Chapter 22
July, Now
The thing about Candice is, she’s been in love with the same girl since she was a teenager. Age thirteen, to be precise. Candice and Hailey met their freshman year of high school through the foreign film club and have been inseparable ever since.
I was only four years old when Hailey started coming around the house, five or six when I understood they were together, which means I pretty much only have an adult impression of Candice in association with her high school sweetheart.
“They’re like, a unit,” I try to explain to Liam on the car ride from Minneapolis to Chicago. “I mean, I know all couples are like a unit, but—”
“I get it,” he offers from the passenger seat (I finally conned him into letting me drive by swapping seats at a gas station). “You don’t think of Candice without thinking of Hailey.”
“Exactly. Candice wouldn’t even be the adult Candice I know and love without Hailey. They sort of molded each other.”
“What are they like?” Liam asks.
“Hailey could talk to a wall. Candice is quieter, but if you’re with her one-on-one, she’ll make you feel like it’s the most important conversation she’s ever had.”
I glance over and catch Liam’s nod. He’s rubbing the heels of his palms over his knees. Beyond our windows, the looming city is sprouting around us. Buildings growing taller, bodies packing in. The setting sun has painted the brick a light-lacquered pink.
Today was a six-hour travel day, and there’s no show tonight, but the bands will play two shows at Thalia Hall starting tomorrow before heading next to St. Louis.
The tour buses have probably made it to the hotel by now, but Candice and Hailey insisted Liam and I cancel our reservation and stay with them.
I’ve been to their townhouse a few times before. After the past few dreary hotel rooms with no surprise cuttlefish for entertainment, it’s exactly the change of pace we need.
“What’s the age difference between Folly and Candice?” Liam asks.
“Four years.”
“So, Folly is equidistant from you and Candice.”
“No, Folly is equidistant from Zara and Candice.”
Liam laughs tiredly, pushing his hands through his hair. I reach over and grab his left hand. He had still been rubbing it. “Nobody’s going to care if you can’t memorize all my sisters’ ages.”
“I’ll care,” Liam replies, glaring out the front window.
“You’re so competitive. Even with yourself.”
“You’re my girlfriend,” he says quietly. “These are important things to keep straight.”
I wish I could study his expression, analyze it, but we’re fast approaching the townhouse.
I concentrate as the streets narrow, the neighborhood cars parked tidily on either side like books on a shelf.
There’s a parking spot right in front of the townhouse—Candice texted and said she’d moved her car for us—and I’ve just parallel parked when the front door flings open.
“PAIGEY!” I can hear Hailey’s scream from here.
“That,” Liam says, looking out his window at her, “is a grown-up Tinker Bell.”
And I laugh because he’s right. Hailey’s blond hair is knotted in a neat bun atop her head, and she’s wearing a gray skirt suit with sparkly slippers. Hailey works for Boeing. She probably just got home from the office and kicked her heels off.
She races down the stairs, then flings open the wrought iron gate that separates her little courtyard of a front lawn from the sidewalk. I jump out of the car to squeeze her into a hug.
“I’ve missed you!” she squeals.
“Missed you too, Hails.”
She grabs my hand, pulls me toward the back of the car just as I glance up and see Candice leaning on the doorframe in a pair of army green overalls. Her hair is in two small braids that kiss her shoulders. She winks at me, and I smirk back.
Hailey migrates to the passenger side to envelope Liam in a hug before he’s even fully stood up. She greets him, verbalizes her excitement, and he his thanks, and then we’re heading up the stairs with our luggage, saying it all again with Candice.
Liam’s acting smoother than he’d been in the car, but that’s one of his forever traits: steadiness under pressure. Striking out the opposing team’s best batter. Fixing the faulty amp ten minutes before the show. Securing a good first impression from his “girlfriend’s” family.
“You look a bit like that guy from Entourage,” Hailey says. She tugs at one of Liam’s dark, wide curls. “It’s the hair.”
