by Libby Austin
“You, stubborn and not asking for help?” I feigned shock. “I would never have believed it.”
“Okay, smart ass, get a move on. I’m sure RB wants to go home soon.”
“RB?”
“Rainbow Bright.”
“Gotcha.” I reached for both paintings, being sure not to smudge the wet paint.
After we were back in the Jeep, Layna mentioned she was hungry.
“There’s an Arby’s on the way home. I’ve been craving their curly fries ever since you said RB back at the studio.” Layna agreed to my suggestion, saying they had the best curly fries ever. I had to agree.
“Does that happen to you often?” Layna asked once we were seated in a booth, digging into our food.
“Does what happen often?” I answered her question with a question because I wasn’t sure which occurrence she was referring to.
“People stopping to stare at you when you’re doing everyday things like ordering fast food,” she pointed out. We had received quite a few stares from the staff, but I was positive it wasn’t because of me.
“No, not really. Most people around here are pretty used to us being out and about when we’re in town. Unless you’re in a boy band or looking for trouble, you get left alone for the most part. Besides, I don’t think they were looking at me.” I gave her a pointed look.
My observation seemed to stun her. “Why would they be looking at me? I’m nobody special, just an average twenty-eight-year-old.”
I couldn’t believe she thought she was average. Layna was beautiful. The more I got to know her, the prettier she became. It was a shame she didn’t see the same thing, but I couldn’t tell her my thoughts. My rules were there for a reason, so I stuck to the safe area.
“Probably because you look like you’ve been reenacting Mel Gibson’s role as William Wallace in Braveheart.”
Her head snapped to study her reflection in the window, then she started digging in her bag until she pulled out a mirror. “Why didn’t you tell me I had blue paint smeared all over my face?” she complained as she began trying to rub it off.
“It’s hardly smeared all over your face. It’s a couple of blue smudges.” Layna stopped rubbing to glare at me. “What? I thought you’d seen it and just didn’t care,” I defended myself. “I’d been trying to act gentlemanly by not pointing it out. I feel like this is one of those situations where I’m going to be wrong no matter what I say, like when a woman asks, ‘Do I look fat in this?’ And there’s just no right way to answer that question.”
“This is so not the same as a woman asking how she looks in an outfit. And I’m not in the habit of checking myself out in windows. Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to go to the ladies’ room and clean my face before someone snaps a picture and uploads it to the Internet with the caption ‘Brand Carmichael has a Smurf fetish’ or some such nonsense.” Then she got up and huffed off to the restroom as fast as she could go on her crutches.
I wasn’t worried about anything getting uploaded. Most people didn’t recognize me because they didn’t expect to see ‘Brand Carmichael, guitarist for Inert Motion’ out doing mundane things, but I could only imagine the ribbing I would receive from Bow if such a thing were to happen. He would be sure I never lived it down. But one good thing came out of this; I knew how old Layna was, and she had told me through no fault of mine.
LAYNA’S FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT FOR HER foot was today. Last night, while we were involved in one of her mandatory Band Jam sessions, she informed me that if she got good news at her appointment, we would be doing something to celebrate afterward. The options for celebrating would be limited because good news meant getting a walking cast or a boot, but Layna was upbeat and happy, so that was all that mattered. When I asked what we would be doing, she said it would be a surprise since I had coordinated our last outing. Her excitement at getting to plan something that I was willingly taking part in was so evident that I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hated surprises. I would much rather know what was going to happen.
Even for as long as I had cultivated a laidback, easygoing persona, it was something I had to keep working on because it no longer came naturally to me. There have been so many times I was on the verge of panicking when plans were altered at the last minute or something malfunctioned on stage. Only the desire to never go back to the dark days where fear and anxiety controlled my life kept me from succumbing to my fears.
Reminding myself that I had done the same thing to Layna just two days ago didn’t help curb my nerves. My mind needed to be kept busy, so I decided to talk to Barrett and fill him in on Layna’s and my painting excursion.
“You better have some details of a date with your lovely neighbor,” was Barrett’s greeting when I reached him.
“Hey, man, it wasn’t a date,” I argued, not bothered by the lack of ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ Our conversations tended to progress as if they’d never stopped. “You didn’t say it had to be a date. You said I had to spend time getting to know her. So we were two friends getting to know each other while we took part in an activity outside of our respective homes, per your instructions.”
Barrett didn’t say anything about Layna’s and my outing, so I called his name to see if he was still there. “Barrett?”
“Hmm, oh, what?” he said with a yawn. “I fell asleep listening to that lame, boring-ass description of a date with your single, attractive neighbor. What are y’all gonna do next? Get your nails done and gossip about the cute guy she’s flirting with at work?”
“It wasn’t a date. If she happens to find someone at work she’s wants to date, it’s no skin off my nose. It’ll just be another reason not to have to spend time with her.” There was a sliver of hope that if I kept repeating that mantra to myself, it would be true. I knew it wouldn’t be fair not to want Layna to date anyone when I wasn’t willing to become involved with her, but the thought of not spending time with her created a different kind of hollowness in my chest. There was another part of me that wished she would find someone to date and I would have another excuse to ignore the feelings she stirred within me. I hadn’t felt anything like this since I was sixteen years old. That part of me had been shut off and sealed away. It was the way I had protected myself. Now there was Layna, and she was slowly chipping away at the cement vault in which I’d locked away any desire for a relationship that extended beyond friendship.
