The town was vibrant that day. The parade ended at the corner of the town hall on Main Street. Barbecues were out and food was being passed around. Everyone stood around chatting, tossing footballs back and forth, and then the moment Super Bowl coverage started, the town became desolate. A ghost town. Shops were all closed, barbecues were abandoned in the streets along with folding chairs and tables. The Super Bowl came in like the Rapture and took everyone away, up to Football Heaven. Except in reality, they were all just in their homes, faces glued to their television sets.
You would have thought the Rapture had come to Burns Bog had Lily not been outside, picking garbage up off the street, moving the tables and chairs back into the town hall they’d all been dragged out from. Lily didn’t care much for the Super Bowl. She enjoyed the high spirits that came along with it, but she didn’t know a game of football from a game of Ping-Pong.
She wanted Denver to win because she wanted everyone in her hometown to be happy. At the same time, she wanted Florida to win because she didn’t want the Florida players to be sad. That broke her heart, seeing those men working so hard and ending up so upset. In Lily’s perfect world, everyone would have a good time playing the game and no one would be keeping score.
She didn’t like to watch the games because seeing everyone so stressed out in turn made her stressed out. So instead, she took to cleaning up the town—a task that she knew was pointless. After the game was over, the town would re-emerge from their homes and recreate their giant mess.
But Lily didn’t mind. She liked having the whole town to herself—even if that meant cleaning it up by herself. There was a calmness to the swaying trees and the chirping birds and the babbling water from the nearby stream.
As she pulled one of the barbecues off of the street, she recognized a familiar face nearby. Aaron was standing outside of the liquor store, pulling on the locked door, looking through the window to see if anyone was in. He pounded his fist on the door and then returned to the window, hoping someone would magically appear inside.
“They’re closed for the big game,” Lily called out. She couldn’t help but giggle at the grumpy mumbling she could see but not hear from down the block.
Aaron turned to Lily and covered his eyes from the sun. “Seriously?” he called back.
“It’s all closed—probably for the rest of the day. Do you need something?” Lily started towards Aaron, closing the block-long gap between them.
“I guess not.” Aaron shook his head and turned to start his long journey back to his home. It took him an hour to walk into town, and it would take another hour to walk home. “This town is a real piece of…” he mumbled under his breath, catching himself before letting something potentially offensive slip out.
“The bar’s the only place open. It’s pretty packed though—don’t know if you’d be able to find a place to sit, so you’d be stuck standing. They do off-sales if you’d rather watch the game from your house.”
“I’m not interested in the game, but maybe the off-sales. Where’s the bar?”
“It’s just down the street and around the corner there. I can show you, if you’d like.”
Aaron started towards the bar and, assuming she was invited, Lily joined.
“Even with your fancy surround sound system, you don’t want to watch the Super Bowl?” Lily asked.
“I guess not, no.” Aaron’s day hadn’t improved since his rude awakening by the morning parade.
The bar was teeming with Burns Bog residents. Getting inside was out of the question seeing as the doorways were jammed with men and women in Denver Broncos jerseys, all fighting to see the bar’s small HD television. There were even people standing outside, shivering, with their faces pressed against the window.
“What in the hell are they all doing?”
“Most people in Burns Bog don’t have HD TVs and almost no one gets cable. You might even be one of the first with both, come to think of it.” Lily stood up on her toes, an attempt to assess how difficult it would be to reach the bar. She was too short to see past the doorway. “You might have to wait for the period to end before you can get in there.”
“Screw it. I’d sooner die than go in there.” Aaron turned and started once again towards his house.
“Can I give you a ride?” Lily asked, running up next to him.
“No. I don’t mind the walk. Go ahead and watch the game.”
“I don’t really want to watch the game, to be honest. I’d be happy to give you a ride home.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Aaron didn’t turn around. He just kept walking.
“What kind of drink were you looking for. I’m a small girl. Maybe I can squeeze in there and get something for you.”
He still didn’t turn around. “I said, don’t worry about it.”
