“Why’s that?”
“Because when the world gives a person a smile like that, it should be the only activity those lips ever partake in.”
My cheeks rose up and I ran my hands through my hair. Talking about my lips made me think about his lips, which made me think about things I shouldn’t have been thinking about. Time to change the subject.
“So do all of your songs deal with different Shakespeare plays, or was I just being an over-the-top hipster while listening to the lyrics?” I asked.
Daniel tilted his head to the side and his mouth parted. A look of amazement stayed on his face. I liked that look. Okay, truth was I liked all of his looks. “You’re the real deal, aren’t you? Most people don’t pick up on it, but yes. Every song is based on some form of Shakes’s works.”
“That’s so nerdy and hot all at once. I’m not sure how to handle it all.”
“What can I say? I’m a nerd-stud.”
I giggled and sipped from my glass. “So there was Romeo and Juliet of course. Then there was…” I paused, trying to recite the exact order of his set list. “Hamlet, Richard III, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Othello?”
Daniel’s hand flew over his heart and his back slammed against his booth. “Marry me,” he joked. I almost considered it, too. Daniel’s lips parted, and I swore I sighed just from the sight. “So tell me, no-name girl. What do you do for a living?”
“What do I do or what do I want to do? Those are two different things, I think. I’m currently a student hoping to someday call myself an author.”
“No way? Really?” He seemed honestly interested.
“Really, really. Like, double really.”
He laughed and I sighed at the sound of his chuckle. The way his smile stretched so far and wide made me think that I was actually charming. “Well, do it. Become an author.”
It was my turn to giggle. “Yeah. Because it’s that easy.”
His head shook back and forth. A somber look overtook him and he held his beer in the air. “I never said it would be easy. I just said do it. Besides, the best things in life aren’t easy. They are tough, they are painful, and they are raw. That makes the arrival to the final destination that much sweeter.”
“Yeah it’s just…” My voice trailed off, yet Daniel appeared to stay invested in the conversation, never tampering off from boredom of my thoughts. “I had a co-writer.”
“Had?” he questioned.
“Yeah, and I can’t imagine finishing the book without her.” When my mouth closed, I began to grind my teeth against each other, trying to fight back the tears.
Daniel took note of the emotion, and his hand moved across the table, taking my hand into his. His touch electrified me, sending waves of heat through my fingertips.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Five words. Five words from a stranger and a simple touch gave me a sense of life I hadn’t experienced before. Such raw humanity in his approach was so welcoming that night.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t hold my hand too long, but I missed his touch when he retreated. “Maybe the key is to start writing something else.”
“Maybe. But I can’t really say I’m ready to close the current book.”
His hand found the back of his neck and he rubbed it, laughing. “Then I will respectfully shut the hell up.” He was pretty dang charming, too. “I’m sorry I approached you outside like that. It’s just… When I saw you enter the bar the first time, you looked like…”
“Like what?” I asked eagerly.
He frowned. “Like everything you ever loved was set on fire and you couldn’t walk away until you watched it all burn to ashes. And all I wanted to do was hug you.”
I blankly stared at him. I was coming off as awkward, yet I didn’t know what else to do. Clearing my throat, I nodded once. I kept my glaze on him, unable to look away.
Daniel smiled and turned to see one of his band members walking over to our table. Our table? What an interesting thought.
The band member slapped his hands on Daniel’s shoulders and smiled toward me. He had shaggy blond hair that sat right above his eyebrows and the sweetest brown eyes I’d ever seen. A peace symbol hung around his neck, and his long-sleeved forest-green shirt was unbuttoned over his white t-shirt.
“I hope this loser hasn’t been giving you a hard time,” he joked.
“Hardly,” I grinned.
He extended his hand toward me. I accepted his handshake. “Randy Donavon. I’m on acoustic.”
“It’s nice to meet you. You’re amazing up there.”
Daniel sighed heavily. “Don’t give him a bigger head.”
Randy stepped back and placed his hands on his chest. “Big head? Me?! No way. I’m super humble.” He put his hands together in a prayer format and bowed toward me. “Thank you, beautiful.”
I giggled at his antics—and at Daniel, who was rolling his eyes.
“I would hate to steal Danny from you, but we gotta get the next set going…” Randy smiled and slapped Daniel on the back. “Beautiful”—he took my hand in his and kissed it—“it was wonderful meeting you.”
“You too, Randy.”
Randy nudged Daniel in the arm and whispered, “She’s hot,” before he marched back to the stage.
My cheeks heated up.
Daniel laughed at his friend. “Don’t mind Randy. He’s a little…unique.”
“I like unique,” I said.
He lifted from his seat and smirked my way. “You’re intriguing. I like that about you.”
“You know what I like about you so far?” I asked, wiggling my butt around in my seat. He made me feel as if there were nothing more perfect than the booth in the back corner of Joe’s bar.
“What’s that?”
“Everything.” When I said the word, his face lit up and warmed me up from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. “Have fun up there,” I said, nodding toward the stage.
