4. Tess
Tess
Fourteen months ago he comes to my door late at night with rain in his hair and no explanation.
I open it and step back. Nobody makes me.
He doesn’t say one word to talk me into it.
I open the door, I step back, and the time we spent together, the end of our relationship, the sorrow I felt at putting him out of my mind… it all disappeared.
He’d been gone five weeks. Not gone the way he was gone when he toured, which I understood, which I’d shaped a whole life around.
Gone the other way. Two-word replies. Me not responding for days.
The fading of our heat, our love, until I half convinced myself I’d imagined the entire thing.
As if Shane, who was bigger than any other solo rock god, had ever wanted me anyways.
And yet, here he is. On my steps.
He drips on the runner and doesn’t say hello.
“I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Do what.”
“Not be here.”
I should ask what changed. I know that even standing there. But he’s got the look he gets after driving a long way with the radio off, and my hand’s already on his jaw, and his coat hits the floor. We don’t get past the hallway.
He puts my back against the door frame and his mouth goes to my throat, and he says my name once, low, like he’s checking I’m real.
I get my hands up under his shirt and he’s shaking.
Not from cold. He runs hot always, he’s a furnace, he used to kick every blanket off the bed by two in the morning and then complain in the morning about being cold.
He lifts me up and carries me the six feet toward the couch, then changes his mind mid-stride and takes me to the bedroom, because I hate the couch and he’s known that since the fourth night.
That’s what people get wrong about him from the outside.
He pays attention. Coffee scalding, never warm.
The exact spot at the base of my spine that makes my body open to him.
He puts me down on the bed and then stops and looks at me.
“What?”
I’m suddenly self conscious, the way I am when I realize that I’m about to get naked with a bonafide rock star. A celebrity, the kind of gorgeous man who women lose their minds over.
And he’s here with me.
“Nothing.” He pulls my shirt off over my head and then just stays there, up on his forearms, looking at me with an expression he has never once managed on a stage. “Give me a second.”
“You’ve had five weeks.”
“Yeah.” He kisses the inside of my elbow, which is not an answer to anything. “Tess.”
“What.”
“Tell me to stay.”
“Stay.”
He’s slow at first because he’s showing off. He can be slow for a very long time and he enjoys knowing it. He works down my body and takes his time about it, and when I say his name he stops entirely, just to make me say it again.
“Say it properly.”
“You are so annoying.”
“Say it properly.”
“Shane,” I exhale with a gasp and a giggle.
I get a fistful of his hair and he laughs against my hip, and then he isn’t laughing, and I lose about ten minutes.
There’s a point where I stop being able to be quiet, and he covers my mouth with his hand, lightly, an old joke between us from a hotel with thin walls in Tucson, and I bite the heel of it and he swears and stops joking.
When he finally comes back up I’m shaking.
“Look at me.”
“Shane.”
“No, look. At. Me.”
He gets one arm under my shoulders and holds me still and when he finally moves it’s nothing like slow.
It’s the other thing, the one where his forehead goes down against mine and he stops being able to run a face at all.
He says my name over and over, and then he says something else into my hair that I don’t catch, and I ask him what and he shakes his head and doesn’t say it again.
The whole bed has come apart by the end. Sheet on the floor, one pillow somewhere near the closet. He collapses sideways so he doesn’t land on me, which he always does, and then drags me over on top of him like he’s putting something back where it belongs.
After, we’re crossways with his head on my stomach and my fingers in his hair and I’m happier than I’ve been in a month and a half. The window’s open. Somebody’s dog is losing its mind two yards over. He’s tracing something on my hip with his thumb, the same small arc, over and over.
“The tour extended.”
“Mm.”
“Through August. Then Europe.”
“Okay.”
“So it’s another year, basically.”
My hand stops. There’s a way a room changes when you understand why somebody drove to you in the rain.
“Another year of what.”
“Of this.” The thumb keeps going. “Of it being ours.”
“Say the real word.”
“Tess.”
“Say what you really mean or get up.”
He sits up. Slowly. He puts his back against the headboard and pulls the sheet across himself, and I notice that. Four minutes ago there was nothing between us and now he wants a sheet.
“Another year of keeping it a secret.”
I get up and put his shirt on because it’s closest, and stand at the end of my own bed in it.
“One photograph.”
“Tess.”
“One. I’m not asking for a magazine. One picture of us that isn’t a secret. One event where I go in the same door you go in. And one time, out loud, to a person who isn’t on your payroll, where you say my name.”
“You don’t know what they’re like.”
“Your fans.”
“You’ve never seen it up close. What they did to Renata after the video went around, that was eleven months, that was her mother’s house, people showing up at her mother’s house.” He’s leaning forward now. “I’m protecting you.”
“No.”
“I am.”
“If you were protecting me you’d be scared for me.” I can hear my own voice getting away from me. “You’re not scared for me. You’re scared of them. It’s a different thing and I’ve let you call it the same thing for a year and a half.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’ve never had one single thing in your life they couldn’t take.
” My throat closes and I push through it.
“So you keep me in here where it’s dark and nobody can reach me.
And you call that love. And I’ve been so grateful to be kept because I knew it would be over soon, once the tour ended. This is starting to feel like forever.”
He doesn’t say anything. Silence stretches between us while a very intelligent man looks for a counterargument and cannot find one. His silence finishes what the distance started.
“I’d give you anything,” he says eventually.
“I know. It’s not the same as giving me us.”
I go past him and his fingers close around my wrist and then open again, like he’s decided something, and I have thought about that half-second more than about almost anything else in my life.
I leave before it’s light. My apartment.
I leave anyway, because if I’m there when he wakes up he’ll say something with his voice cracked and I’ll fold, and I always fold.
I sit in my car in the garage under my own building until daylight.
Then I drive to a session in Georgetown and photograph a family of five in a field and get told I have such a good eye.
Two weeks later I’m doing a walkthrough at a venue outside Dripping Springs and the smell coming off the catering kitchen puts me down on one knee in the gravel, gorge in the back of my throat.
I buy the test at a gas station on 290 because I can’t make it home.
I take it in the bathroom with the door that won’t latch, holding it shut with my foot.
Two lines. Right away. Not the shy second line people describe, where you take it to the window and squint.
It comes up hard and fast, like the question offended it.
I sit on the closed lid and laugh out loud, alone, for a breath, and then I put my hand over my mouth.
And I’m happy.
Nobody’s going to believe that part later, once there are lawyers in it. I sit there with that stick in my hand and I’m not thinking about money or custody or what the internet does to women who dare to love famous men.
I’m thinking, oh. It’s you. I’m thinking about a man asleep in my lap with his boots on. I’m thinking he’ll come home for this, because how could he not, because this isn’t a photograph or a red carpet, this is a person.
I go out and sit in my car and I call the private line, the one that has almost never rung, the one he made me promise I’d only use if it was real. Two rings.
“Tess.” A man’s voice. Comfortable, almost warm. “It’s Mitch. He’s in a session, sweetheart. Can I take a message?”
I tell him I’ll call back, and then I never do get through.