Page 8 of One More Time
She suddenly felt acutely self-conscious, as though every one of the twenty-eight years since she’d last sat across from him had dropped on her face all at once. She knew that there were lines where there hadn’t been before, freckles and marks that remained stubbornly unresponsive to decades of dedication to anti-aging creams and potions. She was closer to fifty than forty. She knew this. It wasn’t a secret or anything she was usually bothered by.
‘So,’ Lucy said, privately reaching deep to find the self-confidence she’d somehow mislaid between her hotel room and the restaurant.
‘So,’ Nicky parroted.
Lucy couldn’t find the patience required for small talk. Instead, she blurted, ‘So, this international rock-star thing. What’s that like?’
Nicky chuckled. ‘Not going in soft. Okay, I appreciate that.’ He idly fingered the flickering electronic votive in the middle of the table, staring at it with a faraway look. ‘Uh, right now it’s good. Sometimes it’s amazing. Other times … terrible.’
‘Gloriously vague,’ Lucy said, smiling.
‘I don’t know how to quantify it. Music is more than a job, I guess. More even than a career.’ He paused for a moment, thinking. Looked up to her and added, ‘I don’t want to get all woo-woo on you here. I try to save all my crazy up for the second date.’
Shit on a stick. Is this a fucking date?
Lucy glossed right over the slightly terrifying implication of his comment and said, ‘I work at a liberal arts university, woo-woo is my bread and butter.’
‘Okay, how do I explain it?’ he asked, gazing at her as though she might have an answer. ‘Music is part of everything I do. Every day. It’s how I move through the world. It’s an internal soundtrack, and the ambient noise of life all around. So, to call it work, like this thing that I do and then stop doing seems …’ His voice trailed off, like he was searching for the right word.
‘Insufficient?’ she offered.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Insufficient. What about you? What’s your work like?’
‘Not as exciting as yours,’ she replied. ‘I’m a college professor. Well, associate professor, but I’m up for tenure this year.’
‘Something in music?’
‘Sort of, but not— Wait, why would you think that?’
‘You really seemed to love it.’
The fact that he remembered that about her – and the space buns, of all things – sent a warm, fuzzy feeling coursing through her limbs. ‘I did.’ She corrected, ‘Ido. Buttechnically my area is American Cultural Studies. Which is just a fancy way of saying pop culture, TV, movies, music. All of it. I mostly focus on the second half of the twentieth century.’
‘College sounds like a lot more fun than I was led to believe.’
‘Well, technically, what I teach is history now.’
‘Jesus,’ he griped.
‘Right?’ Lucy replied. ‘It’s a trip. The students this coming year in my 101 classes were born in 2005.’
‘What?’ he bellowed, astonished.
‘Uh-huh.’ Lucy didn’t feel her age often, but when she looked at the birth years of her students it really hit her.
Nicky shook his head. ‘It’s like one minute you’re still dreaming up ways to have everything you want and the next you’re googling “how do I reduce my cholesterol?”’
‘It happened overnight,’ Lucy added.
‘Yes! When was it for you?’
Lucy took a moment to think about it. ‘Forty, I guess.’
‘Me too.’
‘Fucking sucks,’ Lucy concluded.
‘It really does.’
