Page 63 of One More Time
The other three guys onstage just laughed.
‘Look,’ said Nicky, ‘maybe we should just demonstrate.’ He shoved a guitar pick between his teeth and ran his fingers through his messy dark brown hair. Then he winked at Lucy.
She felt it in her spine.
Nicky pulled the pick from his mouth and adjusted his guitar strap. ‘Sound?’
A disembodied voice from high above called back, ‘On it.’ Then, a few seconds later, ‘Good to go.’
Nicky padded upstage and said something to the rest of the band that Lucy couldn’t make out. Then he stepped up to the microphone and began playing a song she recognized. A newer one, ‘Mix-up,’ that she’d keenly avoided on SiriusXM only a few years before.
She could feel the sound in her chest. In her toes. It was everywhere.Insideher.
Jesus.
Lucy felt a gasp leave her chest, but she couldn’t hear a thing beyond the band and Nicky’s voice. It rattled her, down to the bone.
Nicky was a goddamn vision. The tattoos on his arms rippled as he played, his hair drifted into his eyes. Every square inch of his body was a part of the process. It was otherworldly.
She gaped, her jaw on the floor and her heart racing.
Somehow, she’d forgotten. Forgotten that he could do that. Forgotten that what he did for a living was fucking magic. She had intellectualized ‘rock star’ as this broad title, shuffling him into a neat stack of other musicians, as one might catalog all postmen or doctors in their own respective categories. But what Nicky Broome did with an oddly shaped piece of wood and metal was unique. Remarkable. His talent – this gift he shared with the world – was superhuman. Rare and precious and powerful.
And the band was so incrediblygood. Not listening to Super was a form of self-protection that she’d relied onfrom the first moment she’d heard ‘The Breathing Room’ in college. That didn’t mean they weren’t worthy of listening to. They were. Everything Nicky and the rest of Super wrote was next-level amazing. They were skilled songwriters and superior musicians. It wasn’t an accident that Nicky had platinum records decorating his bathrooms in LA.
When ‘Mix-up’ ended, Lucy clapped robotically. Because it seemed the thing to do when her brain and her heart were buzzing in the reflected glare of Nicky’s talent.
‘How about another?’ Nicky asked his bandmates.
‘Now taking requests,’ Gill said in a goofy tone into his mic, while absentmindedly clicking his sticks against the frame of his snare.
A voice from behind her screamed, ‘“Stairway to Heaven”!’ Which the band simultaneously groaned and laughed at.
From her left another guy yelled, ‘“Free Bird”!’ and they all laughed some more.
Lucy couldn’t help herself. She called out, ‘Play “Little Wing.”’
Gill and Hooper shared glances that said ‘why not?’
‘Which version?’ asked Vinny in her general direction.
Nicky held his hand up to block out the stage lights and locked his eyes right on hers.
‘Nicky knows which one,’ Lucy replied, trying but failing to keep her tone light.
Nicky turned away from her then, talking to the band.
When he turned back, the first delicate notes of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s haunting rendition of ‘Little Wing’ trippedacross the theater. They emerged from Nicky’s guitar like flashes of starlight, shooting right to Lucy’s core. Obliterating her thoughts.
Gill’s drum joined in, grounding the guitars – two now, their notes folding on and entwining with one another. Then, where Vaughan’s melody usually drifted further into the instrumental, Nicky’s voice cut through with Jimi Hendrix’s lyrics.
He sang the words clear and strong. Purred their wistful confession of awe and longing with such emotion that tears filled Lucy’s eyes. It was the perfect marriage of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s soulful guitar with Hendrix’s dreamy acid trip of a story. Just the way she’d always imagined it. When she could bring herself to listen to either version, that is. Most of the time, memories of that summer night with Nicky overwhelmed her and she had to shut it off.
When the notes shifted, Nicky leaned forward to the mic and sang straight at Lucy.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t keep her heart from hammering against her ribcage. Heremembered. He rememberedher. All of it. From their ride in his Jeep that night a million years before and right into the beyond. He had really held on to all of it. That night wasn’t just some anecdote he’d made into a song. He’d really felt those things, everything he’d put into ‘The Breathing Room.’All of it.Her thoughts landed on the image of that tattoo on his back. The one with her name on it.
She could feel Nicky – every tortured emotion – in his guitar solo. Like he was speaking directly to her witheach note. The band’s serene accompaniment simmered in the background, letting him go. Letting him have his say. Nicky’s face twisted; sweat beaded at his temples.