A strange sense of failure washed over Lily. Aaron had been let down again while everyone else in the town was beaming with excitement. Maybe it was residual guilt from letting Aaron down with his move, leaving him stuck in moving-box limbo all weekend, or maybe it was because she so badly wanted to impress the celebrity that she once idolized. “There’s an old bottle of Jack Daniels at the shop. One of the old employees left it there. It’s been there for about four years. Is that bad? Does Jack Daniels go bad? It’s yours if you want it, if it’s any good.”
Aaron finally stopped walking and turned to Lily. “Really?” he said.
“Absolutely!” She ran around the block, fired up her little car, and then zipped up next to Aaron. The sense of failure was gone now, replaced by a peculiar sense of accomplishment.
CHAPTER SIX
While Aaron wanted to take the nearly-full bottle of bourbon back to his house, drink alone in his basement, and play his guitar, he felt an unfortunate obligation to keep Lily company in the staff room of Parker Family Movers for at least a little while. He tried to pay her twenty bucks for the bottle, but she wouldn’t accept the money. He thought about offering her more money—he could certainly afford it—but he didn’t want her to start asking questions again.
Lily went to fetch the bottle and Aaron wandered around the room. He came across a picture of Lily with her mother. Lily didn’t look much younger in the photo. Her mother looked tired and weak, but happy and smiling. In the photo, Lily was wearing a familiar black t-shirt, but Aaron couldn’t figure out why it was so familiar. The photo was cropped at Lily’s chest, just above the text on the shirt. Had Aaron removed the photo from the frame, he would have seen that it was the official tour shirt from his 2001 Gunpowder Girls tour. Lily walked in and saw Aaron holding the photo. It took a moment for her to clue into her attire in the photo, but when she did, her heart skipped a beat.
“Whatcha looking at?” she asked. Her body was suddenly rigid, tense.
“This picture. You look a lot like your mom.”
“Thanks. That’s the last picture I have of her. She passed away last year.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” He put the picture back down.
“It’s okay. She had a good run, I think. So what do you think of Burns Bog so far? Feel at home yet?” she asked.
Aaron had to fight not to roll his eyes. Instead, he bit his tongue and said, “It’s nice.”
But even Lily could see that Aaron was straining to hold a smile, that he was holding back on speaking his mind. “I know that it probably seems like there isn’t much going on, but it can actually be a lot of fun here. There are lots of little hidden treasures around town.”
“Like what?” Aaron was eyeing the bottle of Jack Daniels, but there were no glasses and he didn’t think it would be appropriate to drink straight from the bottle in company. He wanted to fit in with the town, but he didn’t want to be labelled the town drunk.
“Well…” Lily sat thinking for a moment. “There are lots of nice little trails for hiking in the summer, if you’re into that kind of thing.” Aaron wasn’t. “Or,” Lily continued, “a lot of people around here go fishing. Bird watching is popular around he
re. Hunting. In the winter, people go snowshoeing and lots of people like riding skidoos. Have you ever been on a skidoo? It’s so much fun.”
A bunch of hick activities, Aaron thought. Nothing Lily said was a ‘hidden treasure.’ Nothing special, just a list of the standard outdoor activities of any town with seasons.
Lily could tell that Aaron wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t exactly hidden on his face, which looked like it had just bitten into a rotten apple. “Have you ever been snowshoeing?” she asked.
Aaron shook his head. He was a Californian, not a goddamned eskimo.
“We should go out snowshoeing. It’s a load of fun. There are some great fields to snowshoe in around here. Hey—you can even borrow my dad’s snowshoes. He doesn’t use them—hasn’t for years.”
“What’s the point?” Aaron’s eyes drifted back to the bottle of Jack Daniels. He didn’t want to go out snowshoeing, or even regular-shoeing. All he wanted to do was sit in the basement with his guitar and that bottle of bourbon.
“It’s fun,” Lily said, beaming, perking up.
“No. What’s the point? Why wear the big, dumb shoes?”
Lily laughed as if Aaron had made a joke. She stopped laughing when her eyes met his flat, unimpressed face. It was a serious question. “So you don’t fall into the snow, silly.”
