He sees me coming out and hands the guitar over. “Here. I was just playing her for old time’s sake.”

  “She’s your guitar, Rob.”

  He shakes his head. “Nah, I gave her to you. But I wouldn’t mind if you let me play her now and again.”

  I take a drink and watch Rob play, envious of and amazed by his effortless mastery, the way he can make a simple melody so compelling. After a few minutes, he quiets the strings with his palm and lifts his glass to his mouth, takes a long sip, and eyes me.

  “So. Everything, huh?”

  I sigh. “Why do you wanna hear this, Rob?”

  “Because we’re friends. Because I want you to find your way to something better out of your life, emotionally speaking, and you can’t get there by bottling it all up.” He takes another drink. “And because you need a friend. Your sister has her own shit to deal with, and I get you aren’t willing to burden her with yours.”

  “What do you get out of this, Rob?”

  He laughs. “I spent my whole life thinkin’ about me and only me. I took what I wanted from Lisa, from my friends, from my clients, from everyone. I never invested in anyone or anything unless I could get something out of it. For my whole life, I was the one asking ‘what’s in it for me?’ It got so bad Lisa left me, and then I had a health scare and ended up retiring earlier than I was planning, and then damn near died in that freak storm down in Florida.

  “All that has me wonderin’ if maybe I oughta start thinking about other questions, maybe start asking what I can give, rather than what I can get.” Another laugh, a more cynical one. “Plus, if you succeed, I make money. And if you’re happy, you’re gonna make better music.”

  I frown. “What was it you said? You’re talking out of your ass and whistling Dixie.”

  He chuckles and sips whiskey. “Nah, not exactly. Truth is, I like you. You remind me of me, just a whole hell of a lot prettier.” His gaze as it flicks to me is sharp and insightful. “I hope I don’t have to say this, Delta, but . . . I’m your friend. I’m your producer and sort of your manager. Ain’t nothin’ else.”

  I let out a breath, because I don’t sense any duplicity in him. “I’ve been lonely my whole life.”

  “That’s a long time to be lonely.”

  “Yeah. I had a dream, and I went after it. Busted my ass going for it, did everything right, everything I could. Kept myself free of entanglements, you know? I was laser-focused on making it, and there wasn’t place in my life for anything else. But I just . . . I never made it. I almost did . . . but it fizzled out.

  “And then I was trying to survive and got knocked up by a random asshole and had Alex, and then it wasn’t just survival, it was trying to give him everything I could. He’s all I’ve got, that boy in there, and I’m all he’s got. But . . . he’s just a baby.”

  I sniff and cover it with a sip of whiskey, hissing at the burn. “My folks, Ava, Chris . . . what were they gonna do when I had Alex? Bail me out? Watch him while I try to revive my dead music career? Nah. They were there, they love me, I know that. My folks . . . they’re flaky. They’re focused on themselves. They weren’t bad parents, but Ava and I both left home young because they . . . they kept us alive and we knew they cared about us, but they were . . . flaky. I don’t know how else to put it. Don’t get me wrong, I know I was lucky. I grew up with two parents in a middle-class neighbourhood—I had it easy. But I couldn’t depend on them, emotionally. I couldn’t rely on them, so I didn’t.”

  And Ava and Christian were . . . I don’t know. Chris’s success was so meteoric I felt like I couldn’t be a burden to them, and I wasn’t about to take handouts from them, so I just . . . I stayed in Chicago and kept my head down and did what I had to do to take care of Alex.”

  “But that’s all you ever did,” Rob finishes for me.

  “Right. All through my shot at music and ever since, I’ve been alone. I’ve never had a serious relationship, never. I dated this one guy for two months, when Alex was a baby. He knew I had a kid, and it seemed like he was cool with it. But then when it started to get more serious and we talked about him meeting Alex and spending time at my place rather than me going to his . . . he was like, nah, I’m good. He just bailed, dumped me before work one day. And I didn’t blame him, honestly. I mean, yeah, it was a dick move, but I got it. It wasn’t ever gonna go anywhere.

