Chapter Fifteen #2
John didn’t have a microphone in front of him.
Sometimes he sang along to parts of the song as he played it, but nobody needed to hear his voice amplified as part of the mix.
So he had to walk up to Micah to catch her attention, leaning in to talk into her mic.
He could tell he’d taken her off guard, because all she could do was tilt the microphone toward him, like she was interviewing him for the news.
“You didn’t introduce yourself,” he said.
She gave a self-deprecating eyeroll, but the crowd had already started to cheer, and she took the microphone back. “I’m Micah Presley,” she said.
“No relation,” John put in.
“No relation,” she agreed. He had no idea if anyone could even hear what they were saying, between the sound of the crowd and the fact that neither of them was speaking directly into the microphone anymore.
He put his guitar pick between his teeth, freeing his hands so he could clap for her as the crowd went wild.
When he glanced over at Frankie, they were also clapping, and Steve started hitting the snare with a steady, even crack until the applause morphed to trace the same beat.
“All right, all right,” Micah said, giving John a playful shove. “Places, please. We all know why we’re here. Nightshifters—this one’s for you.”
If John thought the crowd was loud before, it was nothing compared to the sound they made when Ryder played the opening notes of “If Only.” John should’ve put his in-ear back in before the song started up, because now he had to come in with that first chord, and it was still dangling around his neck, but he found he didn’t care.
He liked the experience of being able to hear more of what was going on around him, the mix still in the one ear monitor he did have in.
Micah left the microphone in its stand for this one, and even with a view of her back John knew she had her eyes closed.
She’d told him once that she got self-conscious, making eye contact with someone in the crowd while singing a particularly romantic or intimate or revealing line.
She usually kept her eyes closed through the entire first two verses of this song, which led him to wonder which line in particular made her feel that way, or if it was all of them.
People in the audience had started putting their phone flashlights on, swaying back and forth like they were holding up lighters.
John could tell the moment Micah opened her eyes, too, because he heard her breath catch, an almost imperceptible hitch on the last word that sounded like she’d meant it to be there. Are you gonna come over?
“This is your part,” she said to the crowd, turning the microphone toward them to let them take over a couple lines of the chorus before she finished out the rest herself.
John could see people in the first few rows crying—actual tears streaming down their faces—and that used to be the kind of thing that made him uncomfortable.
He’d always looked down at his guitar, turned away, tried to ground himself in his own experience without worrying about anyone else’s.
But now he felt like he might cry himself.
And then there was Micah, arms outspread, belting out the huge building notes of the bridge that felt like they could fill the entire ship.
He’d taken all of this for granted, after a while.
The crowd, the music, the people on the stage, her .
He’d forgotten how special it all was. When the song was over, he almost didn’t know what to do with himself.
It took Frankie, gesturing him over for a quick collective bow with the rest of the band, to get him to remember to move.
“Holy shit ,” Frankie said once they were off the stage. “That was incredible. Seriously. I’ve never felt energy like that.”
“Well, we’re playing to a crowd of die-hard Nightshifters fans,” Ryder said. “Consider the audience.”
“I wish every audience was die-hard Nightshifters fans,” Steve said. “Remember Hamburg?”
Frankie leveled a glare at their drummer. “Steve.”
“What?”
“Read the vibe, please . Nobody wants to talk about Hamburg right now.”
Steve held up a finger like he was about to argue, before thinking better of it. “Tell you what I do want to talk about is a ham burger , because I’m flippin’ famished.”
“All right, let’s grab food. Anyone else?”
Ryder immediately jumped in, which meant that Micah, predictably, declined. John took one glance at Micah and turned down the offer of food, too. He could hear Frankie still talking as the three band members walked away—“I can’t get used to this new Steve who doesn’t curse. It freaks me out.”
When they left, John looked over at Micah. She was actively trembling, he realized, her hands shaking so much she was having trouble raising her water bottle to her mouth.
“Hey,” he said. “Rest for a minute. Catch your breath. It’s okay.”
She sat down on one of the amps that was stowed in the alcove where they’d been hanging out before the show, and he urged her over so he could squeeze onto the spot next to her. He took the water bottle from her.
“Open up.”
She gave him a helpless look, a Really? You think I can’t handle it myself? type of expression, but she did as he told her, opening her mouth and letting him squirt a stream of water in.
He wanted to smooth the strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail away from her face, wanted to pull her onto his lap and hold her until she stopped trembling.
She’d touched him during the show, but that was different—that had been the heat of the moment, part of the stagecraft. He didn’t know what was allowed here.
“Do you need your medicine?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s the adrenaline,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a minute. I just—”
“You were incredible out there,” he said. “But I get it. It was a lot.”
“It was a lot , right?”
“A fuckton of a lot,” John agreed. “But in a good way.”
She smiled at him. Her eyeliner was a little smudged, and it made her look like a tired party girl at the end of the night. “You were incredible out there, too, you know.”
“ElectricOh!’s still got it,” John said. “Who would’ve guessed.”
Micah snorted. “Not Pitchfork .”
John laughed himself, rubbing his hand over his face. “God, no, certainly not Pitchfork . What did they give our second album? A five point something?”
“Four point five. They called it lighthearted but shoddily constructed .”
“Which made no sense,” John said. “If anything, the album was a bit of a downer but impeccably constructed, in my opinion.”
“It was front-loaded.”
“Well.” John looked down at his hands. His fingertips were all calloused from playing the guitar as much as he did, but still somehow he’d managed to nick the side of his hand on the strings while playing so hard tonight, and he had a thin scratch to show for it.
He noticed that Micah was staring at his hands, too, and he picked up her water bottle again, intending to hand it back to her.
But instead she opened her mouth once more, and he squirted another stream of water inside. Some of it dripped down her chin, and she wiped it away, her eyes on him the whole time.
“We probably should get food,” he said, then backtracked when he heard how that sounded. “I mean, not together—just that we should both eat. Separately.”
She smiled, her lips still bright and shiny from the water. “Why not together? I don’t know if I can handle being around a ton of people right now. Why don’t we each go back to our rooms, shower, freshen up, whatever—then I’ll order room service and we can eat it on my balcony?”
If things didn’t feel so weird it was exactly the way John would’ve wanted to spend his night. Just the two of them, hanging out, postgaming the show or talking about everything but the show as they decompressed. But things did feel weird.
“Please?” Micah said.
Then again, they didn’t have to feel that way.
Ever since they’d cleared the air somewhat on the upper deck earlier that day, John felt like there was a chance of them being friends again.
Maybe not the way they were—maybe they could never get that back—but at least where they could be in each other’s lives.
A simple dinner together was a good way to start.
“Okay,” John said. “Give me an hour and I’ll come over.”