The Inside Track: A License to Love Novel

by Tamsen Parker

  Lucky for me, Nick is not at a loss.

  “Hey, mind if I take her leash off? She’s a good dog, and she won’t mess with your stuff. Plus, she’s slow, so it’s hard for her to get into a lot of trouble.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Can I pet her?”

  “Definitely. She loves getting scratched behind her ears, and you know she likes you if she rolls over for belly rubs. It’s, uh, not dignified, but it’s hella cute.”

  Fiona is easier for me to look at than Nick. She inspires me to get on my knees and make cooing sounds and baby talk while I run my hands over her short fur, which eases the suffocating feeling a bit, whereas Nick… He’s making me feel things I don’t, ever. I mean sure, I get horny like most people do, but it’s more inconvenient than anything else, so I take care of it in various ways and then move on. I wish I just wanted to fuck him, but he makes my stomach bubble like it’s full of champagne simply by being near him and that’s new.

  I guess I can’t spend the entire afternoon petting Fiona, though, so eventually I push up to my feet, and there he is again.

  “Hey, do you have a bowl you don’t mind getting slobber on? I like to leave water out for her.”

  “Sure, sure. Kitchen’s this way, come on.”

  Nick

  * * *

  Following Dempsey into her kitchen, I maybe, possibly, okay, yes, totally, check out her butt. If these are her laundry-day jeans, her ass in her best pair would probably knock me unconscious. She’s curvy and kinda, I don’t want to make her sound like a partridge or anything, but…plump? Is that a word I can use about girls?

  What the fuck is with the partridge being in a pear tree anyway? Is that a thing they do? Do they like pear trees more than any other kind of tree? My mom used to ask me to sing the “Twelve Days of Christmas” when I was a kid, to keep me from getting into too much trouble. I bet I still remember all the words. But somehow I doubt singing a Christmas carol would impress Dempsey at all, and like I told Fi, we’ve got to impress this girl. Woman?

  My head’s starting to get overloaded with all the thoughts buzzing around. So I study Dempsey’s house to keep my brain in check. It’s really neat. Like freakishly so. It almost looks like a magazine shoot. The first time I did one of those, I was shocked that they didn’t actually want to take pictures of my house the way it was—Magda had even super-cleaned it before. No, they took out like, half my stuff and then added fake plants and other useless shit. By the time they actually took the pictures, it barely looked like my place at all.

  “Do you clean your house yourself?”

  Aw, man, I can almost feel my mother’s elbow in my side. That wasn’t polite. The corner of Dempsey’s mouth lifts up, though, as she reaches into a cabinet and gets out a wide, shallow bowl and then heads over to the sink where she turns on the faucet.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Dude, I am impressed. Magda—that’s my housekeeper and she’s the greatest—can get a room to look like this for like, a second, and then when I walk in, I feel like shit just flies out of drawers and falls off tables. Don’t worry, I pay her a ton because I’m a slob and I can’t keep track of my stuff at all.”

  Wow, if I’m trying to impress Dempsey, telling her that I basically live in a pigsty is probably not the best way to go if she keeps her place neat as a pin, huh? A-plus flirting, Fischer. Are we even flirting? She seemed happy to see me, but now she seems kinda twitchy, nervous.

  After setting the bowl down on the floor and Fi starting to chugalug out of it like slurping is an event at the Snow and Ice Games, Dempsey turns back to the sink and… She’s not washing her hands, because she’s not using soap and the water’s running more over her wrists than her hands? Is that a nervous thing? I don’t even know. But if it is, I can at least tell her a funny story about me losing shit and my dog, because she seems to like Fi a lot.

  “So, like, once I was supposed to meet up with my friends at this club, and I was trying to find my keys, and Magda had gone home for the night so she couldn’t help, and this was before I came up with a system. I have a bowl now I dump my important stuff I need to leave the house with, and that works pretty well. But before I figured that out? I looked everywhere. In the freezer, in the bathroom, in the front door, in my room—like, everywhere. And I couldn’t find my goddamn keys.”

