Page 16 of The Duet

In the car on the way back to the hotel, all four of us hunched over our cell phones as though we’ve been deprived of them for days, mine buzzes in my hand.

* * *

Can you come to my room later? Any time is fine. Thanks, Lana.

* * *

I read the message a few times to make sure I’m not misinterpreting it. Lana wants me to come to her room? Maybe destiny has far better things in store for me than a few hours of reading to wind down.

I debate whether to tell the band, but decide against it. First, I don’t want to make Jess jealous. Second, I already get my five minutes on stage with Lana at every show while the others don’t get any of that. Lastly, I know what they’re like and I don’t want any speculation, innuendo, or dirty talk about Lana.

Video snippets of tonight’s encore have already been uploaded to Instagram. I relive the moment I threw my arm around Lana’s waist over and over. Maybe that’s what she wants to talk to me about. As soon as the car pulls up to the hotel, I say my goodbyes and rush to Lana’s room.

Lana’s talking on the phone when she lets me in. She motions for me to sit in a chair by the window. Her room is about three times the size of mine, but her band’s the headliner and that’s how it goes. At least we’re not sleeping on a ramshackle tour bus anymore—and we each have our own room.

Lana’s pacing around at the foot of the bed. I glance around. Her bed’s freshly made up and there’s a chocolate on the pillow. She must have just arrived. Maybe I should have given her some more time, but it’s late, and we have the same wake-up call tomorrow. I spy a stack of books on her nightstand. Being an avid reader, I’m in two minds to have a look, but it could be seen as an invasion of privacy and I don’t want to be accused of crossing any boundaries with Lana—not after the conversation we had last night.

“Hey.” Lana slips her phone into her back pocket. “Thanks for coming. Drink?” She pats the door of a full-size fridge—no minibars in a rock star’s hotel suite then. “I have anything you can possibly dream of.”

“Just some water is fine. Thank you.”

“Bit hungover?” Lana hands me a bottle of water. “You had me worried for a minute that The Other Women wouldn’t make the show tonight.”

“You’ll never have to worry about that. We’re made of tough stuff.”

“I was just kidding. The amount of booze The Lady Kings put away in our day… You don’t want to know.” Lana tips her head back and drinks water greedily. “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.” She sits in the chair opposite me, pressing the sole of one bare foot against the leg of the table between us. “I tried to pay attention to it when we were on stage together earlier.”

Lana listened to my drunken rant? My first instinct is to apologize for my inebriated ramblings, but I’m curious to hear what she has to say.

“I mean, I do feel something. It’s impossible not to have feelings when you’re singing a song like that. That’s the whole point, to convey that emotion to the audience and to make them feel the same, or at least something.” She wiggles her toes. “I’ve been doing this for such a long time, I might have been a bit too aloof about it or, at the very least, I haven’t taken your feelings into consideration enough. You must understand, though, Cleo, that this tour is a big shock to my system. Joan no longer being here is like…”

She drops her foot and slings one leg over the other, as though retreating from me—as though the mention of Joan has suddenly made her more cautious about what she was going to say.

“What I’m trying to say is that whatever it is you’re feeling when we sing together is a perfectly normal reaction to the circumstances, and I promise to be more respectful to you about it.”

“Thanks.” I take another sip from my water bottle. “Just for the record, I was quite tipsy last night and shouldn’t have said those things to you. I really shouldn’t have. It makes me look like… I don’t know. Like it’s too much for me, which it isn’t. I love being on stage with you.”

“Let me tell you something I’ve learned over the long years of my career.” Lana drums her fingertips on her knee. “There are no prizes for being cool. There are no prizes for anything. All you can do—and trust me, this is where most rock bands fall incredibly short—is be a good person. Be respectful to the people you work with. I sincerely apologize for not being respectful toward you, for not recognizing what happens between us on stage. In my defense, earlier, after we were done, I was going to give you the most heartfelt thank-you of your life, but you were too busy freaking out with your bandmates.” She arches up her eyebrows and gives me a weird look.

The most heartfelt thank-you of my life? Damn. I’m sorry I missed that. But there’s always the next show. “I didn’t want to give you the opportunity to just walk away from me again.”

“Playing offense is often the best defense.”

I look into Lana’s dark eyes and realize that this kind of conversation is unique to who we are and what we do. I could try to explain this to my bandmates, and they might get it on a more superficial level, but not the way Lana gets it just because of who she is. When you’re at the front of the stage, when you’re the face of the band and you have to sing the lyrics that bring the music we make together, everything is amplified. I’m in the frontline and while my band members always have my back, it’s not the same, because they don’t have to pour their heart out on stage every night. They don’t have to find a means to protect themselves from what might happen if you expose too much of yourself, or not enough, or when things are a little off and the show never quite takes off.

“I’ll make sure to earn myself another heartfelt thank-you from you, then. One I wouldn’t dare stop you from expressing.”

Lana chuckles. “All right.” She leans forward. “Are we good?”

“Of course we are.”

She pulls her phone from her back pocket and tosses it onto the table. “Earlier, I was doing something I never do.” She points at her phone. “I was watching some clips of the show on the internet.”

“You never watch any footage of yourself?” My father in particular likes to remind me we live in the age of narcissism. Maybe he’s right because it would never even occur to me to not watch any footage of myself performing.

“When we started, that wasn’t a thing. People were still holding up cigarette lighters during a slow song instead of a lit-up phone screen.”

My turn to laugh. “Maybe that was to your advantage. It’s so automatic for us to scrutinize our every move on stage. Maybe we should do a little less of that.” I remember me and my bandmates hunched over our phones in the car.

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