by Anthology
That’s what she said, I typed, then backspaced. Didn’t want that on my permanent record in case it pissed Amy off. And right now, as I reached for my pants and her engagement ring box tumbled out of the front pocket and nearly fell into a heating grate, pissed off was definitely not the state I wanted her in tonight.
The water in the bathroom stopped just as I cradled the diamond ring in my hands. I shoved it in the end table drawer and closed it quietly just as Amy walked in, covered with a towel and drying her long, wavy, brown hair. Her face was flushed and mouth turned in a funny, half-confused smile.
“You were…delayed?” Her eyes snapped to the phone next to me.
“Darla. Pestering me to get to rehearsal before the gig.” Not quite the truth, not quite a lie…but it didn’t feel right.
Amy took it as fact, snorting. “She goes into manager mode and becomes a dictator, doesn’t she?”
I smiled. “Jealous?”
Her snort doubled in sound. “Hardly. I’m studying to live in a nonstop quiet environment where I encourage people to lower their voices, not scream and clap harder.”
“And that’s the difference between you and Darla,” I said, walking toward the bathroom to take my own quick shower.
“That’s not the only difference,” she said firmly. I stopped and paused, wondering what to do next.
I thought about the ring, so close, so inviting. I could do this right now. No song, no stage, no showy moment, just ask her to be my wife for the rest of our lives in the afterglow of what we’d just had in bed. Maybe that was the perfect way to do this. Maybe that was—
Bzzz.
Amy’s phone jolted to life. She picked it up and stared at the screen, groaning.
“Your mom?” I asked. My erection disappeared in two words. World record.
She shook her head. “Worse.”
“Your brother?” Evan never texted her, so I was surprised.
“Group project,” she muttered, typing furiously with her thumbs. I exited to the sound of her grousing, smiling to myself.
Public proposal it was.
Which meant I would ask the love of my life to marry me while yodeling like a frog.
Amy
“You’re dressed a little too much like Liam’s sex doll for my comfort,” Sam said to me as I walked into the nightclub where the guys were setting up for tonight’s performance.
“What do you mean?” I looked down in horror. Random Acts of Crazy T-shirt. A short skirt. Red lipstick. Narrowing my eyes, I gave him the stinkeye, then shaped my mouth into a perfect “O” like a sex doll and winked.
He burst into laughter and slid his arms around my waist, yanking me into his body, his hardness evident. “You’re turning me on,” he whispered, hot breath making my neck tingle. His fingers combed through my long hair. I’d left it down and loose tonight, knowing he loved that.
“Sex dolls turn you on?” I murmured into his neck as he kissed my ear. My own hands sought out his body, confident now when I touched him. Permission long ago granted, I reveled in possessing the right to touch him at will, his muscled ass tight under fraying jeans that were so old they felt like suede under my hands, the cloth the color of a pale summer sky. We’d been together for more than a year now, and I loved him so much.
“You turn me on.” His kiss plunged right in, stubble grown out over three days to give him a bad-boy look scratching my face, his tongue hot and fevered. Always nervous before a performance, Sam used sex these days to center him. Calm him. Put him in The Zone.
“Get a room!” Joe shouted from across the too-well-lit nightclub. It was only seven o’clock, and the place was deserted. The doors wouldn’t open for another hour and the cleaning crew was working hard to wash the permanent mess of sloshed drinks off the painted concrete floor. The scent of bleach filled the room, and the blinding track lighting above made every blemish, every chipped stair, every scratch in the table tops stand out.
But the gig paid them each a grand or more, so we were here. Darla ran around with a clipboard and a bluetooth device jammed in her ear. You never knew if she was talking to you or to someone on the phone.
And speaking of Darla…
“They got a room!” she hollered back as Joe rolled his eyes. She looked at me as I broke the kiss and wiped my mouth, a little embarrassed, though that feeling was fading over time, too. Sam lived with Trevor and I’d seen more than my share of just how wild Darla, Trevor and Joe could get.
