as she lets her sheet fall to the floor and with the light of the moon turning her perfect body into a silhouette, I go to her. We make love again, against the glass doors of the balcony, the ocean roaring behind us.
Sinking inside her is better than the best feeling I know – standing on stage in headlights. The arena quiet, expecting. The first depression of the drums. The strike of the symbol. The first note of the bass guitar. All playing a song I wrote. Mine.
A thousand barriers are crossed in this moment. I’m bared to her in every single way. Unravelled. Raw, exposed, and desperate for more.
* * *
The next time I wake up, my bedroom is hot, the sun shining in and heating the space. The smell of coffee sifts through the apartment and I grin at the ceiling as I remember… she’s here.
I pad into the kitchen, dragging a hand through my bedhead as I watch her move around my place like it’s her own. She’s found an old t-shirt of mine and it rides dangerously close to the fine globes of her arse as she makes…
‘Eggs?’
‘You found the one thing in my fridge.’
‘It’s a bit sparse. Don’t you plan on staying?’ she jokes.
‘I’m a day-by-day kind of shopper.’ I move behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist and gently biting her neck until she flicks me off with a spatula.
‘The chef is working here, sir.’
‘Sir? I like that. Makes me feel powerful.’
‘As the woman who’s about to feed you, I’d say I have the power. There’s coffee.’
‘Are you trying to get into my knickers, Lyra?’
‘Please, you’re so easy.’
Chuckling, I take a coffee. ‘What can I do?’
‘Toast, please.’
I set to work under her instruction, all the while thinking, this is… nice. Besides staff on tour, I don’t know that anyone has ever made me breakfast. I don’t even remember my mam doing anything other than pointing me in the direction of the cereal cupboard. Domesticity is new to me.
We sit on the sofa to eat, facing each other from opposite ends, plates on our laps, me occasionally trying to glimpse her knickers beneath my T-shirt. When she objects, I explain, ‘You broke the seal.’
‘Once you pop…’ she says, playfully relaying the words of the renowned crisps advert.
She’s right. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to stop.
When Lyra goes to get dressed, I check my mobile and see multiple messages from Dave: one telling me to have a good night; another two giving me updated analytics on the video of me singing Aerosmith yesterday that has, in his words, ‘blown-up’.
She returns wearing yesterday’s clothes and I turn the phone over without sending a reply. I’m much more interested in what’s right in front of me. The woman I’ve finally conceded I want more than I can manage to resist.
‘Dave,’ I explain. ‘Last night, telling us to have a good night.’
She bites her lip and blushes, the confident woman who has absolutely rocked my world in the last twenty-four hours sweetly shy again.
‘I have to go,’ she tells me. ‘I have work to do, and I usually help my mum make a roast on Sundays. Plus, I have things I promised I’d help my sister with for her wedding.’
‘Lyra, you don’t need to explain.’ Though I can feel myself coming down from the high of her.
‘I know. I just—’ She sighs. ‘I’m not very good at this, Guy. I hardly ever… ah, date? And really never… you know. Not like that.’
I can’t help it, I’m smirking at her discomfort because she’s so unbelievably cute.
‘Are you mocking me?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Huh.’
I cross the kitchen to her and tuck the hair from her temple behind her ear. ‘I like you being here.’
‘Now you’re just trying to get into my knickers.’
I kiss the tip of her button nose. ‘Too right I am.’