I don’t need sympathy. Or my parents’ money.
And I sure as hell don’t need another two-faced man in my life.
When I met Gavin, I thought he was a different person. He was happy. He was funny. He was cute and clever and — as a nice but not necessary bonus — just happened to be attractive enough to launch more ships than Helen of Troy. I’ll admit, his personality and the way he looked at me (like I was worth looking at and being around, I suppose, less plain than I know I am) made me tingle.
In those first hours, before Gavin Adams ruined Gavin Adams for me, I was definitely taken. I wanted him to come back. I wanted to talk to him the next day, and the next. I wanted him to keep looking at me like he had, and make me believe in myself the way I’ll need to if I want my dream to come true.
I’d have been spared all of that unnecessary sentimentality if I’d just met the real Gavin from the start. If he’d never come into the Nosh Pit.
If the first time I’d seen him was onstage, I’d have probably felt the same tingle as the other female audience members during his set … but then been immediately repulsed by his actions afterward. It would have been over practically before it began.
As I look at the door into the hallway, I wonder why I’m thinking all of this. It’s like I’m trying to convince myself, or make myself feel better. My thoughts are full of regret: If only this had happened, or hadn’t. But you tend to think If only when what’s happened isn’t something you want.
I’m pretty much over Gavin. For sure.
Except, I wonder if I am.
The way he walked by just now, I almost wanted to go to him. To see what was wrong. But that’s what’s so dangerous about this, and what proves I need to get over whatever little crush I must still have as soon as humanly possible. Because Brian was that way, too, and sometimes I’m a sucker. He’d act horribly then seem lost with regret. And I’d go to him, like a fool.
Just like I want to go to Gavin now.
To find out what’s wrong, conveniently forgetting that he sleeps around. That he’s arrogant and self-absorbed in his rock star persona. That he’s dismissive. Two-faced. And that even now, as I feel the pull to follow and soothe him, I know that he just finished chewing someone out like an asshole prima donna.
I force myself to ignore my impulse. Whatever’s wrong with Gavin right now, if anything, is his damned problem. It’s his fault, and he surely deserves what he gets.
He’s wrong for me. I’ve been down that road before, and the worst thing in the world I could do would be to let him know I’m still interested in knowing him better. For a guy like that, it’d only encourage him. It’d only make things that much worse.
The bar is getting ready to open, so I find Danny and ask if he needs anything else. Richard, who hangs out near the door and always acts as if there’s a conspiracy afoot, tries telling me that he needs something, but I don’t particularly feel like playing games.
I need to hold onto my convictions and my focus.
I know what I want, and what I don’t.
I just wish the lines between the two would stop blurring.
CHAPTER 14
Abigail
I’m much more interested in hearing Gavin’s set than I want to admit.
As on Friday, the music starts at eight. And like yesterday, the music on tap must be about the same mood because the chairs are still arranged in semi-concert mode. As far as I can see, the lineup looks about the same, too. This is my first weekend at the Overlook, so it’s possible this is more of Danny’s unconventional style: recycling acts from Friday to Saturday without fail. It works for Danny; the Overlook is always crowded on weekends. But it seems strange to me.
I could probably hunt down a schedule somewhere, but the crowd keeps me hopping with drink orders so I can’t check. I ask Terry if he has one, but he doesn’t. I let it go for a while and try to pretend there’s no specific reason I care. A shift is a shift, and I’ll be out of here around 1 a.m. Which acts play in the meantime doesn’t matter at all.
But as I work, I find myself continuing to hum the partial song I heard Gavin playing earlier. Something about it speaks to me, and my mind continues to search for accompanying words — strictly as an intellectual exercise, of course, seeing as I’m through with Gavin and all he creates.
The night goes surprisingly well. Tips come early and often. I wonder if Saturday night crowds are happier. Everyone is well behaved; I’m making money; I’m enjoying chatting with customers. The song, reluctant as I am to have it orbiting my space because it’s Gavin’s, gives my feet rhythm. I find myself practically skipping.
After an hour or so of good-feeling, profitable work, I start to wonder if I’m being unfair.