It made me and Sam feel like a nun and a monk in comparison.
“We do?” Sam asked, nose twitching with amusement. He grabbed my hand and we ran over to Darla. “Where? Point us to it.”
She pointed to a door marked “Custodian.”
“You want us to have sex in the mop closet?”
“It’s bigger than Amy’s old apartment,” she cracked.
“Hey!” Liam called out, running into the room. “What’s wrong with Amy’s old apartment?” Liam had taken over the lease when I had moved in with Sam and Trevor. My apartment had been so tiny you had to peel back the futon I slept on to open the front door the whole way. But it was cheap.
“It’s the size of your penis,” Joe shouted.
Meant to be an insult, Joe’s comment just emboldened Liam. “Why, thank you! I didn’t realize my dick was 300 feet square.”
“That’s your ego,” Darla said.
Liam shot her a pissed look and opened his mouth to retort, but was cut off by his own girlfriend.
“His penis is big enough, thank you,” said a calm, mature voice. Charlotte, Liam’s former ex, came into the nightclub dragging—yes, a sex doll.
“Esme 3.0!” Liam ran over to it and gave it a big hug.
“Seriously?” Charlotte said, giving him that look. “She gets attention before I do? You really do have a plastic girl fetish.”
“She doesn’t call my penis ‘big enough’.”
“You act like that’s an insult!” she said.
“It kind of is,” Joe and Sam said in unison. I swatted Sam’s chest and he grinned down at me.
“What am I supposed to say?” she asked, cocking one hip and raising an eyebrow.
“The truth. That my penis is huge. Enormous. So big it can’t possibly fit and—”
“Oh, Liam, your cock is so big it split me in two!” she intoned, using a sing-songy voice that made Sam laugh. “It’s so big it takes two mouths to fit it in!”
Trevor had walked in the room and was leaning against the threshold. He pointed to Esme. “That explains her.”
Charlotte made a decidedly indelicate sound that made me like her even more.
“At least I don’t have a chicken fetish,” Liam said loudly, grabbing Charlotte by the ass and lifting her off the floor in a great big bear hug. She was dressed so well, a black A-line dress with a big, wide red leather belt, matching earrings and white-and-black shoes. My own outfit made me feel like, well…
Esme 3.0, who was wearing a band T-shirt, a short skirt, red lipstick and—I looked down.
Chuck Taylors.
I cringed. My fashion tastes were the same as a fetish doll’s. Something was terribly wrong.
“Fuck you,” Trevor barked back. The jokes about Trevor’s ex-“fiance,” the chicken he’d stolen while high on peyote and naked on the Mass Turnpike, never got old. The band’s recent performance involving a live chicken on stage had generated viral video so popular that the band was making great money on internet advertising alone.
“I love Mavis,” Liam sighed. “But not the way you do. I love her for the money.”
Trevor threw an empty water bottle at Liam. It bounced off his forearm and hit Esme 3.0 in the head.
“What do you mean the fuse is shot?” Darla screamed into her phone. My eyes went to her and I calmed down. She wore a tattered flannel shirt, old “mom” jeans, and her hair was held off her face by a headband that was last popular when Bill Clinton was first elected.
She really was my tribe after all.
Charlotte peeled Liam off her and set Esme down on a chair. The doll’s face was frozen in permanent surprise, and she had the balance of a drunken frat boy. As she fell sideways and slid on the floor, poor Esme 3.0 gave the distinct impression that she was unlucky at love.
“Poor Esme,” I muttered.
“Amy got into law school today,” Sam blurted out.
Even Darla paused to stare, mouth open to a silent O for a single beat before she mad a loud whooping sound and chaos descended.
Snippets of conversation flowed over me like a verbal waterfall, mostly along the lines of “I didn’t know you wanted to go to law school!” and “Congratulations!”
Joe wandered by, bass in hand, and muttered, “Just what we need. More lawyers.”
