Resonance, page 12
Owen: There should’ve been a Spice Boys. I’d have been all over that.
Dan: Bet you would’ve.
Owen: Like you wouldn’t. You liked Scary Spice the best, didn’t you.
Dan: Actually, I did. Easily the best singer of the bunch. Sexy. Smart.
Owen: If there were a Spice Boys, you’d be Old Spice.
Dan: We’re editing this part out. Jesus, that was awful.
CHAPTER 12
Ru signaled me with a wave as I wove through the maze of tables and chairs at Howie’s Bar on Second Avenue for the second time in a month. I was in danger of Howie thinking I’d actually started being social again.
I plopped into the chair Ru kicked out for me as he nudged his chin to indicate the bucket of beers on the table.
“Help yourself,” he said, so I did, lifting my middle finger to the dramatic jaw drop Howie aimed my way from behind the bar.
“I didn’t miss it, did I?”
“Nah, I think he’s up soon, though. A decent duo just finished. You would’ve liked them.” Ru paused for a pull of his beer. “Newlywed and, damn, they looked young, but really good harmonizing.”
I made a face and popped the bottle cap free with the opener hanging from the side of the bucket. “Good luck with that. Music and marriage haven’t gotten along since the beginning of time.”
“Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash,” Ru challenged me with a sideways tilt of his head.
“He had another wife before that.”
“Fact remains.”
“Uh-huh.” I surveyed the audience. It was Howie’s and they were usually welcoming to new acts and open mic nights, but I still cut a sidelong glance at Ru and asked, “He ready for this?”
“Probably not, but I guess everyone has to stick their feet in the fire at some point.”
Owen hadn’t even mentioned he was playing a show. Ru had been the one to tell me. And I hadn’t planned on coming at all, except as the day wound down and I finished closing up the shop, then idled in my truck at the parking lot entrance, I took a left instead of the right that would carry me home. I didn’t let myself think too much about what it meant. Didn’t need to. The entire week since we’d gotten back from Arkansas, I’d been more aware of Owen whenever I was in the shop. Like the net of energy surrounding him had widened and pulled me in, kept me glancing over my shoulder frequently to see where he was and what he was up to, kept me watching him a few beats longer than I usually would have while he was distracted with a customer, shelving records, or mopping the floor, that sheaf of wild hair falling down one side of his face. He’d huff at it or tuck it behind his ears, and my palm would tingle with the desire to smooth it back from his forehead until I’d make a fist and clench the sensation away.
I wasn’t even sure he’d want me to be here, but I’d come anyway, drawn by that same thread of energy that looped around me in the store.
I’d never heard any of his music before, but Ru said it was good, and I already knew from karaoke that Owen could sing. Guess I’d gotten a little more curious about him lately. I could call it that, right? Because I damn sure didn’t want—or wasn’t ready—to call it anything else yet.
“How was Arkansas and seeing Iona?” Maybe I imagined the glint in Ru’s gaze. I couldn’t imagine Owen would’ve said anything. “You didn’t say much about it.”
I shrugged. “About as expected.” Not at all as I expected, because I certainly hadn’t anticipated the raw desire that came over me in that sauna, or just how addictive Owen whispering my name had been. I blinked away the vision of his mouth falling open, wet lips parted, the way he’d arched into me. He’d been exactly what I’d needed at the time. And maybe I’d been the same for him, but there was no need to go and make something more of it.
“Owen said he went into his fanboy frenzy on Iona.”
I chuckled at the memory. “He did for just a second, yeah, but he reined it in. Didn’t smack himself in the face this time, at least, like he did with Les.”
“I was sorry to miss that one.”
“He was… very helpful,” I conceded carefully. “Glad I took him.” This time Ru’s curiosity was undisguised, but he turned away and lifted his beer to his lips with a grunt as the next act came onstage.
The guy was mediocre at best, played a couple of songs that seemed like they were trying to straddle a tenuous line between country and pop, and then he scooted off the stage.
