Carla laughs and takes her shot glass away, wiping the area underneath it with a rag. “Didn’t say it was good, just that it was Eddie’s.”
Even I have to admit the shit is nasty. Rotgut nasty shit. I don’t know how Eddie drank this all those years.
“Are you two still playin’ together?” Carla asks.
Camryn climbs up onto the empty bar stool next to me and answers first, “Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of that.”
Carla looks at us both suspiciously, taking my shot glass and putting it away underneath the bar somewhere now.
“Been playin’ a lot for how long? And why haven’t I seen you here sooner?”
I sigh heavily and fold both hands on the bar, leaning more comfortably against it. “Well, after we left here we went to Galveston and I sort of ended up in the hospital with that tumor.”
“You sort of ended up in the hospital?” Carla says, and I wonder if her smart ass is related to that cop back in Florida somehow. She points sternly at me but her words are for Camryn. “We told him to go to the doctor, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“You knew, too?” Camryn asks.
Carla nods. “Yeah, we knew. But your boy here is as stubborn as a mule.”
“I agree with you there,” Camryn says with a hint of laughter in her voice.
I shake my head and lean away from the bar again. “Well, before you two gang up on me,” I say, “anyway, obviously I’m alive. Later, Camryn and I went through some really messed up things along the way, but we both made it through OK.” I smile warmly over at her.
“Looks like you came full circle,” Carla says, and it invokes our attention at the same time. “I hope you’re going to play tonight. Eddie would’ve loved to be up there with you one last time.”
Camryn and I lock eyes briefly.
“I’m up for it,” she says.
“So am I.”
Carla smacks her hands together. “Well, all right then! You can go on whenever you want. The only band we had scheduled tonight cancelled.”
We hang out at the bar with Carla for an hour before we finally make it to the stage. And even though the bar is only half-full tonight, we play to an excited crowd. We start off with our trademark duet, “Barton Hollow”; it seems only fitting that it be the first one, since Old Point is where we performed it together the first time. We go through several songs before finally getting to “Laugh, I Nearly Died,” in which I make an announcement on stage beforehand that it’s in honor of Eddie Johnson. I play it without Camryn and with an Eddie replacement, some nice Creole man named Alfred.
A little after midnight, Camryn and I say good-bye to Carla and Old Point Bar. But in true New Orleans style, we don’t go to bed early, we stay out and party with the best of them. We hit d.b.a. first, then head over to the bar where Camryn schooled me in a game of pool that night. It’s been almost a year since we were here last and were kicked out on our asses after a bar fight; I hope they don’t remember me. By two in the morning, after several games of pool and several drinks, just like last time I’m helping Camryn into the hotel elevator because she can barely hold herself up.
“You all right, babe?” I laugh lightly, repositioning my arm around the back of her waist.
Her head sways side to side. “No. I’m not all right. And you would laugh.”
“Aww, I’m sorry,” I say, but it’s only partly true. “I’m not laughing at you, just wondering if we’re going to be sleeping next to the toilet this time.”
She moans, though I think it was her way of arguing with me instead of expressing her discomfort. I get a better grip on her as the elevator opens, and I walk with her out into the hall and back to our room. I lead her to the bed, strip off everything but her panties, and help her into one of her tank tops. She lies down against the pillow, and I start to cover her with the sheet. But I remember that being this drunk, anything other than her panties and top will just make her sweat profusely, ultimately causing her to lose all of the alcohol she drank tonight.
Just in case, I grab the small wastebasket near the TV and place it next to the bed on the floor. Then I go into the bathroom, wet a washcloth with the cold water, and wring it out over the sink. But by the time I make it back to the bed to swab Camryn’s face and forehead, she’s already passed out.
* * *
When I wake up the next morning, I’m surprised to see that she’s awake before me.
“Mornin’, baby,” she says so softly it’s almost a whisper.
I open my eyes to see her lying on her side, facing me, her face pressed against her pillow. Her blue eyes are warm and vibrant, not the tired, hangover kind that I expected.
“What are you doing up so early?” I ask, reaching out to brush her cheek with the backs of my fingers.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I was a little surprised myself.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine.”
I drape my arm over her waist and pull her body next to mine, our bare legs tangling together. She traces the tip of her finger around the definition of my chest muscles. Her touch breaks my skin out in chill bumps.
I study her eyes and her mouth and let my fingertips follow every path that my eyes take. She is so beautiful to me. So goddamn beautiful. She reaches up and caresses my fingers underneath her own and then she kisses them, one by one, and pulls her body even closer. Something is different about her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask.
A gentle smile warms her eyes and she nods. Then she touches her lips to mine, pressing her breasts firmly against my chest. Her nipples are hard. I’m hard long before I feel her hand grip my erection. She licks the tip of my tongue before closing her mouth around mine and I wrap my arms around her body possessively. She presses herself against me below, the softness of her skin, her wetness that I feel so easily through her thin, cotton panties. Without breaking the hungry kiss, I reach down with one hand, slipping my fingers behind each side of her panties and take them off. I thrust my hips toward her, pressing my swollen cock against her warmth.
