The Girl of Tokens and Tears Page 14

  I stare up through the car window at the city lights. It’s a pretty city and it edges the Pacific. In a lot of ways Neil is like me. I can’t imagine either of us living away from the ocean. When he’s not at his job, working on his music, or in bed with me, he’s at the beach surfing.

  Neil parks in front of a dilapidated building that sells art supplies. Josh Moss rented the basement as rehearsal space. The street looks a lot less safe than the one where our hotel is located.

  Josh is leaning against a brick wall smoking a cigarette. I’ve only seen him the one time, that night at Peppers, but I didn’t remember he was such a good looking guy. Though I really don’t like his long, wiry build. Definitely more Rene’s type than mine.

  Neil says, “I don’t know how long this will be tonight, Chrissie. Whenever you want to cut out, take the car. I’ll have one of the guys drive me back to the hotel.”

  “OK.”

  I watch him open his door and climb from driver’s seat. I wonder if, now that he has me here, he’s changed his mind about me sticking around.

  Neil walks around the car and opens my door. Strange, but the two guys haven’t even said hello to each other yet. I wait at the curb, feeling awkward, as Neil retrieves his guitar and Josh just stands there smoking and staring at me.

  Finally, Josh pushes up from the wall and tosses his cigarette into the road. “The convict is back,” he says.

  “Fuck you, Josh,” Neil says, but he’s smiling.

  Then they’re hugging each other in that guy way, hard pats and a firm clutch. They shake each other and then step back.

  “You look good, man. You good?” Josh asks, taking in Neil with a thorough glance. The way he says that makes it sound more significant than a casual inquiry.

  Neil nods. “It’s all good, Josh. Nothing to worry about. Like I said on the phone, I’m here to work. Then I’m going back to Berkeley with Chrissie.”

  Josh shakes his head. “You had me fucking worried there for a while.”

  Neil tilts his head toward the building. “Did the rest of guys send you up here to make sure I wasn’t a fucking nut-case before you let me through the doors?”

  I listen to the conversation, trying not to let expression surface on my face. Nut case? What the heck does that mean? Neil is the farthest thing from crazy I know.

  Josh laughs, lighting another cigarette. “Yep. Told them you looked good when I saw you in Berkeley. They’re not sure about you yet. You fucked up Andy pretty bad. Everyone is still blown away about that, trying to figure out what set you off enough to fuck up him enough to put him in the hospital. Fuck, Neil, we’ve all been friends since grade school. Why the hell did you fuck him up instead of talking to me?”

  Andy? My eyes search Neil face. He’s tense and edgy with anger. Andy…and then I remember the night at Peppers, the guy Neil was pissed at, the guy who stared at me so strangely while I danced with Neil. Is that the same Andy? The guy Neil caught in bed with his girlfriend? Getting fucked over by a friend; is that why Neil flipped out and did such a non-Neil thing?

  Josh’s eyes sharpen on Neil’s face. “Andy is back in Seattle. Did you know that?”

  Neil shakes his head, but his tension intensifies. “I don’t talk to that fucker and I never will.”

  “There are not going to be any problems are there? There’s no way to avoid him here.”

  Their eyes lock in an intense stare, full of meaning I can’t begin to decipher.

  “Like I said, I’m here for a week to see what we can put together, but I’m not moving back. I’ll come here to work. I’ll go on the road. Nothing more. Then I’m back in Berkeley with Chrissie.”

  I’m startled out of my thoughts by the feel of Josh Moss’s eyes on me. He says, “I know you. We hung out together once. You have a friend. Rene? Right?”

  I flush, but before I can say anything Neil laughs and gives Josh a little shove in the chest. “You’re such a prick. I told you not to mention that to Chrissie. Not cool, man. Don’t fuck with my girlfriend.”

  For the first time Josh smiles at me. “I’m just messing with you, Chrissie. Rene was hot. I was hoping you could give me her number.” His gaze shifts to Neil. “Girlfriend, huh? You didn’t tell me this when I was in Berkeley.”

  “I didn’t think it mattered in making a decision to let me rejoin the band. Is there a problem?”