“You look a bit like Tinker Bell,” Liam says. “Also the hair.”
“My fiancée,” Hailey says, looking at Candice with iridescence, “is the best hairstylist on this side of River North.”
“Just this side?” Candice reaches for Hailey’s stiff jacket collar and helps her shrug out of it.
“If you claim the whole city, you’ll create enemies,” Hailey warns.
Candice nods in agreement, and they are absolutely not joking, which is delightful.
This place, more than any other, reminds me of my childhood home.
When Dad packed up and sold the Bristol house, Candice and Hailey claimed most of the furniture and drove it up here when they first rented this townhouse.
That couch, those antique frames, the artwork Folly did for her senior portfolio that hung in our entryway and now hangs in theirs.
It’s a hand-drawn map of Bristol to Lancaster (the United Kingdom’s version).
We head through the entryway to the kitchen, Hailey mumbling something about a cocktail, and then my eyes catch on Folly and Harry, grinning like Cheshire cats.
I shriek as they shout “Surprise!” tackling me in a group hug. Harry laughs with delight and Folly cackles maniacally. Immediately, my eyes snag on her rounded belly.
“Oh my God!” I squeal, my hand shaking as it goes to her stomach.
“It was Liam’s idea!” Folly says.
“The pregnancy?”
“The surprise!” she screams.
“I only suggested.” Liam comes up beside me to hug Folly and shake hands with Harry. “The execution was all them.”
Whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is, that’s how I feel. Packed in and surrounded in the best possible way. As if love is stretchy, as if it can travel far from you without ever leaving for good, but it can also be snapped back to halo you for a while.
The energy in the room sizzles while Hailey pours us batched cocktails that taste like summer. We migrate up to their rooftop for a picnic-style dinner.
Liam is the focus of everyone’s attention; he barely eats as he explains his job, the flow of the tour, how it’s been so far, what he’s still up against. And he answers like a pro.
This venue’s load-in dock is basically nonexistent, and that manager is known to disregard the band riders, and the security contract at this place has no provisions for attendees with heat exhaustion.
“Paige has been great with it all,” Liam says, hand going to my knee. “She’s helpful and kind and patient, and everybody loves her.”
“Of course they do,” Folly says, sipping at the dregs of her mocktail. “She’s like them, isn’t she?”
“Penelope Parker’s band is not helpful or patient,” Liam says, and I laugh.
“Though they are usually kind,” I offer.
I catch Candice’s eye. There’s something she wants to ask me, but she won’t bring it up in front of the others. I doubt Folly would’ve kept it from Candice, how my presence on Liam’s tour came to be.
Candice has always been the purest hearted of us. I imagine she has an opinion on the matter.
“How’s the songwriting going?” Harry asks.
I nod while everyone falls hushed. The sun is finally gone and the night’s cooled off considerably, but the shiver that runs through me is pure discomfort.
I push through it like I’ve learned to do.
Harry isn’t asking to embarrass me in front of my family; he’s asking because they’re all proud, because they all genuinely want to know.
“Really good. I’ve written a bunch of new stuff. Being around the other songwriters is like, this huge creative injection.”
Harry nods, his smile curving. “And the rewrites?”
I blow out a breath. “Less progress on those.”
But I’ve been playing one song a day during sound checks, most of them without lyrics at all, and Penelope, Misha, Gretta, and Henrietta said once we get through them, they’d each pick a favorite to work on.
“What about the live performance aspect of it?” Candice asks. “I know you used to say you never wanted that.”
“If anything, I want it less than ever,” I tell her, laughing as I remember Penelope having to mother a few fans the other night who were flinging their drinks into the crowd. “Now that I’ve seen it up close.”
The way she’s claimed by strangers all the time. Like they’ve convinced themselves they get to own a piece of her, to comment on her body, her voice, her outfits, her dating life. It’s as if, because she offered up something, her right to withhold anything else is forfeited.
