by Anthology
My mind lost all its words then. Something else took over.
“No, Tyler. My no isn’t to you. It’s to the part of me that’s afraid of what performing will open up out there. Out in the world. I can’t let that be the reason to disappoint you.”
“You’ve never disappointed me!”
“And I’m not starting now.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he said as his mic was adjusted and he began to bounce in place on the balls of his feet, nerves getting the better of him.
“Yes, I do.” I motioned to Darla, who got a mic person to outfit me, too. Someone shoved something in my ear. My body morphed into something connected only to Tyler. Anchored to him.
Integrated with him.
“No.”
“Which song is first?”
“No, Maggie. No.”
“Just introduce me as Maggie. Not Margaret Stevenson.”
“No.”
Darla watched us as a guy in a suit stood behind her, red-faced and furious. I heard something about ticket refunds and debts and all kinds of shit while her eyes flickered between her phone and us.
“Fifteen minutes,” she gasped. “Two songs.”
“I can do that.”
“No, you won’t!” Tyler shouted.
“Yes. We did two songs. We can do it again.”
“I refuse. You stay here.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Darla asked Tyler. “Let Maggie do this!”
“I can’t keep taking and taking from her when I have nothing to give back!” he screamed, his face exploding.
“We’re on in ten seconds!” someone shouted.
“You already gave me what I needed,” I said softly.
“I failed you,” he choked out.
“You saved me.”
“I—what?”
“You know, this is a really bad time to do the kissy-face drama thing,” Darla declared as the curtain rustled and an announcer’s voice quelled the crowd. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the atmosphere changed.
Tyler’s eyes were all I saw, though, filled with pain and determination.
I’d imagine his were a mirror for mine.
A cold clarity wrapped my body like a blanket, like a wave of serenity. I took three steps and closed the gap between me and Tyler, looking at his sweaty face, his skin pink with anger and nervousness, confusion and fear, determination and a maybe hint of terror.
And then I pulled him to the edge of everything and kissed him on the cheek, my fingers intertwining with his.
“We’re going on together. Just have them call me Maggie,” I told Darla.
“Already done. And you guys are singing—what?”
“Whatever we remember to sing,” I said.
“No,” Tyler declared.
“Wrong word,” I countered.
“Wrong—”
And the curtain parted.
Showtime.
Tyler
I never get nervous for concerts. Never. The whole fucking point of playing bass is to go on stage and get paid to jam and have a good time with my fingers, my instrument and my mind.
But as Maggie held my hand and smiled at me from a thousand miles away, I walked on stage with legs that turned into cold rubber bands.
The announcer introduced us, and we walked on stage to polite catcalls and applause. Darla came on stage, too, carrying a leash with Mavis attached to it. That got some laughs, and as Maggie and I took our places, me to the left side of the piano so I could look at her, the set-up perfect for us, I knew Darla was saying words. I have no idea to this day what those words were.
I don’t remember a single thing that happened to me over the next fifteen minutes. I don’t remember what I did. Not one note, not one word, not one measure, not one rest.
All I remember is her.
Maggie’s fingers opened “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer” with chords that sounded so ethereal I almost forgot to come in, the sound enchanting and captivating. Just like her. When I play, music brain kicks in. It’s like there’s this frequency I can only access when I’m playing my bass, or in this case a guitar. Time disappears and everything physical turns into a finer version of itself.
Like when I’m with Maggie. I become a better Tyler. I become a better me.
The crowd jeered at first, clearly upset they weren’t getting Random Acts of Crazy, and while my blood pounded against my bones like a fucking hammer on a rail road track, it became a beat. An undercurrent in the music that Maggie spun from those gorgeous hands. From that mind and soul that worked with her body—and me—to go places we could never go alone.
But we did. Together. In front of twenty thousand people.