The guys had been safe. Friendships, or, more accurately, friendships with people who had no idea about my past, were the only type of ‘relationship’ I was interested in maintaining. When I met Ruff during my first semester in college, he offered friendship without pushing. Guys just don’t sit around asking each other about their past and their feelings and shit. They accepted me as a guy who enjoyed music and was a decent musician. Everything else was superfluous details to them.
“Riiight. Keep telling yourself that crap. I hope she does it just to put a chink in that armor of yours.”
“Well, it won’t be tonight because she’s already going out with me.” So there, asshole!
“See, you called it a date.”
“I did not call it a date,” I argued, sure that I hadn’t used the word date.
“You said ‘going out with me,’ which equals a date.”
“It’s just a figure of speech. What the hell have you been reading? Cosmo or something?” There was no way I was going on a date with Layna. Not happening. Two friends spending time together, doing stuff they enjoyed, was not dating.
“Did you have dinner the other night?” Barrett asked.
“Yes, but—”
“What did the two of you do after dinner?”
What the hell was this? The Third Degree a la Barrett? “We went to a painting class. What does this have to do—”
“Did you pay or did you each pay for your own class?”
“I paid because I invited her. It would have been rude to ask her to pay.” This argument was beginning to sound all too familiar.
“Who’s picking tonight’s agenda?”
“Jeez, Barrett, what’s with the barrage of questions?” I felt like I should be strapped to a chair with a bright light shining in my eyes.
“Just answer the question,” he ordered.
“She is. But I fail to—”
“Are you gonna let her pay?”
“Of course not.” I was a bit offended by his suggestion. We were raised to be generous and thoughtful. There were many times I picked up the check for the guys, especially when we were first starting out.
“Then it’s a date!” Barrett declared as if he had the final say on the matter. Which he didn’t.
“It’s not a date!”
“She’s attractive, right?”
“Well, yeah. She’s …” I struggled to find a word to describe her that didn’t make me sound infatuated. “She’s cute.”
“Cute is what you use to describe a puppy. Come on, Brand, you use words for a living. You have to come up with a better description than cute.”
All the adjectives and descriptive phrases I could think of didn’t seem to capture what I saw or felt when I was around Layna.
“Umm, you know how Mom and Dad like to sit and read together because they enjoy just being with each other?” I asked Barrett.
“Yeah, Mom said that was how she knew Dad was the one, even though it took him asking her to marry him three times before she said yes.”
Our mom and dad met on a train from Baltimore to New York. Dad was on his way to meet a client, and Mom was going to visit a friend who was a student at NYU. My dad sat next to my mom and took some paperwork out of his briefcase without saying anything to her. She was irritated because she was working on a project for her economics class and it wasn’t going very well.
After listening to her muttering to herself and realizing the plan she was concocting was deeply flawed, he told my mom her business would fail within a year.
“Oh, you’re familiar with economics and finance?” she’d asked him.
“I know a little,” he’d replied.
Now, my dad saying he knew a little about economics was like Mozart and Beethoven saying they could pick out “Chopsticks” on the piano. By the age of twenty-seven, he’d earned a B.A. from Wharton and an M.B.A. from Columbia, and he’d already made his first million and was well on his way to further financial success. For the rest of the train ride, he explained the flaws within her paper. When they pulled into the train station, he told her he would be in the city for a few days and would be happy to help her with her project.
Instead of living it up in New York for the weekend, my mom took him up on his offer. They spent their evenings together, working on her project. My mom said my dad had a way of breaking complicated financial theory down into layman’s terms. On her last night in New York, he gave her his business card and told her to contact him if she needed anything in the future.
Using my dad’s advice, my mom reworked her entire paper. The A she received on the paper helped her pull her final grade up to a B. She sent my dad a copy of her paper and a thank you card. When she received a letter in reply two weeks later, she was shocked, but responded with another letter. They corresponded over the next year and a half and met a couple of times, whenever business brought my dad back to the East Coast, until my mom graduated from college.
My dad flew out for her graduation and proposed to her that night. She told him no. On the same day, for the next two years, he traveled to wherever my mom was and proposed to her again. The third time was the charm and she said yes.
My mom has always been a very free-spirited, busy person who can’t stand to be idle. She rarely stays in one place for very long, whereas my dad is very quiet and laidback. I can’t remember what the exact conversation was, but her telling me she knew my dad was the one because he made silence comfortable stood out in my mind. My grandfather—my mom’s dad—was a very stern, austere man. He believed children should be seen very little and never heard. For my mom growing up, there hadn’t been any lively dinner conversations or rambunctious playing inside. She was rarely allowed to play outside or be spontaneous. As an adult, she rebelled against the constraints of her childhood. Our home was always filled with music, a TV show, or the sounds of whatever Barrett and I were up to.