  Josh moves to open the store door. He shakes his head. “Neil Stanton and Chrissie Parker.”

  The tic twitches in Neil’s cheek. “Don’t say it like it’s fucked up.”

  Neil’s sudden temper and the tone of his voice send an instant chill through me.

  Josh freezes and turns to look at Neil. “Don’t be so fucking intense. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “You better not have,” Neil counters harshly. “Chrissie goes pretty much everywhere I go. If it’s going to be a problem, you tell me now.”

  Something in their exchange makes me flush. I stare at Neil, but he doesn’t look at me.

  Josh shrugs loosely. “No problem, Neil. You just surprised me.”

  They start walking. I tug on Neil’s shirt. He stops.

  I stare up at him. “What was that all about?”

  Neil jerks a hand through his hair. He’s very agitated right now about something.

  “Nothing. Josh is an asshole sometimes. Blow off anything he says.”

  “OK.” But I don’t really get what just happened here. It feels strange, disturbingly so, even though I can’t make sense of it. I stare up at Neil. “Andy. That’s your friend from Santa Barbara, right?”

  Neil nods.

  My eyes widen. “Why did you leave that part out when you told me about the guy you beat up in San Francisco?”

  Neil shrugs. “It wasn’t important.”

  “Getting screwed over by a friend is kind of a significant part.”

  “Jeez, Chrissie. Stop with the fucking third degree.”

  My body goes cold. I take a slight step back from him. He feels peculiar.

  Neil’s shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I’m really tense right now. Can we just wait to do this until I’m done here?”

  Neil walks off toward the basement. At the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs is a storage room filled with canvas, paints, and raw materials. The basement is dark and dirty, the scent of the air has an unpleasant odor of cleaning supplies and dust, but the area is large and the equipment is already set up.

  I’ve seen everyone in the room once before except the lead guitarist, Les Wilson. They were part of Neil’s gang at Peppers the night we met and later, part of the upstairs party we went to for Kurt. Old friends. A Santa Barbara mob. It makes the tension in the room that entered with Neil a doubly odd thing.

  Nate Kassel, drumsticks in hand, gives Neil a wraparound arm pat and then a lift of his chin toward me. Pat Larsen is a little friendlier in greeting Neil, but not much. And Les, their new lead guitarist, isn’t really a part of this tight knit group from Santa Barbara, so he’s sort of just here, like I’m.

  I sink down onto an old, dirty couch pushed up against a wall of shelving and, for once, I’m grateful I’ve been rapidly forgotten in a room. The strain between the guys is palpable. It almost looks like none of them know how to act around Neil. So strange. Calm, smiling Neil is the awkwardness in the room.

  It isn’t long before they’re plugged in, playing and really gelling. Neil started with this band. That’s the way they’re playing, like musicians who have played together forever. And there’s definitely something in the music they create. Something raw, powerful, uniquely their own.

