Chapter 11 #2
She finishes whatever she was typing and snaps her laptop closed with a soft click. “Congratulations,” she announces. “I actually think you’ve chosen a prime disappearing spot.”
“Why’s that?” I squint over at her.
“People are scared of rooftop pools.” She states like it’s a known fact.
I raise a brow. “Since when?”
“Since the internet taught them falling is a thing,” she explains. “They don’t come up unless they’re drunk, tanning, or in denial. None of which is a morning activity, generally.”
“Which one are you?”
She considers, then smiles, her blue eyes dancing with mirth. “Denial, obviously. With a side of coffee.” She reaches toward the small table between us and grabs a paper cup. Condensation beads on the sides. She takes a sip, eyes closing briefly like she’s communing with a higher power.
The movement causes her breasts to squeeze together. I look away, then back, then internally slap myself. Get it together, Ross. “What are you editing?” I ask, nodding at her camera.
“Nothing yet. Just backing things up.” She taps the device affectionately. “I learned the hard way not to trust technology on tour. Too many vibrations. Too many chances for memory cards to get stupid.”
She’s got a little portable hard drive hooked up, the cord looping across her thigh. Her fingers move over it with an ease that says this is second nature, this ritual of preserving, organizing, and labeling chaos.
“You always work this hard?” I wonder out loud.
“You always worry this much?” she counters.
I huff. “Not worrying. Observing.”
“Observing is the gateway drug to worrying.” She leans back, stretching her arms over her head.
Her stomach is taut, the muscles more defined than I expect, and as my gaze slides down, I realize there’s a rather large gap in the waistband that allows a view I’m not ready for. My brain short-circuits for a second.
“Feels like that’s my line,” I mutter, trying to keep my eyes anywhere but her bare skin.
“You don’t own observation,” she replies. “You just brood with it more.”
I let that slide. Mostly because she’s not wrong. A hotel staff member walks by, adjusting cushions, pretending not to look at us. His gaze slides away fast when I meet it.
Sadie watches the exchange over the top of her sunglasses. “Do you ever get used to that?” Her voice quiet.
“What?”
“The flinch,” she says. “The way people snap their eyes away like they’ve been caught. Like they weren’t just imagining what your hair feels like.”
I smirk. “You imagining what my hair feels like, camera girl?”
“Please.” She scoffs. “Your hair looks like it’s got mites.”
“Possible I suppose.” I chuckle. “Wanna check?”
Her mouth curves like she might. I shift on the chair, more restless than I want to admit. The thing is, she doesn’t flinch. Not like that. She doesn’t look at me like I’m a god or a monster. She looks at me like I’m data. Like I’m just something else to catalog. It’s infuriating. It’s addictive.
“What about you?” I shoot back. “You ever get used to being invisible?”
She turns her head toward me at that, expression flickering. “I’m not invisible,” she insists. “I’m just designed to disappear.”
“Explain,” I prompt.
She wets her lips, thinking. I try not to follow the path of her tongue with my eyes. I fail.
“Photographers aren’t supposed to be the story,” she surmises. “We’re the conduit. We make everyone else look how they want to look, or capture how they actually do. Either way, we don’t belong in the frame.”
There’s something bitter at the edges of that. “And if you want to be?” I probe further, wanting to know.
“In the frame?” She laughs once, short and humorless. “Then I picked the wrong job.”
I watch her for a second. The wind lifts a strand of hair and blows it across her cheek. Without thinking, I reach over and tuck it behind her ear.
Her breath catches. So does mine. Her skin is warm under my fingers. Soft. Adrenaline spikes in my veins like I’m about to walk on stage. Bad idea, Ross. I pull my hand back slow. Her eyes stay on mine the whole time. “You look better on this side of the lens, for the record.” My voice low.
She swallows. “Flattery from you is suspicious.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think you’re dangerous.” She tilts her head, eyes narrowing.
I nod my head, considering. “Yeah,” I agree. “You’re not wrong.”
She exhales, a sound halfway between a scoff and a sigh. “You’re not supposed to admit it.”
“Honesty’s cheaper than pretending I’m safe.”
She looks away first, out over the edge of the roof, where the city stretches in low, easy lines. Lincoln isn’t a skyscraper town. It’s brick and trees and distant highways. It’s not trying to be something it’s not.
“How’d you end up doing this?” I ask. “Following bands around. Living on buses. Pining over guitar gods.”
“Presumptuous.” She snickers. “And I didn’t really ‘end up’ here. I chased it.”
“Why?” I wonder out loud, genuinely curious.
She shrugs one shoulder. “I like stories and I like sound. Cameras let me catch both. First it was shitty little clubs. Then regional tours. Then one of my sets went semi-viral and an editor at Amped called. I sent them three hundred shots. They hired me for one weekend. That turned into a month. Then two months. Now…” She gestures vaguely at me, at the hotel, at the pool, at the invisible bus humming down in the lot below.
“Now I can pretty much pick any assignment I want.”
“You ever wish you’d picked something quieter?”
“Like accounting?” she deadpans, arching a brow.
“Like anything where you’re not sleeping in a coffin with wheels,” I jab back.
She thinks about it, eyes scanning the horizon like the answer might be written there. “Sometimes,” she admits. “There are days where my knees hurt, and my back hates me, and I’m three time zones away from anyone whose couch I might crash on if everything goes to shit.”
She pauses, glancing at me. “But then there’s a night where a whole stadium sings the same lyrics back at someone like it’s a holy sermon in a church. Or a girl in the front row cries because a song cracked something open in her that needed light. And I think, yeah, okay. This. I can live here.”
Her voice isn’t reverent. It’s resigned. And somehow, that hits harder than worship.
“I get that.” I sigh, nodding at the same time.