  Dempsey’s leaning up against her kitchen counter now, her fingers curling over the edge, and it hits me again. How when she pays attention to me, it feels almost as good as when I’ve got a stadium full of people cheering me on. It’s even better than when we were talking on the phone, and that was already pretty incredible. I almost feel…tingly. Maybe it’s her eyes? They’re big and brown and warm and…I don’t know. People talk about eye daggers, but this is more like an eye hug. But that’s weird and a thing I definitely shouldn’t say out loud. I should keep telling her this awesome story instead.

  “I shit you not, I was looking for those fuckers for like an hour, and Fiona’s following me around, just trotting after me, and I’m tearing my hair out and swearing, and the guys are all texting me and I’m about to lose my frigging mind.”

  It hadn’t been a good scene, at all. You’d assume a guy who can’t think in a straight line would be able to just wander off and think of something else. But sometimes I get fixated on stuff like whoa and I can’t let it go. Like, I’ve forgotten to eat or sleep or whatever other human-type things we all need to do because I’ve been so focused. That’s why I don’t play video games without the guys. I can get sucked into a game and play with no breaks for like dangerous amounts of time.

  Sometimes that focus comes in handy, like if I’m trying to help Zane iron out a song or we’re playing a long set at a concert or whatever, but for the most part, I feel good when it’s happening and like shit when it’s over. It’s like my brain doesn’t tell my body that my energy account is overdrawn.

  “So where were they?”

  “Where were what?”

  Dempsey makes kind of a duckface. “Your keys?”

  Right. Story. “Well, finally, I gave up. I texted my friends, told them I wasn’t coming, grabbed myself a beer outta my fridge, and sat on the couch and turned on this Netflix show I was totally digging. But Fi came and stood in front of me and just stared. Usually she likes to cuddle on the couch, but she wouldn’t climb up. She didn’t even sit or flop over. And in case you couldn’t tell, it takes her a lot of energy to stay upright. I mean, look at that giant head, and her jowls. And like, her stubby little legs. She’s the cutest, but come on, it’s exhausting to be alive when you look like that. I’m thinking something must really be wrong. So I tried letting her out, but she wouldn’t go, just stood by the door and glared at me. I refilled her water, I gave her her favorite treat, I tried playing tug-of-war, and she was not having it. Finally I went to go feed her because I could’ve sworn I had when I got home, so she shouldn’t have been hungry again, but it wouldn’t be the first time I forgot, so I go over and open up the bin and—”

  “Your keys were in the dog food? Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, can you believe it? And I swear Fi was trying to tell me, because she’s the best dog ever. Aren’t you, princess?”

  Fiona makes a huffing sound and then flops over onto her back, waving her leg nuggets in the air. Which looks especially ridiculous in this dress. But I give her the requested belly rubs, because I’m not going to say no to my best girl.

  Dempsey

  * * *

  Nick has been regaling me for hours with stories. He’s barely stopped talking all through our takeout sushi. Also, he wasn’t kidding about Fiona liking sushi. She ate half a spider roll from chopsticks. But not before Nick took her dress off so she wouldn’t get soy sauce on it. I just can’t even with these two.

  Except I very much can. Between the two of them, I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in years. And while I’d usually be watching the clock after I’ve had strangers in my house for so long, I find that when I do catch a
glimpse at the time, I’m startled by how many hours have passed.

  After feeding Fiona, Nick has downed almost all of his sushi. When he’s not telling stories that mostly consist of embarrassing anecdotes about himself, he’s asking me questions. And he’s constantly digging his phone out to look stuff up on it because his mind is seriously never still. I think of myself as having a very active interior life, but Nick’s got like the Fourth of July plus the Super Bowl plus Mardi Gras plus Burning Man plus the Snow and Ice Games plus some other shit going on in his brain all the time. It should probably be tiring, but mostly I’m in awe and entertained. I like his chatter and his energy, how he seems to expand to fill all the spaces in my house I hadn’t realized were empty.

  He looks up at me, and I get this pang of what if he says they’re leaving? A few hours ago, I would’ve thought I’d be relieved to get rid of them, but I find myself wondering if he and Fi have dinner plans.