“You can always leave Penn,” I shot back.
He gave me a half smile. “Maybe you know me better than I thought.”
My raised eyebrow was my response.
His answer: “Good job, Smithson.” Darla gave me a hurried hug and dragged him off, muttering something about the wrong cables for his bass.
Liam exchanged an odd look with Sam, whose fingers twitched at his hip, tapping some unseen beat. I grabbed his hand and interlaced my fingers with his. A long time ago I’d memorized the callouses between his fingers and on his knuckles, well worn from years of drumming. The pads of his fingers were a bit swollen, oddly enough.
I gave him a quizzical look. “Did you hurt your fingers?”
He and Liam gave each other those inscrutable looks again. “No,” Sam said quickly, snatching his hand away and shoving it in his back pocket. Was he not telling me something? Did my admittance to law school trouble him more than he was letting on?
My turn to look at someone, and it was Charlotte, who watched the scene with another arched eyebrow and an evaluative look. She shrugged.
Men.
Sam
I shoved my hand in my back pocket and my fingers brushed against the folded piece of paper I’d jammed in there earlier today.
My throat went dry.
Not that I needed that piece of paper. The song lyrics for the tune I’d written for Amy were seared in my brain. I couldn’t get the chorus out of my head, a chanting loop that filled up, well…all the space in my mind:
The space in between
Silence and love is filled by you
You’re my bridge, my tightrope, my lifeline, my lifeboat
My heart out there
Yes, you….
In a fit of madness the words spilled out of me one night, the only piece of paper I could find in the apartment a flyer for some pizza joint down the street, and I’d scribbled the words half-blind in the living room while Amy slept in my—our—bedroom.
The space in between silence and love
That’s what she filled. That’s who she was to me. She really was my lifeline, and the rest of the words had come slowly, in fits and starts, the whole picture of the song filling in.
Sharing it with Liam a month ago had been harder than writing the damn thing. We’d been at a practice with Trev and Joe, and Trev was in the can while Joe went out for coffee for us all.
Expecting Liam to laugh, I’d shoved it at him and said, “I want to perform this for Amy at one of our gigs. Like Trevor does for Darla.”
He’d read it carefully, frowning, then looked up at me, with a tilt to his head, eyes serious. “That’s really good. It’s short, but good. What’s the tune?”
“Tune?” I’d said, a sinking feeling hitting me. Fuck. Tune. It needed music, didn’t it? Lyrics weren’t enough.
“You’re not going to do a drum line to it while you sing, are you?” He’s snickered, the tension broken. “You need music. And to figure out which instruments you want.”
“Instruments?”
He parroted me. “Instruments. You know, those musical things the rest of us play on stage.”
“Fuck off. I know what an instrument is, I just…”
Flush.
The sound of running water, then Trevor came into the practice space. “Instrument?” He snatched the lyrics sheet from Liam and asked belatedly, “What’s this?” Squinting, he’d read the song in the warehouse’s shitty lighting, then looked at Liam with an appraising look.
“Not bad.”
Liam had pointed to me. “Sam wrote it.”
Red embarrassment pounded through me.
“Really not bad,” Trevor had added. He’d read through the song once more and said, “Ukelele,” as if it were the most natural word to utter at that moment.
“You-keh-huh?” I’d asked.
“Ukelele. Perfect.” He’d picked up a guitar and started riffing through the first few lines.
“That’s it!” I’d shouted. “That’s the tune in my head.”
“Then let’s get it out of your stupid head and onto this paper.”
An hour later, it was done. Scribbled notes on a score sheet gave me the song. Only one problem had remained:
“I don’t play ukelele,” I’d groaned. The end result of the first go of the song had been something wistful and longing, a little cute and folksy, but it worked. It was honest and true and I had hoped Amy would like it.
“You’ll play,” Liam had growled as Joe had shoved his ass against the door bar and exploded into the cavernous space, carrying cups of coffee big enough to drown a Great Dane in.
