16. Geo
— ? —
Geo
The studio Harrison booked rents by the hour to people who need a room with no history in it. Beige carpet, a mixing board with half the labels worn off, a vending machine in the hall that only takes coins.
I arrive early, because I refuse to give him the satisfaction of being here first.
He’s already there, which I should have predicted.
He’s sitting at the mixing board with two coffees in front of him, and when I walk in, he stands up so fast he almost knocks one of them over.
There’s nobody else in the room. No engineer, no assistant, no label kid hovering with a clipboard and a schedule.
He carried the gear in himself, and I can tell because the cases are stacked the way a man stacks things when he’s never had to do it before and doesn’t want anyone to know.
For a year I’ve been hearing what this cost him, secondhand, from people with their own reasons for telling me.
This is the first time I’ve been in a room with the actual size of it.
“You’re early,” I say.
“So are you.”
“I’m always early.”
“I know. That’s why I got here at nine and sat in the car like a stalker.”
He holds out one of the coffees. Caramel oat milk, extra shot. I take it without thanking him, because thanking him feels like giving him credit he hasn’t earned yet.
“So,” I say, settling into the chair next to his. “How do we do this?”
“However you want.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
His thumb worries the edge of the mixing board, a tell I remember from years ago, from before he learned to perform confidence instead of feeling it. “I thought maybe we could start by listening to the demo together. Talk through the arrangement. Figure out where your voice fits.”
“I already know where my voice fits. I’ve listened to it about a hundred times.”
His hand stops on the fader. Surprise, or hope.
“You have?”
“Don’t read into it. I was trying to figure out if I could stand to be in the same room with you for more than five minutes.”
“And?”
“Jury’s still out.”
“I’ll take still-out. Still-out is the most hope I’ve had all year.” There’s the old quickness in it, the thing I married and then taught myself to stop finding funny. I don’t laugh. I make a point of not laughing.
We put on headphones. He plays the demo.
His hands move over the board like they belong there, sure and unhurried, and I make the mistake of watching them.
The tendons flexing under the skin. The forearm braced on the edge of the console, sleeve shoved to the elbow the way he always did the second he sat down to work.
I used to find it unbearably attractive.
I’m furious to report that the intervening years haven’t fixed this.
Don’t. He doesn’t get to be attractive right now. He has not earned attractive.
I close my eyes and let the song wash over me, feeling the places where it opens up, the spaces he left for a voice that isn’t there yet.
My voice. He left spaces for my voice.
The song ends. I open my eyes. Harrison is watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.
“The bridge needs work,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“The resolution comes too fast. You rush through the pain to get to the healing.”
“I know.”
“It should hurt more. Before it gets better.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Like us.”
I don’t answer. Agreeing with him would cost me more than I have on me tonight.
“Show me what you mean,” he says. “Sing it the way you think it should sound.”
I go into the booth. Put on the headphones. Wait for him to cue the track.
When I start singing, everything else falls away.
I don’t know why I do it.
One second I’m in the booth with the last notes of the song still vibrating through my chest, watching him through the glass with his hand frozen on the talkback and his face doing what I haven’t seen it do in years, like I’ve reached straight through him and moved things around.
“That’s it,” he says into my headphones, and his voice isn’t steady.
“That’s exactly it.” And the next second I’m out the booth door and walking toward him with no plan, no strategy, just raw instinct driving me forward.
We shouldn’t. This is only ever supposed to be music. You said it yourself. You’re not ready. You’ll hate yourself in the morning-
He tastes like coffee. Like the expensive kind he always drinks, dark roast with no sugar, and underneath it the taste that’s only him, familiar and foreign at once.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him down and kiss him like I’m angry, because I am. I’m furious that this song exists, that it’s beautiful, that it makes me feel things I’ve been trying so hard not to feel.
His hands find my hips, my waist, the curve of my back. He walks me backward until I hit the glass of the recording booth, and I gasp against his mouth. The glass is cold through my shirt. He’s hot everywhere else.
