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I nod reluctantly.
“Should I know that name?” Jack scans the table. I knew there was a reason I liked him.
Yvonne hands him her phone. And if I’m not deluding myself, she’s watching me with a newfound respect, perhaps? It’s better than contempt, so I’ll take it.
Jack holds the phone up to his ear, listening intently as a Spotify track plays. Then his attention jerks to me. “Oh, the ‘heart is a windmill’ bloke.”
I hate that song. It’s one of Dad’s first singles and at this point a cliché staple of every commercial, saccharine TV soundtrack, and instrumental elevator background score. How the hell is a heart like a windmill anyway?
I asked my dad that once. He said he was probably high when he wrote it, then gave me the just-say-no-to-drugs talk.
“Really?” I glance around the group. “None of you are going to make a big deal out of it? Because you have no idea how refreshing this is.”
“We’re English, Abbs,” Jamie replies in his crisp, posh accent. “Englishmen only make a big deal about pints and footy.”
“You seriously don’t care?” I glance at Lee, who seems most likely to suffer from celebrity obsession syndrome. He grilled me hard when he found out I grew up in LA.
“I listen exclusively to pop stars and power ballads,” he says gravely.
I hide a smile and turn to Celeste, who shrugs. “I’ve never been a Bly fan. But that one track he has? ‘Acrimonious’? Not terrible.”
I’m tempted to type that out as a quote and text it to my father.
“Gunner Bly: not terrible”—Celeste Clarke.
To my immediate relief, no one presses me for salacious details or some vague promise of a favor. There’s no gushing at all, in fact, and the group quickly moves on to a nostalgic cataloguing of their middle school playlists.
I am well off the hook when the lights in the room dim as the band takes the stage. They get decent applause from the audience.Proving they’re capable of caring about more than soccer and beer, Lee and the boys whistle and holler, which elicits a nod from the bassist while he plugs in. A couple of stage lights above our heads flash on, at which point my attention becomes transfixed.
For perhaps the first time in recorded rock history, the bassist is hot.
6
MY ENTIRE LIFE, I’VE BEEN BAFFLED BY THIS CULTURAL INFECTIONof rock star worship. Groupies sleeping in cars on cross-country pilgrimages. Teen girls staked outside hotels. Waiting hours in the rain, distraught and hysterical, for an autograph. Obsession as disease.
Then this dark-haired bit of poison slings a bass guitar over his shoulder, and I’m entranced. Utterly dumbstruck. Riveted by the way the instrument hangs low at his hips. His shoulders hunched over as he plays. The silver rings on his fingers. Leather bands and bracelets of string around his wrist that all have a story, a meaning, but you don’t ask because he won’t tell. You don’t want him to; it would ruin the infinite mystery.
While not Jack-sized, he’s tall and lean with perfectly sculpted arms, biceps flexing when he begins to strum. My throat goes dry as he closes his eyes, nodding his head to a melody I’m scarcely hearing. I’m too distracted by the way he’s biting his lip. He’s feeling the chords as his fingers rip across the bass line. Rhythm and poetry.
I’m mesmerized by the dumbest things. How one lock of hair drips in front of his eyes. The shirtsleeve riding up his bicep. The worn, raw marks on his guitar that each encompass a memory. I hardly hear a single song in their set. For twenty full minutes, I’m in a trance, until they leave the stage and I snap out of it. I hastilylook around, worried that everyone has noticed my intense preoccupation, but they’re all chatting among themselves, oblivious to my pounding heart and damp palms.
The bassist eventually reemerges and makes his way through the maze of tables in the pub.
Toward ours.
He’s coming this way.
A jolt of nervous panic surges through my limbs. Stupid scenarios of him picking me out of the crowd run through my head as he flashes a wry smile, jerks his chin the slightest bit in recognition, and—
Kisses Yvonne, who eagerly rises to meet him.
I feel flattened.
Run down and backed over.
Frantically embarrassed, I avert my gaze and stare into my barely sampled wine. My pulse remains wild and frenetic, so insistent I feel it in my feet, my teeth. I hope nobody can see my mortification.
“Nate,” Lee says as the bassist pulls up a chair beside Yvonne to throw his arm over her shoulder. “This is our new flatmate from America. Abbey, this here’s Nate.”