  “That’s all I’ve ever had. Quick and easy and cheap and shallow. Nobody has ever . . .”

  I have to stop, because this more real than I’ve ever gotten with anyone.

  I take a deep breath and start over. “No one has ever made me feel special. No one has ever made me”—I shrug—“just feel. Like, deep down. My songs are all about heartbreak and getting drunk and hooking up, because that’s all I’ve ever known. I gave them what they wanted, but deep down . . . I’ve just . . . all I want is . . .” I can’t quite finish the thought.

  “Someone to give a shit,” Rob fills in.

  “Yeah,” I laugh, through a sniffle, “someone to give a shit. And Jonny, I didn’t know him long, but it felt like he gave a shit. He made me feel. More than just, you know, the sex stuff, wanting him and being attracted to him and all that . . . Jonny made me feel real emotions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Fear. Need. Curiosity. Desperation. Helplessness.” I swallow hard. “He made me feel like . . . like I wasn’t so alone.”

  “Now you’re here, and he’s . . .?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  I thought I was strong enough to handle the end of whatever Jonny and I were: more than a hook-up, less than a relationship—some fucked up amalgamation that wasn’t quite one and wasn’t quite the other. I’d known it was going to hurt, but I couldn’t help taking what I could get from Jonny, because despite being all too brief and not quite enough and also far too much for the short time we had, it was better than anything I’ve ever known. Physically, it was incredible. Emotionally, it was . . . a tease.

  Nowhere near enough.

  I’ve been avoiding this realization for the last month, but now I can’t ignore it anymore:

  I miss Jonny.

  Ironically, I’m exploding onto the music scene, getting the break I never thought I’d get. Success is in my grasp. I’m about to go on tour with some of the most famous country music stars in the world, and people are learning my name and the sound of my voice and the flow of my lyrics. I’m making it.

  It’s tempting to say it doesn’t mean anything without Jonny, but that wouldn’t quite be true, and I’m not really into unnecessary melodrama. I wanted this long before I met Jonny, and if I never see him again, this sudden and unexpected success will still be just as sweet.

  But long term? Without Jonny . . . when the lights go out, when the recording studio is empty, when I’m alone in my bed, I’ll still miss him. I’ll still always wonder what could have been. What should have been if my life didn’t seem determined to screw me out of love.

  God, why is nothing ever easy?

  I end up with Gloria on my lap, a song in my head, a melody emerging. I’m unaware when Rob left, but I find myself alone on my porch, the glass of whiskey forgotten, working on a song.

  My first live performance in front of a crowd in fifteen years is in three days, and even though I’m excited and happy and incredulous, it doesn’t taste quite as sweet as I want it to because, deep down, I know I was wrong to let Jonny walk away. I was wrong to let him. He was wrong to go. I was wrong to think I could be strong enough to forget him, to move on without him. We were both wrong to think that what we had was going to be easily forgotten or healed.

  I shouldn’t have touched him. Shouldn’t have kissed him. Shouldn’t have fucked him. Shouldn’t have slept all those nights in the sand with him behind me. Shouldn’t have woken up beside him, smelling him, hearing him, feeling him. Shouldn’t have let him inside me, into my heart, into my head, or between my thighs. None of it. Because all I have now are a few hot memories and a gaping wound in my heart, where he should be, where he was, where he never will be.

  Yeah, it’s stupid. He gave me the tingles. That should have been the biggest and reddest of red flags. I barely know him. I spent less than a week with him. It was a little bit of sex and some intensely emotional situations.

  But . . . even though it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, he’s . . . inside me. I don’t mean that in the dirty way, either. I wish I did, because God I miss the feel of him.

  I shouldn’t be in love with him, but I am.

  10

  New York City

  * * *

  Delta is everywhere I fucking go. Mierda, I can’t escape her. That song, her voice, that video, her face. I’ve spent the last three days rattling around NYC like a marble in a can, lost, in a daze, trying to escape her, trying to avoid the feelings I’m fighting. Yeah, it’s easy to think about not running, easy to think about staying . . . it’s a lot harder to actually do. I’m fighting the urge to bolt, but I don’t know what to do.