I roll over on top of her and look down into her eyes. But I don’t say a word. I don’t tell her how wet she is, or force her to look at me. I don’t dominate her with words or gestures or demands. I just gaze into her eyes and know that this is a moment where words are not needed.
I kiss her lips again softly, the corners of her mouth, the outline of her cheekbone. Parting her lips with my tongue, I very softly kiss her and reach down and take my cock into my hand, rubbing it against her. I feel her hips shift toward me, letting me know how bad she wants me inside of her. I don’t want to tease her this time, or deny her what she needs, so I push myself in just barely and watch her lose control of her gaze, her eyes fluttering, her lips parting. Forcing my cock in further, I feel her legs tremble around me. She moans softly, biting down on her bottom lip. I kiss her again and finally push myself deep inside of her, as far as I can go. I hold it there, basking in the shaking of her thighs, the trembling of her hands as they hold onto me, her fingers digging into my back.
I rock harder against her, gyrating my hips. A thin layer of sweat begins to bead off our bodies. I want to lick it off her, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop…
I raise my body up enough that our chests are no longer touching and I grab one of her legs from around me, gripping under the bend of her knee, pushing it back so I can thrust deeper. I pound her harder, pushing her thigh down against the bed. She calls out my name, both of her hands clutching my waist, but she pulls them back and curls her fingers around the top of the mattress above her head. I watch hungrily as her breasts bounce up and down against her chest and I thrust even harder, leaning over to take her nipples into my mouth and then into my teeth.
My vision gets hazy. She moans loudly and then begins to whimper. The whimpering makes me crazy. I let go of her thigh and feel my body closing in on hers again, her breasts smashed into my chest, her arms wrapped tightly around my back. I
feel her fingernails press painfully into my flesh. She rocks her hips against mine, and my mouth crashes over hers. As I start to come, my kiss becomes more ravenous. Tremors move through my body and I moan against her mouth and my hard thrusts are reduced to gentle rocking. Camryn takes my bottom lip between her teeth and I kiss her gently, still rocking my hips against her until I’m finished.
I collapse onto her chest. My erratic heartbeat trying to find its rhythm again, I feel the pumping of blood in my fingers and in my toes and aggravating the vein near my temple. I lay the side of my face against her bare breasts, my mouth parted, the breath expelling unevenly from my lips. Her fingers move through my moist hair.
We lie here together just like this, all morning, without saying a word.
31
I don’t remember falling asleep. When I open my eyes, the clock beside the bed says that it’s eleven ten. And I realize that I don’t feel naked because I have no clothes on, but I feel naked because Camryn isn’t in the bed with me.
She’s sitting on the windowsill, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt without a bra. She’s gazing out the window.
“I think we should go,” she says without taking her eyes off the bright New Orleans landscape.
I sit up on the bed with the sheet draped over my lower half. “You want to leave New Orleans?” I ask, confused. “But I thought you said we left too soon the first time.”
“Yeah,” she says, but still doesn’t turn around. “The first time we left too soon, but we can’t stay here longer now just to make up for that.”
“But why do you want to leave? We’ve only been here one day.”
She turns to face me. There’s something like sentiment or resolve in her eyes, but I can’t make out which, or if it’s both.
After a long hesitation, she says, “Andrew, I know this might sound stupid, but I think if we stay here… I…”
I stand up from the bed and step inside my boxers I find on the floor. “What’s going on?” I ask, approaching her.
She looks at me. “I just think that… well, when we first got here yesterday all I could think about is what this place meant to us last July. I realized that I kept picturing the times before, trying to relive them—”
“But they’re just not the same,” I add, having an idea.
It takes her a second, but finally she says, after a subtle nod, “Yeah. I guess it’s just that this place is such a significant memory—Shit, Andrew, I don’t even know what I’m saying!” Her thoughtful expression dissolves into frustration.
I pull out a chair at the table in front of the window and sit down, leaning forward and draping my folded hands between my knees, and I gaze up at her. I begin to say something to add to her explanation, but she beats me to it.
“Maybe we should never come back here.”
I didn’t expect her to say that. “Why?”
She presses the palms of her hands on the windowsill to hold up her body, her shoulders rigid, her back slouching. Confusion and uncertainty start to fade from her face as the seconds pass and she begins to understand.
“It’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter what you do, even if you try to replicate an experience down to every last detail, it’ll never be the way it was when it happened naturally the first time.” She looks out at the room in thought. “I remember when I was a kid. Cole and I would always play in the woods behind our old house. Some of my best memories. We built a tree house back there.” She glances at me and laughs lightly under her breath. “Well, it wasn’t so much a tree house as it was a few boards fixed between two branches. But it was our tree house and we were proud of it. And we played in it and in those woods every day after school.” Her face is lit up as she recalls this moment of her childhood. But then her smile begins to fade. “We moved away from there and into the house my mom lives in now, and I always thought of those woods and our tree house and the fun times we had together there. I used to sit alone in my room, or be driving somewhere, and get so lost in those memories that I could actually feel those feelings just like I felt them years ago.” She places her hand on her chest, her fingers outstretched.
