Page 40 of Reverse

“Cult of Personality”

Living Colour

Natalie

Once the rain stopped, we ate the small haul I bought at the gas station sitting on a weathered and slightly warped wooden picnic bench. We laid off the heavier talk, though with Easton, he refused to make it small. After a few minutes, he steered the questioning to my side of the table. He was probing me for more about myself and seemed to absorb the answers rather than just hear them with the intense look forever in his eyes. When the sun finally made an appearance, we raised our collective faces to it, soaking it in.

As Easton chauffeurs me back to my hotel, we sit in comfortable, amicable silence, wind whipping through the cabin, both occupied by our thoughts. In lieu of me playing DJ, Easton tuned into an oldies station. The music is at his usual level—a few obnoxious decibels over loud. As each mile passes, I find myself staring over at him, processing all he’d divulged today, my empathy for him increasing tenfold.

He’s seemingly in the midst of a crisis of his own—a battle about his future, and his predicament is far more daunting than mine. In order to venture into his career dream, he has to overcome his fear of the spotlight. The fact that he relayed why he hates the medium of the press and that he trusted me with that information says a lot. With every mile we travel, it’s on the tip of my tongue to thank him and ease his worries about what I’ll do with what he revealed. Just as I go to speak, he beats me to it.

“What do you listen to?”

He gestures toward the radio for me to take over.

“Nuh-uh, I’ll only disappoint you.”

“Go on,” he says, a barely-there lift of his lips.

“Okay, but you asked for it.”

I look at the time and calculate the difference at home before switching the dial to AM and Hearst’s national news radio. The puckered look of distaste on Easton’s face has me cackling. He listens for a few minutes and shakes his head.

“Two tornadoes killing sixteen people, left and right fighting, as usual. Tell me how this is uplifting?”

“It’s my life.”

“No, it’s other people’s lives.”

I raise a brow. “Careful, you’re getting offensive.”

“And you’re getting defensive,” he quips back. “Why is that?”

“I’m not a music fanatic.” I shrug. “We just march to the beat of different drums, pun fully intended.”

“No, no, Natalie,no,” he shakes his head profusely. “Not with music,neverwith music. It’s where we discovercommon ground.”

He stares at me for a few long seconds, turns off the news, reconnects to Bluetooth, and flips through the playlist on his cell.

“Eyes on the road, Crowne. I don’t feel like playing airbag roulette today.”

He ignores me and shifts his attention between the road and his phone. “Don’t you jam when you’re out with your girlfriends?”

“Onegirlfriend and one boyfriend, they’re my best friends. Damon’s my dad’s best friend, Marcus’s son. We’re like brother and sister.”

Shut the hell up, Natalie!

“And then there’s Holly. She’s the daughter of one of my mother’s closest friends. She’s a year younger than me, but we all grew up together. Anyway, I guess we jam out occasionally, but I never fight for control of the radio.”

“What do you listen to when you work out?”

“News radio mostly . . . stop looking at me like I’m an alien,” I mutter, only to get another slight lift of his lips.

“Got it,” he says confidently, referring to a choice from his playlist. “We’ll start here.”

“What?” I laugh at his animated expression as he cranks the volume up and kicks back in his seat. A second later, what seems like the middle of an old news bulletin sounds through the speakers—‘and during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.’

Easton lifts a mocking brow at me, and I roll my eyes in response just before a jarring guitar riff blares through the speakers making me jump.

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