He stood, unmoving, staring at the back of the head of the person sitting on the barstool in front of him, while his skin slowly heated. Her voice wrapped itself around him, a girlish python gently but surely squeezing the air out of his lungs.
She had a good voice. Not a professional one. It was a little shaky, but in tune as it sang a story of some kind of victory against the odds. It described crowds going wild, and he was transported back in time to the baseball game. To the joke proposal, when they had colluded in stealing poor Julie and Jason’s romantic night out.
Others joined in on the chorus, their voices emphatic in the way only drunk friends can be. Then for some reason, he thought about Amy driving them around in her little red car, concocting a crazy caper to trick his mother into moving. It had been another great joke they’d shared, conspiring against everyone.
Amy had been really fun to scheme with. Somehow, with Amy, the world was full of inside jokes. And if you were very lucky, you got to be one of the insiders.
As the laughing, happy chorus reached its peak, he was suddenly able to put his finger on what had been wrong with him lately.
He wanted to be an insider.
Everything was more fun when he and Amy were sleeping together.
Was it possible he had made a mistake? He abandoned his quest for a drink and began to move away from the bar, letting the voices of her and her friends wash over him.
He cleared the bar, and there she was. God, there she was. Exactly as he expected, and yet nothing like he expected. She was wearing that purple silk dress again, and a small braid ran along her hairline, framing her face, which, as he watched, went from a wide smile to a serious, almost pained look. For a moment, he thought she’d seen him, that he had inspired that change in mood. But, no, she hadn’t. It seemed to accompany a similar change in the music.
Her backup singers grew serious too, letting their voices fade out as she picked up the verse. It was about saying good-bye, about life taking the narrator and the person she was singing about in different directions.
She looked up then, almost as if she had felt the weight of his gaze, and met his eyes. The sad part of the song was over, and what he assumed was the final verse was crescendoing. Her friends were doing most of the work now, though. She was singing, but she was phoning it in.
Mostly, she was just staring at him with big, sad blue eyes.
He had been an insider for a brief, beautiful moment. Amy and Dax versus Jason and Julie. Amy and Dax versus Lin Harris. Amy and Dax versus the goddamned world.
He wanted back in.
Dax wasn’t an idiot. He could recognize when his self-imposed rules had grown too rigid.
Time to start sleeping with Amy Morrison again.
…
Everything started happening all at once. It had seemed to Amy like the song would never be over, that she would be forced to endlessly live out a waking nightmare in which the object of her imaginings literally manifested in front of her eyes.
She’d been thinking about the baseball game as she sang. The fake proposal. Pulling one over on that whole stadium, almost like they were professional criminals. That was probably the most fun she’d ever had. Except for the time they’d gone paddleboarding. Or…to the movies.
And then there he was. So gorgeous and so unexpectedly dear to her.
To know that she couldn’t have him—in any capacity—was as gutting, all of a sudden, as her non-wedding day had been. Worse. Because this time, she had come to realize, she’d really, truly lost something worth having.
His face was utterly blank as he stared at her. It was almost like he didn’t see her, like he was looking through her. And yet she felt the weight of his attention. She couldn’t wait for it to be over. To flee. But she dreaded it all at the same time.
Then he was coming at her. But so was her brother. For some reason, the prospect of Dax meeting her brother scared her. Dax’s family was so sweet. So normal. She feared, totally irrationally, that if he met hers—even Michael, the only normal member—they might somehow taint his.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, her phone started ringing. She glanced down. It was the moving company. She looked back up. Dax was still making a beeline for her, looking like he was going to explode in anger or…something.