Gavin was definitely full of himself onstage last night, and he did go home with a floozy — or at least left the premises with one. But those are his choices, right? I’m acting like he’s my boyfriend, which he isn’t and never will be. And if he’s not — especially if I’m going to get more weekend shifts and we’ll be spending more time around each other — maybe it’s best that I find a way to make peace with the idea of Gavin.
Feeling exceedingly proud of myself for being the bigger person, I decide that no, I don’t like the man. But there’s no reason for me to hate him, either.
Even if he’s a prima donna.
Even if he’s rude and ignores me.
Even if he’s two-faced.
Even if he shouts at people and raises a fuss.
Yes. I can abide him. It’s only fair to myself.
And maybe it’s okay that I like his song.
And maybe it’s okay that I kind of liked hearing him play it — not just the song, but the guy with the guitar bringing it to life.
And really, maybe it’s okay that last night, I was genuinely moved by his set. He’s a good musician. There are plenty of excellent musicians who have detestable personalities.
I keep looking at the clock. I’m waiting for 10 because that’s when Gavin went on last night.
I ask Carla, one of the other waitresses, if she knows for sure when Gavin goes on. She tells me 10, but then gives me this little knowing look, and I’m all of a sudden on the defensive again.
Ten rolls around, and Gavin takes the stage. The song is still playing in my head, and I wonder if it’s something he’s been figuring out to try tonight. He must make new stuff all the time, so it makes sense. I’m eager, and the anticipation feels like a building sneeze, bringing all of me to attention. I feel the need for completion, seeing as I only heard one little piece of the music.
Does the hook repeat? Or play just once? Does the chorus carry the same rhythm? It must have words; it feels like something that would. Nothing Gavin did last night had lyrics, but somehow I’m sure that tonight, if he plays the new song, it will. I realize I’ve never heard him sing, though some of the others say he occasionally sings when the place is closed, trying stuff out.
I want to hear that voice on more than just YouTube. If I can get over myself and tolerate Gavin, then it’s okay to be eager to hear him sing. It’s like the music has tickled me, but the tickle whetted my appetite. Others have heard his singing live, and they say it’s beautiful. I find myself resenting those other people. I want it for my own ears, to feel what they must have felt.
But he only plays the same song — the one from last night: acoustic, without any words.
The crowd doesn’t seem to mind. I look around and see the same looks from last night. It might even be a lot of the same crowd; they shuffled my section, so if the same folks have lined up their usual tables, I wouldn’t necessarily know. Maybe this is a thing. Maybe people come to hear the music over and over. Maybe they come to hear Gavin over and over.
The doe-eyed way the women are watching him (while the men do nearly the same, or at least slip into passivity), maybe it’s all one big conditioned response. Last night, a crowd surrounded him, and he went home with one girl. Maybe they’re hoping he’ll do the sa
me tonight, so that even the music — the prelude to seduction, as it were — gets them hot and bothered.
Carla slides up beside me at the bar. I hadn’t noticed, but several of the other waitresses — all of them very pretty, and in an obvious but not offensive way — are already mere feet away. How did I not see them? Have they been here all along? I haven’t been here staring at Gavin for that long, have I?
“Not easy to work when he’s playing, is it?” Carla asks me.
I turn, almost feeling caught. “What?”
“Gavin Adams. I figured he’d snared you in his spell when you were asking earlier.”
“I was just curious. I’ve heard about him around town.”
Carla gives me an oh-come-on look. “You don’t normally work weekends, Abigail. I know you don’t because I usually do.”
I’m not sure if this is an insult. Maybe she’s trying to establish a pecking order among the Overlook’s cocktail waitresses — to be the Roxanne of this place. She’s reminding me that the weekend spots I’ve coveted, she’s had all along. And maybe she’s trying to remind me that if I want to ogle Gavin, I’d better get in line.
I consider telling her that I’m not ogling him, even though she didn’t say as much. I’m fascinated by the music. His little hook from earlier is quite the earworm, and I’ve been unable to shake it. Same for Firecracker Confession’s catalog, found on YouTube — made somehow more mysterious, freshened by this adaptation to nonvocal acoustic.
