Page 224 of Rock Me All Night
His bedroom door is open. I knock lightly and step inside. Drew turns to me. He's sitting on his bed, back to me, acoustic guitar in his lap.
He's wearing nothing but boxers.
That flutter builds below my belly. His back is so strong. It's like he's cut out of marble. I want to touch him and have him touch me.
Maybe I can tell him.
Maybe he won't run away.
"Can I listen?" I ask.
He pats a spot on the bed next to him. "It's pretty rough."
"I like it rough." My face flushes. "I mean... I don't mind."
"I'm afraid I don't have it in me to tease you as mercilessly as you deserve." He turns back to his guitar.
I sit on the edge of the bed opposite him. The three feet between us might as well be a million miles.
An acoustic version of Drew's song fills the room. I lie back and hug a blanket to my chest. The music is beautiful and sad. It presses on the walls of my heart, threatening to collapse them completely.
I can tell him.
I have to.
Drew lets out a heavy sigh. I keep my back to him, my attention on the clean, white wall in front of me.
The song bleeds into an outro until our breath is the only sound in the room. There's something so intimate about it, but that only makes the horrible space between us hurt more.
I play with the blanket. "Is that a Sinful Serenade song?"
"No." He plays a chord. "It's mine."
"Are there lyrics?"
"Yeah, but you're not going to get me to sing. I don't sing."
"What about..." I shake my head, but it's too late. The memory is already there. The sound is already drilled into my brain.
"That was a special circumstance." He leaves it at that.
Music fills the room again. "Fire and Rain," the James Taylor song. The only song he's ever sung.
It was the night of my father's funeral. After everyone left. I was in my room, alone, finally out of sight of everyone who was concerned about how I was handling it. Finally about to give in to how much it hurt and cry myself to sleep.
He had cancer. It was a slow, agonizing death. I was half-glad he wasn't in pain anymore, half-miserable I'd never see him smile again. But there was no time for any of that. That last year, he was too weak to help. My mom was either at work or shuffling him to treatments. Everything else fell to me.
I cooked dinner, did the shopping, paid the bills. I didn't mind the work. It kept me busy.
Staying strong was the hard part. I was their happy little girl. I had to smile for them, to convince them it would be okay, to convince them it was fine.
It was the same thing at the funeral. Everyone was proud of me for being strong, for being there for my mother, for taking care of things. I wanted so badly to cry, but I couldn't, not until I was alone in my room.
Drew and I weren't close anymore. We had drifted apart my first year of high school. But he was there that night and he refused to leave, refused to believe me when I told him everything was okay.
He sat there in my bed and he played and he sang to me. And then I cried and he held me until I was too numb to cry anymore.
That was the last time anyone saw me as anything besides their rock.
