Waiting for You

by Stahl, Shey

  The more Dylan talked, the more I listened to his words and the underlying meaning of them. Dylan wasn’t running from anything when he left. It was me, I was the one running.

  The following morning, Dylan had been talking on his phone on the balcony when I woke up, the sheets tangled around me as I wore nothing but my underwear and Dylan’s flannel. I noticed he only had his shorts on, no shirt, and his underwear was peeking from the waistband. Why I found it sexy, seeing his underwear was weird, but I did.

  I watched him closely, wondering what he was thinking out there and if he regretted anything, we did last night. I doubted he did. Last night had been my first sexual experience. Although we didn’t have sex, it was the closest I had ever been, aside from making out with Eric. So many thought ran through my head, none in focus, drifting thoughts and memories of his touch.

  When Dylan came inside scratching his bare stomach with casualness, he smiled a beaming smile I hadn’t seen in a while, boyish even. “That was my uncle Eddy,” he said holding his phone up. “He’s in Wichita tomorrow night, not far from here.”

  “That’s cool. Are we going to meet up with him?”

  “If you want to,” Dylan took a seat on the bed beside me rubbing my leg over the blanket. “He’s doing a show there at some bar. He said he could get us in.”

  I nodded thinking a little about last night and a little about what this summer would bring for us. We hadn’t had sex but I felt closer to Dylan after last night, like we’d shared something special between the two of us.

  He laid there for a minute rubbing his stomach before he sat up.

  “Come on, we need some exercise.”

  “Exercise?” I flipped his words over in my head wondering what kind of exercise he had in mind.

  “We’ve been in a car all day for the last week, we need exercise,” he said tossing my shoes toward me and putting on his own. When he stood, he ran his hand down his stomach that screamed fitness. “You didn’t think I got this body by accident, did you?”

  Dressed in a pair of his shorts and no shirt, he headed for the door.

  “Like right now you want to run?”

  “Yes, like right now.”

  I decided to wear my jean shorts, which I was positive I would regret, and my sports bra, which I was positive Dylan would regret.

  I was never much of a runner, it just didn’t appeal to me. Now that Dylan was beside me, suddenly running had some appeal.

  We did a few stretches in the parking lot and then walked for about a half mile when Dylan gave me a nod to run, so I did.

  As we fell into a comfortable jog, my lungs told me they were very upset with my new hobby and my legs threatened me every other step with giving way to my ass and those donuts.

  At some point, my breathing went from gasping from full on choking. I was glad that I was so dry-mouthed from dehydration or I would have choked on my own spit at the way I was motor boating.

  When we slowed to a comfortable walk around two miles later, I thanked the heavens above because I was moments away from passing out and we were finally back in front of the hotel.

  “I’m impressed,” Dylan said keeping his eyes on me, he tipped his head back. Before taking a drink, he pulled the bottle back. “You’ve got endurance.”

  The last part came out seductive, as it was meant to be, judging by the wink.

  I had no reply. But I couldn’t breathe so how could I have replied?

  Sitting down in the grass, Dylan noticed that I wasn’t exactly doing so hot with all my panting and side grabbing.

  “Come on,” he motioned with his hand for me to sit down in the grass beside him, “stretch out those freakishly long legs.”

  When I could talk again, and in between stretches, I asked. “Did you run a lot in high school?”

  “Yeah,” he gave a thoughtful shrug, “sometimes it’s nice to just shut your mind off.”

  That I could relate to. It’s why I enjoyed photography so much. Dylan, knowing me, brought that up. “Kind of like you and your photography.”

  I smiled that Dylan took notice that I found something relaxing about photography. Since we’d left home, I had to buy a new memory card with the amount of pictures I had taken and Dylan didn’t miss the fact that I enjoyed it.

  As we sat there stretching, my eyes scrolled over his tattoos again.

  “Why did you get a tattoo of a dragon?” I asked focusing on the dragon on his shoulder and back.

