Page 13 of Guitars and Mistakes
“So what would you play?”
At this, I felt myself start to blush again. “Usually something by Blondie.”
“Blondie?”
I reached out and poked him in the shoulder. “Hey, they were popular in my household.”
“Not exactly Nashville’s normal sort of music, though.”
I shrugged at that. “My dad loved them. He used to produce for a punk rock band and brought a lot of his music home. We grew up with that stuff.”
“Obviously. And what’s your favorite song?”
“In the world?” I asked, wondering at the change of topics.
“No. By Blondie.”
Ah. “‘The Tide is High,’” I said, without having to think about it. “Obviously.”
“Obviously.” This time I could hear the smile in his voice. Hear the lightness in his tone. “So you and your sisters were up there on your homemade stage rocking Blondie when you were, like, eight, and then you... decided to take up country music instead?”
The impending laughter had the last words turning up slightly and I reached out to poke him again, already knowing that he was making fun of me. Knowing that this was about to turn into a session where he asked increasingly ridiculous questions about something that he found entirely too funny. To my surprise, he grabbed my hand before it could get to him and did some fancy kung-fu-twisting thing that ended up with me in his lap and facing away from him—while his laughter grew from chuckles into outright gales of mirth, the force of it shaking him underneath me. I struggled against him, half furious, but he trapped me in his arms and held me there while he laughed harder and harder, the sound of him echoing through the dark night around us.
“It’s not funny!” I snapped, struggling again.
His arms got even tighter around me and I stilled, knowing that I wasn’t going to get away. He relaxed and grew quiet, leaning his chin on my shoulder and breathing out.
“You’re right, I suppose,” he said. “But I love the visual of it. Tiny you up there singing her heart out about the tide being high while your parents pretend to be impressed.”
“I’ll have you know that they wereveryimpressed,” I told him firmly. “They always thought we had talent.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.” He paused for a moment and we sat there, breathing and staring into the playground like we were waiting for something. “Thank you,” he finally murmured.
“For what?”
“For sharing that with me.”
I bit my lip, wondering what that was supposed to mean—and what I was supposed to do with it—and then launched into the question that wouldn’t stop spinning around in my brain. “Well according to the game, you owe me an answer of your own. Rivers, what are you doing out here all by yourself? What’s going on with you?”
Another pause, and then: “That’s two questions, not one.”
“So it is. Now answer them.”
He was quiet for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer me. In fact, I was waiting for him to shove me off his lap and tell me we were finished playing this game.
Instead, he cleared his throat, pulled me back against him, and started swinging gently. “I’m out here all by myself because I needed the space to hear myself think. Or rather... No, I guess it’s more that I thought I could quiet the voices out here.”
Okay, this got serious quick. “What voices?”
“The ones that tell me things I don’t like to hear.”
Right.
“We all have those voices. You know that, right? It doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth.”
“I’m afraid these ones are.”
“Why?” My voice cracked on the word, but I didn’t apologize for that. I hadn’t come out here to have this sort of conversation, and the sudden tension in the air—the emotion charging the man underneath me—felt like it was going to crack me in half.
