Page 16 of For Eva

The tone of his voice landed somewhere between disappointment and anger, and my face softened. I hadn’t forgotten we’d been down this road before only to be blindsided, and there was no denying the bitterness we both still felt about it.

I sighed, buttoning my shirt. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? But I gotta go.We can talk about it later.”I scanned the area for Matt, whom I spotted across the room with his arm around a tall blond. I called his name, and he looked up from the chick’s tits just long enough for me to catch his eye. “Hey, man, I’ll owe you one if you make sure my shit gets in the van. I gotta run.”

Eric folded his arms and pressed his lips together.

“Jesus Christ, what now?” I asked, throwing my hands into the air.“I said I’m sorry. What the fuck else do you want from me?”

“That girl.Eva.” His face twitched as though it physically pained him to say her name. “She’s the one you ditched when you came out here, isn’t she? The one you were afraid was gonna get in your way…make you ‘lose focus’?” He curled his fingers into quotation marks.

I scoffed and reached for my guitar case. But the truth in his words delivered an unexpected jolt to my brain, causing me to rest my fingers on the handle for a moment and hesitate before answering. “So what if she is?”

“So I don’t want her becoming a problem.”

“Fuck off, Eric,” I said, grabbing my case and pushing past him.

“I mean it, Danny,” he called after me.

I raised my left hand above my head and extended my middle finger as I headed for the door, praying Eva would be outside and I’d somehow find the right words to ask her to give me a second chance.

SEVEN

Eva

January 1988

Ahelicopter whirred around my stomach, the chopping and humming of its blades causing my entire body to vibrate. It didn’t help, of course, that the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees while we’d been inside. I furiously rubbed my bare arms while smoking a cigarette to calm the search and rescue mission that circled above the rough seas inside me.

Denise squeezed my shoulder and studied my face. “You okay, babe? You don’t look like you’re okay.”

I managed a nod, which was actually more like a shiver. “Yeah. I mean, no. I’m not. But I will be. Maybe. I just need, like, a Valium. Who do you think has a Valium?” My eyes darted around the crowd spilling out of the Troubadour. “I mean, it’s almost midnight in Hollywood. Somebody here has to have drugs, right?”

Denise chuckled and shook her head. “I think the best you’re gonna do is coke or weed. And we don’t need you booking a midnight flight to Amsterdam or passing out and drooling in Danny’s lap, so I’m not gonna allow either.”

Since I couldn’t say with one hundred percent certainty that those things wouldn’t happen based on past experience, I expelled a heavy sigh. With my arms still crossed over my chest, I dropped my head to take a drag off my smoke.

“I’m so in the dark here, Denise. I mean, what’s he gonna say? What’s he gonna do?” I let my cigarette fall from between my fingers and crushed it with the toe of my shoe. “For that matter, what amIgonna say, and what amIgonna do?”

Denise stepped in front of me, placing her steady hands over mine. “Deep breaths, Eva. It’s gonna be all right. You’re in control here.He’sthe one who fucked up.He’sthe one who’s groveling. Not you.”

I looked up at the starless, smoky-gray sky. “Yeah, but why is this happening? What does he want from me?”

“I think you know the answer to that, babe.”

My chest tightened, and I closed my eyes for a moment before bringing my gaze back down to earth.

“I think you know what he wants,” she began, fixing her chestnut eyes on mine. “Just like you know whatyouwant. Otherwise, why are we even here?”

Her words sent the helicopter plummeting to the bottom of my stomach and a peculiar thrill rushing through my veins. A dangerous sense of excitement I imagined came only from jumping off cliffs, scaling treacherous mountains, or offering your poorly-reconstructed heart back up to someone who had once shattered the last remaining pieces of it.

Someone you still loved despite that.

Of course, I knew why I’d come and what I wanted. And after he’d played the song—mysong—it was hard to keep telling myself that Danny didn’t want the same thing. I wasn’t scared because I was in the dark. I was scared because everything was coming to light.

“Eva!”

Danny pushed through the crowd that had gathered outside the club, offering terse smiles and thank-yous to the people who tossed compliments his way. He stopped in front of me and Denise, standing just beyond the increasingly chaotic scene at the entrance. His chest was frantically pumping up and down, and the confidence he’d displayed on stage waned into a flustered humility. And while it comforted me to know he was still human, I couldn’t help but wonder why, when given the choice to spend the rest of his night with groupies or unearth the past with me, he was choosing the latter. Wasn’t the allure of being young and wild and free the reason he’d left me in the first place?

“Hey. Hi,” he managed, setting down his case.

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