  “Landon told me it means power and wisdom.” Dylan rolled his eyes stretching out his arms, his left one crossed over his chest. “I think he’s full of shit but mostly because my mom liked dragons. Thought it’d be a nice gesture.”

  “It is.” Then blurted out, “why did you get a humming bird on your wrist?”

  Dylan’s eyebrows pinched together and then he looked at the inside of his wrist. “It was for you.”

  “Why though?”

  He shrugged, “because I wanted to.”

  Standing, he held out his hand to me, which I took. “Come on, let’s eat and then head to Wichita.” His arm slung around my shoulders.

  There’s something about a road trip that’s relaxing to me. The silence, the unknown, the sunsets, the perfectly planned songs with the hidden meanings, but that wasn’t every road trip.

  That’s what a road trip with Dylan Wade was like.

  We were somewhere along Interstate 35 when a girl walking on the side of the highway caught my attention.

  “She looks like she might need a ride,” I said looking out the window when the traffic slowed for what appeared to be a wreck ahead.

  “You don’t pick up hitchhikers,” Dylan said adjusting his rearview mirror to look back at her too. “That’s a dumb idea.” Since traffic had slowed, he used that time to take a drink of his water that was lying next to him.

  “You’ve had worse.” I felt the need to add taking a drink of my own water and opening the chips I had got at the gas station in Perry.

  Dylan knew damn well I was referring to the lot lizards. He glared swerving to the side of the road. “Point taken.”

  “Hey!” she chirped bouncing into the backseat of the GTO. Dylan looked over at me as he slouched to the side looking annoyed. “I’m Teri.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said shaking her energetic hand. Energetic was putting it lightly. She was a trip.

  In the thirty minutes we were in stop and go traffic, I learned more about Teri than I cared to and felt more confident in myself in that thirty minutes.

  The girl had so much fucking energy it was exhausting to listen to her talk.

  “She’s fucking bent,” Dylan said when the girl had her head stuck out the window. She claimed that it made her feel like she was flying.

  “How do know?” I asked trying to keep myself from punching the girl in the stomach as she leaned over me to hang out the window. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with my face pressed to the dash.

  “Uh, maybe because her fucking eyes are black and she’s a blonde?”

  “Oh.”

  Dylan laughed sarcastically, “Oh she says.”

  “Hey,” I pushed back against the seat with a brackish laugh. “I was trying to be nice.”

  “We gotta ditch this girl,” he said noticing my irritation with her.

  She was completely fucking crazy but I tried to play it off for entertainment value. My glare toward her must have given it away. “She’s not that bad.”

  “Not that bad? She asked me if she could suck my dick.” He gave his own brackish laugh watching the girl hang out the right side of the car. “I can’t believe you’re okay with that.”

  “I like watching you squirm.”

  “Don’t fuck with me brown eyes,” Dylan’s eyes drifted from the girl to me arching his eyebrow, “or I’ll ditch both your asses.”

  “I wonder how many times you’re going to get offered to get your dick sucked?”

  Dylan glanced at me as if he didn’t quite hear me and then i
t made sense. “You offering too?”

  “Maybe.”

  He let out a huff and reached for his cigarettes on the dash.

  Crack head finally got back in the car when Dylan, by swerving, tried to make her fall from the car as she hung out the window. When that didn’t work, he sped up, close to ninety, hoping maybe she’d suffocate or something.

  Eventually she fell asleep, or passed out as Dylan said, against his guitar so we stopped at a gas station and propped her ass against a payphone and left.

  Never looked back.

  We weren’t far from Wichita when the sun began to set behind to the left of us. I watched taking a few snapshots here and there, mostly of Dylan and the way the lighting in the background mixed with this hair and eyes. His eyes always seemed more like glaciers when the smudged colors of the sky melded with him.

  Watching him now, his stare on the road, I felt something more than I had in the past few days. Something stirring deep inside my gut, only it was different from all the other times I watched a sunrise or sunset. This time I was content, relaxed, comfortable, not knowing anything. It didn’t matter that I was running because now, regardless of the unknown, I felt at ease.

