Chapter Twenty-Three
When John found Micah, she was sitting out on the beach, right on the line where the ocean met the shore.
She had her arms linked around her knees, the bottom of her jeans darker where they’d gotten wet, her bare feet covered in sand.
He lowered himself to sit next to her, and for a minute they just stared out at the ocean without talking.
“I brought you some water,” he said finally, placing a cup on the sand in front of them. He placed another cup right next to it. “And some extra ice.”
“Thank you.”
He hadn’t been surprised that Ryder attacked him.
That had been a long time coming—he was almost relieved it had happened, was glad that the tension had finally erupted.
He had been surprised when Micah punched Ryder back.
He knew that had been an even longer time coming, that she obviously had more reasons to hate Ryder than any of the rest of them, but it had felt a little bit like she’d done it to stand up for him , too.
And he was surprised how good that had felt.
Still, he felt like there was a lot more to that story than she’d ever said, and suddenly that seemed like the key to all of it.
“When you asked me yesterday if Ryder had ever shown me anything,” he said, “what did you mean by that?”
She gave a jagged, humorless laugh, rubbing her eyes with her uninjured hand. “He has pictures of me,” she said. “Compromising pictures.”
That revelation in and of itself wasn’t that shocking. It was something people who dated did, John supposed. But the way Micah said it, he knew it was only the tip of the iceberg, and so he stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.
She glanced over at him, as if assessing his reaction to that before she continued.
“When I broke up with him that last time, he threatened to release them,” she said.
“He said it would be good for the band, actually. Get us some publicity. He said if I was going to use sex to sell our music then we may as well go all the way with it.”
John curled his fingers into his fists until he could feel his nails biting into his palms, and he had to make a deliberate effort to loosen his hand and stretch his fingers back out.
He wished he had punched Ryder, after all.
He wished he’d shoved his face into the sand so hard it would take days to get all the grit out of his eyes and mouth.
The sudden violence of the fantasy was jarring to John, but for once he didn’t shy away from it.
He let the scenario play out in his head, trying to control his breathing until eventually he was able to speak.
“That thing he said, about you being there for sex and novelty.” John turned to her, wanting to make sure she heard him, not just his words but really heard him.
“It’s not true. You never needed anything to sell our music.
You have an incredible voice. A once-in-a-lifetime, sends-chills-down-my-spine voice.
You’re so goddamn talented, Micah. As a singer and a songwriter.
That’s what got us as far as we got—not any of the rest of it. ”
She rubbed her hands over her legs, like she was cold, even though it was fairly warm in the sun.
“It’s complicated, though, isn’t it?” she said.
“Because I know that the way I look, the novelty of me being a girl …it is part of it. If I wear a shirt onstage where you can see my nipples, then that’s the big story afterward.
But also I chose to wear that shirt, I wanted to wear it, it made me feel powerful and sexy and like I could do anything.
It’s part of the show, and I love to put on a show.
But then I’d get off the stage, and I’d feel…
I don’t know. Dirty. Pathetic, like I wasn’t good enough to stand on my own without the extra theatrics.
Silly, like I was making a mockery of what we were doing, of the music .
But for me, it was all wrapped up together.
I loved the music, I loved how it made me feel , but no matter how I tried to express that, it felt like I was wrong somehow. ”
John knew the exact show she was referencing.
They’d played an outdoor festival, just after their second album—the weather had been suffocatingly humid, and they’d been scheduled in the middle of the day.
Micah had worn a one-shouldered tank top, no bra underneath, and every article about the show afterward had included the same picture of Micah, her hair damp with sweat, leaning back, holding the microphone with both hands, the outline of both nipples clearly delineated against the thin fabric of her shirt.
It was an incredibly hot picture. He should know—he’d looked at it enough.
But it was made all the better for its context , as far as he was concerned.
He could hear Micah belting out that note, could feel the energy of the crowd, could still channel the adrenaline that had coursed through him when they’d taken their final bows and run off the stage.
He’d never thought Micah was wrong in any way she’d chosen to express herself with music.
She’d always done it in a way that had lifted him up and put him right there with her.
“Here,” he said, pulling a wadded bunch of napkins out from where he’d stashed them in the pocket of his swim trunks.
He grabbed a few ice cubes from the cup he’d brought and wrapped them up in the napkin, reaching for Micah’s hand.
Her knuckles were a little red and swollen, and she winced slightly when he pressed the ice to the area, but he didn’t think anything was broken.
“I hate that you felt that way,” he said. “I mean, I know a lot of it is systemic shit that’s bigger than both of us, but I especially hate that Ryder ever made you feel that way. And I’m sorry if I didn’t see it, or if there were ways I contributed to it.”
She shook her head. “It was never you,” she said. “And some of it was Ryder, but a lot of it came from inside me . Like I allowed myself to feel those things. I’m angry with myself for that most of all.”
“I think,” John said, “that we should give ourselves permission to let all that shit go. All the things we wish we’d done differently. I feel a lot of tenderness for those kids back then who thought they knew everything but still had so much to figure out.”
She’d been watching where he’d been ministering to her hand, but now she looked up at him. “You do?”
He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“I have a lot of regrets.”
“Such as?” Maybe naming them would take away their power somehow, would make them not loom so large in her mind.
“I shouldn’t have broken the band up the way I did,” she said. “I should’ve talked to you all, figured out a way to either go on or end things on good terms.”
He regretted the way that had gone down, too, wished he could’ve done something else to make her feel like she could’ve talked to him. He hated to think of her going through all that and feeling so alone.
“None of us were at our best then,” he said. “And I think we were all in survival mode. There was a lot that we missed.”
