Page 19 of Hero on the Road
Maybe ten.
And they were always the same. She always stepped out on the stage looking like a dear in the headlights and stared at the crowd like she didn’t know what to do with them. I’d never seen her come out looking comfortable or ready. It was like every time was her first time. Every time was another opportunity for her to mess it up or for people to decide that they didn’t like her.
The moment she started playing, she calmed down. I didn’t know what that looked like inside her head, but I knew it from having seen it so many times.
Which was how I knew she’d be okay as soon as we started playing.
I grabbed the cord to the speaker that would be attached to the microphone in front of her guitar and walked it over to her, plugging it in. “You’ve got this,” I whispered in her ear, pausing to inhale the scent of the lily in her hair. It was perfect on her, the way I’d known it would be. The color set off the flames of her hair and made her face glow.
She was beautiful.
And that was precisely none of my business. She’d made that clear back in Arberry, at Christmas.
I turned back to the sound equipment and found my microphone’s cord, trying to put Christmas out of my head. It had taken me weeks to stop looking at my phone, hoping for a text from her, and I wasn’t going to put myself through that again. That emotion—that emptiness—had no place on the stage with us right now.
I plugged in my microphone and sat on the bar stool the park had provided, running my fingers quickly over my string to make sure they were warm and ready. We’d tuned and re-tuned the guitars during our soundcheck, and my strings responded with a perfect strum.
In front of us, the crowd had gone silent, their faces expectant in the fairy lights strung up in the trees.
This was it. Our first show on our first tour. Me and Olivia together. Just us and our guitars.
“Hi there,” Olivia said, her words echoing through the dusk. “Thanks for coming out! I don’t know if you know who we are—”
“Of course we do!” someone in the crowd shouted.
Olivia chuckled. “Okay, so you do. Well for those who don’t, I’m Olivia Johns and this here is Connor Wheating. We’re from a little town called Arberry in North Carolina—” More whoops sounded out. “—And we’re here to play you folks some Nashville-style country.”
The crowd cheered at that and Olivia shot me a quick smile. This might not be a big tour and the crowd might have gotten in for free, but so far they were responding exactly the way we would have wanted.
“Right,” I said quickly. “Enough talking, Liv. Let’s play.”
And I broke into the first song—one of the ones we’d just written—and grinned at her. We were ready. I knew it. When her fingers started picking the strings of her own guitar, adding the harmony in, I laughed.
I couldn’t believe we were up here together on stage, playing one of our songs for an actual crowd. This was going to be brilliant.
The moment for the lyrics arrived almost before I was ready and suddenly we were singing, our voices blending together the way they always hand, dancing along with the sound of the guitars and threading out into the night like we’d done this a million times. We sang our hearts out, just us up there on that stage, and before long the crowd was joining us on the chorus, shouting out the parts they’d already figured out. And when the song ended, the music finishing abruptly on the last note, the twenty people watching us went crazy, jumping up and down and shouting.
Olivia immediately launched into the next song, laughing as she started singing, and a moment later we were up off the bar stools, dancing with each other as we played and jigging behind the microphones as we sang. Barry raced out onto the stage to adjust the microphones so we could stand—actually doing his job—and we spent the rest of the show on our feet, dancing with members of the audience when they found their way closer to the stage. Our music played just as well as I’d known it would and the crowd loved every song, though I was keeping notes in my head about which songs seemed to be more popular.
By the time we got to the last song, I was breathless and tired and elated—and ready for more. I didn’t want to be done already. I didn’t want to leave this stage or stop playing our music, and I could have watched Olivia laughing and joking with the crowd all night.
Maybe Atomic had known what they were doing when they matched us up for this tour. I couldn’t imagine having to carry this on my own. Being up here with Olivia felt so right it was almost scary.
“Okay, folks, this is the last song,” Olivia called out. “We’ve already stayed longer than we were supposed to and I’m pretty sure we’re going to be getting a bill tomorrow for using more power than we were allowed.”
There was laughter from the crowd, who were eating right out of her hand, and I laughed right along with them.
“We want an encore!” someone shouted.
Olivia giggled. “And we’d give it to you, even if we had to pay extra for the power!” she told the guy. “But I’m afraid we’re out of songs. This is literally the last song we have. I guess you’ll have to come back and see us again next year when we have new songs to play.”
“That’s a date!” he shouted.
God, the girl was good. She was already booking our next tour and getting people to agree to come to it. She shot me a cocky look, asking without words whether I was up for it, and I gave her a quick nod.
If there was going to be another tour, I’d be there. She didn’t even have to ask.
She launched us into the last song and I jumped to match her, my heart soaring. We’d thought it was a good idea to end the show with one of the first songs we wrote together—right after we got into the studio—and that had been the right choice. It was our fastest song and the one most likely to make people dance.
