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“For bringing me back.”
“I rolled for you,” Tom says as I take a seat beside him. “You’re in jail, I’m afraid.”
“Barry’s is the tea of the people,” I say, and Tom looks like he could propose.
Wouldn’t let me put her hair in pigtails. Went to school with a whole chunk down her back that she missed every day.”
“We were Bonnie and Clyde for Halloween once. I was seven…and I was Clyde.”
“Man…” Mike shakes his head at the cases of beer. “You are so in love with him.”
I’m planning to stay in this bus and read. Or hide out in a guest bedroom with a drunk woman with a bruised elbow hoping she’ll retch on me. Either works.”
Tom bursts out laughing. It’s the best sound I know. I want that on my desert-island album.
It’s what I’d thought, too. A rider—the list of anything an artist wants that gets sent to every venue on the tour—usually means famous folks get their dressing room stocked with fine bottles of wine and bonbons imported from a specific boutique in Paris. What I doubt most musicians ask for is Barry’s tea and a pack of Claritin. Like together Tom and I make up one congested old woman.
But that’s not why tears spill down my cheeks. It’s the way he looks at her. It’s the raw sorrow in Tom’s eyes. He looks at Cara the way you drift off, unplanned, into a painful memory. In his mind, he’s there, with her, whenever it all went wrong.
“Don’t be naïve. Those two have something nobody can replicate. They’ve been talking the entire time he’s been on tour. I’ve known Tommy since I signed him at twenty-five. All the women he’s dated since then are just Cara placeholders.”
“I can’t leave everything behind, change my entire life—” “What life?!”
“Depressed girls don’t leave the house.
He could tell me to hit the road, and this entire journey would still have been worth it just to see him again.
“I’d gladly watch my kitchen tumble into the core of the earth for another moment with you.”
“I dunno what’s wrong with you,” Francis jokes. “I grew sick of ’em ages ago.”
“These last few weeks without you…I about needed a mercy killing.”
“She was coming home from a gig we played together. Stopped to help an animal out of the road. A fox, apparently. She’d had a few drinks with me after the show, but she wasn’t drunk. The guy that hit her was, though. He was plastered.”
I wonder if Tom’s ever considered that his friend may have been in love with Eden, too. Or maybe he’s known all along, and they’ve just left it unsaid.
“But, Clementine…I fell in love with you that night in Raleigh. Right there beside that vending machine.” He shakes his head. “It never felt wrong.”
“I was so mortified,” Tom admits with a half smile. “Itchin’ to go put on a feckin’ shirt, but terrified of coming back out and findin’ you’d gone to bed. So I just stood there like a half-naked eejit.”
“It’s all the same now. None of it mattered once I met you.”
“Promise you won’t take them down. They’re”—his lips press hotly under my ear—“so beautiful.” Tom’s voice is gruff. “Like you.”
Clementines grow on evergreen trees.
“Whatever you want out of this life, and I’ll have it done.”
“I’m yours.”
“Lad at the pharmacy convinced me to buy an oversized pack for the tour. Says they don’t make them the same in Europe. That’s not even true, is it?”
Feck not Skechers!
Molly Moreno: Wait nvm I can fly with you two Pete Sullivan: Same Conor Callaghan: Pull yourself together kid
“Sweet as honey from the bee, is my fruit from the evergreen tree. Voice of a swallow, just as free, I only hear music when she’s with me.”