And during the next month those guys had taught me, by God.
The only problem?
Now I had to follow through.
Amy excused herself and was animatedly chattering with Charlotte, pointing to Esme and frowning. I pulled the page out of the back pocket and mouthed as I read along:
The Space In Between
I used to think
That silence was my only hope
That if I stayed quiet I couldn’t break my heart
But then you came into my life
And words weren’t enough
Suddenly
You made me want you more than—
The space in between
Silence and love is filled by you
You’re my bridge, my tightrope, my lifeline, my lifeboat
My heart out there
Yes, you….
Too many years
I left you in doubt
And pain and more
Now I’m here to tell you all the words you deserve
I love you, I need you, I want you, I feel you,
I—
Can’t fit them all in the space, the enormous space between
Silence and love…
The space in between
Silence and love is filled by you
You’re my bridge, my tightrope, my lifeline, my lifeboat
My heart out there
Yes, you….
Shit. It was corny, right? Cheesy and immature and all wrong. I couldn’t do this. What was I thinking? Amy had said over and over how romantic Trevor’s song was, how she wanted me to write one for her, how she didn’t want to pressure me, but…
You date someone for more than a year, love them for more than six years, and a simple song doesn’t seem like a big request.
What she didn’t know was that not only had I written her a song, but that folded note wasn’t the only thing I had in a pocket, waiting for her.
No, not that.
A box. From a jeweler.
Tonight I would propose.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, fingers beginning their nervous tap against my leg, guiding my heartbeat.
Please say yes.
Amy
I knew.
Sam didn’t know I knew, and in a way I wished I didn’t know, but I knew. The jeweler’s box had been rolled up inside a handkerchief in a drawer in his bedside table, and last week we’d been frantic for a condom during round three one night and…I found it.
Round three had been ah-MAZ-ing.
Keeping my mouth shut had been the hardest part. Knowing he wo
uld propose. Propose. Ask me to marry him. Mrs. Sam Hinton.
Amy Hinton.
Amy Smithson Hinton.
To hyphenate or not to hyphenate? That was the question.
No.
Will you marry me? was the question. My insides turned to liquid fire at the thought. Was tonight the night? Sam seemed so nervous and fidgety. Tonight was probably the night, and it suddenly occurred to me:
I was dressed like a sex doll.
Oh.My.God.
In my rush to get over here and help set up the band it didn’t even flit through my addled brain that maybe I should try to dress better than a character out of a Kevin Smith movie.
“What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked as I gravitated to her.
I pointed at Esme, then to my torso. Her eyes got huge.
“Oh,” she said softly. “I see. Wardrobe….”
“FAIL!” I moaned.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “No. You’re just cutting edge.”
“I don’t want to be cutting edge tonight,” I hissed.
“What’s so special about tonight?”
I cut my eyes to Sam, who was talking to Liam. “Because I think tonight’s the night,” I said through clenched teeth, “and I’m dressed like a tomboy from some ’70s Saturday morning cartoon show.”
“You’re not—” She interrupted herself and looked me over from head to toe. “Um…”
“I know!” I hissed. “And tonight is…”
“The night?” Charlotte’s jaw dropped. “You mean you two haven’t done it yet?”
“Done what…oooooh, no! No no no!”
“It’s fine,” she said, her face folding into an expression of pity that made my stomach shrivel like a raisin in an oven. “There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin at twenty-three. It’s kind of cute, actually.”
“I am not a virgin!” I practically shouted, just as Darla walked by.
“Amy? A virgin? Hell, no. She’s slept with Mr. Red-Blooded Drummer over there. We can hear her through the wall sometimes. Plus she had intimate relations with a variety of electronic devices.”
Charlotte snorted. “Who hasn’t?”
I glared a warning at Darla. Don’t even think about it, my eyes warned. Blood pounded through me, unsure whether to make my face flushed, force my heart outside my chest, or to pool inside my stomach and make me faint. It decided to do all three, it seemed.