“I probably shouldn’t have done that Playboy spread,” she said. “At least, not in that way. It was very reactionary, and I wish I had done it for a different reason.”
He wanted to squeeze her hand, but he didn’t want to hurt her, so he settled for rubbing his thumb along her palm.
He remembered what Frankie had said, about the timing of that interview being odd, and now he understood it so much better.
She’d been spooked by Ryder’s threat, and she’d decided to get out ahead of it, to put out her own pictures that she had agency over before he could beat her to the punch.
It was a savvy move, because it took most of the sting out of anything he could do to her.
But it also meant he’d still had the opportunity to get to her, in a way.
“Were you happy with the pictures?” John asked. “Do you like how they came out?”
She seemed to think about that for a minute before she smiled, a private, sexy smirk at the corner of her mouth that made John’s heart speed up.
“Yeah,” she said. “I do like them. You really never saw them?”
He started to bite his lip before remembering that he had his own injury, and that move hurt. “I read the interview online,” he said. “But I didn’t think…I don’t know. It didn’t seem right to look at the pictures without your permission.”
“I mean, my dentist saw them,” she said, “which I could’ve done without him bringing up while he had his hand in my mouth. They were public.”
“I know,” John said. “Still.”
It hadn’t seemed right, and it had seemed dangerous , to even allow himself to see Micah that way.
“I wanted you to see them,” Micah said. “You, specifically.”
Now his heart was going a mile a minute. “Yeah?”
“I thought about it a lot,” she said. “What you’d think of them. I even had—”
She laughed, cutting herself off, and he held his breath until he couldn’t take the suspense. “Had what?”
Her eyes cut to his, a little shy, before she looked back down at where their hands were still touching.
“I had a fantasy that you’d try to get back in touch with me afterward,” she said.
“Like maybe you’d see the A minor tattoo and it would be the perfect icebreaker to get you to talk to me again, when you finally saw what I’d gotten. I don’t know, it’s stupid.”
He could point out that communication went both ways, and that if she had been dying for him to reach out to her so badly, she could’ve certainly texted him at any time.
He’d never changed his number. But his last text to her had been sent only a few months before that interview had come out, sitting like a stone at the bottom of their long text chain.
What the fuck, Micah? He could see how that wasn’t a message that exactly inspired a response.
Or when he’d shown up at her concert, a couple years after that, she could’ve allowed him backstage.
But he’d also known there were other ways he could’ve gotten hold of her, if he’d been committed enough to try.
How many times had he driven by her parents’ house when he was back in Ohio, thought about ringing the doorbell and just asking for her new number?
They’d both made mistakes in that regard, and he really was feeling like it was time to let them go.
“I wish I had,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “I should’ve known you’d be someone who’d read Playboy for the articles. Jesus, John.”
“I’m no saint.”
“Never thought you were,” she said. The way she looked at him, he knew she was remembering the night before just the way he was. She turned her hand over until she was holding one of the half-melted ice cubes, and she reached up to touch it gently to his bottom lip. “Does it hurt?”
He shook his head slightly, not wanting to speak and disrupt what she was doing.
“I’m sorry I—” She swallowed. “That thing I said about you seducing me. I didn’t mean it.”
Everything she’d told him about Ryder made that make more sense, too.
There was a lot of trust involved, sending naked pictures of yourself to someone.
There was a lot of trust in letting someone touch you, in letting someone in on a fantasy or allowing someone to get you off in public.
Have you always been like this? Micah had asked him, and the truth was that to the extent he was like anything it was because it was her , and he trusted her.
He hoped she felt the same way about him, but he understood if she had hang-ups in that regard, after everything she’d been through.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I could’ve handled the reunion tour discussion better. My timing’s always been shit.”
The smile she gave him was more in her eyes than her mouth, which was parted as she dragged the ice cube from his lip down the side of his throat. “I’ve listened to a million hours of you playing guitar,” she said. “You have impeccable timing.”
“Well, I hope so,” he said. “Because that’s kind of the perfect segue.”
She was still watching the path the ice cube was making down his throat, a cold drip sliding down and getting caught in his clavicle. But her gaze pulled up to his at those words, a quizzical line between her brows. “Segue to what?”
He took her injured hand again, gently flexing her fingers, monitoring her face for any sign of pain. “We seem to be down a guitarist,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Oh my god,” she said. “Did I hurt him that bad? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but…shit, I never meant to take him out.”
John shook his head. “He’s fine,” he said. “He’ll need to have his nose reset, maybe—frankly, I’m not losing any sleep over it. But he’s not coming back on the cruise. He’s going to arrange a boat to take him to Nassau and he’ll fly back to the States from there.”
“Whoa,” she said. “That’s…over a broken nose? Don’t they have medics on the ship?”
“They do,” John said. “And they’re probably helping him right now to make him more comfortable for his boat ride.
But it’s the funniest thing, he also happened to have a family emergency that meant he had to leave right away.
Don’t worry, Steve and Frankie are making sure he gets all packed up and arrangements are made to ship his gear back to him. ”
He could see the moment when it dawned on her, what he was really saying. “You guys kicked him out.”
“I would argue he brought it all on himself,” John said. “But yes, we kicked him out.”
“You…” Her eyes were a little shiny, but it wasn’t until she laughed that a single tear leaked out and spilled down her cheek. “I don’t know what to say.”
John linked his fingers with hers, careful not to jostle her hand too much as he gave a gentle squeeze. “Well, that’s why I’m hoping your strumming hand will be in decent enough shape by tomorrow night. How would you feel about playing the rhythm part for ‘If Only’ at prom?”