  Just find her and be like, so I think I love you?

  Find her . . . where? Go to Chicago and knock on a million doors?

  Essentially, I’m frozen with indecision, which is fucking emasculating. I can sail a boat across the ocean alone. I can fix an engine, I can swim like a fish, I can survive shipwrecks and hurricanes and typhoons, I can lobster, trawl, cook, hold my own in a fight, and even pilot a freighter the size of a damn village, but one woman has brought me to this . . . frozen with indecision.

  It’s embarrassing.

  Worse yet, the more I think about her, the more I try to convince myself to forget her and move on, which leads me to trying to figure out why I can’t get her out of my head. It’s an obsession. All I do all day is go around and around in circles, telling myself to forget her, it wasn’t anything real so just move on you stupid puta . . . and then I get sucked into thinking about her. Her eyes, her skin, her smell. The way she touched me. The way she felt. The sound of her voice whispering, or talking, or singing. God, the way she sang. The sight of her in the light of the bonfire, a guitar on her lap, eyes closed, sorrow on her face, singing a haunting song in that hypnotic voice. She packs so much expression into the way she sings, each note becomes its own emotion, each layer of her voice its own distinct entity. I want to hear her sing again. I want her to sing to me. I want . . . fuck, I just want her.

  But it’s so dumb. Mierda, I’ve gone in circles a trillion times, trying to talk myself out of the way I feel.

  You can’t fall in love that fast, I tell myself.

  Love isn’t real anyway, I tell myself.

  It was incredible sex with a gorgeous woman and that’s all it was, I tell myself.

  It wasn’t just incredible sex, though, is the problem. It was so much more than that. Jesus Cristo, so much more. More than the slide of skin, more than the touch, the kiss, the orgasm. What was it? I don’t know, I can’t put it into words even in my own head. I’ve tried.

  If I’m going to stay on land, I need to find work. So I hit up a temp agency and look for a short-term gig to get my feet wet in the dry-land employment world, and to get my mind off Delta.

  My first job is working security at a concert venue. I go through the orientation, get the shirt and headset and briefing. I’m the newest guy, so I’m paired with a full-time security guard and told to walk the perimeter with him, keep people from doing stupid shit, basically. Seems easy enough, and I’m thrown in right away.

  I don’t have time to ask who’s playing before I’m monitoring the still-empty stadium as the first people begin streaming in through the doors. There’s a manic bustle on stage as the crew finishes last minute setup, sound goes through last second checks, and lighting goes through theirs.

  I stay toward the back, stick with my partner, and do my best to look intimidating. It’s boring, for the most part, especially for the first hour, with people filing in. There’s country music playing over the house speakers, so I suspect the main draw is a country artist. I could ask my partner, but he speaks with an African dialect and has very little English, and doesn’t seem inclined to chat anyway, so I don’t bother. Not like it matters, anyway.

  The venue is half-full when there’s some commotion on stage, a tech testing the mic one last time, a single mic stand at the very front of the stage, by itself. The tech leaves, and the lights go down. Silence, expectant, as the audience waits to see who will come out.

  At this point, my patrol of the perimeter has brought me to the far left of the stage, and now my partner beckons for me to follow him up the center row toward the stage. I scan the rows of people, watching for anything out of place, and so I miss the moment when the first performer comes out, but I’m alerted by the scattered applause and and a few wolf whistles.

  My scan brings my gaze back to the stage, and I’m stopped dead in my tracks. I’m less than fifty feet from the stage, staring at the mic. Blinking hard, trying to clear my vision . . .

  This has to be a hallucination.

  Delta.

  Standing at the mic, guitar hanging by the strap in front of her body. She’s plugging it in, glancing down to check that the plug is seated in tight, adjusting the mic stand, and then her gaze travels to the crowd.