“You’ll stick around?” he asked with such a soft tone. Like a schoolboy asking a girl to come listen to his garage band for the first time.
“Yup.”
“Promise?” His hands slipped into his jeans pockets, and his hips swayed back and forth.
I ran my fingers across my eyebrow and felt as if my cheekbones were going to shatter from all of the grinning they were partaking in tonight. “Promise, promise.”
Five minutes ago I was lonely.
Five minutes ago I walked alone.
Five minutes later I told you the deepest secrets of my soul
And when you turned away I whispered, ‘Please don’t go.’
~ Romeo’s Quest
The show continued on, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Daniel for the remainder of the night. I could tell he loved what he did, and just the idea of that made me happy for him. When the final song finished, I stood with the rest and applauded in complete awe. He was brilliant. The whole band was ecstatic. Gabby would’ve loved them.
When Daniel looked down to me, I smiled and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” and he narrowed his eyes with a look of confusion, which I chose to ignore. I headed outside, knowing I’d stayed out longer than Hailey had thought I would, and she was probably having a panic attack, thinking that I’d stolen her car.
The warm air bustled through my hair. Digging into my pocket, I pulled out Hailey’s keys, ready to return to the place I had yet to call home.
“No name!” was shouted behind me, and I turned to see an exhausted-looking lead singer running my way. “What was that? Connect and run? You’re bailing without a goodbye?”
I opened my mouth and shrugged. “I said thank you.”
He slid his hands into his jeans. I could tell that the small breeze probably felt good against his bare arms after having stood under the hot lights in the bar. He stepped closer to me, and my body tensed up.
“I thought…” He paused and laughed. I thought he was laughing at himself. It was clear that I had
n’t done anything funny. “Never mind. It was nice meeting you.” He held his left hand out toward me and I shook it.
“Nice meeting you, too. Get inside and have a celebratory drink. You did amazing up there.” I chuckled.
He wasn’t smiling with his lips, but his eyes sparkled with care. “Was it your sister? Who you lost?”
I straightened up, taken aback by his words. “How did you know?”
Our hands still connected, he stepped one inch closer. “When you told the story about your golden, you spoke about her in past tense.”
“Oh.” That was all I could say. I didn’t know what else could be said, and just thinking about Gabby standing on that sidewalk was sending my waves of tears back.
“Still a new hurt?”
“Still fresh and ugly.”
“My mom passed a year ago. And last Friday I lost my dad to liver failure.” He stepped another inch closer.
My mouth dropped opened. “You just lost your father and you’re performing in a bar?”
“I’m pretty fucked up,” he whispered, tapping his finger against his head. I knew the feeling all too well. “He was an English teacher. The band was his idea, actually—a Shakespeare-themed band. Only Dad could’ve come up with that.” He paused. “People tell you over time it’s suppose to get easier but—”
“It just gets harder,” I said, understanding completely and stepping closer to him.
“And it gets old to everyone around you. People get tired of you bringing it up. People get burdened by your sadness. So you act like it doesn’t hurt anymore. Just so you can stop people from worrying about you. Just so you won’t annoy anyone with your grief.”
“You want to know something that sounds crazy?” I felt a bit insane for talking to a complete stranger about losing a family member, but the truth was that he was the first person who seemed to understand where I was coming from. “When I drove over here, I could have sworn my twin sister was sitting next to me in the car.”
I watched as his eyes filled with such a look of despair. The words ‘twin sister’ had probably run through his mind, giving him that pained expression. I felt bad that I’d made him feel bad. A person like him should always feel good.
“It’s fine,” I whispered, “I’m okay.”
He shifted his feet around. “Sometimes I swear I can smell my dad’s favorite cigar smoke floating around me.”
We silenced our thoughts for a moment and both glanced down to our hands, which were still attached from our ‘goodnight’ handshake. Then a nervous laugh happened. I wasn’t sure if it was his nervous laughter or mine.
I broke the stillness and stepped backwards. Looking up into his blue eyes, I blinked once, hoping to not miss too much of his stare. “Ashlyn,” I said, offering him my name.
He stumbled back a few steps with a wide, toothy smile. “Ashlyn,” he sang. “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more stunning, you pull out a name like that.”
I slipped my hands into my pockets and stared up at the night sky. It all seemed so simple. A bar with music that touched my soul. A boy who knew what it was like to lose a part of his joy. A light breeze that refreshed my entire being. “If there were a God, which I’m not certain that there is, do you think this night would be a form of apology for him taking away the things we loved?”
He released a breath and rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I don’t know. But I think it’s a good start.”
We were silent again. I’d never known that a silence could feel so much like home. He couldn’t stop smiling, yet neither could I. They were intense, cheesy grins that felt nothing but natural.
He broke the stillness and stepped backwards. “Well this has been a really fucking weird night.”
“I can second that.”
“All right then. I will stop bothering you and let you get going.”
“Yeah, of course. It’s just…” My words faded off, and he looked at me with narrowed eyes, waiting for me to finish. “I’m not ready to go yet. Because I know once I leave, all of this will be over. All of the magic of tonight that turned off my mind for a few hours will be gone and I’ll be sad Ashlyn again.”