“So?”
“Everyone slows down when he’s onstage.”
A girl farther down the bar — a black girl with beautiful velvet skin whose name I don’t know, stares right at Gavin and says, “It feels like his music is reaching right inside your panties, doesn’t it?”
I feel like this comment might make me blush, and with my fair skin and red hair, it almost certainly shows. It would be a full-body blush, of course. They’d see it on my arms. They’d see it anywhere that’s usually pale, but swells pink with blood.
I look over, but it’s another waitress who laughs. Not at me, I don’t think, but it feels like a near-miss. Her eyes are on Gavin, same as the others. He’s between songs, and we should be circulating through our customers’ tables, gathering glasses and inquiring on orders without disturbing their enjoyment. But we’re not. We’re all watching Gavin shift his tall, solid body around onstage, watching his fingers find their places on the strings.
“Dream on, Heather,” says the speaker — a petite blonde with perky little boobs that are a bit more on display than uniform code suggests. I don’t know her name, either. I’m pretty sure we all met when I came in last night, but I was hardly listening.
“I don’t have to dream, Sugar.”
Something in me jolts. I look at Heather.
“I don’t either,” says the blonde, whose name probably isn’t really Sugar.
I’m suddenly sure there will be a catfight — two waitresses realizing that they’ve both slept with the club’s hottest act, or at least posturing in the same direction — but the women just meet each other’s eyes and laugh.
“Play your cards right, and I’ll bet he notices you too, Abigail,” Carla tells me.
My stomach is turning in knots. So this is what it’s about? He picks through the wait staff and chooses different girls to sample, as if from a buffet? I’m revolted. I look at Gavin onstage. But at the same time, I’m not totally revolted. I’d never admit this, not even to Lisa … but the idea of being used by Gavin in the way these girls describe sounds as delicious as it is hideous.
I have too much self-respect for something like that, but my mind goes there anyway. I watch his hands on the frets and imagine those fingers playing me. I watch his serious eyes and pressed lips, imagining them on mine. I’d never do it, knowing how he is and how he notches his bedpost, but nobody can see inside my head right now and there’s no harm in imagining. He is beautiful, after all — pig that he is.
“Something about musicians,” says Heather, the black girl. “Even if they’re not as smoking as he is, the music makes them hot.” She pauses, and I think she wets her lips. “Although trust me, that man up there is as hot all over his body as he is with what you can see right now.”
I glance at her before returning my eyes to the stage. Heather is taller than me and looks like a model. Even if I was pathetic enough to want to be noticed by Gavin, it’s hard to imagine he ever would. The other waitresses — like those at the Nosh Pit, now that I think about it — look like they’re straight from a long casting couch. Next to girls like this, I’m the sprig of grass that got stuffed into a bouquet of lilies by mistake.
“You’ve both slept with him?” I find myself asking. The words have an edge. I’m accusing as much as asking, in the spirit of girl talk.
“Mmm-hmm,” says the blonde. There’s no shame. No concern over being just two in a long string of meaningless encounters. Don’t they have any self-respect? Or was it good enough that they figure they got what they needed as much as Gavin did?
Again, my mind spills into the gutter as we watch Gavin play. They got what they needed. In the strictest sense, I have some need of my own brewing for sure. I haven’t had a serious boyfriend since Brian, and I’ve barely had flings since. It’s just not how I’m wired. I can’t have sex with someone I don’t see at least the potential of some sort of future with, and I’ve gone on my few dates in Inferno knowing I just wasn’t ready.
But if I could be that kind of girl? If I could drop my shyness and rules long enough to try, for once, to merely scratch that itch? My best lover to date is my shower massager, and that includes my ex-fiancé. Plenty of girls can turn off the commitment thing, too.