“Of course you do.” She grins. “You’re the idiot on stage.”
“I’m the idiot with the guitar,” I correct. “Big difference.”
She tips her head, studying me. “Why guitar? Why not drums? Or vocals? Or, I don’t know, kazoo?”
I snort. “Kazoo doesn’t get you laid.”
“Ah.” She chuffs. “So, this is all about sex.”
“It was,” I admit. “For pretty much the last decade.”
“And now?”
I pick at a loose thread on the arm of the lounge chair. “Guitar does what my mouth can’t,” I speak slowly. “When shit gets too loud in here,” I tap my temple, “it gets quiet when I play. Like it rearranges the noise into something I can breathe around.”
She goes very still. The wind brushes her hair again, but she doesn’t move. “That night on the road,” she inquires softly. “With the accident?”
My spine stiffens. “Not your story,” I snap out of reflex.
“I know.” Her brow furrows. “I’m not asking you to make it mine. I just-” She swallows. “You looked like someone who knows what it’s like to be ambushed by sound. Even when it’s quiet.”
The truth of that lands between us like a stone in water.
Ripple after ripple. I should shut this down.
Crack a joke. Change the subject. Talk about anything else.
Instead, I hear myself confessing a little bit of my truth.
“I was driving behind someone who crashed. Long time ago. Someone I…” My throat closes around the word; loved.
“Someone I knew was in the car. There was nothing I could do.”
The admission tastes like rust in my mouth. I don’t talk about this. Not with interviewers. Not with fans. Not with strangers on rooftops who make my heart forget what species it is.
Sadie’s face goes soft around the eyes, but she doesn’t say she’s sorry. She doesn’t coo or tilt her head or ask for details to look for empathy. She just says, “That explains a lot.”
I exhale a laugh that doesn’t feel like one. “Yeah?”
“The control thing. The ‘don’t get close’ thing. The way you watch exits when you walk into a room.”
My brow shoots up. “You notice that?”
“Observing is the gateway drug to worrying,” she volleys, throwing my words back at me. “Remember?”
I huff. “You’re dangerous.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
We sit there for a minute, the morning stretching open around us.
The woman in the pool climbs out, wrapping herself in a white towel, and disappears inside.
The guy with the tablet leaves. The staff member finishes perfecting the symmetry of the chairs and vanishes too.
It’s just us. Empty pool. Empty sky. My body full of nerves.
“You ever think about quitting?” she asks at last.
“Music?” I blink in surprise.
“Running,” she clarifies. “From whatever that was. From yourself.”
“Every day,” I admit. Then add, “Don’t worry. I’m too stubborn.”
“Good.” She smiles, small but real. “The world would miss your talent.”
The compliment hangs there. I look at her, really look. The line of her jaw. The way her mouth curves when she’s trying not to show what she’s feeling. The shadows under her eyes from too many late nights and not enough dreams that don’t involve alarms.
I want to kiss her again. Well, not again. Still. I shift closer on the lounge chair, our knees almost touching now. She doesn’t move away. Her breath catches just a bit.
“I can’t seem to get you out of my head,” I confess. The words feel like dragging barbed wire out of my chest. “On the bus. With that camera. With your damn rubber bands.”
Her gaze flicks to my hair, then back. “You threw one of them away.” Her mouth pulls down into a frown.
“You took up residence.” I shrug. “Plus, I’m an asshole.”
“Won’t argue with that.” Her voice softer now. Less armor. “You’re not easy, you know.”
“Good.” I chuff. “That makes us even.”
Her lips part, just a fraction. The part of me that remembers the elevator, the almost kiss, and the, go to your room before I do something stupid speech, starts yelling again.
The other part, the one that remembers her that night on the bus, drunk and vulnerable and pissed at herself and still, somehow, kind, wins.
I lean in. Not all the way. Just enough that our shoulders brush, where my mouth is just close enough to feel the ghost of her exhale. “I want to kiss you. I do. But, if I kiss you,” I breathe out, “it’s not going to be because I’m drunk. Or pissed. Or trying to make you jealous.”
Her pupils blow wide. “What makes you think I’d let you kiss me at all?”
My mouth curves. “Your face in that elevator last night said everything required.”
She almost smiles, then catches herself. “You’re insufferable.”
“Probably,” I crack a wide grin.
“I don’t…” She swallows. “I don’t get involved with people I work with, Dean. It complicates things. Messes with the story. Blurs lines.”
I nod slowly. “And, I don’t do relationships.”
“I’m not asking for one.” Her response instant. “I’m not asking for anything.”
“Me either.” I stare at her. “That’s the problem. We both want something that would probably burn us both.”
For a second, we just sit there, breathing the same patch of air, surrounded by all the things we’re not saying. Then she drops her head back against the cushion, breaking eye contact. The spell fractures, but doesn’t fully fade. “Take me somewhere,” she requests.
I blink. “What?”
“In the city,” she clarifies. “Somewhere that isn’t a dressing room or a press junket or a tour bus. You’ve been on the road longer than me. You must have a favorite type of nowhere.”
It’s not what I expected. It’s somehow more dangerous. “You trust me to do that?”
She snorts. “No. But I trust me. And I trust my feet. If you try anything, I’ll kick you in the shins and walk myself back to the hotel.”
I grin, surprised by how good it feels on my face. “Fair enough.”
She stands, slipping her boots back on, stuffing her hard drive into her bag. She tugs a T-shirt over her head, then slings her camera strap over her shoulder.
“Well?” she prompts. “You coming, or are we starting our co-dependent rooftop staring contest again?”
I push up from the chair, shoving my hands into my pockets. “There’s probably a record store somewhere that doesn’t suck. Locals always have one.”
“Lead the way, rockstar.” She grins. “And no promises I don’t take pictures.”