“I went back there one day,” she goes on. “I got so addicted to the nostalgia that I thought I could intensify the feeling if I went, stood in the spot where our tree house used to be, sit down on the ground where I used to sit and drag a stick through the dirt to leave secret messages for Cole to read if I got there before him. But it wasn’t the same, Andrew.”
I watch and listen to her intently.
“It wasn’t the same,” she repeats distantly. “I was so disappointed. And I left that day with an even bigger hole in my heart than I had when I went there looking to fill it. And every day after that, whenever I’d try to envision it like I used to, I couldn’t. I shattered that memory by going back there. Without realizing it until it was too late, I replaced that memory with the emptiness of that day.”
I know exactly that feeling of nostalgia. I think everybody experiences it at some point in their lives, but I don’t elaborate or go into my own experience with it. Instead, I just continue to listen.
“All morning, I’ve been tricking my brain into believing that we’re not really in this room. That the bar we went to last night wasn’t Old Point. That the sad news about Eddie was just in a dream I had.” She looks me straight in the eyes. “I want to leave before I destroy this memory, too.”
She’s right. She’s absolutely right.
But I’m beginning to wonder if…
“Camryn, why were you trying to relive it?” I hate it that I’m about to say this. “Are you not happy with how things are? How we are?”
Her head snaps upward, her eyes filled with disbelief. But then her features soften and she says, “God, no, Andrew.” She moves off the windowsill and stands in between my parted legs. “That’s not it at all. I think it’s just that because we came here I subconsciously started trying to re-create one of the most memorable experiences of my life.” She rests both hands on my shoulders, and I reach out and hold both sides of her waist, looking up at her. I couldn’t be any more relieved by her answer.
I smile and stand up with her and say, “Well, I say we get the hell out of here before that brain of yours knows you’re full of shit.”
She chuckles.
I move away from her and immediately start tossing our stuff in our bags. Then I point to the bathroom. “Don’t forget anything.” Her smile widens and she rushes immediately past me into the bathroom. In just a couple of hectic minutes, everything is packed. We each have a bag and a guitar, and without looking back, we leave the room. Neither one of us even glances at the door of the room next door that we didn’t rent this time. When we make it downstairs and into the lobby, I step up the counter and request a refund for the week in advance that I paid for. The clerk takes my credit card and refunds it back as I slip our card keys across the counter to her.
Camryn waits impatiently next to me.
“Stop looking at shit,” I demand, knowing she’s risking the memory.
She laughs lightly and squeezes her eyes shut for a moment.
“Thank you for staying at the Holiday Inn New Orleans,” the clerk says as we leave the counter. “We look forward to seeing you again.”
“Holiday Inn?” I pretend. “No, this is the… Embassy Suites in… Gulfport. Yeah, this is Mississippi. What’s wrong with you, ma’am?”
The clerk’s features crumple and she raises a baffled brow, but doesn’t say anything back and we exit the building.
Camryn plays along once we get outside and start loading everything in the Chevelle: “I say we drive straight past New Orleans when we get to Louisiana.”
It’s not really as hard as I thought it would be to pretend we’re someplace we’re not.
“Sounds like a plan,” I say, shutting my door. “We can drive straight past Galveston, too, if you want.”
“No, we have to visit your mom,” she says. “After that we can go where
ver.”
I put the car into gear and say just before backing out, “Doesn’t mean we can’t stop somewhere on the way to Galveston, though.”
She purses her lips, nodding in agreement. “That’s true.” Then she looks at me as if to say, Now let’s get out of here.
* * *
We take the long way out of New Orleans and make our way northwest through Baton Rouge and Shreveport, and eventually over the Texas state line and then into Longview. We stop for gas in Tyler and drive from there to Dallas, where Camryn insists we drop in West Village for a “gen-you-ine cowgirl hat” (her words, not mine).
“Cain’t road-trip through Texus without dressin’ like ah Texun!” she said just before I agreed to take her.
Personally, I don’t do cowboy hats or boots, but I have to say it looks good on her.
And we stop off for a night at La Grange, where we have a few drinks and watch a great country-rock band play. And the next night we hang out at Gilley’s, where Camryn rides El Torro the mechanical bull, of course, with that sexy cowgirl hat on. And later, when we go back to our hotel, being the horny bastard that I am, I pretend I’m the mechanical bull and let her ride me. Wearing the cowgirl hat, naturally.
Two days later, we find ourselves about an hour from Lubbock, broke down on the side of the highway with a blown tire. I guess I should’ve checked out all four of the tires back at that gas station in Tyler.
“This is fucked up, babe,” I say, squatting down next to the shredded rubber. “I don’t have another spare.”
Camryn leans against the side of the car, crossing her arms over her chest. Sweat glistens on her face and the skin above her breasts. It’s hot as hell out here. There’s not a tree or a structure of any kind for miles. We’re surrounded by an almost completely flat, barren landscape of dirt. It’s been a long time since I was this far west in Texas, and I’m starting to remember why.
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