I’ll admit it. As much as I don’t want to hear these women talk about their encounters with Gavin, I also kind of do. Secretly, hidden and never discussed, I can picture a different version of myself where they’ve lain. I imagine Gavin’s handsome, serious, brooding face as it moves into position, eclipsing the glow of a light above us. I can imagine the pressure between my legs, see him moving in my mind’s eye, his skin sheening with sweat. I can feel my lips wanting to part just a bit, even now. I can almost feel his thrusts, and my release. Finally. Blissfully.
That’s who he is. I could wait for my spot in line. And maybe, if I were lucky, I’d be chosen.
It’s degrading.
It’s insulting.
But throughout the rest of Gavin’s set, after the waitresses have scattered back to work, I can’t stop seeing and feeling that torrid night unfold in my head, anticipation making me tingle in all the wrong places.
CHAPTER 15
Abigail
I wonder if I could do it.
I hate to admit it, but I’m turned on enough by the end of the night that I’m considering heading up to Gavin and seeing if we could have a little talk. It’s irrational beyond measure and not me at all, but the point of moving away from Hartford and to Inferno Falls was to start over as someone else. I don’t have my parents’ money; I’m cut off even if I hadn’t cut myself off. I’m not the brainy little rich girl who skipped out on a Princeton scholarship anymore. Now I’m …
Well, I already have a persona here. And like it or not, I’m two varieties of waitress — not the free, artistic, self-determined spirit I always fantasized I’d one day be. Things have ground to a halt, but the stodgy, useless parts of my personality have already moved from my Hartford self and become permanently lodged in my Inferno self. I don’t want to be a goodie two-shoes here who’s above screwing a handsome rocker for a single night of good times. But I am, like it or not.
I force myself to stay away. To look the other direction when his set ends, ignoring all the girls who line up to touch him. I’m better than that. Yes, I’m riled up, and yes, I’m thinking irrationally. I may have imagine things I’d never do, like cornering him in the back and doing things to him that only the worst sluts might imagine. I comfort myself in knowing that what’s in my mind is only
my reality if I allow it, and that nobody’s to blame for their fantasies or dreams. It’s another part of us that thinks those things, and I refuse to act.
I finish my shift. For a while, it’s terribly uncomfortable, but the urges subside with my eye on the ball. I become myself again, and as I do, my heart quickens at the sense of a near-miss. I would never have done those things … or would I? I don’t think so, but part of me remembers how urgent things had felt, after I’d heard the other waitresses’ stories and let Gavin’s hypnotic music squirm its way beneath my clothes. I’d been plenty irrational. Maybe willpower and dignity had kept me from acting. Maybe it was luck.
As the night winds down, I again find myself stocking bottles under the bar. I remember Gavin coming over at the same point yesterday trying to talk, and how I blew him off.
I realize I was acting like that not because he was a pig, but because I felt angry and hurt. Our discussion at the Nosh Pit had been a silent kind of promise. I’d expected one kind of man, and the Gavin I’d seen performing (and mingling afterward) didn’t match.
I’d only feel that way if I was attracted to Gavin. If the thoughts I’ve been fighting tonight hadn’t been there from the start — albeit in less dirty forms.
I felt angry last night, and tormented tonight. Even feeling normal, without the sense of a hand down the front of my pants, is torment. Because I’m keeping those sensations at bay by staying busy and not looking in Gavin’s direction. I can be my usual, honorable, self-respecting self as long as I forget he exists. But how sustainable is that?
For one, I might run into him at any time. Now that I know who he is, I’m sure I’ll start to see him around town where he’s previously been a face in the crowd. He could return to the Nosh Pit. And with me stepping into Meg’s shoes after her firing, I’d guess that my wishes at the Overlook will continue to come true, too, and I’ll keep working these lucrative Friday and Saturday nights. If that’s the case, I’ll see Gavin twice every week. Worse: I’ll see and hear him perform twice every week. I hate that standing and listening to Gavin’s songs makes me feel naked. When he looks at me from the stage, which he did a few times tonight, it’s like he can see right through me. I can feel that whole-body blush, and it’s as if I’m on display. As if, were he to ask, I’d be his for the taking.
The Forbidden Muse (Inferno Falls #2) Page 8