Chapter Twenty-Three. Riley
Chapter Twenty-Three
Riley
When I wake up in the morning and see Luna’s brown hair splayed across the pillow, I breathe a sigh of relief, because it means yesterday wasn’t a dream.
I turn over and wrap my arms around her, pulling her into me and nestling my face in her shoulder.
She wiggles closer to me, and I drift back to sleep.
When I wake up for the second time, Luna has a guitar and is softly strumming and singing to herself. I’m not sure where it came from, maybe her team sent it ahead? But I don’t recognize the song she’s singing.
I told myself that I was just like
Everybody else
Kissing guys under the skies
They told me were always blue
But I found you and somehow realized
That this is the feeling they always said was true
And the skies aren’t blue at all—
They’re pink and red and scarlet.
I took your hand and kissed you back
And suddenly everything that had been so black and white
Was a screaming Technicolor sunset
And I think, I think I like it
I’m stuck somewhere now
Right between the assholes from my youth
Who made me think life would be easier without this
And the fans I owe the truth
But who would rather I let them think
They already know who I like to kiss
But it’s okay
Because I wouldn’t trade anything for even a second of this
I step out of bed and Luna turns around as the springs creak. Her brown hair is wet from either a shower or a swim, and the morning sunrise is washing her face in a golden glow.
“Is that something new?” I ask.
She holds a hand out to me, and I take it and kiss it. Usually the morning after is an awkward dance of how much to give, but this just feels natural. “It is,” she says. “It’s unfinished, but I think there’s something here.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say. The way she was singing it was haunting and slow, but somehow I could also imagine it screamed.
The longer I spend on tour, the more impressed I am by Luna’s intense work ethic.
Even if I know she’s exhausted, when she steps onstage, no one would ever realize that.
Her drive is one of the things I admire most about her.
I know I’ve seen Luna write before, but it’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that she’s writing something right now, about our night, that I’ll probably hear on the radio, on movie soundtracks, and on social media. It gives me chills.
“It’s not a pop song,” she retorts after singing for a beat more. “But maybe … maybe that’s okay. I haven’t written new music I really liked in a while.”
“Well, I like this,” I say gently.
“Me too.”
While Luna keeps singing to herself, I make us both coffee and then she puts down the guitar, and I follow her over to the sliding door to the pool and patio. She leans against me and I wrap my arms around her as we watch the end of the sunrise.
“Luna … maybe this is a dumb question. But why does your next big song have to be a pop song? I know you can write pop—‘You and Me’ is amazing. But your older songs are getting huge. Why can’t you just write more of that type of music?”
Luna tenses for a moment, but then I feel her shoulders relax.
“It needs to be a breakthrough year. I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to do something new, just that this has to be the year I gain prominence.
But I guess I also just felt like if it was because I went more pop, then it would be because I did something different.
Not because dating Hudson made people care about what I already did. ”
“But what if it wasn’t Hudson? What if ‘You and Me’ was just the gateway song?”
“I…” Luna trails off. She turns around and kisses me. “Maybe. But what about today. Should we explore Mykonos? Or stay in bed?”
I kiss her back languidly. I don’t want to push the subject, because I know about as much about music as she does about cooking. “As much as I’d love to stay in bed all day … I’ve never been to Greece before, so it would be nice to see outside this house of a hotel room.”
Luna kisses me. “It is early, though,” she says between kisses.
“Mmmm, good point.”
After spending a few more hours in bed exploring every inch of each other, we change into bikinis and cover-ups and get a ride to the Scorpios, the high-end beach club on Paraga Beach.
Luna rents us two chairs and a cabana right by the water, while her security watches over us from the bar, and we order food and cocktails and alternate between swimming and tanning.
The water is clear blue, and in the distance we can see the white of Mykonos’s old town.
Our cabana and loungers are in the sand, but behind us is a rocky, almost mountainous terrain that looks desertlike.
It’s clear that the club was designed to blend into nature rather than to stand out, and even the roofs of the cabanas are a brown straw material that makes them fade into the rocks from a distance.
Luna looks incredible in a black strapless bikini with a gold buckle on the hip, and as I catch her checking me out, I’m suddenly glad that I packed one bikini that was cute instead of sporty. “Let’s go back in the water,” Luna says to me across the daybed.
We’ve been avoiding all PDA while at the beach club, since the world still thinks Luna is with Hudson.
But in the water, out of view of phones or photographers, we’ve been sneaking touches here and there.
We run to the waves and when we both dive in, Luna takes my hand for a moment.
I wish I could pull her to me and kiss her, holding her up in the water with her legs hiked around my waist. But I understand why we can’t.
I just hope it really is just for now, not because she wants to hide us.
Instead we swim out a ways and float on our backs, our fingertips just barely touching. “I think this is the first time I haven’t felt alone since my mom died,” Luna says suddenly, still floating.
I stand so I can see her face. The water laps against my chest. “What do you mean?”
I knew Luna’s mom had died of breast cancer after discovering it late and battling it for a year.
Luna wrote a song about it, and donated all of the proceeds to breast cancer research, but she’s never played it live.
She stands up, and under the water I take her hands as she talks.
“My mom was my best friend. She went to every recording session and show with me. After she died, I still had Ashley, and she’s great—she was my mom’s best friend and she’s family.
But she also works for me. And my boyfriends …
I never felt like they understood me at all, and I thought that’s just how it was.
” She bites her lip and looks down, and I can tell she’s trying not to cry, not here, where there could be prying eyes.
“And then when we met, I just felt like I didn’t have to work so hard to explain myself.
All I had to do was stand in front of you, and you saw me exactly like I see myself.
And I feel a little guilty, because you see this part of me, and help me understand this part of me, that my mom will never get to.
She would just love you. She’d love that you make me happy, she’d love the song because it’s the first love song that’s completely true, and she’d make telling the world feel exciting instead of scary. ”
“Luna, I’m so sorry. Losing someone you love is so …
It’s unimaginable,” I say softly. I can’t understand what it’s like to lose a parent or to be scared of not being accepted for my sexuality, especially on the scale Luna’s dealing with.
But I know what it’s like to lose someone.
How devastating it is. “Your mom may have known. Parents … they know. They can feel it. And I wish she were here still. I would have loved to get to know her. But you don’t have to be alone anymore.
I’m with you. And I think now that you’ve realized you’re queer … I think things will feel less hard.”
“I almost feel guilty, you know? When I’m so happy that I forget to miss her,” Luna whispers, quickly wiping away a stray tear.
I squeeze her hand. “I know. This morning when I woke up, my first thought was how can it be possible that I don’t get to tell Liv about this?
I’ll never text her a selfie of us, you’ll never meet her, it’s …
I can’t believe she’s gone. There’s so much I would do differently if I could go back, and I’m a different person because of everything that happened.
I think it’s normal for big happy events to make you sad after losing someone.
But the one thing I know more than anything is that everything can be taken away in an instant, so I’m so fucking happy that we’re here. ”
I need to keep cooking. With sudden clarity I see what a hypocrite I am right now. If that’s what losing Liv taught me, how can I just walk away from cooking to be a consultant or whatever MBA-approved job is next?
But before I can say anything else, Luna suddenly steps toward me and kisses me so fast, I barely register it.
“You’re right. Life is precious, and I should act like it,” she whispers, still standing so close to me, and looking at me in a way that shouldn’t be photographed right now.
“Thank you. I’m really glad we met.” She steps back.
“Should we go into town? Change at the hotel and then catch the sunset there?”
“Sounds perfect.” And it does. Because I don’t want to let the heaviness of losing people we loved puncture this moment.