Chapter 9 #2
Eventually, she found she didn’t have to fake enjoyment: she was having a good time. The joy and energy rolling off that tiny stage was infectious, the band playing for nothing but the pure love of it—and, honestly, she liked more Grateful Dead songs than she’d realized.
Then there was the fact that Niko’s knee was, once again, pressed to hers under the bar, which had to be intentional this time. Didn’t it?
When the forty-five-minute set ended, she applauded loudly, then turned to Niko. Without a word, he picked up both their glasses, and they headed to the staircase half-hidden in the back of the bar.
Upstairs, the far wall was lined with booths, with a few pool tables scattered around and a jukebox at one end. Niko slid into one side of a free booth, Merritt taking the other. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he just sipped his beer.
“What?” Merritt prompted.
He glanced up, reticent. “You have a Grammy?”
She almost brushed it off with a simple affirmative, but what the hell. It had been a long time since she’d let herself flex a little. “I have seven.” She paused before adding, “And an Oscar.”
Niko couldn’t have looked more dumbfounded if she’d told him she had a tail. “You have an Oscar?”
“I wrote a James Bond song,” she said with a shrug, taking a sip of water.
He leaned back in the booth, assessing her. “Wow,” he said. “I see why Frank is so insecure around you. I mean, he was being an asshole and should’ve kept that shit to himself, but now I kind of get it.”
She felt a twinge of regret seeing the expression on his face, the first time he’d looked at her like that. Like he’d just realized she was from a different planet, and he wasn’t sure whether to be awed or afraid. “I just had a really good publicist,” she mumbled.
It had been so long since she’d talked about that part of her life that it felt unnatural. Sitting in this booth with him now, she’d never felt further away from the version of herself that had employed a mini empire of people in the business of Being Merritt Valentine.
He nodded at the stairs. “When’s the last time you were up there? Onstage, I mean.”
“Ten years?” She said it like a question, as if she didn’t know, almost to the day, the last time she’d performed in front of a single person, let alone a crowd.
Niko took another drink, looking pensive. “Can I ask you something?”
She wanted to point out that he had already asked her several somethings, but clearly he was trying to gauge her comfort level with this line of questioning.
She met his eyes, trying to shake off her apprehension. “Go for it.”
“You’re a musician.”
“Is that the question?”
“I’m working up to it.”
She laughed a little. “Okay. Yes, I’m a musician.”
“But you don’t make music anymore.”
Something deep inside of her twisted. “No.”
He held her gaze for a long breath. “Why not?”
She broke eye contact first, looking down into her water glass, the lemon wedge cuddled by the ice.
“Because I don’t want to,” she said finally. It came out sharper than she meant it to, and under the table, she dug her nails into her palm, fighting the impulse to drive this perfectly nice evening right off a cliff.
Niko took a sip of his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank. But when he put it down, he still didn’t say anything. The pause stretched into a silence, the tap of their conversation abruptly twisted shut.
Beside them, the group at the pool table cleared out, leaving it vacant. Niko inclined his head toward it.
“You wanna play?”
Merritt hesitated. At least it would remove the pressure to talk. “Yeah, okay.”
They scooted out of the booth and picked up cues. Niko racked the balls in a few graceful motions. Merritt busied herself chalking up her cue so she wouldn’t gawk at his triceps flexing under the sleeves of his T-shirt. She wasn’t even sure what the chalk did.
“You can’t make fun of me.”
He grinned. “Why would I make fun of you?”
“I’m really bad. Like, really bad.”
“I don’t believe it. I think you’re trying to get my guard down to hustle me.” He leaned over and lined up his shot, breaking the rack with ease.
Merritt took her turn, fumbling with the cue. She was even worse than she remembered. Unfortunately, the hand-eye coordination that allowed her to quickly pick up instruments seemed to be nontransferable, and her slight daze from the beer didn’t help.
They didn’t talk much besides Niko giving her the occasional pointer (from a respectful distance, she noted with disappointment).
He quickly cleared the table before she could sink a single ball.
She wanted to be annoyed, but she’d never been so turned on by having her ass so thoroughly handed to her.