  Have you ever been in love? It’s a question you’re asked a lot as a kid from your friends, adults, anyone. They’re curious. How do you know you’re in love? Is there a distinct feeling you get and you automatically associate that with love? Do we even really know what love means? It’s just a word to define a feeling.

  To me, love was like the colors of the sun bleeding and spilling over to the best parts of you and him together and highlighting what needed to be. Love doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s a word, a phrase given to someone that bleeds the same colors you bleed, feels those same lines.

  I wasn’t sure if I loved Dylan the way I was supposed to. I knew I didn’t want this to end. I know that anytime I thought of him, something tugged at those lines and forced me to consider that I might bleed to the same colors he bled.

  My thoughts of bleeding colors and lines I couldn’t define ended when we made it to Wichita and Dylan was on the phone with Eddy trying to find a bar called The Brickyard.

  We found it hidden away on a side street and as we approached, Dylan reached for my hand. It was a nice gesture, colors bleeding, relaxing, falling, that was me.

  Smiling, I took his hand and walked in step with him around the side of the car noticing he reached inside for his guitar. “Are you going to play tonight?”

  His eyebrows pinched together, smiling, coy, shy maybe. “Not sure, maybe.”

  The bar was cleaner than the one we were in the other night, a long brick hallway led us outside to a bar open to an alley with an outdoor covered stage. In front of it were tables with cream plastic chairs filled with swaying bodies as they listened to a live band. I recognized Eddy right away. The only other time I had met him was when I was nine. Eddy wasn’t the type of guy you forgot though. He had a lasting impression.

  Dressed in a flannel, similar to Dylan, he wore faded jeans that in true rocker style hung low with ripped edges and worn boots to match. His hair was a little longer than I remembered and his tattered appearance revealed his years of living life in the fast lane.

  His voice, a deep rasp was perfectly belting out the lyrics to a song I recognized as a Nine Inch Nails cover.

  Dylan smiled when he saw Eddy, a memory flashing in his eyes as he laughed lightly leading me around the side of the stage to sit in a quieter part of the alley, watching his uncle.

  With his guitar beside him, we sat in silence listening to the music, Dylan’s head bobbed to the slow beat, feeling it.

  When the song ended, Eddy came over to the side and Dylan approached the stage keeping his hand around mine. Dylan whispered in Eddy’s car when they hugged, words I couldn’t hear over the hum in the alley.

  Eddy smiled my direction, the same smile Dylan had. They looked a lot alike, same eyes and smile that was.

  Dylan gave Eddy a nod reaching for his guitar and then leaned into me. “Stay with Eddy.” His lips brushed my cheek slightly, a fire rose and I shivered at the contact and the excitement that I might be able to hear him sing again.

  Eddy moved closer to me and sat at the same table Dylan and I had just been sitting at, I did the same. Pulling out a cigarette, Eddy lit it and then tossed his lighter on the table. “How are you doing sweetheart?” His voice sounded different now, the thick baritone he had to his singing voice was marred by years of smoking.

  “I’m good. Ran away from home,” I said, as if this was no big deal, relaxing into the plastic chair watching Dylan talk with the other guys in the band. “I’m on the run now. I’m kind of an outlaw right now.”

  “It’s the only way to be, sweetheart,” Eddy said with a laugh, he too watching Dylan. Leaning back in the chair, his legs kicked out in front of him slouching to one side. “You ready for this?”

  I gestured to Dylan with a tip of my head when Eddy pushed a beer my way. I sighed taking it. I didn’t really like beer but I was acquiring a taste for it since it was all Dylan drank. “You mean hearing him play the guitar?”

  “No.” Eddy took a long drag from his cigarette letting the smoke drift slowly out his nose. “I mean sing.”

  My eyes went wide shifting from Eddy to Dylan on the stage, beer in hand. “I’ve never heard him sing before, can he?”

  “No one has heard him sing aside from his mom and me,” Eddy said shifting his weight to lean into the table tapping his cigarette against the edge.