Owen’s name was announced, and he shouldered through the black curtain hung behind the stage.
“He was really nervous he’d trip over something,” Ru explained as Owen picked his way carefully across the carpet and cords snaking over it, the coltish way he moved at odds with my recall of him onstage in Arkansas. He’d leapt on the platform with gusto, urging the crowd to cheer on his partner’s teetering steps behind him. I couldn’t remember her name now, just the flourish of his hands and his laughter as he reached for her elbow to help her up alongside him.
“Rightfully so.” There was a disturbing fondness in my voice. “Guy sometimes moves like he was born with his feet on backwards and strapped into roller skates.”
Ru swatted me. “Stop.”
I grinned shamelessly, but as Owen slid gingerly onto the stool in the middle of the stage and lifted the strap of his guitar over his head, my attention homed in on him. I searched his face, looking for confidence or fear, but his expression was decidedly blank. The murmur of conversation lowered and someone coughed as Owen leaned closer to the mic.
In the slight tremor in his hand as he gripped the neck of his guitar, I saw it. Fear.
“Hello, my name is Owen Harper, and my first successful act tonight is not busting my ass walking up here. If you know me, which you probably don’t, then you would understand that’s extremely likely.” He laughed, the sound nervous, and so damn close to a squawk that I was stunned. I’d never heard him make such a noise before. “So… so…”
Shit.
“Shit,” Ru echoed my thoughts. Live crowds in smaller settings could be cutthroat, despite Howie’s typically friendly atmosphere. A heaviness settled in my stomach as Owen rambled on. “So my name is Owen Harper, and… ah, I already said that. Right.”
“He needs to get to the fucking music,” I muttered under my breath. With effort, I relaxed my hands where they clenched the tops of my thighs and picked up my beer again. Fortunately Owen cut himself off, took a deep breath, and strummed his guitar. Then strummed it again and faltered.
Ru stuck his fingers in his mouth, let out a sharp whistle, and Owen’s head shot up in alarm, gaze frantically roving the audience.
“Goddammit, Ru.” I knocked the side of his shoulder with my fist.
“It was supposed to be encouraging. Fuck, look at him, he’s choking.”
And he was. Owen’s eyes had gone wide, and he blinked rapidly a couple of times, then strummed his guitar again, like it was an engine he couldn’t figure out how to get turned over.
“You just startled him, jackass. You oughta know better than that.”
“Shit,” Ru muttered again.
“Don’t be scaaaaared,” someone just in front of us yelled, but it came out as skeered.
I slid to the edge of my seat and delivered a swift kick to the back of the guy’s chair with the heel of my boot before I could think twice. “Shut the fuck up,” I growled.
The guy twisted in his seat, startled, and eyed me up and down, then Ru, before glowering and turning back around wordlessly.
When I glanced back at the stage, Owen was watching us, chest expanding visibly as he took a breath, and Jesus it was fucking killing me to watch this.
The mic caught a soft “Um” as Owen shifted around like he couldn’t get comfortable, found his footing on his strings, and then leaned toward the mic again, lips parting. But nothing came. Heat rose to his face in bright pink splotches, and a moment later, he whispered, “Excuse me.”
Scattered laughter moved through the crowd as he abandoned the stool and trotted rapidly to the back of the stage, disappearing behind the curtain.
“Come on!” someone yelled, and my jaw twitched, but when I started to rise to go after Owen, Ru shot his arm out to prevent me.
“Wait. Just for a second.”
I grunted but complied, tension electrifying my body, pulling my muscles tight as if spring-loaded. I couldn’t stand it but wasn’t sure what the hell I meant to do, either. There was nothing I really could do, aside from glower at the people cutting up near the front of the stage. But shit, that was music, and if your skin wasn’t thick as a rhino’s you’d be flayed in a second.
Jesus, I should’ve just gone home in the first place.