Niko dipped out to the bar and back again to get them another round. She took the water glass from him, her fingers briefly closing around his before he let it go. He grinned cheekily.
“Should we play a game?”
“We are playing a game.”
“No, I mean…if I make a shot, you have to answer a question about yourself. And if you make one, I do.”
Merritt laughed. “That’s not fair, you’re destroying me.”
He shrugged. “I’m just trying to get to know you. We could always go back to the table and have a regular conversation; it’s up to you.”
“Fine. Rerack ’em. I was just warming up.” She cracked her neck and narrowed her eyes dramatically. He laughed, and warmth bloomed under her skin.
He let her shoot first this time, but it didn’t make much difference. He sank his first shot within seconds. She groaned. “Okay, go easy on me.”
From the other side of the table, he rested his hands on the edge, leaning forward. “Why did you leave LA?”
“Bad breakup.” She thought about leaving it at that, just for the sake of stubbornness, but she realized with a start that she wanted to tell Niko about herself.
At this point, being coy wasn’t doing anyone any favors.
“It was only supposed to be temporary. But I fell in love with the town, with the house—and I wanted to be near Olivia. So…here I am.”
He nodded. “You two are close.”
“Sharing a womb will do that to you.” She set the end of her cue on the ground. “Do you have siblings?”
He grinned. “Nuh-uh. No freebies.”
Once again, he easily cleared the table, but she appreciated that his subsequent questions were softballs: her favorite season (autumn), her favorite movie (All That Jazz), her favorite food (her mom’s roast chicken and potatoes).
When she sank her first ball all night, she was so shocked that her mind went blank, even forgetting the question she’d already tried to ask.
“Are you fluent in Greek?” she finally managed.
“Eímai,” he replied, which she took as a yes, and which also was so hot she thought she would literally swoon.
After a quick break to grab another round, Niko lined up his final shot.
“Eight ball in the corner pocket.”
Merritt was by his side by this point, staring down at his shoulder blades flexing through his shirt, the long line of his arm stretched in front of him.
In one smooth, controlled motion, he sent the cue ball rocketing toward its target.
The eight ball sank with a clunk into the corner pocket.
Niko straightened up, turning to look at her, and once again, they were close enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes.
“Why did you stop making music?”
She should’ve expected it, but the tameness of his other questions had lowered her guard. She took a long drink of water, trying to clear her head.
“Can we sit down?”
The band had started their second set, so they reclaimed their old booth without issue. She settled in across from him, propping her elbows in front of her and interlacing her fingers.
“How much do you know already?”
He shook his head. “Not much. You were a teenager when you got famous, right?”
She nodded. “My first album came out right before my seventeenth birthday.”
“And it’s been a while since you’ve performed live or put out anything new.”
“Ten years.”
“That’s all I know.”
She drained her glass, debating exactly how much to tell him, and how. She’d never had to do this, she realized—recount the whole story to someone who had zero preexisting knowledge.
She took a deep breath, unsure where to begin. The pleasant buzz from the beer had worn off, leaving her morose.
“So…yeah. I was sixteen when I made my first album, and it just…my whole life changed. It wasn’t overnight, but it feels that way now.
And it was the best thing that ever happened to me, but it was also…
a lot. Too much. All that attention, all that pressure…
it felt like I was always saying or doing the wrong thing, like everyone was rooting for me to fail.
They build you up, then they tear you down.
And I…didn’t handle it well. I was too young, and too sensitive, and had already been struggling with mental health stuff, even before it all blew up. I felt like one giant raw nerve.”
She paused, looking down at her hands, dropping them to her lap when she noticed they were shaking.
“I tried to focus on the parts I loved—on creating, on performing, on how lucky I was to be in that position at all. But as time went on, it only got worse. I mean, it was up and down, but whenever I’d take a break, I’d be right back where I left off when I came back.
I made three albums, and by the last one, I was a total fucking train wreck. ”
She glanced up and met Niko’s eyes. Even recounting this to him in the broadest, vaguest strokes possible made her stomach feel like it was turning inside out.
As desperate as she was to find something she didn’t like about him, she was perversely terrified of revealing something that would make him lose interest in her.