Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things

by Morgan Lee Miller

  “You guys were, like, the It couple for that whole summer. The internet wouldn’t stop talking about you two.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I know. It was probably the most stressful six months of my life. That’s when all the stalking and the rumors happened. I guess that’s what happens when you date an It boy, right?”

  “You know, it was Zeke Fowler’s show that put us on the map. They played one of our songs during their season two finale.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yup. It was our first claim to fame. Got people buying our music.”

  Zeke Fowler was an actor in this TV show about superheroes. He played a character inspired by Lex Luthor, and his evil ways on the show just enhanced his tall, dark, handsome looks…if I was into that. I sure as hell wasn’t. And I wasn’t into superheroes, but I was all into them using our music. Once the show used our EP song on their finale, it was a hit, and we found ourselves on the top one hundred most downloaded songs for a few weeks.

  “So, what happened with you and Zeke then?” I said.

  “Well, he’s an actor and a model, and you combine both of those, and you get one melodramatic narcissist. My second album came out, it won a few Grammys, I had my first headlining tour, and he didn’t feel that high and mighty anymore. He felt intimidated. I think he wanted to be more famous and successful than me. Like, he got off on the thought of taking this Hollywood noob under his huge biceps and parading her around to parties like fresh meat but instantly hated when I started winning Grammys and sold out big venues, and he wasn’t winning any awards. So, he broke up with me.”

  “He dumped you?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, can you believe that? Men and their fragile egos.”

  “And then you swore off men and found yourself a woman? Nice.”

  “Well, I didn’t swear off men, but a really hot woman bought me a drink at the Grammys, and it went from there.”

  “I still can’t believe you dated a woman, and I didn’t even know!”

  “Seriously? ‘By the Way’ is about my ex-girlfriend.”

  She caught me. I didn’t know the songs on her second album. “By the Way” was this upbeat, poppy breakup anthem everyone listened to with a really catchy bass line. Except for me, apparently. It was also her opening song to her show. This whole time, I had a lesbian song dancing in front of my face, and I had no idea.

  I was the worst lesbian in the world.

  “Who’s your ex-girlfriend?” I asked eagerly. I needed to know the type of women Reagan Moore fell for…since she was complimenting my looks in robes and bathing suits. “Is she famous?”

  “A little. Jessie Byrd?”

  My mouth met gravity once again. Jessie Byrd was a solo act, singing pop folk that found its way onto the Top 40 radio stations. I loved her music, then secretly hated her because she was so good at songwriting and playing the guitar. She was our competition and completely destroying us at it. She wasn’t selling out arenas, but I don’t think she cried about that at night. She was one of the most popular, relatively unknown singer-songwriters that all the TV shows wanted to use for their dramatic moments. She was very pretty, with memorable hazel eyes, but had some mysterious swagger that I didn’t know how else to describe. Just something about her was edgy and cool. I followed her on Instagram because I had a crush on her face and her career. They only shared a few Instagram pictures of each other, but those pictures gave no indication that they were dating.

  I so envied Jessie Byrd. On top of her writing and musicianship, she was actually rewarded with Reagan’s smiles, more than what I had—the smiles I liked to pretend were because she thought I was pretty.

  “I thought you guys were just friends,” I admitted. “Honestly. Maybe even writing a song? I kind of was hoping for that.”

  “Yeah, we definitely weren’t friends. She was my girlfriend for seven months, and those seven months were really fucking electric.”

  Describing her relationship with a woman as “fucking electric” should have sparked something in me, like a rush of excitement that my tiny little crush used such words about a woman. Instead, it was a painful shock of pure jealousy to my core. I didn’t even know she had the ability to make me feel that until she said Jessie Byrd was “fucking electric.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked, fishing for more details to settle the envy in my stomach.

