My vision swam and my heart pounded with a mixture that was seventy-five percent embarrassment and twenty-five percent possibility, but I didn’t delete the email. Later, as we waited for takeoff on the mostly empty flight, I fished my phone out and looked at it again, tapped the hyperlink, and watched as the map zoomed in on a place called Stormville.
Stormville. For the last week of the tour and the DeadBeat Festival, the name had bounced around in my head. It sounded like the place a supervillain would live, or the terse detective in one of the Swedish mystery shows that had played on a twenty-four-hour loop in our hotel rooms on tour.
But, as remote as Stormville sounded, I couldn’t stop thinking about Caleb. About the way he’d touched me, hands roaming my body as he played me like an instrument he knew as well as his guitar. Voice sweet and rough in all the right places. His laugh, rare and unexpected, rolling through the conversation like thunder. And his eyes. The way he’d watched me, taking in every detail, like he couldn’t bear to miss anything. I was used to being looked at, but being seen was something quite different.
And I felt like Caleb saw me.
Which is how I now came to be in Stormville (apparently—though there’d been no sign announcing it, the way I’d imagined, like in a comic book: NOW ENTERING STORMVILLE—POPULATION 3,999 + YOU), about seventy-five miles north of the city, watching for the blue dot that was me to meet up with the pin my GPS told me was Caleb’s house. When the two converged, I thought it was a mistake. All I saw was a scratch of land and a few trees. Then I saw a mailbox a ways down the road, so I parked there. There wasn’t a driveway, just a large plot of patchy garden, with a few monstrously tall and woody sunflowers waving overhead in the breeze like creatures from an outsize planet.
Set back a few hundred yards was a small farmhouse, with weather-beaten gray clapboard siding and peeling white paint on the door. A sagging screened-in porch hugged the side of the house, and a shed slumped beside it. I would have assumed it was deserted if not for the freshly turned ground and sound of music coming through an open window.
I’d spent weeks thinking about this man, listening to his music, but now it seemed ridiculous that I was here. That I’d tracked down the address of someone who’d left me in bed after fucking me, without so much as a phone number or a note.
Was this a terrible idea? Probably. But it had been so long since I’d felt any kind of connection with someone. I couldn’t just let it go without trying.
There was no answer when I knocked on the door at first, and no doorbell. I knocked harder and the music stopped. When Caleb opened the door, holding his guitar, a chill ripped through me despite the heat. I couldn’t explain the way my body responded to him. Yes, he was gorgeous, but this was a deep, chemical reaction, like he atomized something in me and set the particles vibrating.
“Hi,” I said. And then I just stood there, looking at him.
When he opened the door, he looked shocked to see me. Then something flickered over his face that I couldn’t quite read. Curiosity, maybe? Did I dare hope, hunger? Now he just looked wary. Which was reasonable, given that I’d shown up unannounced, at a home it seemed likely didn’t get many visitors.
I couldn’t think of a single explanation for my presence that didn’t scream desperation or creepiness. How did you tell someone who was practically a stranger that you’d been thinking about him for weeks? That you realized spending time with him had been the best you’d felt in longer than you could remember? That you kind of wondered if maybe you could just stand near him in the hopes of soaking up some of that good feeling again?
“I wanted to stand near you,” was the garbled jewel that fell out of my mouth, and Caleb’s eyebrows rose.
“Oh Jesus, fuck me. That was so stalker creepy. Not what I meant.” Exactly what I meant.
“How did you find me here?”
I bit my thumbnail. “Uh. I asked my agent to find your address. You didn’t…you left without…so I…oh, fuck, never mind. I’m sorry.”
Miserable, I started to shuffle off the stoop, but a hand snagged my arm.
My face was burning and the awkwardness closed around me like a fog. It was a familiar feeling, though not one I’d had the displeasure of experiencing lately. That kind of went with the territory when people wanted to meet you but you weren’t invested in them. When you didn’t have time to connect with anyone. When you didn’t even try.