CHAPTER 13
It was happening again. Just like at the Sparrow. I was skeered. Definitely skeered. The guy in the crowd who’d said that? He’d been smiling, hadn’t even been all that rude about the total clusterfuck I was making of myself. But it’d still sent my stomach plummeting off the anxiety cliff I’d barely been clinging to the edge of since I’d walked onstage.
And then I’d lifted my gaze from the half smile on the guy’s face that my brain had been distantly registering as attractive, and ran into the craggy minefield of handsomeness that was Dan.
I’d had no idea he was coming, and I’d already been carefully avoiding looking too much at the audience for this exact reason, because knowing someone was there to hear me play was one thing; actually seeing them was another. Much less Dan, a guy I desperately didn’t want to make an ass out of myself in front of. Even though I did on a daily basis.
And then registering his and Ru’s expressions turned my insides into a trip wire for their response. The fucking look on Dan’s face, while it wasn’t pitying, was very close and very much something I didn’t want directed toward me. Ru just looked outright concerned. It made me feel inept and jumpy. In short, it intimidated the fuck out of me, and I realized my mistake had been mentioning the show to Ru in the first place. I should’ve known better after my failure at the Sparrow, but I thought maybe having Ru there would pump me up somehow. Wrong.
My chest tightened around my lungs in a squeezing vise that made my next breath come as if sucked through one of those stirring straws scattered liberally over the bar.
So yeah, I choked—both literally and otherwise—and I hauled ass backstage in a daze. The only thing on my mind was to get away from that feeling of full-body compression. Like a giant had wrapped his hand around me, tipped me upside down, and was squeezing the life out of me.
I stumbled behind the curtain and gasped for a breath that this time poured into my lungs as if from a waterfall, so much oxygen dousing me at once that I slid to the other end of the spectrum and got light-headed.
When something landed lightly on my shoulder, I jumped a mile back, shooting a bewildered gaze to my left.
“Slow down. You’re panicking,” a voice said. Soft, smooth, and masculine. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dimness backstage enough to register the figure standing there, the body of his guitar resting on the ground, his fingers dancing idly over the neck.
“No shit,” I muttered, “And now I’m having a heart attack on top of it.”
He gave me an apologetic smile. I didn’t recognize him at all, but his expression was warm and understanding. His eyes were a funky meld of gray and steely blue. Maybe it was the lighting. I’d seen the list of acts posted on the wall in the back room, glanced at the name of the guy going after me—John something. John Paul. Guess this was him. Better than the guy who’d been backstage at the Sparrow.
“Want me to go on out, or are you gonna go back?” He thumbed toward the curtain.
Howie’s rules were fifteen minutes to fit in whatever we wanted, and right now I felt those minutes crawling all over my skin, eating me alive.
“I can’t go back out now, I’ve already left. Who does that? Gluttons for punishment?”
“Happens.” He shrugged. “I panic, too. Every time.”
I looked him over, his casual posture, the quiet repose. Even the softness of his voice had a soothing white-noise quality. “You don’t look like you’re panicking right now.”
“Because I’m not here. John Paul is, and he’s gonna walk out there and perform two songs and then walk right back off. The panicking can happen before and after to the other guy.”
I studied him for a moment. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe he’d been in the shop before, but I thought I would’ve remembered his eyes. He looked me up and down assessingly, then glanced away and hitched up his guitar by the neck as he took a step forward.
“No, wait.” I threw my arm out to stall him, and he bumped into it with a grin. “I’m going back.”
I got what he was saying, sort of. The whole bit about dissociating yourself from what you were doing. It was a bandage for the larger issue of stage fright, but I didn’t want to tuck tail and run. Again. Fuck that. I’d done harder shit in my life than play two songs in a dive bar on Second Avenue. Dan wasn’t gonna fire me if my songs bombed or if I sucked as a musician. Ru wasn’t going to stop being my friend or giving me shit—and god, I expected plenty of shit from him after this. And the rest of the people out there? The guy who’d shouted at me, and the group of girls near the front of the stage who’d been giggling? Whatever.
Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. It was kind of like lobbing spitballs at a tornado, though.