  Reagan huffed. “Guess she got bored. I don’t know. She kinda has a track record of going through girls, so I don’t know why I thought I’d be any different. I was pretty devastated. Not heartbroken but devastated in the sense that I was so emotionally invested in it and felt all these intense feelings whenever we were together or texted or FaceTimed, just for her to drop me like a dime. Knife to the heart.”

  All that information made me look at her in a different light now. I always thought she was intimidatingly beautiful but so far out of my league that I didn’t let more than a thought or two of making out with her consume much of my brain.

  Until she told me her ex-girlfriend was Jessie Byrd and that I looked good in a bikini. Then the woman who I thought I was used to seeing was someone totally different. Someone who liked girls. Someone who was interested in dark-haired singer/songwriters who liked to brood in their music while drinking beers on stage—except that Miles and I didn’t drink on stage at the Reagan Moore concerts. The average age she attracted was much younger than our own shows.

  Damn it, one snap of a finger and I had a full-blown schoolgirl crush on the headliner of the tour I was on.

  “So, now I know how to shut you up,” she said to break the silence, gently flicking drops of water at my face to snap me out of my trance.

  “So, you definitely were hitting on me earlier?”

  “When you allowed me to put sunscreen on you, were you hitting on me?”

  “I, uh, well…”

  “Who’s stuttering now?” she said with an aggressive point at me.

  I blushed and sunk farther into the pool to hide. “You look good in your bikini too, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “It does. You can enjoy it while I head on out now.”

  She winked. As if my face couldn’t feel any warmer. She whisked herself around and walked up the steps of the shallow end onto the deck. I felt anchored to my spot as I watched water drip, down her back, and off her bikini bottoms. She dried herself with her towel before wrapping it around her waist.

  “You coming, or are you gonna stay there and drool in the pool?” she asked.

  Man, was she a thorn in my side, but also the excitement I needed to revive the life back in me.

  Two could play this game. She was the one who first said I looked good in my bikini, so as I got out of the pool, I grabbed my robe, quickly dried myself off, slung the robe over my shoulder, and refused to wrap myself up. She thought I looked good in a bathing suit? She could watch me until the elevator carried her up to her penthouse suite. I strutted to the door and held it open for her. Those eyes trailed from my lips, down to my breasts, down to my waist, to my legs, then all the way back up to my eyes.

  “You’re not cold?” she said after that really long and obvious glance over.

  “It’s hard to feel cold when your compliment makes me feel so hot,” I said with a facetious wink.

  She blinked a few times, accepted my invitation inside the hotel, and we didn’t say a word until the elevator closed us inside tight quarters. I could feel her looking at me from her peripheral, and I sensed that she saw me looking at her from the corner of my eye by the way her lips curled upward as if she felt victorious.

  By the time we got to my floor, I regretted my decision to not bury myself in the robe. Goose bumps broke all over my body, and the thought of cocooning in the duvet on my comfy, king-sized hotel bed felt amazing and wonderful. But what also felt wonderful was, when the elevator doors opened, Reagan’s eyes fell back down to my breasts before flitting back up to me as if she accidentally dropped her gaze like a wet bar of soa
p.

  “See, swimming after hours wasn’t that bad,” I said.

  This crush developed at rapid speed. Her eyes churned my insides in the best possible way, a way that made me automatically smile as a reflex.

  “No, not at all.” She scratched her nose. “Um, yeah, thanks for the good day, Blair.”

  “I’m here anytime you need a spontaneous adventure.”

  I stepped out of the elevator, and as the doors started to close, I stopped one with my hands. “Oh, and, Reagan?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Just so we’re even on the compliments, you have a really nice smile. Just thought you should know.”

  Chapter Five

  “Mom, you sold the house?” I whined, sitting up straight while FaceTiming her as the Reagan Moore fleet traveled from Charleston to Raleigh.

  A mountain of cardboard boxes containing our Irvine life towered behind her as she showed off the empty house where I grew up. Grandma and Gramps’s house. The last remaining thing we had left of them.

