If Not for My Baby

by Kate Golden

they both hope one day I’ll shed my cynic-cocoon and reveal myself as a lovestruck little butterfly, fluttering into the arms of some upper-middle-class suitor.

They’re so the music can live inside of me again just for a little while, and so I can remember exactly who I am when that indescribable alchemy occurs.

now with her own rabid fan base of melancholy twentysomethings who love wildflowers and rain and cigarettes.

I’ve missed the music swimming through my body.

But there’s no brakes on the car your man’s in. He can’t unlearn how to love you. I doubt he’d want to even if he could. That’s the beauty of it, tucked inside the sorrow.”

“It’s true. You’re some kind of sex god to most women. What will you do with all that responsibility?” Against the low hum of the ice machine, Halloran runs a hand across his mouth in thought. “Cave under the crushing weight of impossible expectation?”

Halloran nods, but doesn’t say I’m sorry nor how brave of her, which are my two least favorite responses.

“Regardless of my sexual orientation, if you’re after intimacy advice, Joe, I’d be glad to help you out after the show. You needn’t suffer alone, mate.”

I expect crippling imposter syndrome I find only bone-deep, near-spiritual rightness. I wonder if I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

“You don’t sleep around, you don’t party. You drink less than I’ve been led to believe is common for the Irish. You have no tattoos as far as I can see…Have you always been this bad at being a rock star?”

When I meet his eyes—all the way up there—they’re sparkling in the lavender light. They look like galaxies. “Is it very foreign to let someone look after you?”

“What?” I think I physically stumble backward. “You’re not interested in me.” “I’m not?” A slight smile twists at the corner of his mouth. “You should tell my dreams that.”

“I’m a one-kiss-on-a-bus girl. Not dream-worthy. Not your hyper-intelligent, mythic-love kind of dreams, anyway. I don’t even have dreams of my own.”

“Come on, Hangover Spice,” he jokes, eyes on my impossibly high heels, wind dancing in his angelic curls. He offers me his hand. “Let’s get you some sea air.”

and when he does something thoughtful or chivalrous I get sad and moody because I have feelings I don’t know what to do with.

This is a slow descent into euphoria. This is his tongue sliding mercilessly against mine until I groan into his mouth. This is his hands spanning my middle, wrapped around my rib cage until his thumbs nearly meet above my navel. This is my fingers tangling in his hair and caressing his savagely sharp jaw and memorizing every inch of his face and lips and body for the day I miss him so much it hurts to breathe.

I shake my head before pressing my lips to his again. I’m going to kiss Tom Halloran until we are dehydrated. Until we need IVs for loss of fluids.

But something about these two kisses—just two kisses with the guy—feels so emotionally overwhelming I can hardly fathom putting it into words.

Hey, Mom, I kissed Halloran twice and now my skin is too tight on my body all the time, and my heart gets hooked up to some kind of generator on overdrive whenever he walks into a room, and I’m constantly dying to ask him every question I can think of and scribble his answers into a notebook that I’ll read each night before bed like a zealot, but it’s chill, it’s so casual, and how have you been?

Nothing has ever felt as good as being kissed with reckless abandon by Tom Halloran. His kisses are like his music: passionate, thoughtful, devastating.

I’ll be thinkin’ of that night when I’m ninety. And every single day until then. I just mean…I’m hoping to grow something here.”

“I started to think about every song in terms of what questions I’d be asked by interviewers. How the melodies would sound played to thousands of ears, night after night, show after show.”

“She’s just…she needs me, you know?” “I don’t blame her,” he says, brushing his knuckles over my cheek. “You’re very easy to need.”

The memory of how good it felt to gorge myself on more than just a meager slice of him.

“Life will sabotage your dreams enough. Why do it to yourself?”

“It’s a very satisfying sensation, gettin’ you something you’ve craved.” “Can I do the same for you? Need a new book of dusty Grecian fables? Another pair of high-tops?” His laugh wreathes the cab’s interior in neon lights. “You’ve plenty I’m craving.”

“Don’t knock the hell of heartache. It’s rare to feel anything in life as severely as longing. I’ve broken bones that hurt less.”

“I can’t watch you. I’ll—” He closes his eyes. “I don’t want it to end,” he admits. “I’d keep you in this bed…keep you like this, around me”—he flexes his hips just a little, as if it can’t be helped—“for days, if I could.”

Tom is quiet for a moment. I can hear the wheels turning in his head, trying to parse out why on earth I’m talking about Dana Scully at three in the morning. He settles on, “She’s a fine character, sure.”

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.

His crooning is smooth and effortless. His voice harmonizing with each of ours. Wren’s low register, Molly’s impressive warble. This moment—a family like I’ve never known, the music that lives in us, the end of a journey that’s changed me—it’s like clean air on a mountaintop. Rainfall in your ears.

I’m gutted and I’m free and I’m in the kind of love I spent my entire life hiding from. I’m sailing through the air with no parachute and the wind in my ears sounds like a harmony. I wish I could tell if I’m falling to my death or flying with wings I never knew I had.

“I can’t promise you a life free of sorrow. Nobody can. But I can swear to shelter the heart of ye with all I have.” “I don’t care.” “You do.” A tear slips down his cheek and he wipes it away. “I know that you do.”

“I said I wasn’t going to fall in love with you.” A sad smile cuts my face as the tears drip down. My voice breaks as I tell him, “But I did.”

Hustling to the airport and boarding a last-minute flight to tell the man you love how badly you messed everything up is not as romantic as Nora Ephron led us to believe.

“He’s outrageously cute,” Tom says. “And clearly’ll be smart, too. Lucky you married her, otherwise he’d have your shite for brains.”

“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’m learning lessons in love in real time these days: when you feel about someone the way I do about Tom, there isn’t much room for shame. To be loved is to be known—the worst of you, the best of you.

“You changed the mind of me. The soul, too. I’d been sleepwalking through my life. Wishing each set would be over before it began. I’d given up on my work ever feeling as fulfilling as it had when I was young. Before I’d shared it with the world.”

Wishing to wind over those jaw-shaking potholes so long as you’d let me listen to you sing each night.”

“Because it’s you that I’m to thank. It’s been far too long since I’ve written anything out of sheer adoration. Out of awe or joy…I’m looking forward to this record, if you can believe.”

As he holds my hand and taps it on the leather divider to the song’s rhythm, my eyes roam his kind features, the countryside rolling behind him—wooden fences, spruce trees—and I’m reminded once more who Tom is to me: the man who scored my soundless life with a love song.