Page 23 of If Not for My Baby
“Whatever.” I’m fighting my own grin. “You get my point. It’s phony.”
Halloran’s eyes widen. “Phony?”
“Kind of. People obsess over the importance ofromantic loveonly to weaponize it to explain everything from having an affair to making single women feel badly about themselves on national holidays. Look at what your preciousloveis doing to a perfectly good friendship as we speak.”
“Fair play, but neither your ex-turned-boss’s intolerable predicament nor the patriarchal pressure put on women to marry is really what I’m such a stout believer in.”
“Then what? Soulmates? Destiny? Come on.”
“Nah, none of that. Not airy-fairy, saccharine apparitions. What of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, I dunno”—he shrugs—“Nora Ephron? I don’t think it’s coincidence that the greatest art and literature since the Old World have mostly been inspired by the complicated, all-consumin’ feckin’ rhapsody of romantic love.”
I roll my eyes, but can feel the swoon I’m fighting to keep at bay. People don’t really speak like that where I’m from. I have a feeling they don’t really speak like that anywhere. “I get it. You’re a hopeless romantic.”
His eyes warm on mine. “I’ll concede I’m susceptible to lovesickness. And, perhaps, the errant bout of excruciating yearning. And you?”
“And me what?”
“You’ve never been in love?”
I shake my head, ready for him to tell me what I’m missing or that I’m just too young. I have my counterargument about oxytocin locked and loaded.
But all he says is, “Ah.”
He has such a gentle presence. It’s rare to meet men who don’t see arguing with women as foreplay.
“What did you need a pen for anyway?” I ask, gesturing toward his notebook with my chin.
He’s still leaning against the other side of the hall, and yet he’s tall enough that I have to crane my neck up a bit to keepmy eyes on his face. “Some lyrics came to me as I was dozin’ off. I wanted to jot them down but my room was clean out of writing instruments.”
I check my phone and try not to balk at the1:37 a.m. that blares back at me. “Are you nocturnal or something?”
Halloran laughs again and I’m hit with the strangest urge to store all his laughs somewhere safe. Cram them into a little treasure box and bury them in my backyard.
“I work best when it’s quiet and I can’t be bothered by anyone. Except frisky ex-girlfriends, of course.”
For a moment I balk, before I realize now heispoking fun at me. Then I have to fight to contain a hideously girlish grin.
“You’re one to talk,” I say, narrowing my eyes at him. “All your songs are about…” I raise my brows as if to say,You know what.
Halloran’s smirk could light me up like a matchstick. “Are they, now?”
“Oh, come on,” I scoff, willing myself to stop blushing. “You must know what you’re doing. You’re giving teenage girls across the country carpal tunnel.”
Halloran coughs on nothing in sheer horror and I can’t help how hard I laugh. He’s so cute when he’s flustered.
“Christ,” he sputters. “I’d pay you handsomely to remove that mental image from my mind.”
“It’s true. You’re some kind of sex god to most women. What will you do with all that responsibility?”
Against the low hum of the ice machine, Halloran runs a hand across his mouth in thought. “Cave under the crushing weight of impossible expectation?”
Too humble, too charming, too talented. The stark fluorescent hallway light paints his jaw and pecs in shadow and I can’t help the way my eyes travel the same path. I think my robe is trying to crawl off my body.
“I’m not ashamed to write songs about lovemaking,” he concedes after a beat. “It’s as powerful as anything else I could be singin’ about.”
I’d never felt that way specifically, but it’s no great leap of the imagination to assume Halloran is having better sex than I am.
“What I find interesting is how often people think the songs of mine that aren’t about sex are, and the reverse. Not that I particularly mind.”