  And she smiled at me as if this was an accomplishment. As if she was actually glad to rid herself of the home we spent ten years in.

  “Why are you telling me this now that the whole house is packed?”

  “Because I knew what your reaction would be,” she said and sat in Gramps’s computer chair with the vacant bookshelf behind her cleared of all his records and record player. Now, it really was only a memory.

  “But it’s their house,” I said.

  “It doesn’t feel like home to me anymore, and I don’t need a four-thousand-square-foot house just for me. It’s too much. You’ll love the condo I bought though. It has a loft.”

  “You already bought a condo?”

  “Yes, in Los Feliz. Oh, Blair, it’s so beautiful. You’ll have your own room when you come visit me.”

  I couldn’t believe it. We spoke on the phone at least twice a week, and now I was finding out she was moving out of the Irvine house when the house was already packed up? I was furious at her. But as much as I wanted to yell and express my frustrations, seeing her smile beat all the angry emotions in me. As much as my gut twisted from moving on from the place that would serve as a time capsule for all my wonderful memories I had of my grandparents, Mom looked hopeful.

  “Honey, I know you feel attached to this house because it’s your grandparents’,” she said with much more sympathy than before, “but if I’m going to live by myself, I’m not gonna do it in something too big for me. This is the first time in my life I’m able to buy something for myself, and it’s scary and exciting at the same time. I’m forty-four years old and haven’t had anything except for a Chevy Cruze in my name.”

  She guilt-tripped me without really trying. Mom was right. She’d spent eighteen years trying to raise me as she matured throughout her twenties and thirties. Then right when she finally got her bachelor’s degree in business, after taking classes for years while juggling administration jobs, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she stayed in their Irvine house to take care of her rather than follow through with the plan of buying her own place. She didn’t want to leave Grandma, even though both of her parents insisted that she still move out. But she never did. After Grandma died, Mom wanted to keep her grieving father company since he was just as miserable without Grandma as I was miserable without both of them.

  Mom spent the past twenty-four years taking care of everyone but herself. She’d never been married. Never had a serious boyfriend since my shitty father. In six years, she lost both of her parents to cancer. I guess I didn’t blame her for wanting to sell the house to start a new life in her control. I just really hated to let go of the one last thing that still smelled like my grandparents.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said through a heavy sigh.

  “Just because I’m moving out of the house doesn’t mean I’m forgetting about them, hon. It means I’m trying to move on and continue upward.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just—I really loved that house.”

  “I know you did. But selling the house is what I need to do. My therapist says I should consolidate because having all this space is a reminder of what I’ve lost. Oh, and guess what else?”

  I pressed my lips together for a moment, hoping that she wasn’t going to deliver more bad news. “What?”

  “I have a date later this week.”

  My eyes widened. My mom had only dated two men that I knew of. My dad and then some guy named Mark for about a year when I was fifteen. The rest of her time she spent working her ass off, taking care of her family, finishing her education, and taking extra hours as a receptionist at the hospital.

  “You have a date?”

  “Yes!” She squealed like a little girl. Was this really my mother I was talking to? I could only remember the rage burning in her eyes when she found out I was suspended for three days because during a drug lockdown, one of those drug dogs sniffed the eighth of weed I had in my car. I didn’t think they were so cute after that. That memory of her jaw set firmly, eyes drilling in how disappointed and angry she was totally belied the shriek and school-age grin that consumed her face over a man. Gone were the days of tossing glares at her rowdy daughter, and hello to the days Mom acted like a little schoolgirl because she had a date. She informed me she actually had three dates with three different men the past three weeks. A lot of threes for me to remember. I’d never been prouder of my mother until hearing about all her dates. And here I thought my life was thrilling because Reagan Moore said I looked good in a bathing suit. But seeing my mom’s smile and her voice climbing up an octave was a great moment for me to witness.

  I guess there was more to Mom than just being a mom.