I joined and it was just like the pleasure between us last night. My fingers weren’t playing some random guitar I’d been handed; they were stroking her cheekbones. My mouth wasn’t open and singing the lyrics; it was kissing a trail of healing and connection from her belly to her neck. The beat became that pulse at the base of her throat, where my mouth could make her gasp.
Her voice became the sound of a language where all the words came so easily. Where I understood everything and could say it right back. Perfectly. Every single word.
We sang the song with a brutal honesty that made my heart go raw with the ache of saying so many of the right words in such a short stretch of time. Like stretching a sore, cramped muscle. I finally got the divine ache that comes from the agony of waiting, the rush of rightness, the push to take the one true space in the world where you’re rightfully allowed to just be.
And as the chorus rang out, the crowd began to clap in time. They began to cheer. They liked us.
They loved us.
Our voices rose together in alto and baritone, in sweetness and grit, in the sublime and the heartfelt. My nerves pushed forward and her eyes stayed closed until in one moment they flickered open and she sang to me. Twenty thousand people in front of us were an afterthought.
She sang to the me that she uncovered, that I exposed to her by giving until I broke.
Her eyes became a portal between us, our words like ecstasy and eternity, and then the song wound down, tempered only by the fact that the words had a finite end.
Thunder rained down.
The crowd roared.
Millions of flashes filled my eyes and the reverberation of twenty thousand bodies pounding turned me into a conduit for energy. Tyler stopped existing. I was nothing but whatever I saw in Maggie’s face.
She just stared at me like I was the only one there.
The thunder went on. And on. And on.
The second song felt like we were bragging. The slow, sultry tones of Trevor’s love song to Darla was filled with beginnings and imaginings. Teases and questions. Declarations and fait accompli.
Random Acts of Crazy wasn’t just the name of the song, and it wasn’t just the name of the band. It encompassed everything about falling for someone when you least expect it, whether you’re high and naked and hitchhiking six hundred miles from home, or you wake up after your junkie brother robs you clean and you have to show up at the house of the woman you turned down for sex and beg her to—
Ah. Hell. You know the story.
Maggie played her soul out. Sang like she was a lounge singer in a dive bar, like she was a Broadway understudy singing for fun on her night off. There was an abandon, a carefree tone with a mournful, knowing blend of something in her voice that slammed into my chest, making it hard to get my own words out.
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
No kidding.
She had the face of an angel and the voice of a poet. The heart of a lion and the body of a goddess. She was, in those mesmerizing notes, the center of everything holy and right. I finished my part and Maggie took it, using a hollow echo to add a lingering sense of the sublime to the final measures, the piano’s sound like smoke and light, like dawn and eclipse, like the end of the world and the forg
ed iron of a new beginning.
The air hummed and then the place exploded. It was like sound itself turned inside out. The audience became a single force, a kind of energy that merged into something distinct. The world changed. It just....tipped.
I didn’t know who took the first step. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I found myself in her arms, she in mine, and we were kissing, the connection of our bodies transporting us. The crowd howled and screamed, video’d and chanted, and it didn’t matter. Noting mattered.
Only her.
A loud voice cut through everything.
“You like that?”
Maggie and I pulled away from each other, breathless.
“Because we can get Trevor to kiss a chicken on stage if what you all want is more kissing!”
Liam strutted on stage carrying a guitar, hair wet with sweat, eyes wild and eating up the crowd.
They ate him right back as Trevor and Sam stormed the stage, arms waving, breathless.
Holy fuck.
Liam came over to us and gave us a big hug, my face smashed into Maggie’s shoulder, the stage shaking with the volume of sound and movement as the techs quickly moved the set into place. Liam took the mic and did his banter with the crowd.
“You did it,” Trevor shouted over the rushing madness of the crowd. “Thank fuck you did it. We’re here now. Maggie, you can go. Darla and Charlotte are there.” He pointed backstage.
I started walking off stage with Maggie, who looked like she was three seconds from fainting. Trev grabbed my arm.
