Page 39 of That Reunited Feeling

“Does this shit come off?” he asks as he rubs the vague area where the marker landed.

“Rubbing alcohol. Lesson learned when one of Dylan’s friends drew a Groucho Marx mustache on him. In red.”

“Think of it as a beauty mark for now.” Tom wiggles his eyebrows at me. “Anyway, my verdict on the evening.”

He flips the scorecard around. There’s just one entry. Filling the Rank of Awesomeness row, he’s written, “Hannah 10/10.”

I yawn and stretch in the back seat of the car as we hurtle south along I-95, headlights flashing past on the other side of the road, red taillights dotting the darkness in front of us.

“I wonder if Dylan’s in bed yet. Or if he convinced Maggie and Jim that I totally allow him to stay up playing video games till midnight.”

“He can sleep it off tomorrow if he has,” Tom says. “Is he into music?”

“Ha,” I scoff. “What kid is into the same thing as their parents? I’ve always been into music, so it’s not cool. I hate video games, so they’re the coolest thing ever.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom snaps his fingers. “Now I remember being a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“I remember you being a thirteen-year-old boy too.”

“I was cute, right?” He peers at me from the sides of narrowed eyes.

“You were annoying.”

“Only took me a couple years to change your mind.” He nudges me playfully with his elbow. Or is it flirtation?

Either way, it sends a tingle of electricity up my arm and across my chest. Which is also annoying.

“Well, I’d never have imagined that at thirty-three I’d be sitting in the back of a chauffeur-driven car with you after a night scouting bands for your London-based international music label.”

“Me neither. And if I hadn’t been trying to impress you by learning guitar from Uncle Bob’s neighbor, I might never have been in the band I was in, then realized my talent wasn’t inplaying music but in spotting those who’re good at it, and Garage Records might never have been born.”

What was that?

“Hold on.” I swivel to look directly at him. “You were learning to play guitar in London toimpress me?”

“Yeah. Bob and Linda’s neighbors had a son a bit older than me who played guitar. And one day when we were around there for a barbecue, we were both bored, so he started to teach me. And I figured if I could learn enough to play a song for you when I got home, you’d be super impressed.”

My heart surges. He had intended to come back. And to impress me when he did.

He turns his head away to look out the side window, his hair shielding his face from me. “I had this wild fantasy that maybe you’d sing and I’d play guitar, and we’d get a deal and tour and see the world together, and…”

He heaves a sigh so big his wide shoulders rise and fall.

“I’d thought you’d forgotten about me.” My words come out as a whisper.

“Never.” He turns back and tucks his hair behind his ear so he can see me. “Because I stopped being such a shit while I was in London, Maggie and Jim, and Bob and Linda, thought being there was doing me good and it would be better for me to stay there a while. And I didn’t fight it because I’d started to have fun, mainly with the music stuff, and somehow some of the darkness had lifted a little.”

The harsh shadows from the streetlights and passing vehicles highlight the deep furrows in his brow, the worry and fatigue lines around his eyes. “Then the managing bands thing took off quickly. I started the label, and it was so all-consuming I had to stay to ride the wave. And now…well, now it’s seventeen years later.”

Hot spikes form in my throat.

“And now I know you hate me for it,” he adds.

And with those words, he washes away every remaining drop of the animosity that racked me for so long after we lost contact. All the anger and hurt that compounded and compressed until it was this tightly packed ball of grudge and resentment that lived and breathed inside me and became who I was, crumbles into dust.

“I just loved you,” I tell him.

His sorrow at the pain he caused me is clear in the firm set of his lips.

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