I was more like my mom, even as a kid, constantly in motion, whereas Barrett was calm like our dad. Always moving was something I carried with me into adulthood. I hated staying in one place too long, but being away from my comfort zone was hard. Traveling with the guys, I got the best of both worlds; I was constantly moving with people who provided me a sense of familiarity and comfort.
“Well, that’s kind of how being around Layna makes me feel. She makes the silence easier,” I admitted to myself, as much as to Barrett, for the first time. “Most of the time we’ve been doing stuff, but the other night when we were painting, we didn’t talk a lot. The two of us sat side by side and painted in the relative quiet. I’m pretty sure if she hadn’t been there, the quiet would have driven me up a wall.”
“You always were one to have the music blaring. I’m surprised your hearing isn’t permanently damaged,” Barrett kidded in an effort to lighten things up a little. “You should be glad you’re that comfortable around her. She seems nice from the way you’ve described her.”
“Layna is nice, but I don’t see how that changes anything.” I wouldn’t break my rules, and she was only living here temporarily, so it’s not like we were going to be in each other’s pockets that long.
“Dude, just relax and live a little. You don’t want to open yourself up and let someone in long term, so why not have some fun? Give Layna a chance to see more of the guy behind the mask.” I started to tell him it was no use, but he interrupted me. “Just try having a real relationship where you don’t hide who you really are. Let somebody see all of you for the first time in your adult life.”
“What’s the point in getting involved in a relationship that isn’t going anywhere? Why put myself out there for that?” A relationship without trust was doomed to fail, and I couldn’t see myself trusting anyone.
“Just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it’s a failure. People come and go from our lives for all kinds of reasons. You can’t trust everyone, but maybe you can trust one person and see how it goes. Layna could quite possibly surprise you. I have a good feeling about her, so give it a shot.”
I knew Barrett wanted this for himself as well me. He wanted to feel better about how he left me in the aftermath, but just like he told me nothing was my fault, I knew he hadn’t made the choice to leave. “I’ll try, but I’m not making any promises,” I conceded because easing some of his burden of guilt might ease the weight of the guilt holding me down.
“That’s all I ask. You should probably try to get some rest before your date tonight. Knowing you, you probably look like hell. And a shave wouldn’t hurt. The ladies aren’t fond of whisker burn in sensitive areas if you catch my drift.” At that, Barrett began laughing like a hyena.
“There will be no sensitive areas exposed to whisker burn, so it doesn’t matter if I shave or not, jackass.”
“Whatever you say. Go get some beauty rest, and I’ll catch up with you later. I expect date details next time. By—”
“No, remember we said we’d never say that to each other again.” It was semantics, but I never wanted to hear Barrett tell me bye again. My heart began to pound at the mere thought of hearing him say the word. Hearing Barrett say it would probably send me into a full-on panic attack.
“Okay, dude, chill out. I’ll catch you later. Better?”
“Yes, anything but … you know.” I took a couple of deep breaths to settle my heart rate and calm myself down.
“Catch ya later, Brand.”
“Catch ya later, Barrett.”
Without thinking to set an alarm on my phone, I rolled over and fell asleep.
THE LOUD EXPLOSION WOKE ME from my dream. As us
ual, my skin was coated in sticky sweat, my heart pounded, and my breath came in rapid pants. What left me even more disconcerted than I normally felt when I awoke from the dream was I woke up at the wrong part of the dream. In all the years I’d been having this recurring dream, I woke at the exact same moment, unless something else caused me to wake up first. Two seconds later, I had the answer to what had woken me when the booming sound of thunder cracked five seconds before lightning lit the darkened sky.
Thunderstorms didn’t bother me unless I was asleep. Any sudden, loud noise when I was sleeping would startle me awake. In the past, it hadn’t been a big deal because I was getting decent sleep. But over the past year, my sleeping habits had taken a drastic hit as the dream that haunted me returned no matter when I slept.
I swung my legs over the side of my bed. No need to move the blankets; I’d kicked them off as I slept. Most likely, they’d been tossed aside not long after I fell asleep. I rubbed my face and shook my head as if that would dispel the images clouding my brain.
Reaching for my phone, I checked the time. It was a little after three. There was no way I was going back to sleep, so I decided to go work out¸ even though I’d already worked out with Mark this morning. I’d stopped working out when the dream first began recurring frequently, but I figured out that working out helped to make me more tired in order to get any sleep I could, and it diverted the guys’ attention so they stopped watching me and checking up on me at weird times.
I’ve had the dream at various times over the years, but it’s frequency increased as the turmoil inside of me flared when the guys began pairing off and things within the band began changing. Those things happening together had caused me to start to withdraw from the guys. When I realized they’d assigned me a babysitter, I knew I had to act more like the normal Brand they all knew, or things were going to get much worse for me. The guys had no idea about my past, and I planned to keep it that way, but it wouldn’t stop them from kicking me out of the band. So I pulled myself together enough to make it through the rest of the tour and hoped the hiatus would be short lived.