“That’s the spirit. And maybe don’t even try talking to them this time. The crowd, I mean,” John said. “That’s a different skill set. Harder to master, and they don’t care yet, not at shit like this. They just want to hear music. Worry about the rest later. You give them music when you’re no one until they decide you’re someone. So go give them something to talk about.”
I nodded, adjusted my guitar strap, and took two seconds to close my eyes and drag in a deep breath just in case it was the last good air I’d get.
Then I walked back through the curtain before I got all worked up again.
The chatter that’d started up in my absence died down, but I noted it only distantly and found a dark notch in a wooden post holding up the balcony to focus on. There was laughter, too, and someone shouted, “The sequel!” but I took a breath and forced it to the background. Play a song. Just play a song. Inner cheerleader had reappeared, but was slightly less annoying this go round.
I didn’t bother sitting down this time, just shuffled back to the mic.
And then I played my song.
Not perfectly, maybe not even well, but my fingers moved over the strings and remembered what they were supposed to be doing, and I opened my mouth and let my vocal chords and breath do the rest, focusing on that knot in the wood the whole time, like I’d ground everything that was Owen Harper into a ball in my fist and was pushing it into that space, far away from the guy standing onstage.
I didn’t really remember finishing. The scatter of applause and encouraging whoops at the end seemed like they were chasing me offstage. And I couldn’t even enjoy that brief second of redemption.
“Not bad for a first run.” I jumped as Dan’s voice boomed behind me. Even backstage, the small area crowded with other folks tuning their guitars or milling around, the deep resonance seemed to muffle everything around it.
I finished tucking my guitar back in its case, then hitched it up and turned around. The expression he’d been wearing earlier was gone, thank fuck.
“It’s not my first run. It’s my second, but the first run was so embarrassing that it might as well not count at all.” I wrinkled my nose at him. “You’re not a bullshitter. It’s what I like about you, so don’t start now. Just tell me if it gets better or worse. And how I fix it. “
Dan rested his hand against the nearby wall and scanned the room before his focus returned to me. “Both. Some things get easier, some get harder. Facing the crowd, you can learn to do that. Being nervous as hell what they think? Takes a lot longer to get over that. For me at least. But a lot of people get over that, too, the more they put themselves out there.” He gestured toward the door. “C’mon, Ru and I’ll buy you a drink.”
“I don’t think so.” My whole body vibrated with residual energy and anxiety, that ball of Owen I’d stuffed into the hole of the post beam returning full force and flooding me with adrenaline. “I’m not about to go sit out there after making a fool of myself. You still kinda look like you want to hug me, and it’s freaking me out.” I squeezed the handle of my case tighter. “I can stand someone being embarrassed for me, but I don’t think I can stand your pity. I’m legit having a physical reaction to it. It’s itchy and gross like a rash.”
I skirted around him and walked out the door, heading down the hall that would lead me to the back exit and trying to ignore the sound of Dan’s footfalls behind me.
He caught me by the elbow and turned me around. “You need to be washing better in the shower, then.”
“It’s not funny.” I glowered at him, and his grin faded as he reached for the case in my hand and set it gently to the floor. His gaze bored into me, the melted-hazelnut warmth of it more of a steely ochre now. “I wasn’t embarrassed for you. And I wasn’t pitying you. Don’t mistake empathy for pity.” He paused for a moment, some emotion flitting over his features I couldn’t place, but it had a brief effect, like a warm breeze stirring around me. “I’m pretty sure I threw up before and after shows for a solid month when I started. Can’t even look at a Tums now without it turning my stomach reminding me of all that. Your song was good. Your stage presence needs work. You were nervous and it bled out all over the stage. People pick up on that. It makes them nervous and uncomfortable, too. Smaller venues like a bar can actually be more intimidating than larger venues, because you’re more aware of the audience. If it’s a stadium, there’s so many damn people that they kinda form this anonymous mass. But you need to be able to handle the small to take on the large.” He paused a beat. “That’s the no-bullshit-zone stuff there. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