  Apparently, his name was Greg, a business executive who lived in Beverly Hills, which meant he was probably some obnoxious rich dude who voted for Donald Trump because of his “fabulous tax plan.” Mom lectured me about how I needed to stop assuming things about people who I’d never met.

  While Mom’s love life was booming like a Fourth of July fireworks display, mine was utterly confusing. While the Reagan Moore fleet traveled up Georgia and the Carolinas, I couldn’t tell if it was my dreams causing me to act weird around her or if something started swelling between us. Since our time in Miami, our post-show wine chats brought us together on the same sectional couch in her bus, or she’d invite me to her hotel room. Each show, I’d noticed the space between us close the more comfortable we became around each other. Her insults became harsher, but still, that beautiful smile eased her words a little bit. In return, I’d playfully hit her arm or leg or whatever body part was closest to me because I just wanted to have an excuse to touch her.

  As I tried forcing myself to go to sleep, still hearing murmurs from Miles and Corbin snorting in their sleep, my mind would go back to Reagan’s bus and she’d finally kiss me, like, push me up against the kitchenette, kiss me. Imagining those lips on me stirred the warmth underneath my clothes and jolted a flutter in my chest. Damn it, it really sucked living with two boys plus our bus driver because all those nights kissing Reagan over and over in my head really collected tension in my body that needed to be released.

  * * *

  To continue the nostalgia train that kept chugging in circles in my brain thinking about Mom moving, our next stop was the first city I ever called home: Nashville, Tennessee.

  When I was thirteen, Gramps moved us from Nashville to LA when he started his label with his longtime friend and former bandmate. Although when asked where I was from, I always answered Irvine, a part of my heart still belonged to this city, and I was so glad to be back for the first time in eleven years.

  It was also Reagan’s hometown, and my body craved being next to her so it could soak up all her attention, but her parents and two older brothers lived right outside the city in Franklin, so she was spending the day with them.

  So, third wheeling it with Miles and Ethan, I showed those Southern California boys the very little culture that Am
erica had, and the best culture—in my opinion—was Southern culture. Forget about the animal-style burgers at In-N-Out Burger, fish tacos, and avocado toast, Miles’s stomach had never been introduced to proper barbecue or hot chicken before. And I didn’t know about Ethan, but the lack of twang in his voice and lack of knowledge about hot chicken proved to me that his stomach hadn’t fully lived. So, I took them to my favorite barbecue spot that Gramps always treated me to on the best days, indulging in slathered ribs, hot chicken, warm, buttery biscuits, and banana pudding with vanilla wafers.

  We eventually waddled our full bellies down Broadway Street to a scotch saloon that served as our nightcap while we listened to live country music. I pounded back scotch after scotch, wondering what Reagan was up to, and how empty the Irvine house was, and reliving the first memory of Gramps introducing me to Nashville hot chicken and always laughing when I managed to get barbecue sauce all over my face.

  I really missed his laugh. And all the scotch I drank filled my nose with the smell of Gramps. Nashville, scotch, and live music. If that wasn’t Gramps’s heaven, then I don’t know what was.

  Everything leading up to that moment in the cramped, dingy scotch bar was great, so why the grief stacked on top of me like bricks when I was with my best friend in a city I absolutely loved and missed was beyond me. I sat there in my own corner of the table, watching Miles and Ethan carry on effortlessly. Actually, it felt as if everyone carried on effortlessly. Mom too, even though I knew that wasn’t the case, but her tossing that house to the side for a new one still clung to my brain. Even though I knew it was the right decision for her, and I was genuinely happy that she was excited about having a place to herself and finally entering the dating scene, it still made me wonder how she did it. I carried the weight of Gramps’s death with me every night, and anytime it became too much, I poured myself another large glass of wine while I was talking to Reagan after shows, or I pounded back another shot in the green rooms, or I lit a joint and relaxed into my seat, but none of those were working.