“Are you asking me to make believe with you for a little while longer?” he asked.
I nodded with hopeful eyes, praying he wouldn’t think I was a total nut job.
He lifted my hand into his and nudged me in my shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he offered.
We took lap after lap around the block. I didn’t know why, but we started exchanging stories back and forth about our lives. On lap three, Daniel told me about his father, how they hadn’t been close until his mom died. Then they’d grown really close, and he regretted the years he’d lost due to being distant. He paused on the corner of Humboldt Street and James Avenue and took a deep inhale. Staring out into the night, he laced his fingers behind his neck and closed his eyes. I didn’t say anything because the regret in his body language was saying all that needed to be said.
I learned that he had a brother, but when I asked about him, Daniel’s body tensed up. “We don’t talk.” The words came out colder than anything I’d heard him say before. I didn’t ask more about it.
On lap four, we laughed about how overly tired we both were and how we hadn’t been able to truly sleep. On lap six, I cried. It started out with a few fallen tears but morphed into full-on waterworks, and Daniel didn’t ask me to explain. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into his chest, soothing tones leaving his lips.
I tried to choke out the words to tell him that I would be all right, but he warned me against them. He said that it was okay to not be okay. He explained that it was fine to be broken for a while, to not feel anything but hurt. We stayed on lap six the longest, him whispering against my hair that someday, somehow, the hurt would be overshadowed by the joy.
Later, I told him about the bucket list Gabby had crafted for me, and he asked to read it. Reaching into my purse, I pulled out the folded piece of paper and handed it to him. He held it with such care, unfolding it slowly. I watched his eyes travel from left to right as he moved his way down the list.
“Hula-hoop in a department store?” he questioned, arching an eyebrow my way.
I chuckled, nodding.
“Sing a Michael Jackson song at a karaoke bar, including dance moves?”
“I know, right? That one was more Gabby than it was me,” I replied.
He smiled at the list before folding it back up and handing it to me. He asked me how many I have checked off so far, making me sigh.
“None yet. I was supposed to dance on the bar tonight…but as you witnessed, I had a minor mental breakdown.”
“So you haven’t read a letter from your sister yet?”
“Not yet. I kind of want to just rip them all open but…”
He laughed as he started to walk around the block again. “But you don’t want to be that girl.”
“That girl?” I questioned, standing in place, staring in his direction.
“You know. The girl who deliberately disobeys her dead twin sister.”
I smiled. I knew it was twisted, and some would call it wrong what he said, but I smiled because heck…it was funny. I really missed funny moments in my life. “You’re right. I wouldn’t dare be that girl.”
“Besides…” He turned around toward me and bit into his bottom lip. He walked closer to me and playfully nudged me in the shoulder. “You’re about to complete one of the tasks.” When he said this, my nose wiggled and my eyebrows arched.
He laughed at my somewhat dumbfounded stance. When his face grew closer to mine, I let the air release from my mouth, brushing against his lips. It felt like forever that our mouths were millimeters apart, yet it was only truly a few seconds.
His lips didn’t only look soft and kissable—they looked talented as well. Like they could kiss someone even if they were on the other side of the world and make that person melt. It wasn’t long before I realized just how talented thos
e lips were.
Our lips connected in a way I’d never been kissed. There needed to be a new word for this type of kissing. Therapeutic. Poignant. Apologetic. Blissful. All of those beautifully diverse feelings—all at once. The overwhelming amount of emotions running through my body electrified the energy that traveled from me to him.
I knew I would never want to kiss another man from the way I kissed him. I never knew that kissing could be so simple yet so complex. He did all of the work with just his lips discovering mine.
He pulled me to the side of the bar and my back found the stone wall, but it wasn’t the wall that was holding me up as much as it was his touch. He leaned in closer to me and I felt his tongue part my lips, finding my tongue ready to become well aquatinted with his.
When his arms wrapped tighter around me, my leg reached up to find its final placement around his hips. A small gasp fell from me as his strong hands clasped around my bottom and lifted me up even higher, making my selfish want to wrap my legs around him become a desperate need in order to fight gravity.
Like a wandering star, my body fell into the depths of desire, and I began to beg the heavens that this wasn’t some depression-drenched fantasy—yet if it were, I hoped to never find reality again.
He moved his mouth away from mine, leaving me with my eyes closed and my heart open. I could feel his heart pounding against his t-shirt, and he placed his hand over my heart. Words were not needed because everything was felt from within, spilling out into each other’s fingertips.
One last time, his lips crossed mine, almost not touching, as a closing ceremony. When I opened my eyes, I found his stare, and he smiled toward me as he began to explain in more depth. “Number twenty-three.”
He slowly lowered me back to the ground. I looked down to the list still resting in my hands and quickly darted my eyes to number twenty-three.
#23. Kiss a stranger.
Well I’ll be damned. I kissed a stranger.
Loving Mr. Daniels Page 6