“Not so fast, Frown,” he said, grinning. “We’ve got a set to finish.” He handed me a bass and a techie took the acoustic guitar off me.
Oh.
Maggie turned back, each hand held by Darla and Charlotte, and gave me a hard, searching look.
I didn’t have to say a word.
Chapter Fifteen
Maggie
“That was amazing!” Charlotte squealed, hauling me off the stage and hugging me so hard she lifted me off my feet. Darla gave me a thumbs up and muttered into her mouthpiece, talking with a techie and glaring at some guy in a suit.
My ears felt like Niagara Falls ran through them. I was drenched with sweat, my skin chilling as I got into the shadows and away from the stage lights. Tyler, Trevor, Liam and Sam all hit the opening notes of a song I couldn’t remember, and then the next thing I knew I was sitting on a couch with something cold on the back of my neck, Charlotte next to me and saying soothing words that didn’t make sense.
I couldn’t stop shaking.
Every cell in my body was in micromotion, and I became dimly aware that my vision was full of black and white spots.
“Maggie? Do you need a doctor?” Charlotte asked, her hand patting my shoulder like I was a little dog.
“Huh?”
“She’s just freaked out,” Darla said from somewhere. “Give her space. She needs to breathe. That was a big shock, going out there. Not many people can do it.”
“But she did,” Charlotte said, squeezing my shoulder.
“You fucking saved the band. You and Tyler. And now everyone wants to know who the opening duet was,” Darla declared.
“Huh?” I was becoming a broken record.
“Drink,” Charlotte said, handing me the cold thing from the back of my neck. It was a bottle of water.
“I think she needs something stiffer,” Darla said.
“That’s what she said,” Charlotte added with a groan. I couldn’t even smile.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Tyler. What the hell had just happened out there, on stage? I became someone else, my hands guiding me through motions and song, through touch and sound, as if we’d made love on stage in front of twenty thousand people. Whatever happened in that short set felt even more intimate than making love. That was impossible, right?
You can’t get more intimate than that.
Or...can you?
My phone buzzed in my back pocket and I felt something pop in my ears. Charlotte became smaller and smaller, until I found myself lying down on the floor, phone in hand.
“Maggie!” It was Lena on the phone. “Do your friends need to call 911?”
“No,” I muttered. I pulled the phone away from my ear. Who had turned on the speakerphone?
“Charlotte just said you performed on stage with Mr. Hottie?”
“You mean Tyler?”
“Yeah. Mr. Hottie.”
Charlotte’s eyebrow went up. I didn’t see it. I could feel it. “Your gay sister called him Mr. Hottie?” she asked.
“You should see him naked,” Lena added.
Two eyebrows went up. “You’ve seen him naked?” Charlotte sputtered.
“I slept with him,” I said.
The world turned into a series of spiral squeals as Lena and Charlotte exploded, both full of happy sounds.
“Oh, my God! I knew those condoms would come in handy!”
“Your gay sister gave you condoms so you could sleep with Tyler?” Charlotte gasped.
“I have a name. I am not ‘your gay sister,’ and technically, I’m not gay. I’m pansexual.” Lena’s tone made Charlotte’s eyes go wide.
“I’m so sorry. Maggie calls you ‘may gay sister’ and I—”
“You WHAT?” Lena shouted.
“Can we get back to talking about the fact that I slept with Tyler? That seems to be the least volatile topic here,” I mumbled.
“YAY!” Lena screamed through the phone.
“My sister is cheering me on for having sex.”
“YAY!” echoed Charlotte.
“Why don’t we just announce it to the crowd?” I groaned.
“Maggie, this is huge!” Lena and Charlotte said in unison. Then they laughed. I sat up, chugged the water and felt some of my weirdness ease up.
“No. Sleeping with Tyler wasn’t huge. Getting on that stage and playing and singing at the concert was huge,” I said, correcting them.
