Page 63 of If Not for My Baby
It’s as if I’ve never seen a man before.
The song ends. Tom sways back with the swell of the crowd. I swallow a mouthful of drool.
While he takes a sip of his mug of Barry’s, the fuchsia lights melt into a chilly ice blue against the low, curling fog. Hair falling in front of his face, expression mournful, Tom staggers back up to the mic and begins “Heart of Darkness.”
“Come first light.”He rests one hand on the neck of his guitar. The other, still grasping his pick, he places casually on the mic, his index finger falling over the bridge of his nose as he presses his mouth to the metal. Eyes closed—exhausted by his own need.“I don’t blame you, tell me to go.”
Tom begins to strum, staggering back with the sound of the first resonant electric notes. The crowd wails before him.His hair is wild, swaying and thick. The song gains steam as Molly and I hum the low backing notes, but my breath is growing uneven.
“What you need,”he croons, mouth back on that mic, eyes closed.“Let me show you how I know.”
That feral, woodsy roar sends a violent shiver down my spine.
The music picks up. Wren slams the drums in a brutal rhythm. Conor plays the bass with a vital gravity—the music, reaching a crescendo, blood pumping hot in my veins…
“Oh, baby,”Tom begs into the mic, brows knit with the torture of unfulfilled desire, mouth turned down as he strums.“Please let me stay.”
He told me what this song was about. About sex as a way of connection. About not knowing someone outside of theirbroken whines formore, but wanting desperately to. Tom lookspainedas he sings, tossing his head back and offering a sick smile to the heavens as he plays, eyes wound shut. As if he’s accepting the low-belly ache, the sorrow, the savage need coursing through him that he just cannot quell.
And I know that I need him. Physically, religiously, unspeakably.
A neutering couldn’t help me at this point—I need Tom Halloran.
He nearly misses his cue as he lowers his mouth back to the mic just in time to bellow,“In your darkness I can lay…”
He’s sweating, howling as he purges the words from his lungs, slamming his hand into his chest to the beat. I’ve never seen him sing like this—and the crowd is beside themselves over it. Foaming at the mouths on the front lines, reaching with outstretched hands to grasp the air he’s touched.
“Knowing how you plead.”Tom inhales deeply. “Jesus Christ, you can’t keep me away…”His unruly curls have overtaken his face, and only his full lips and that rough scruff can be seen. I think he’s still got his eyes closed. An overcome deity heartthrob. A dropper of jaws.
The crowd goes quiet, along with the thrumming bass line. They’ve known what’s coming since the first note of the song.
“I prowl through streets”—he purrs—“I thought I owned…”Unlike the high note he usually hits, the one they’re all waiting for, Tom growls the final lines of the song low into the mic until they grind right into me. “And realize I’m just your prey.”
The audience is inconsolable. They know they’ve witnessed something different tonight. A new, less polished version of the song. Tom dips his head to them and then staggers back to staredirectlyat me.
His eyes are the green you can see through. A stormy, crystalline sea. They pierce mine from across the stage. No humor. No playful smirk.
Searing.
It’s a promise of what’s to come.
The notes end, the lights dim, and Tom finally exhales. He shakes out his numb fingers, adjusts his IEM.
But I’m not as composed. I can hardly stand the want scattering along my limbs. My whole body is poised and sensitive, like the fine point of a needle. It’s a terrible time for our duet. I’m fearful I’ll catch fire and my clothes will burn right off me before this entire shrieking stadium.
The lights shift into a brand-new configuration. This venue’s size means it’s equipped with higher-end lighting and enormous LED screens. Walls of swaying wildflowers in a balmy breeze play out across the entire arena. Low spotlights rise from the stage’s edge and give the illusion of lit candles, flickering in artificial wind.
As Conor strums the first isolated, folksy notes, I grab my mic and make my way to center stage. The galaxy of tear-stained, red-cheeked fans don’t make me anxious—and yet my knees begin to shake when Tom’s eyes meet mine.
Awash in cobalt petals and stems, he studies me. There’s always an intense emotionality in the lyrics, but tonight as we sing, each word flickers inside my body. The swirling hymn builds,Wren’s low cymbals and Grayson’s gliding keys. Tom prowls closer, pressing his hand into his heart. There’s something new in his eyes as he sings,“Without her good love my heart atrophies, I’d succumb to gloom and mourning doves, if not for my baby.”
I’d thought our shows before this evening were bewitching—this rendition of “If Not for My Baby” makes every other one feel as though we’d been singing to each other through fogged glass.
Perhaps it’s the obsession funneling off the audience in a crowd this massive—the fans who were bawling,screaminghis name, who’ve now been revered into silence. Perhaps it’s the intimacy we almost succumbed to hours earlier. Frankly, I wish that was it. That I could chalk whatever’s happening right now up to the rush that anyone would get knowing you’d come so close to having a man whom millions of others would kill for.
But when I sing my verse back to him—how I’d never have braved the boiling oceans nor the crumbling peaks if it weren’t for his patience and steadfast love, I know I’m a fool. The expression on his face, the way his eyes fix on my mouth as I sing…that little half smile, as if he’s in awe of me—
What that does to my heart has nothing to do with ego or seduction or adrenaline. It’s something nectar-rich and heady. It sinks down into my soul and spreads like wildfire.