  Four hours later, they’re still jamming. I move to lie on a pillow. My lids drift open and closed, over and over again. Sleep tugs at me even though I’m emotionally messy. It doesn’t matter what shit Neil brought with him to Seattle; Neil’s band is a band again.

  ~~~

  I am exhausted. Our six days in Seattle have moved at a grueling tempo. Hours in the rehearsal space. Sex. Late n
ights in the thriving music scene here. Sleep. Then the cycle all over again, numbing me until I can’t feel, too tired even to sleep.

  The band played their first live gig together in an old theater that looked as though, at one time, it had been scarred by fire. The corridors, the performance area, everything had been packed. Normally this kind of nightmare I would avoid—new places, new people—but it wasn’t a difficult thing for me. And I’m glad I went. Neil and the guys were amazing live, on stage.

  It feels like everyone here is sort of different, an outsider probably everywhere but here. By extension it makes everyone belong. Being strange, being different, is normal in this underground world of hungry and creative musicians. It’s a surprisingly good feeling to feel I belong simply by being here. The easiness of it all is seductive. I understand why Neil loves life here. It’s so different from what my life has always been in the judgmental world of money and pretty rich girls.

  In spite of the first day’s tension, everything else has rolled in an easy flow. Neil is subjected to the occasional jeer about having fucked-up Andy. Good-humored taunts about his jail thing always flitter through the air wherever we are. But for the most part, it’s the music and the scene everyone focuses on in this alternate universe of not normal.

  There is only one moment I would label bad if I had the strength to write in my journal today. In the corridor after Arctic Hole’s fist live gig—Arctic Hole, the name of Neil’s recreated band, was lifted from a joke he made about jail being an arctic hole—I came face-to-face with Andy. He just showed up out of nowhere and was there; cocky, long blond hair, an unattractively small and thin guy with blues eyes, always staring with a glint that makes it obvious he’s an asshole. He didn’t seem at all like a guy who would have ever been a friend of Neil’s.

  I didn’t really want to talk to Andy. There is something in the way he looks at me that puts my nerves on edge. But he started talking to me and I didn’t know how to get away from him.

  When Neil spied us from across the room during the after performance party, something changed on his face. Jealousy over me? Hatred of Andy? I couldn’t tell for sure. The mixture of anger and other emotions was something new and strange on Neil.

  I thought they were going to come to blows right there in front of half of Seattle. It was an ugly scene. Neil snarling in Andy’s face for him to stay away from me. Then dragging me, like a caveman, from the party, barking at me: You don’t talk to him. You don’t look at him. You don’t go near Andy.

  Neil’s nerve in ordering me had my temper fully lit by the time we got back to our hotel room. We would have had an enormous fight, except Neil had me on the bed the second we stepped into the room. The sex was pounding, emotionally void, rough, and painful. It was messed up, but it made my blood boil; the unrestrained acts of his body.

  I curl into the blankets. It’s been an intense week. Tomorrow we’re supposed to return to Berkeley. It’s our last day here. I wonder when Neil is going to tell me we’re over and he’s not leaving Seattle with me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I zip closed my duffel bag. My last final of summer session is done. I’m out of here for three weeks.

  The phone rings. I click on the cordless. “Hello.”

  “Hey, Chrissie. You got everything arranged to come up here?”

  Neil. I smile. “Yep. Bag packed. Ticket booked. Are you ready to meet me at the airport tomorrow?”

  “More than you know,” Neil says in a husky growl. “You can count the new calluses on my hands when you get here.”

  I laugh. Neil staying one extra week after me in Seattle slipped into all summer in Seattle for Neil. But it wasn’t as awful as I feared it would be, being alone in the condo for eight weeks.

  There was a weird sense of relief, getting a breather from both Rene and Neil. A loss of tension in the air. A loss of tension in me.

  I lay back on the floor, curled around the phone. “Have you missed me at all?”

  A long sigh. “You know I have.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  A pause. “Chrissie?” Neil’s voice has changed.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t just sit around down there alone in the condo without me, do you? You should be having fun. Going out.”

  “You can be such a conceited jerk at times, Neil,” I say flippantly, though the emotion running through me is uncomfortable.

  I wonder if Neil has just told me, in a guy roundabout way, he’s fucking around. And I’m pissed off with myself because I realize I’m pretty much just sitting around when I don’t have classes.

  “What time is your flight?” Neil asks, ignoring my jibe.

  “I get to Seattle at 3:30.”

  “Are you staying the whole three weeks until fall semester begins? Or are going to go to Santa Barbara also?”

  “Nope, the entire three weeks you’re stuck with me.”

  “Good. You’re not going to get out of the apartment for days,” he whispers.

  “I’m counting on it, Neil,” I whisper.

  I try not to let clearly form in my head the shabby apartment Neil is living in, unpleasantly located in a cheap-rent neighborhood of Seattle. He shares it with Josh Moss and Les Wilson.

  A two bedroom rat hole above a store, with walls so thin that knowing the guys are in the next room when I visit Neil definitely doesn’t put us, sexually, at our best. I wish Neil would come to Berkeley instead of me always going to him.

  I hear the guys in the background calling for Neil. “I’ve got to run, Chrissie. Night.”

  Click.

  I take the cordless phone to the kitchen and drop it into the receiver. I wander to my glass patio doors. I stare across the Bay to the city. Alan is there. Blackpoll’s San Francisco concert date of his world tour. It’s the closest we’ve been to each other for over a year. I wonder if Alan is standing across the Bay thinking of me.