Charlotte’s eyes softened and she gave me a hug. “What you just did for the band is huge. But breaking through everything and being sexually intimate with someone...that’s bigger.”
And that’s when I started to cry.
And cry.
And cry.
In my peripheral vision I could see workers coming in and out of the room, some holding bottled water, others long electronic cords, and one carried a giant bowl of what looked like unwrapped Reese’s cups. Minutes passed and all I could do was sob into Charlotte’s shoulder. I was crying for the person I was seven years ago. Crying for the person I was a day ago. Crying for the feeling that something deep had shifted between me and Tyler. Crying from confusion and the absurd notion that I was falling in love with someone I didn’t understand. Who wasn’t capable of communicating what he felt.
But who felt—and expressed—it anyway.
I was just plain tired and emotionally done and I needed a friend to cry on. Charlotte’s timing was impeccable.
“Honey, we have a hotel room right around the corner. Where’s your car?” Charlotte asked as I sobbed.
“I parked it near the loading dock.”
She stood and helped lift me up. “Let’s go. There’s a block of rooms at the hotel and let’s get you settled into one. You look like you need a long bath, a long talk, and a lot of wine.”
I sniffed and tried to laugh. My body buzzed like I’d been shocked by radioactive bees. “You got that out of order.”
Charlotte gave me a gentle smile, her red lips parting to show straight, white teeth. “C’mon.” And with that, we walked out of the backstage area and she opened a door, the air hot and steamy. I handed her the car keys and she climbed in.
She had no problem driving a stick.
“So, spill,” she ordered, backing out of the loading dock and turning right. “You slept with him. And...”
“And I slept with him. He’s amazing. Infuriating and inconsistent and stubborn—”
“And amazing.”
“Ye
ah.”
Charlotte chuckled. She sounded eerily like Lena. “The Amazing Frown,” she declared. We turned a corner and she maneuvered the car to an underground parking garage beneath an enormous skyscraper hotel. She pulled in to the Valet Parking section.
“Fancy.”
She shrugged. “It seems to be a thing here. Besides—expense account.”
“Does that mean we get to drink fancy wine? Something that costs more than three bucks a bottle?”
“Three bucks gets you a thimble of wine in L.A.” she said with a laugh.
“I hope the expense account is enormous, because I need a bathtub full of wine.”
“After what you did for the band, Maggie, I think they’d fill a swimming pool with Merlot just for you.”
We got out of the car and I snagged my backpack. Charlotte handed the keys to the valet, got a ticket, and led me to the elevators. She kept looking at me, stealing covert glances.
“I’m the same Maggie. Haven’t changed. Take a picture. It lasts longer,” I mumbled.
“You have changed.”
“Sleeping with Tyler changed my physical appearance?”
She shrugged, the motion insolent and languid. The doors parted and she stepped out on the seventeenth floor. “You may not believe it, but yes.”
“How? And if you say I’m less uptight, I’ll take that as an antifeminist stereotype and tell on you.”
“Tell who?”
“The Director of Residence Life back at the college. You are a Resident Director. You can’t hold stereotypes.” I struggled to keep myself from laughing but failed.
Charlotte just snorted. “It’s not that you’re less uptight. It’s more that you look relieved.”
“I’m crying and relieved?”
“Yes.”
Damn. She was right. She led me to a room and pulled out a pocketful of key cards. “Darla gave these to me. We haven’t even checked in yet. There’s a room for me and Liam, Darla and Trevor, Sam and one for Frown.” She looked up at me through her impossibly-long black lashes. “This can be Frown’s room.”
“I—uh....”
“Let’s go in,” she said in a voice that permitted no argument. Charlotte walked into the bathroom and turned on the tub. It was an enormous jacuzzi tub that looked like it could hold twelve people. I walked past the bathroom door and marveled at the rest of the room. Airy, Scandinavian colors and sharp lines, with a view of the hills outside of Los Angeles.
