Page 55 of With Stars in Her Eyes
I cleaned up the trash from our lunch and headed out of the space and down the stairs with what I’d said to Thea still playing in my head.
I had grown up with some major identity issues.
No wonder I had bought Jeremiah’s bullshit when I met him.
I was fifteen when I got invited to be a guest performer on his band’s summer farewell tour around the Christian youth camp circuit. It was the first time I had been away from my parents’ control for more than a few days. I felt free.
He had long, flowing hair that I loved touching—yes, this should have been a sign of the lady gay things to come. He made me laugh with off-color, risqué flirting that, in retrospect, was highly inappropriate given our age gap. But I felt a million years old, and I was so damn sick of performing the stupid routines and tired childish dialogue as Dove. We still had to be “clean,” but there was an edginess around playing with a group of guys with piercings who dropped the occasional h-word or d-word. And Jeremiah called me Courtney when no one had foryears.I thought maybe someone “mature” like Jeremiah could understand thejagged version of me beneath the charade. The memories flooded upward from my gut, a rush of hurricane storm surged against a levee in my throat.
I had been so desperate for someone to see me back then that I had given even more of myself away. It was ironic that after I left him, all I wanted was to disappear and never be seen again by anyone.
Of course he reappeared in my life at the worst possible moment.
Of course, the biggest mistake of my life was going to make it impossible for me to do what I loved again even if I figured out how to get back up onstage again.
A familiar panic built in my chest. I leaned against the brick wall around the corner from the bookstore door, pressing my shoulder blades into the rough surface in an effort to control my breathing. As I scanned to see if anyone was watching me randomly lose it, a man walked out of the shadows near the pub. I gasped and then relaxed, giving myself a mental shake.
I was so on edge thinking about Jeremiah, I had nearly screamed. But of course, the man walking across the green space in front of the pub wasn’t my ex-husband. It was just Marshall. My overactive imagination had pulled me back into the shock of seeing Jeremiah’s face in the crowd at the Troubadour.
I was stupid not to guess why he had come to my show that night. I was stupid not to expect the humiliation he had planned for me.
I grabbed my phone and typed in a message to Abbott about the case laws about blackmail and defamation before deleting it without sending. If I stirred things up again, innocent people would get hurt. Demetrius had believed in my music and career more than anyone, and I refused to put his reputation at risk because of ghosts from my past.
I needed to figure out if I could perform again, before I decided whether fighting for my career was worth it.
That evening, I sat behind my keyboard. It was the instrument that felt right tonight. My fingers played through a few chordswhile I thought of Thea and how the world felt more magical when she was near me. I needed some magic if I was going to try. I opened a notebook with Thea’s question playing in my head.
WhatwouldI tell my childhood self if I could?
I ran my fingers over the keys until I found a melody that sounded right. I scribbled out words as they came to me. Plunked out notes. When I looked at the clock, it was three a.m.
The pages in front of me were full. I had written my first song in over a year.
The most surprising thing was that it wasn’t a sad song. It was a whimsical story about a silly little bird who kept looking for a magic spell that would let her fly because she didn’t realize she already had wings.
CHAPTER 18Thea
I rested my chin on my hand with my elbow propped on the Squid counter, sighing heavily as the door swung closed with Courtney on the other side. Courtney was headed back to the bookstore, carrying an empty thermos of the soup we had just spent forty-five minutes sharing during our lunch together.
I sunk my teeth into my lower lip to keep every bit of giddiness out of my expression. Because I shouldn’t still have butterflies every time. We had done this nearly every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday forweeks. We had never formally planned it. It somehow made the entire thing more exciting.
She hadn’t asked for my number, but that was probably my fault for leading with the no texting thing.
I had been out of town the last three weekends, so it wasn’t like I could have easily asked Courtney out then. I had been spending the rest of my time in the space I had transformed into a functional photography studio.
Next week was thefinalweekend of my obligations back in Huntsville. The wedding rehearsal. Then I would be back. And then come hell or high water I’d be asking the beautiful bookseller out.
I mean… if I felt brave enough by then. And if it didn’t seem like it would screw everything up.
But maybe I was being friend-zoned again? Maybe taking it slow had backfired?
Dang it all.
Twenty-three lunches together.
Not that I was counting.
Becausecountingwould make this pathetic. Because my pouty, irrepressible pining wasn’t pathetic at all.