“Geo, tell me to stop.”
“Don’t talk.”
He doesn’t talk. He kisses me harder, his body pressing mine into the cool glass, his thigh sliding between my legs in a way that makes my breath catch.
I’m already wet. I can feel it, the slick shame of it, and when I roll my hips once, just once, against the hard muscle of his thigh, the friction is so good I see white at the edges of my vision.
He’s hard. Thick and obvious against my hip. The knowledge detonates low in my stomach.
I hate you for still being able to do this to me. I hate that I want to drop to my knees on this stupid beige carpet and take you in my mouth until you forget every woman who isn’t me. I hate that I’m three seconds from letting you fuck me against this glass with the mics still hot.
“I hate you,” I whisper against his lips.
“I know.”
“I hate that I still want you.”
“I know.”
His hand slides into my hair, tilting my head back so he can kiss along my jaw, my neck, the sensitive spot below my ear that he still remembers after all this time.
His other hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise, holding me still while he rolls against me once, slow, filthy, deliberate, so I feel exactly how much he wants me.
I moan, embarrassing and helpless.
“Wait.”
The word comes out strangled, desperate. “Wait.”
He stops immediately. Steps back. His hands come up, palms out, giving me space. His mouth is red. His pupils are blown black. The front of his jeans is obscene.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to push.”
“Don’t apologize.”
My voice is shaking. My whole body is shaking. My clit is throbbing in time with my pulse and I have to lock my knees to stay upright. “I started it.”
“Okay.”
“I just can’t, not yet. Not like this.”
I press my hands to my face, trying to catch my breath, trying to remember why I’m here, what I’m supposed to be doing. “It’s too fast. I’m not ready.”
If you touch me again I’ll let you. If you ask me to get on that couch I will. Please don’t ask. Please ask.
“Then we wait.”
His voice is gentle and wrecked. “I’ll wait. As long as it takes.”
I look at him. His lips are swollen. His hair is a mess from my hands. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I hate him for it.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “We finish the song tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Harrison.”
“I know you do.” He says it without any argument in it at all, which is somehow worse.
I grab my bag. I walk toward the door. And then, because I’m apparently incapable of making good decisions where he’s concerned, I pause.
“The song is good,” I say without turning around. “It’s really good.”
There’s a thread hanging off his collar. It’s been hanging there the whole session and it has been driving me insane. I go back and pick it off, which takes a second and a half and means nothing, and I do it without asking, the way I’d have four years ago.
I leave before either of us can decide what that was.
In the parking lot I sit in my car with the engine off and my hand between my legs and come in under a minute thinking about his thigh and the glass and the sound he made when I said I hated him.
***
Harrison
I stand alone in the studio after she’s gone.
My heart is pounding. My hands are shaking. I can still taste her on my lips, still feel the phantom pressure of her body against mine, still feel how wet she was through her jeans when she ground down on my thigh.
She kissed me.
She kissed me like she hated me for wanting her. She was soaked. She moaned into my mouth like she’d been starving.
It doesn’t mean anything. She said it herself, twice, in the voice she uses when she needs a thing to be true. She’s not ready. She’s still angry, still hurt, still holding onto all the reasons she has to never forgive me.
But she kissed me.
At the mixing board, I play back the take we just recorded, her voice, raw and broken and beautiful, layered over the confession I wrote when I thought I’d lost her forever.
I’m so hard it hurts. I palm myself once through my jeans and nearly come from the pressure alone, from the smell of her still on my shirt.
I don’t. Not here, and not to the memory of her saying wait.
I save the session and lock the studio. I drive home with white knuckles and take the coldest shower of my life and still end up braced against the tile, fist working, her name in my teeth, coming so hard my knees buckle while I chant I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry into the spray.
My shirt still smells like her.
I don’t take it off.
I don’t know anything except that I love her, and I ruined everything, and she kissed me anyway.
Tomorrow, we finish the song.
Tonight, I let myself hope, and I let myself ache.