Page 102 of If Not for My Baby
I need to find Tom. I don’t give two shits anymore about running away from love. Every reason I told myself to break it off before it breaks you—they all feel made up to me now. Like when you realize there’s no monster under your bed and all those years it was just a damn sweater.
It’s terrifying, and my heart is so high up my throat I could chew on it, but I get to Tom’s suite and knock hard. I’m going to tell him everything. How I feel, and how I don’t know what on earth to do with those feelings, and that he doesn’t even have to feel them, too, but please, God, I can’timagine never seeing him again after tomorrow and if he’d just give me a little more time maybe he’d fall in love with me, too, and then who knows what we’d do but at least we’d be in this mess together. When he doesn’t answer and I’m not sure if the moisture on my face is sweat or tears I knock so hard I know I’ve woken anyone that was sleeping in their bunks.
Tom swings the door open, eyes wide. “Clem. What’s the matter?”
He’s not alone in there. Gabriel is sitting on his bed with his keyboard, and Jen has her glasses on and her hair in the cute version of my utility topknot. She’s peering over her laptop and her phone at the same time.
“Need something, Clementine?” She looks vaguely irritated. “We’re trying to get this right before sound check.”
I suck in a big breath like a child between tantrum wails. Tom looks marvelous with his hair pulled back and his glasses on. His gaze is so affectionate, so at ease, my hysteria abates a little. “I just wanted to say hi,” I lie. “Bored.”
He nods as if he knows that wasn’t it. “I can take a little break.”
“Not really,” Jen says to her computer.
Gabriel just shrugs at me.
“Not necessary,” I say. “But could we hang out tonight, after the show?”
Tom leans against the doorframe, a slight grin catching his lips. “Where else do you suppose I’d be?”
There’s a big end-of-tour party tonight at the most exclusive spot in LA, and per Lionel, there isn’t an outfit on thisbus that could make me fit in. He said this lovingly, but it still stung, like most Lionel-isms.
“The party?”
“I dunno if you’ve noticed this, but I’m not much for parties. I’m planning to stay in this bus and read. Or hide out in a guest bedroom with a drunk woman with a bruised elbow hoping she’ll retch on me. Either works.”
My laugh feels like releasing a band that’s been tightening around my chest all day. Reaching on my tippy toes I press a single kiss to his scruffy cheek. “Perfect. I’ll get nice and wasted.”
—
Cara Brennan is spellbindingly beautiful. She looks like the good witch from an old English fairy tale. Hair as white as the moon. Thin, delicate features. Dainty tattoos that make everyone else’s look like a blind four-year-old did them. She’s walking through life with a level of pretty privelege models strive for.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she says with the same lyrical lilt Conor and Tom have, but higher pitched, like Tinker Bell. “Tommy speaks quite highly of you.”
“Great,” I say. It kind of hurts to look at her. “I mean, thank you.”
Sound check only makes matters worse, because she takes all that cheery, high-cheekboned, wood-nymph beauty and delivers justsoul-crushingmusic. If I’m ever in the mood towallow in some small-town bus stop over the unavoidable ennui of the human condition, I’ll be sure to play her stuff.
After a few songs we take a break for Conor to help Gabriel with the “Heart of Darkness” bridge, and I wander to the edge of the stage to take in the view. Tom props an elbow on my head as if I’m a low street post, a cute thing he’s taken to doing given our height discrepancy.
He looks achingly handsome in his John Lennon sunglasses and trademark jean jacket. His presence makes me feel more rational, and I take a breath to ground myself—we’re going to talk tonight and it’s all going to be okay. The air is still warm, but not stifling up here, and it’s scented with fresh-cut grass and orange poppies that dot the surrounding mountains.
The Hollywood Bowl is one hell of a historic venue—an outdoor amphitheater built like a conch shell into the hills. Surrounded by rising peaks on all sides, it is somehow both intimate and stadium-sized, with an immaculate view of the late afternoon sky. Though it’s gin-clear, not a cloud to be seen, the vivid blue is already melting gradually into a dusk of soft summer pink. It’s vivid, it’s stunning, it’s—
“It’s you.”
I turn up to him, and Tom is pointing at the watercolor sky. The impact of his simple words make my eyes burn. He sees that view and to him, it’s the embodiment ofme.
I shake my head at him in awe, trying and failing to say anything as poignant. I’m aware of every graceful rustle of his curled hair in the breeze.
“You stop by the dressing rooms?”
I had, and found Claritin—over-the-counter allergy medication—waiting for me alongside his preferred boxes of tea. I take a deep inhale of pollenated summer air through my nose. No sneezing. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m more of a Zyrtec girl.”
Tom bursts out laughing. It’s the best sound I know. I want that on my desert-island album. “I’ll fix the rider for you.”
“I’m kidding. It was perfect and so thoughtful.” I press my face into his side.
