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1CRAIG
TAKE YOUR TIME
(SIX YEARS EARLIER)
It takes me approximately five minutes to find Lorelai Jones, recently spurned country music princess, let loose in Nashville. She’s perched effortlessly at the end of a shiny bar top and appears to be up to her gorgeous eyeballs in tequila and righteous fury. As expected. And as the Good Lord intended, really. Nothing will make a man take a full step back, clutching his chest, like the sight of a stunning woman, indignant, haughty, hot as hell, and ready to throat-punch the next asshole who has the nerve to tell her to shut up and sing.
She’s a goddamn vision.
I pause at the entrance to Georgie’s, the seediest of seedy dive bars off Broadway, to give my eyes time to adjust. The contrast inside to the glowing neon outside is almost poetic, if not most certainly ironic as fuck. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is looking for Lorelai: her cowardly sycophantagent, her second-rate bandmates, every country music news outlet from CMT to Square to Sirius to TMZ… everyone except the one fucker who ought to be hunting her down on his hands and knees, her ex-fiancé, Drake Colter.
But since my partner is off being a supreme dickhead, rejecting his almost-wife as publicly and soundly as possible in the barely eighteen hours since she bravely played Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” to a sold-out stadium crowd, calling out legislators to challenge the Second Amendment after yet another devastating mass shooting… well. Since all that happened, I’m here. At Georgie’s.
I rub my hand against my face, catching on stubble, and grimace. I’m not the one who should be here, but somehow I always am. Can’t help it. It’s what friends do, and if there’s anything I am, it’s one hell of a friend.
Lorelai still hasn’t noticed me, so I take a deep breath, straighten my shoulders, and wipe the exhaustion from my features, replacing it with good old-fashioned shit-eating charm. Because that’s me. Irreverent goofball. Backup bass player. Best-friend trope in the flesh.
(What? I’ve read romance. Well, I’ve read the “aliens fucking” ones, anyway.)
Lorelai’s head is thrown back in a loud cackle, her long slender throat exposed and the Jose Cuervo fumes rolling off her smooth skin in those wavy little heat waves. She’s shimmying to some Halsey, which is the first clue that something’s really wrong (as if I needed confirmation). Halsey is for bottles of overpriced Cabernet on my loft balcony while the stars wink overhead; she’s for deep conversations and sarcastic avoidance.
She’s not for bar-top shimmying and forced hilarity in a dingy dive where the clientele is ninety percent bikers.
I make my way to the electronic jukebox and swipe my debit card, picking Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” as well as loading a bunch of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and George Strait in case we’re here for a while. The familiar opening guitar riff kicks in and it’s as if Lorelai’s been struck by lightning. She freezes in place comically, spinning her head around, searching, until she locks eyes with who she’s looking for.
Me.
I ignore the sharp pang in the region of my long-dead heart and hitch a half-cocked grin before making my way to her side and, forgoing the stool, hopping straight onto the bar top next to her.
“Had to be ‘Ohio,’ huh? Should have just gone for the full-frontal assault and pulled out ‘Southern Man’ to really do the thing properly.”
She snorts into her glass, making the ice cubes clink. “Might as well have done. I was going for subtle.”
“Fun fact:subtleandstadiumaren’t as synonymous as you think.”
She makes a face. “Where were you with that wisdom two days ago?”
I accept my beer from a harried Georgie with a nod and raise my brow to my friend. “Would it have made a difference?”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t need to. It is what it is. Lorelai can’t change, and I wouldn’t ask her to. Before she became famous for country crooning, she was a schoolteacher.She’ll never be able to shed the trauma of hiding twenty-five eight-year-olds in a tiny bathroom during active shooter drills every other month all while knowing if someone ever threatened her students with a gun, she would place her own tiny body between that person and them without hesitation.
That shit doesn’t fade just because you sing to arenas full of people and accept gold statues. It imprints on your DNA and bleeds out in every interaction. Lorelai Jones couldn’t hold on to that mic night after night and stay silent about her biggest heartache.
And I love her for it.
So instead of criticizing, I take a long draw from my beer and say, “‘A Boy Named Sue.’”
A relieved pretty smile spreads across Lorelai’s flushed face and she immediately picks up on our favorite game of Best Song Ever Written. She thinks a minute and says, “‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’”
“Hell,” I mutter. “I handed you that one.” I concede that round and start another. “‘Night Moves.’”
“‘Tennessee Whiskey,’” she counters.
“‘Jolene,’” I fire back. This time, she concedes my win with a tilt of her head, her dark waves falling over her shoulder. There might be better songs than “Jolene.” Arguably, Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” or even “9 to 5” are mighty contenders. That Lorelai doesn’t even try is plenty telling. That’s not what we’re about tonight.
“Next round’s on me,” she offers, tipping back the rest of her drink. I work to catch up, gulping my beer down. If Lorelai wants to sit in this bar and get drunk, then that’s what we’ll do.
An hour later, Georgie’s is packed to the rafters with inebriated bodies and the off-kilter soundtrack of a cover band that is quite literally ruining the originals. Not that Lorelai cares about the travesty that is Lynyrd Skynyrd being played with a calypso backbeat. She pulled me to the suffocating dance floor three songs ago and hasn’t let up.
