Page 24 of If Not for My Baby
“Really?” I remember the lyrics that had me sweating on that Greyhound bus. “So, ‘Consume My Heart Away’?”
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “Not to me at least. Though every song is fulfilled by the listener. It’s complete only as they understand it, right?”
“I guess that’s true,” I say, parsing through what he’s just said. I’d never thought of music in that way before. That the listener is the last step in the craftsmanship. “Can I ask what it’s about? If not innuendo?”
His eyes spark a little. “I haven’t a clue to what you are referring.”
I think of quoting the lyrics to him, but it feels too intimate. Not just their blatant eroticism, but speaking words directly back to the man who wrote them. So I sing the verse instead, the consistent rumble of the ice machine my metronome. “Whenever she first met me, my intentions bare and pure, the seeds I’d sow—a garden, the net I’d cast—a lure.”
Halloran’s voice is a little husky when he tells me, “Keep going.” He says it like he wasn’t fully in control of the words.
I’m completely exposed in this stark hallway with no instrument to guide me, and yet there’s a ridiculous pleasure in singing to him. “Her Hestia and my hearthside, a feast of sea and soil, kneeling before her boldly, I swear that I’m made whole.”Too far gone to turn back, I let the chorus possess me. “I devour her, the taste so pure, she heats and quakes, she breaks and breaks, her desolate mess the only cure.”
“Jesus. Your voice.” He draws a hand over his jaw. “What a thing to behold.”
“Stop.”
“I won’t.” He shakes his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone make the music sound like you do.”
Those simple words do more for my soul than I can articulate. Halloran saves me a baffled, incomprehensible response when he says, “What did you hear, then? In the lyrics?”
Though I can feel the blood rush to my cheeks, I’m honest. “I thought you were describing one hell of an orgasm.”
Halloran’s mouth quirks, though his eyes don’t leave mine, and I’m both set alight and self-conscious.
“Okay, now please tell me. Put me out of my misery.”
He chuckles as he relents. “I’d written it about our lack of accountability to the earth. We take what we please and are shocked when temperatures rise or a devastating earthquake hits. Hestia’s the Greek goddess of the hearth…I was really mixin’ metaphors back then—” He scratches the back of his head. “The title’s from a William Butler Yeats poem about growin’ old and wishin’ to keep his mind, but be rid of hisdecaying body. Felt apt.” He runs his fingers along his chin in thought. “I like your interpretation better.”
I’m dumb as a brick. All the mentions ofwet heatandmindless pleasure with no consequencemake so much more sense now. “You’re a genius.”
Halloran just laughs. “That’s high praise.”
“Now you have to tell me which ones are actually about sex.”
He scratches at his beard to hide his smile. “Ehm—”
“Or not,” I say to spare him. “No pressure.”
“No, I’m just thinking.” His eyes cast downward, and when they find mine again, the heat that simmers there nearly knocks me unconscious. “ ‘Heart of Darkness’ is, actually.”
The slow-burning beat echoes in my mind as the lyrics dance across my vision. “Sure. Makes sense. It kind of sounds like sex.”
That’s a wild thing to say and I know it as soon as it leaves my mouth. His throat constricts a bit when he swallows.
“Oh, baby, please let me stay. In your darkness I can lay. Knowing how you plead, Jesus Christ, you can’t keep me away. I prowl through streets I thought I owned, and realize I’m just your prey.”
As if he can hear his own raw vocals growling in my mind, he runs his hand over his rough beard again. “Folks were debatin’ if ‘Consume My Heart Away’ was about pleasurin’ a woman. I wondered if I actually wrote a song about that if anyone would even notice.”
Something about my expression makes him follow that bombshell with, “Not to be crude. The song’s less about ridin’, and more about feeling as though you know someone bynight—someone you’ve longed for and lusted after—but come daylight there’s a sort of baffling otherness to them. You can’t connect unless you’re inside them. It’s about acknowledging the limitations of that kind of relationship. That discrepancy in knowin’ their body, how to speak to them in that language, but not really knowin’ them at all.”
“I see” is all I can muster.
“It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, though, because the allegory is that of a sort of feral, dodgy cat. One who knows its township innately by night and is this fearsome thing, but in the stark morning light, finds the place a bit unsettling.”
Talking to Halloran about sex might be better than any sex I’ve had. I stare at the curve of his goose-bumped biceps. His eyes never abandon my own, except when they do and I watch his gaze dip to my lips and then my neck. Nerves that have been on some kind of summer vacation finally kick back in and I clear my throat to fill the electric silence.
The noise seems to break Halloran out of our mutual stupor. “I’m startin’ to feel really odd about my lack of shirt.”
