And herself for being a prisoner of it.
A text message freed up her evening. There were no handsy shenanigans on the way into the city and a pit stop at her unit fueled her up with a change of clothing. They snuck into Jay’s hotel via the staff entrance, causing some excitement in the kitchen that Jay solved with some selfies.
In his stunning hotel room, they were gawky again, all elbows and knees and getting in each other’s road. Possibly because the bed was so huge and so enticing. Jay talked too much and then fell silent in front of the TV. Evie spent too much time looking at the view over the harbor, beautiful though it was, thinking about the grim need to confront Errol.
There were whys she and Jay never would get a satisfactory answer to, hurts that might never entirely scab over. But here they were, both of them working on what they loved, loving each other in old ways and new ways and ways they hadn’t tested yet.
There were worse comebacks.
FOURTEEN
You’d think clearing the air between them would’ve have made it sunshine and popping rocks. Not so much. Back in his room, Evie was tense and silent and Jay didn’t know how to deal with that. He was having enough trouble getting his own head straight.
Her tears, the way her whole body had shuddered with them, had wrecked him. Evie was more likely to punch something than cry. It was like a smack to the head to see her breakdown, left his sensing spinning. And it had been a tongue-biting exercise not to crap all over Errol for their troubles.
Jay had spent a decade feeling like Evie had dumped him for no good reason and now that they’d hashed it out, he could see how much of the responsibility for what happened was his alone.
He hadn’t been listening carefully enough to the things she wasn’t saying. How could he not have known Errol was pressuring her? And he’d never have guessed that it would end up in her astounding voice being silenced.
He was listening now. The way she wandered around the suite told him she might rather be anywhere else, though they were here at her suggestion. Her restlessness made him feel edgy. He tried to watch TV and spent more time flicking between channels than he did taking in anything on the screen.
“Are you hungry? We could get some snacks in,” he called after her.
She flitted back into view. “I’m not hungry but you go ahead.”
What did it say about him that he was disappointed she didn’t come back with some crack about him being a bottomless food pit? This is about her, not you, dickhead.
There was a big fruit bowl in the room and a bar full of snacks that cost five times what he could spend at the corner shop if leaving the hotel to make a trip to the corner shop wasn’t a recipe for a road closure and a police presence. He wasn’t hungry either, stomach felt too unsettled. Five McMuffins and a crap load of delayed realization worth of unsettled.
“Evie.” The rest of the sentence was going to be another excuse to start a conversation she clearly didn’t want so he shut it. The carpet in here was so thick, he couldn’t hear her moving around in the other room and she didn’t answer. Changing the channel several more times didn’t make her materialize either.
Maybe they needed to work through this with sex.
Said no one ever who genuinely thought that was a thing.
It felt like a thing. The only thing that had worked for them. Had they grown so far apart as people that all they had left was animal attraction? That was a depressing thought. Straight-up physical need was great and all, but it was also like snack food, readily available and not necessarily the best thing for you.
Evie is not a vegetable, man. Though it felt like she was, delicious, life sustaining, good for him.
And messing with his guitars.
“Hey,” he said, moving towards the sound, leaning on the doorjamb to find she held Suzi Q, his old acoustic by the neck.
“You still have this?” Her smile was worth all the snack food, vegetable nonsense in his head. It was the whole supermarket, the whole glorious garden.
“I learned to play ‘Wild Thing’ on that. I still compose on it. Of course I still have Suzie Q.” Did she remember what she’d done to it?
She turned it over, using both hands, and smiled. “You left it there.”
He could’ve had it polished out. Could’ve dumped this battered hunk of plywood that he’d bought second-hand for fifty bucks for something solid that had a better tone.
And she could’ve had any other three chords tattooed on her fingers.
Something new wouldn’t have had Evie’s graffiti on it. She’d carved a heart on the waist with Evie loves Jay Everyday written inside it, right where he’d see it when he played.
“You were so mad with me,” she said. “I’d defaced your baby.”
They’d had a memorable fight about it with Jay accusing Evie of being cavalier with other people’s belongings and Evie shouting at him for being precious and not having a romantic note in his range.