  ~~~

  When I wake, I’m on my couch and the living room is filled with cruel morning light. My head hurts. My mouth is dry. I can feel that I drank too much last night. I fell asleep without making it to the bedroom.

  I roll over, stretching and yawning, trying to rally my muscles into action. I definitely need more than my share of coffee today. I look at the clock on the wall. Crap, it’s midmorning. I’ve got to get to the airport for Seattle by one.

  I wander into the kitchen and grab the instant coffee. As the water heats in the microwave, I down a tall glass of orange juice and I run my finger over the newspaper lying on the counter. It’s folded with the block ad of Blackpoll’s West Coast concert schedule glaring up at me. Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, then away.

  After giving it a good crumple, I toss it in the trash. The only thing more foolish than having that darn thing lying on my counter for two weeks is spending an entire night thinking of Alan.

  It’s over, Chrissie. He’s out of your life. Married.

  I stir the instant coffee into my cup and head for the bathroom. An hour later, I’m in my bedroom, dressed in a simple black sundress, trying to decide if I’ve packed everything I’ll need for three weeks, when there’s a soft knock on my front door.

  Groaning, I move toward the hallway. Rising up on my tiptoes, I look through the peephole. A large body, so close to the door that I can’t make out who it is. I undo the chain. I open it a crack and my heart drops to my knees.

  Oh my god! I don’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t find a single word in my head.

  The perfect lines of Alan’s face change from enigmatic to amused.

  “The correct moment to say hello passed about three minutes ago. Are you going to invite me in, Chrissie?”

  I flush. Crap, how long have I been standing here doing nothing but staring at him?

  Alan doesn’t wait for my response. I clutch the door for support as he moves around me into my condo. He tosses his leather jacket on a chair and then sinks onto the sofa.

  I try to still my spinning emotions by focusing o
n closing the door and locking it. I’m feeling more than a little flustered and more than a little stupid, but in my wildest dreams I never would have believed that Alan would cross the Bay to drop in on me, uninvited.

  I step from the door, and then do a fast float of the room with my eyes for a place to sit. I drop down onto the chair where he tossed his jacket.

  “You’re looking good, Chrissie,” he says softly, shattering the acutely silent air.

  My vision ignores my will and fixes on him. “You look good too, Alan.”

  It’s petty, but I hate that he does. Alan looks even better than he did during our spring together. Fit, tan, rock star chic. He’s stylishly dressed in the kind of clothes he wears for interviews: a flowing black shirt and leather pants. His long, wavy hair is just the right amount of tousled. Must have wanted to give his fans a dose of fuck-me hair in the morning.

  “Are you enjoying school? What are you studying?”

  I inhale a long breath. God this feels weird. “Music.”

  I drag my gaze away from him. In spite of how many times I’ve imagined this moment, I never expected it to feel like this. Miserably uncomfortable. But then we didn’t exactly part as friends and having him here sitting, strange and distant, forces me to remember he’s married.

  “Jack bought you a nice condo, I see,” he says casually, fishing his cigarettes out of his pocket. He lights it without asking if he can, takes a long drag, and stares at me through the smoke. “I’ve wondered what it would look like. The place you chose over me.”

  My face burns. Only Alan could make a glib pejorative directed at himself a cutting insult. If there had been a hint of anything in his voice—kindness, gentleness, affection—that comment would have played so much differently. But it held only the clip of meanness.

  I stare at him. Elegantly mean Alan. Emotion rockets through my veins, raw and unwanted. It’s mean Alan who is sitting in my condo with me today.

  “If there’s a reason why you dropped by, tell me and then leave,” I whisper, in spite of my resolve to stay emotionless. “Otherwise, your being here is ridiculous, and I should go to the airport for my flight to Seattle.”