  “Hey, y’all!” She smiles bright as the sun, and I’m blinded. “I’m Delta Martin, and I am absolutely thrilled to be here. Seriously, you don’t even know what today means to me, to be on this stage, gettin’ ready to play my songs for you guys, opening for freaking Miranda Lambert? Are you kidding me? Honestly? I’m still pinching myself because it still doesn’t feel real. Am I real? Is this real? Let me hear you guys get real loud, just to make sure I’m really awake.”

  She’s playing chords softly, background music for her words, and at her encouragement, the crowd howls and cheers, a deafening noise. Delta grins even more widely, playing the same few chords in a simple progression, just staring out at the crowd, her eyes shining.

  “Wow. Y’all are real, huh? All right. Let’s sing some songs, huh?”

  She launches into a fast, upbeat, hard-driving song about drinking and forgetting who you’re with, and the crowd stands up and starts clapping and stomping their feet. It’s crazy catchy with an easy chorus, and halfway through the song the audience is singing along, and Delta is just beaming, glowing with joy.

  She finishes the song and hangs her head, laughing, shoulders shaking, raw emotion pouring off her. “Wow, that is such a rush! I don’t know how much you guys know about me other than the one song going around right now. Probably not much, I’m guessing. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you my life story or nothing, but I just want you to know why I’m so excited to be up here.” She spins a quick story about being an eager young songwriter in Nashville, writing dozens of songs and getting nowhere, and then finally brings it around to introducing a song. “So, finally I sold a song. Y’all may have heard of it, it’s a little song called ‘Another Bar, Another Mic.’”

  I’m absolutely frozen in place, stopped dead in my tracks. Ignoring my job, ignoring the crowd around me. Ignoring everything. I’ve got eyes for no one and nothing but Delta. She hasn’t seen me yet, I don’t think, understandably more interested in the audience, and with no reason to think I’d be here.

  If she sees me . . .

  Shit, if she sees me, it might throw her off, and this is her big break.

  I force my eyes off her and wrench myself away. I move past my partner—don’t even know his name—and I find my way to the backstage area, amid the frenetic bustle of crew members. I find a spot in the shadows where I can hide and watch.

  She plays a few more raucous drinking songs, keeping the crowd moving and clapping.

  The notes quaver, and Delta’s shoulders lift and fall as she stares out the crowd, which I can see from here has grown to sold-out capacity.

  When silence reigns, she picks out a slow, sad melody. “Changing pace here for a minute,” she says. “So, ladies. This one is for you. Guys, I think you can probably relate, but I wrote this one for myself when I was having a particularly hard day, feeling sorry for myself, hating life, hating men, hating love.” There’s a huge wave of shrieks and whistles from the women in the crowd, and Delta laughs and nods. “See? Y’all get it. This song is about that feeling. It’s called ‘Until It’s Gone.’”

  The song is the one she played as I was walking away.

  Fuck.

  I force myself to remain still, because the hurt I hear in her voice is palpable, it’s as if in singing this song she’s putting herself right back into that moment, feeling that pain all over again, and I want to comfort her. I want to take her in my arms and whisper soothing words to her like I did that day on the beach, when we first met.

  But I don’t.

  I stay here, in the shadows, watching, hurting with her.

  When she ends the song, there’s a long moment of tense silence, and then it shatters into deafening applause, louder than ever.

  She lets it go on for a moment and then strums the strings a few times, quieting the audience. “So . . . while I’m on the topic of heartbreak . . . wanna hear another sad song? I’m full of ’em, y’all. I’ve got a son, his name is Alex, and he’s six, and he said the other day, Mom, you’re always sad.’ Which, I guess, has been true for most of my life. There’s been a lot of heartbreak and a lot of sadness, which as a person kind of sucks,” she says, laughing, “but as a songwriter, it’s a lyrical goldmine, know what I’m saying? So yeah, here’s another one about heartbreak. This one is for all those lovers out there who have loved and lost and learned that, shit, maybe it’s not so much better after all. This one is called ‘Cry All Night.’”

  She plays the intro and sets the melody, slow and sorrowful, and when she starts the lyrics, my throat closes.

  * * *

  “Dawn breaks, pink on the beach

  Love sick, you’re out of reach

  You sat in the shadows, listening