53 EVIE
E VIE
It’s a strange feeling to be near someone you’ve been intimate with, unbeknownst to others who stand alongside, unaware.
To have an exact memory of the flashes of details and freckles and scars on their skin and the way they breathe and move and the way their eyes look in the quivering breaths of night.
The map of their body and the way they smile when their head is on a pillow as the sun is rising.
The two of you privy to a shared invisible memory that no one else can see.
He had emerged onto the stage with a slow swagger while I’d drawn in the shallowest of breaths.
He looked much the same. A tiny bit older, sure, but only in the way that some people get more attractive as they age.
His stance was different. Arrogant was the word that came to mind.
I wondered if he had become that way in truth or if it was a well-honed stage presence.
He owned every single person in the audience, and he knew it, while simultaneously seeming grateful.
He wore head-to-toe black, still favoring the plain T-shirt, pressed tightly against his body.
Just as slim but more solid, like someone who clearly took care of himself.
I watched his hips move with the music, remembering the way they’d felt under my hands.
His hair was shorter but still in the same tousled style.
My eyes followed the length of his left arm, noting multiple new tattoos, to where his hand gripped the microphone.
From where I sat, I could just barely see it, only because I knew what it was, the EV inscribed on his left ring finger.
Kate nudged me, excited, muttering something about how it should be illegal to be that sexy, and ridiculously, I felt a flash of irritation and territorialism at her remark. Who was I to have any ownership? Up on that stage, he belonged to everyone and no one.
The elaborate screens displayed moving images of geometric flowers and diagrams captured from old astronomical texts alongside moodier elements and throbbing lights.
I watched, hypnotized by it all, while we remained in the shadows.
Whenever they played a song from their first album, I’d close my eyes, imagining I was on the side of the stage, as I had been so many times all those years ago.
That I’d be in his arms by the end of the night.
He talked to the audience occasionally, and I was happy to see that he still had some of the self-effacing charm I’d remembered, though it seemed to have developed a darker edge to it now.
He ran the length of the stage, amid the outstretched arms of fans, having become the kind of performer who could command an audience of that size, a rare thing.
A few acoustic moments were spent on a piano, and private smiles were exchanged between Tommy and him.
I remembered the Post-it Notes that the guys would occasionally put in a hidden spot on each other’s instruments—grade-school boy jokes and X-rated stick figures and words of encouragement.
I wondered if they still hid such notes.
The show went on for nearly two hours. Too soon, he began rounding out the final songs of the show, and as the stage went dark and a familiar, low, haunting melody began, the crowd exploded in adoring euphoria.
He sang the words that had once been intimately ours but had become the world’s, the lyrics taking my breath away as much as they had back then, accompanied now by thousands of others, singing along.
“We’ll light a flame and let it burn. You and I.
” How many times had he sung it over the years?
“And tell me this will never end. You and I.” Did he think of me each time?
I wondered. Or was it empty, the way a word loses its attached meaning when you repeat it over and over?
I closed my eyes, transported back in time, and for a moment, I could almost have been in that studio with him.
I was abruptly shaken out of my thoughts by Kate pulling on my arm.
“We’ve gotta go!” she shouted into my ear, loud enough to make me wince. She pointed at her watch and grimaced, tugging my arm.
Had she not forced us to leave at that exact moment, while the audience was still and mesmerized by the song, had she not forced our way through to an empty space, an anomaly in the crowd, plummeting us into an empty pool of light, it might have never happened.
But at the thought of it being the last time that I would ever see him in person, I turned around and looked up, and he wasn’t more than fifteen feet away.
He was bathed in the glow of magenta lights from the stage—as 65,000 people looked only at him—and his eyes, improbably, locked with mine.
Time stood frozen. Though the concert and the crowd continued to blare around us, unaware of the significance of what was happening, it was as if everything became completely silent in the bubble that had been formed.
For a split second, I wasn’t sure he recognized me, until I registered the expression on his face and saw the shock, realizing he’d stopped singing midphrase.
Stopped moving. An instant jolt of panic swept through me for reasons I still don’t quite understand, and oddly, once again, my instinct was to turn away.
I caught up with Kate and kept moving. Away from my past. Away from the love that I’d lost.
“Geez, Ev. I’m not in that big of a hurry. Slow down,” Kate said as I passed her.
The music continued behind us, but the sound of his voice remained noticeably absent from the stage.
I glanced behind me to see him walk over to say something to a member of the crew perched on the side of the stage, while Tommy and Alex and Darren closely watched one another, and a few moments later, he picked up the last verse.
The whole exchange had taken only seconds, barely noticeable to anyone watching.
But it had felt like time moved in slow motion as I willed myself to leave.
Then I heard my name. Not from the stage but from much closer. Barely audible over the sound of the music. The voice was unmistakable, and not far behind me.
“Evie,” Fred called out.
I froze.
Kate continued past me. She hadn’t heard him. Turning around, I saw him red-faced, huffing, having evidently made his way from the giant enclave of the soundboard in the middle of the floor seats.
“Evie, what are you doing?” Kate shouted, turning back. “I didn’t even think you liked them? Come on, groupie, we have to get to the car before we get stuck in traffic,” she said, taking my hand.
I let out a breath. “I can’t go yet.”
“But—”
“There’s something I have to do here. Someone I have to see. You can go on ahead. I’ll get home on my own.”
“You’re joking, obviously.” Her expression was one of confusion. “What? Who?”
“Just an old friend.” Amid the roar, I could tell she barely heard. I turned and looked to where Fred stood watching.
“Ev, I’m not going to just leave you here.
Where are you—?” She stopped talking as the large, surly man approached.
Fred and I stood for a moment, facing one another.
I tried to smile hello. I wanted to barrel into his arms and feel his hug, the combination of aftershave and diesel.
But he was flat and cold as he motioned for me to follow him past the crowd, Kate tugging at me as Fred wove us past security guards standing sentry into the warrens of steel beneath the stage, covered from view in black curtains.
Miles of thick cable snaked in every direction on the floor, and I heard the crowd roar as the show’s finale began, then startled sharply at the sound of booming fireworks.
I stopped, grabbing Fred’s arm. He removed one side of the heavy black headphones covering his ears as I leaned into him.
“I don’t think I can do this.” I swallowed hard.
He looked toward me sharply before his face softened. I noticed the gray that had taken over his hair and the lines that had deepened into his weathered skin. “I think you already did, sweetie.” He sighed heavily. “Don’t you?”
Tears pricked my eyes. “I didn’t think he would see me,” I told him. And I certainly didn’t think he would care.
“Well, he did.”
“Evie, what is going on?” Kate asked nervously, leaning into me.
My heart thumped heavily in my chest as I tried to process the unexpected turn of events and the way that gravity had, once again, begun pulling us toward one another, the force of something smaller being drawn toward something greater.