  I couldn’t believe that I didn’t realize that he sang. Of course he would, given he played the guitar. I guess I always thought he just played rather than sang.

  The thought of hearing Dylan sing had my tummy knotting wondering what his voice sounded like. If it was anything like it was when he was turned on, I could picture myself crawling on that stage and clinging to his leg again.

  Eddy smiled and pointed to the stage, amused. “You might want to listen.”

  My head whipped around when the amp chirped and Dylan tapped the microphone once. A taller man with darker hair and ripped jeans strummed his guitar once catching the crowd’s attention, a slow beat thumped as if preparing for the set.

  “I’m Dylan Wade, Eddy’s nephew…go easy on me,” he laughed giving a wink to the crowd when they cheered holding their drinks up. “Uh…this song goes out to brown eyes.” Dylan spoke into the microphone drawn close to his lips, his eyes trained on the guitar in his lap. “I hear everything you’ve ever said to me. Just…hear me now.”

  Shock was my only answer, lip-parting shock.

  Eddy laughed. “Watch the drool there sweetheart.”

  Dylan looked at me for a brief moment knowing my reaction. His smile, crooked and powerful, made it hard not to spill my heart on the ground before him.

  While Dylan played the first riff of that Framing Hanley song, his eyes stayed casted down. When he looked up, my breath caught.

  When his voice rose above the crowd, both hands clutched the microphone, pouring out words that came from deep in his soul, I gasped at the intensity having never seen this side of Dylan before.

  I swear to god…

  Holy shit! I knew he could play the guitar but didn’t know he was hiding that voice in there. When the part in the song called for his voice to go higher, my jaw dropped.

  My favorite part, if I really had to choose, was when the music would stop and all I heard was his voice echo through the bar.

  There was something about watching someone sing and witnessing them pour their emotions into words. This, playing music, it was easy to see this was a passion for him. I always knew that as I saw it when we were younger and he’d play the guitar.

  Eddy noticed and handed me another drink, this time it wasn’t a beer but some fruity drink that tasted like strawberry. “You know why he sounds like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “That raspy drawl that nobody has and tries so hard to get wh
en they sing―the shit record labels dream about signing,”

  “Why?”

  “That little fucker cried for eight months straight when he was a baby,” Eddy snorted lighting another cigarette. “I blame that.”

  Nodding, I smiled thinking about a baby Dylan. When I met Dylan, we were three-years-old and he’d just moved from Alabama to Washington when his dad took a job there with an accounting firm. I couldn’t tell you a lot about that time as we were both very young but I remember some things. Most of which included an adorable icy eyed boy that captured my heart by calling me brown eyes and kissing my skinned knees.

  So as I sat there with Eddy and dreamed about Dylan as a child, that one drink became two and then three, others were added for good measure and before I knew it, I was dancing on tables and screaming like a groupie as Dylan not only played that one song, but ten others with Eddy and his band. My favorite was Icky Thump. They played that song perfectly and I was right there, front and center rocking out.

  Every night with Dylan I didn’t think I could have more fun than I was having and every night I did.

  By the time they were done playing, I couldn’t even stand up on my own. I had met a girl, Lanny, dancing next to me, she was a good support system, for my body anyway.

  Dylan approached me, his shirt off and tucked into the back of his khaki shorts. “Look at you all rosy cheeked and adorable.”

  I grinned, spinning, falling, smiling more than I ever had before. “That was…” I jerked my hand in the air, with a drink still in it. “AMAZING!” I shouted. Laughing broke out around me, thumping in my ears, blurred vision, I could faintly make out Dylan, full on cheesy grin. “I had no idea you could sing like that! Have you always had that in you? I mean Jesus Dylan, you’ve got talent!”

  “You’re drunk, brown eyes,” he said reaching for me. “Adorable, but very drunk.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  That’s the last thing I remember aside from waves of memories like puking in the parking lot, swearing off strawberries and doing my own guitar solo on the hood of Dylan’s car as he tried to help me down.