In Atlanta, Peyton talked to a woman he’d assumed to be in her middle thirties, maybe only a decade older than he was, and definitely possible spending-the-night material.
When he mentioned that he just graduated with his masters in performance from Juilliard, she’d settled back in her chair a little and asked how old he was.
“I’m legal, I assure you.” He rattled the ice in his drink at her. He’d gotten carded.
“You’re at least twenty-nine or thirty, right?” Her pale eyes examined his face and torso, scrutinizing.
“I’m twenty-three,” Peyton said. “That isn’t a problem, right?”
The woman crossed her arms over her chest. “Twenty-three. Of course, you are. Look, darlin’, you’re a lovely young man—”
As soon as Peyton heard her emphasis on young, he knew she was a lost cause for the evening, and he went up to his hotel bed alone, again.
She wasn’t looking for a bit of fun for the evening. She was looking for either someone to spend the rest of her life with or someone who at least wouldn’t end up in the tabloid pages and get her caught cheating while she was away from home on business.
In Hartford, Connecticut, which was perilously close to where Peyton had grown up, he recognized a guy whom he had known from the Greenwich Yacht Club. They reminisced for a few hours about great boats and great dinners at the yacht club, which meant Peyton had gone back to his hotel room alone, again. He’d been so intent on talking with the guy, hearing a familiar voice, and remembering his teen years that he hadn’t even gotten around to hitting on any of the women in the bar.
That night in his hard hotel bed, he’d felt even lonelier for having talked to a familiar face about home things. He had thought about going to visit his parents since the show was so close to Greenwich, but they’d had a country club dinner booked for that night. Not that they would have come to see him at a loud rock and roll concert, anyway.
Sometimes he went out to dinner with Tryp and Elfie, or Cadell and Andy, or very rarely, Xan and Georgie.
You know what the most pathetic three words in the English language are? Table for three. Obviously, one of them is a straggler whom the couple had taken pity on.
Sometimes Peyton hit the dive bars with the roadies for cheap beer after they struck the set, which happened very late at night. They usually had early call the next morning or rode the advance busses to the next venue, so Peyton didn’t get much of a chance to become a lonely alcoholic.
He spent mornings in the gym with the other band guys.
They were making sure they stayed healthy and looked good for the magazines.
Peyton was working off a hell of a lot of frustration.
Yes, Raji had not given Peyton her contact information, but she had evidently not warned her friend Andy, Cadell’s new wife, not to tell him.
That was practically an invitation, right?
It had taken a bit of wheedling, some jollying, and timing his seemingly offhand questions when Andy had been a little tipsy from an unusually intense after-party, but eventually, Andy had looked on her phone and texted Raji’s phone number to him.
Andy warned him, though, even as she was thumbing the number into her phone, that Raji was married to medicine and wouldn’t want any kind of a relationship, not even a friends-with-benefits arrangement. Raji was obsessive about her career and would be a world-class cardiac transplant surgeon someday.
Andy looked straight at Peyton. “So don’t fuck it up for her, okay?”
And that’s how Peyton acquired Raji’s phone number.
He stared at it a lot.
Christmas came and went. He saw his parents for a few days.
His old country club and yacht club had parties where he saw many of his high school friends who had gotten engaged or married to each other, bought houses, and joined the clubs on junior memberships until they were thirty.
They were all coupled off, too.
No other singles to even hook up with.
Peyton could have sworn that he heard his biological clock ticking as he slept in his childhood bed and then rejoined the tour to sleep in more cold hotel beds. Why were hotel rooms always set at sixty-three degrees? No one liked that.
The Killer Valentine tour went on, mostly up the Eastern Seaboard, but there was one excursion to California because Killer Valentine had been invited to play at the Whisky a Go Go, the famous club that had discovered The Doors and so many more bands.
So that’s how the rock star Peyton Cabot came to be standing backstage at the Whisky in January, the pinnacle of many band’s careers, sweating over calling a woman.
Xan Valentine was still on the stage. They were all going to pull a runner after his last encore.