  “Hey, Demps? Wait, can I call you Demps? Or is that too familiar? We don’t know each other real well, and I like Dempsey, but Demps just sounds friendlier, more chill. We’re cool, right?”

  That is a lot of questions, and my chest constricts with a short laugh. “Yes, you can call me Demps, yes, we’re cool, and was there something you wanted to ask me?”

  “Yeah. Two things. One, do you want to play a game? Do you even have any games? I usually play video games with my friends, but I had this mad craving for like an old-school board game. I’m talking like Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders or some shit. Do you have any of those?”

  “I have Scrabble,” I offer.

  “Oh, yeah, sweet. But I warn you, I will play curse words. It’s just gonna happen, so sorry in advance.”

  That is somehow unsurprising. “What’s the second thing?”

  “Second thing?”

  “You said there were two…?”

  I have to confess that I’ve watched footage of License to Game performing, have been frustrated that the cameras seem to gravitate more toward Zane and Teague, though I suppose that’s not surprising because Zane’s the lead singer and Teague’s “the hot one.” It seems like the only times Nick gets the camera to focus on him for more than a short pan are when he’s up to some kind of nonsense. Of which there are plenty.

  But when he’s not being an absolute nutball—there was totally a video of him doing a naked one-handed cartwheel while holding his guitar—he seems very focused. Like his music is the one thing that can ground him for any length of time. Is he any less wired whenever he has a guitar in his hands? Or if it’s only when he’s performing? I think I’d like to find out.

  In the meantime, he’s remembered what he meant his second inquiry to be.

  “Oh, yeah, Fi needs to go outside. Want to go for a walk?”

  No, no, I do not. Nor can I even if I wanted to. But I’m enjoying his company, and I don’t want to send him scurrying away instead of playing what I’m expecting to be the best game of Scrabble ever. So I hedge.

  “Why don’t you take her and I’ll go hunting for the Scrabble box? I’m not quite sure where I stored it.”

  Liar. I played last month with Oona while we drank tea and ate macarons that she brought me from my favorite bakery. But it’s a convenient reason to give, and lucky for me, Nick doesn’t think to call me on the fact that we could easily go on a walk and then look for the Scrabble box. And by we, I mean him and some other hypothetical Dempsey Lawrence.

  Nick

  * * *

  When Fi and I get back from our walk around the neighborhood, I’m a little surprised Dempsey locked the door after us. We weren’t gone long—like, maybe twenty minutes? And her neighborhood’s pretty nice, but whatever. I know I’m a dude and I can afford to think that way and it’s different for women. Which sucks.

  Anyway, she lets us back in, and she must’ve found the Scrabble board pretty quick, because it’s set up with all the tiles flipped over in the box top and everything. Fi goes and slurps down some water, and I plop myself onto the couch, rubbing my hands together. Any kind of memory game I’m total crap at, but shit like this and Boggle, I’m kind of amazing at because this is what my brain does all the time, makes leaps and patterns from things that seem unrelated and turns them into something that makes sense. To me, anyway.

  We pick our letters, and I start. And when we’ve gone a couple of rounds, I get the best letters ever. Dempsey side-eyes me pretty hard as I start dancing in my chair, but when she sees my masterpiece, she’ll understand, oh yes, she will.

  But when I lay down my tiles, her side-eye intensifies.

  “Dude, you can’t put ‘bromance’ down. Why don’t you just use ‘romance’?”

  “I totally can use ‘bromance,’ and if I only put ‘romance,’ I don’t get the triple-word score.”

  I will not tell the girl in front of me who I’d really like to date that it hadn’t even occurred to me to only play “romance.” That maybe says something about my dating life and probably not anything good. But Dempsey doesn’t need to know that.

  “But ‘bromance’ isn’t a real word.”

  “Uh, yeah, it is. And I think Zane, Teague, Benji, and Christian would be really insulted that you think our love for each other isn’t real.”

  She gives me an are-you-fucking-kidding-me look that I know well. Get it from Fiona all the time, and before her, from my mom and my sisters. Where do women learn to do that? Guys just don’t have the same skill at withering stares. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sure your feelings for…all of those people are pure and true. However, I don’t think ‘bromance’ is in the dictionary.”