And even if I were willing to put up with everything Penelope puts up with, it’s not lost on me that she has something—some magnetism and star talent so rare—that even most musicians who are interested in performing would never be able to mimic.
“Paige always helps out with sound checks, though.” Liam’s hand comes to the small of my back. “If you guys are free in the early afternoon tomorrow to come by the venue, you can see for yourself.”
“That’d be awesome,” Hailey says, flashing me a wide grin.
After that, the conversation slips to Folly’s pregnancy updates (solicited) and advice on pregnant-friendly Kama Sutra positions (unsolicited).
Harry tells us about the latest jingle he sold for big money to Nintendo, and we close the evening planning for Candice and Hailey’s wedding this fall.
It’ll be back home in Bristol at a beautiful barn, and yes, Dad and his wife are coming, Candice promises us, I made them send me screenshots of the flight confirmation.
We all help bring armfuls of things down to the kitchen, and Candice and I go back up for the last of it. Like I knew she would, she pulls me aside, and we stare out at the dark streets by the roof’s edge. She loops an arm over my shoulder, pulling me into her side.
“Folly told me.”
“Yeah. I figured she would.”
“Does anybody else on the tour know?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“That man is in love with you, Paige. It’s clear as day on his face.”
How in love with me are you today? Liam had asked me last night, right as he got into bed and pulled me close, but didn’t try anything more.
Eighty-five percent, I’d answered, and it’d been a lie.
“I’m in love with him,” I whisper. “Even though I know it can go deeper, get bigger—I know it can, and I know it will, but I’m already there.”
Candice pulls back just enough to watch my face. “Then why do you look sad about it?”
Is sad how I look?
Apprehensive, maybe. Liam and I have been in a suspended state since we migrated from clinging to each other on waking to preemptively doing it before we fall asleep.
“He won’t touch me,” I admit. “Sexually. When we made our deal, Liam said he couldn’t be intimate with me until he felt that we had—trust, between us. And then I made it worse on the first night by suggesting leaving—”
Her brow crinkles. “Why’d you do that?”
“Because this is his life. Liam’s fitting me into his life, and I’m meeting the people he works with, befriending them, and lying to them at the same time, asking him to lie to them, and I feel this guilt,” I gasp, grabbing at my chest, “all the time. Pushing down on me like a weight, and I used to think I was angry enough at Liam for what he did not to feel guilt where he’s concerned, but that’s not the case at all.
“I don’t have any anger left for him,” I realize in a verbal epiphany. “It’s gone, and now all I have is a constant sickness in my stomach. Because this relationship—it isn’t fake to me, it’s real. But he still won’t touch me, which means I’m not doing enough to convince him.”
I push my fingers through my hair. “It’s not that I need sex to make it real. I just need what it represents. I want him to be able to touch me because he trusts me as much as he loves me.”
Candice pulls me into a hug and whispers, “Breathe, breathe.”
I sob quietly on her shoulder, overcome with the emotions spilling off my tongue. Somehow, she gets me to verbalize things I can’t even line up in my head in her absence.
“Trust takes time,” she says. “It’s only been five and a half weeks. He just needs more time.”
But time is the finite resource we’re running low on. On tour, we’re in a closed loop, a locked environment, but that will change. It’ll have to.
“Hailey and I have been together for twenty years,” Candice says, petting down my hair, “and in small ways, we still break each other’s trust. The fact that Liam is here means he’s in this with you. He wants it to work.”
“But how do I get rid of the guilt?” I ask her.
“Get rid of the source,” she replies, like it’s that easy. “When Hailey and I used to feel guilty about being in love, we’d cut the things and people and places out of our lives that made us feel that way. Get rid of everything that makes this relationship feel less than to you.”
“I’d have to tell everyone on tour the truth,” I whisper.
She nods.
“They might never look at me the same,” I worry.
Candice shrugs. “But they also might understand.”