“How deep is the snow?”
“Out there?” Lily thought. “Probably close to three or four feet in some places. There’s a trail right off the property here that we used to walk when we were kids. I’ll go grab the shoes.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t think—I mean—I should be leaving…” Aaron’s words were lost in the air of the staff room as Lily buzzed away to retrieve the old snowshoes from storage. Aaron stood up and walked to the doorway, but Lily was already long gone. “Lily?” he called out. He received no response. “Great,” he mumbled. “I guess I’m going snowshoeing...”
Aaron’s old manager, a very wise man, once told Aaron, “Never tell anyone you have no plans, or they’ll make some for you that you won’t want.” He said it after Aaron got roped into a string of university gigs midway through a world tour. No money, shit security, and no sleep. He wouldn’t have minded, had the university crowd not been so cruel, throwing bottles on the stage, mocking every song, making sure everyone knew how ‘cool’ they were, hating all the current pop music for no other reason than it being popular. Never again.
Sitting alone in the Parker Family Movers staff room, Aaron took a big hit, straight from the big bottle of Jack Daniels. He was going to need a few more if he was going to go out snowshoeing around Burns Bog, Illinois. Fifteen years earlier he was sitting in his mansion in Beverly Hills with three songs at the top of the pop charts. What would a twenty year old Aaron Brown think if you told him he’d be trudging through four feet of snow in some place called Burns Bog?
Lily returned, out of breath, with two pairs of snowshoes. “Try them on.” Aaron silently prayed the shoes wouldn’t fit. The shoes fit. So Aaron took another hit straight from the bottle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Snowshoeing was a surprisingly exhausting activity. You get nowhere fast, and with each step out, you know that’s one more step you’ll have to take to get back. Aaron wasn’t even out of sight of Parker Family Movers when he began to wonder how the hell he’d gotten roped into such a mundane and taxing activity. He couldn’t begin to count the number of times he’s been asked to play a round of golf, or a game of tennis. But never in his life had Aaron touched a golf club or a tennis racket. So why the hell was he out snowshoeing in below freezing temperatures.
It was because of Lily—because she didn’t give Aaron a chance to say no. It was an annoying quality, but it was a refreshing quality—a big part of why he came to Burns Bog, to get away from all the brown-nosers and the phonies. He knew that being treated like a regular human would come with its disadvantages, like having to pay for dinners, having to wait in line-ups, and being dragged out into the frozen bog with a pair of goofy-looking snowshoes.
Not even ten minutes into their trek, Aaron’s legs were throbbing with pain. He was discovering muscles he didn’t know existed, that machines in the gym weren’t designed to target and beef up. Lily didn’t notice Aaron’s unimpressed discomfort because she was having the time of her life, floating over the snow with seasoned ease.
She was too busy buzzing around the bog, pointing at things and recounting pointless memories. “That tree is where I built by first fort, when I was a kid. It wasn’t much—more like a stick-shelter than a fort. One of the neighbour kids, Byron Lewis, came and knocked it over and I cried. I was eight.” Aaron was still straining to understand why Lily loved Burns Bog as much as she did.
Despite his exhaustion, and despite not caring about any of the redundant stories spewing out from Lily’s mouth, Aaron couldn’t help but smile. It was strangely satisfying, watching someone having the time of their life, and feeling like he was contributing just a little bit to that happiness. The smile was short lived though, ending the moment he sunk into the snow, and a big chunk of snow slipped into the ankle of his boot.
“Isn’t this fun?” Lily asked, spinning around to face Aaron, who was down on one knee, trying to dig the snow out from his boot, but actually just pushing it down deeper. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Having a great time,” Aaron said without much enthusiasm as he continued to dig the snow out from his boot.
She walked up and knelt down next to him. “Here—take your boot off and shake out the snow.” Aaron did. “Now put it back on.” He did. Then, Lily pulled a roll of clear packing tape out from her jacket pocket. She took off her gloves, stuffing them in her pocket, and then wrapped the tape around each of Aaron’s ankles, securing Aaron’s boots to his pants so more snow wouldn’t get in.