  Ah-ha, got her. “Merriam-Webster begs to differ.”

  “But—”

  “No, no, no. Let’s make a wager about this. If I’m wrong, I’ll give you anything you want.”

  “And if you’re right?”

  She raises a flirty, teasing eyebrow, and it does something to me. I don’t know exactly what, but I do know it feels good and I like it. A lot.

  “If I’m right? I’d really like to kiss you.”

  Her lips part and she blinks, and for a second I think I’ve gone too far. We’ve been having fun, I know we have, but maybe she feels as though it’s been in a friends way? Which is obviously fine. I like friends. But I feel like there’s a different flavor to what’s going on here. It’s like ice cream. Ice cream is always good. Chocolate? Strawberry? Mint chocolate chip? Good, good, and good. But my absolute favorite is sweet potato with torched marshmallow, and it’s probably a giant leap because we’ve known each other for what, a couple of phone calls and most of a day spent together? But there’s something to be said for chemistry and feeling a spark with someone when you first meet, and not just because your asshole older brother dragged his feet on the carpet and gave you the shock of your life. No, the shock of your early days of childhood, because you bet your ass I’ve electrocuted myself pretty good on all kinds of shit in the intervening years.

  But instead of telling me to get the fuck out, she gets this tiny little smile and says, “Yeah, okay.”

  We both stare at each other. I think because the game has just changed. Not only is there an attraction of the getting-it-on kind between us, but we’ve both acknowledged it.

  Then her flirty smile turns kinda mercenary and her eyes narrow. She’s about to roast my ass, I can tell. And to be honest, I’ll probably like it. “But hold up. What exactly are the terms of this deal? Because words in the dictionary and words permitted in Scrabble are not the same. So how are you defining ‘correct’?”

  Well, shit. “Are you sure you’re not a lawyer? That sounds like something a lawyer would say.”

  Dempsey turns up her nose, looking prissy as all get out. “I’m not a lawyer, nor have I gone to law school.”

  “Wait, don’t you have to go to law school to be a lawyer? And why would you go to law school but not be a lawyer?”

  Not that I’m an expert in school of any kind and definitel
y not law school, but it seems like you should go to law school to be a lawyer? Like doctors should definitely go to med school. And also, why the fuck would you go through law school—which seems like absolute hell, uh, yeah, I’ve seen Legally Blonde, thanks—and then not be a lawyer?

  Dempsey gives me a look like she’s reluctant to wade into my tangent with me, but she’s going to anyhow. “You don’t actually have to go to law school to be a lawyer, you just have to pass the bar exam in whatever state you want to practice in. Or pass it in a state that has reciprocity. And some people go to law school but don’t take the bar because they don’t actually want to practice law. They want to be consultants or legal scholars or all kinds of other things. All of which is beside the point.”

  Yep. Welcome to a drop in the ocean of my brain. Pretty much like this all the time.

  “What we were supposed to be talking about is the terms of this bet. My position was that you can’t put down ‘bromance’ because it’s not an accepted Scrabble word. Your position is that ‘bromance’ is in fact a real word, but you seemed more interested in the dictionary definition, which would not necessarily permit you to use it in the game. So which is it?”

  “Both? I don’t like making decisions. Race you for the answer.”

  I whip out my phone and dismiss a few texts from the guys; I’ll talk to them later because we’re meeting up. Dempsey is right behind me, and a moment later, we’re both shoving our phones in the other person’s face and declaring ourselves victorious.

  Huh. Turns out we’re both right. Bromance is indeed in the dictionary, but it isn’t an acceptable Scrabble word. I scratch my neck behind my ear. “So now what do we do? We both won, but we both lost. Is it a draw? Should we rock–paper–scissors for it?”

  That’s how we solve a lot of our disagreements in the band. That or Benji and I wrestle. But I don’t think Dempsey and I are going to wrestle. Like, maybe sexy wrestle at some point because that would be awesome. And I’ve always wanted to be one of those WWF dudes with their faked matches because their costumes are rad and I don’t care that it’s not really a real wrestling match. It’s still a performance, still art. Why does something being rehearsed make it worth any less?