“Do you just carry around a roll of packing tape?”
“Sure do,” Lily said with a big smile, as if Aaron’s question wasn’t dripping with sarcasm. Even more perplexing than her love for Burns Bog was her love for the moving business. Most people dreamed of being artists, musicians, doctors, lawyers—Lily was happiest when talking about moving.
She reached out her hand and helped Aaron up. Her hand was warm and soft. “Don’t you have gloves?” she asked.
“No.”
“You should have said something. I could have given you a pair.”
“I’m fine,” Aaron said, ignoring the fact his fingers were different shades of blue and ivory.
“No. Your hands are freezing. Give me your hands.” Lily motioned for Aaron’s hands. After a moment of reluctance, he gave them to her. She sandwiched both of his hands between her palms and began to rub in fast circles.
“How does that feel?” she asked.
It felt good, but Aaron didn’t want to admit it. There was something strangely demasculinizing about having a woman—especially such a petite woman like Lily—warm up his hands. “Thanks,” he said instead.
Maybe living in Burns Bog wouldn’t be so bad. Lily was nice, fun, and spunky. Maybe the other townspeople wouldn’t be so bad either. Maybe, for once in his life, things wouldn’t be so bad, so chaotic.
Their eyes met. Aaron hadn’t noticed until that moment just how pretty Lily was. She was beautiful, even, way prettier than those fake, plastic bimbos in Los Angeles, or the try-hard fashionistas of New York City. She had a real beauty to her, eyes that told a story, a smile that wasn’t forced.
She put her gloves back on and turned back to the snowy field. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
Aaron tried to keep up, but unlike the lightweight Lily, he kept sinking into the snow.
“Come on, Aaron!” she called out from across the field.
He stopped the moment her voice reached his ears.
Aaron?
She knew who he was. She knew he wasn’t Fred Stein. She wasn’t genuine after all—it was all a rouse. The cold seeped through Aaron’s clothes and into his gut. If he couldn’t escape out in a
town like Burns Bog, a town in the middle of nowhere, where could he escape? He couldn’t. No matter where he went, he would always be Aaron Brown, the past-his-prime, fallen-from-grace rock star.
It didn’t take long for Lily to realize her flub. From across the field, she could see Aaron’s expression drop. He looked sad, disappointed, let down. She tried to apologize but no words came out from her parted lips. By the time she was able to gather a sentence, Aaron was turned around and heading back towards the Parker Family Moving lot. “Aaron—I’m sorry. Wait up!”
Aaron didn’t wait up. He didn’t see the point—Lily didn’t want to be his friend. She just wanted the status of friend. She wanted the claim to fame, to tell everyone that she was friends with Aaron Brown, the guy who wrote Gunpowder Girls. She was no different from the masses of socialites crawling around the Los Angeles night clubs.
Aaron left the snowshoes in the parking lot and then continued towards the road, towards his house. It was a long walk, but he preferred a long walk alone to a quick drive with a lying starfucker.
Out of breath, Lily finally caught up. “Please don’t go. I’m sorry. I should have told you that I knew. It’s not a big deal, really.”
“Leave me alone, please,” Aaron said, without looking over at the panting Lily.
“I don’t want you to think I was trying to trick you or anything. I wasn’t—I promise. I just—I just didn’t know how to tell you. I was nervous. I’m a big fan—”
“—Are you a big fan? Or do you just want to tell everyone that you know a famous guy? Just go home. Okay? Finish unloading my house, and then don’t come around again. Understand? And do me a favour, and don’t go around telling everyone who I am. I moved here to get away from this shit.”
“I won’t tell anyone, I promise. But just hold on so we can talk about this. Let me just give you a ride home and we can talk.”
The volume and power of Aaron’s voice increased. “There’s nothing to talk about. Just go home.” Lily got the message, stopping in her tracks and watching as Aaron continued down the snowy street, hands buried deep in his pockets.
LIMELIGHT LOVE: A Small Town Rock Star Romance Page 4
