I was starting to understand how frustrating it must be to actually be him.
When the chicken was gone, and we’d lost interest in the TV show, and Stacy hadn’t left, Adam went into my bedroom and found my guitar. He sat cross-legged on the sofa and strummed. I shut off the TV and joined Stacy on the love seat. She squeezed my hand hard and whispered, “Oh, my God! Private concert!” Okay, so she thought she was whispering.
Adam tuned the guitar by ear and asked Stacy, “You wanna hear something?”
Stacy flailed against me. “Holy fucking shit. Can you play ‘Dam Burst’?” She dug her phone out of her purse, but I laid a hand on her arm and shook my head.
“No videos, Stacy. Remember our conversation?” She’d made some improvements, though. She hadn’t tried to take a picture of Adam eating fried chicken. She hadn’t pocketed his half-eaten fried chicken.
Adam found the chord and strummed a rhythm. Then he sang. I didn’t even know the song, but Stacy clearly did. She mouthed the words along with him, swaying and grabbing my hand. I worried she might have an orgasm right there on my sofa. I had no clue she was that much of an ardent fan. It would’ve been funny if she turned out to be Pumpkin39.
Adam, for his part, lost himself in the song. His eyes closed, and his voice held so much emotion, I wondered where he’d gone to. I’d always held this cynical suspicion that pop/rock music was written in a factory and that the people singing it were puppets—this despite watching Micah struggle to write his songs and get his music out there.
When he finished singing, I asked, “When did you write that?”
“Ages ago. All our songs got changed when we went into the studio. I like playing them acoustic sometimes. It reminds me why I wrote them.”
Stacy said, “We should call Kelly over.” Then, without taking a breath. “Can you play ‘Expulsion’?”
Adam shook his head. “Maybe later. I wanna hear Eden play.”
Stacy blew a raspberry. She’d heard all my songs. I could skyrocket to the top of the charts, play Madison Square Garden, get interviewed on the TODAY show, and Stacy would never see me as any big deal. I guess she’d be the one who kept me grounded through fame and fortune. While treating my boyfriend like a mythological creature.
I took the guitar. I’d never tried to play “Expulsion” before, but I’d listened to it about forty-seven times since the night I sang it in Adam’s car with him. I strummed the first chord and sang, “In the beginning . . .”
Adam chuckled, and Stacy started singing along. As soon as Adam joined in, I found the harmony and slowed it way down.
When I set the guitar down, Stacy grinned like a giddy schoolgirl. “That was so much fun! And oh, my God, Adam, your voice is gorgeous.” Her eyes widened, and her hands flailed like she’d had one too many lattes. “You, too, Eden! You guys sound amazing together.”
Adam raised an eyebrow at me. “See? We should duet. Right, Stacy?”
She bounced. “Yes! And I’ll stand behind you guys and play the tambourine.”
I handed the guitar to Adam. “Maybe we should listen to you for a while.”
Eventually, Stacy left. Adam put the guitar back, and I gathered up the fried chicken trash. Stacy hadn’t asked Adam to autograph any of it.
Adam hummed and followed me into the kitchen, wrapping his hands around my waist from behind. He laid his head against mine. “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s record a song together tomorrow.”
I twisted around to face him. “What? Where? I have work tomorrow.”
“I know. I mean later. When you get off work, let’s drive to Brooklyn. My drummer Hervé will let us use his studio. It’ll be great!”
I gulped. “Are you serious?”
“Dead. Think about it.”
He helped me get the kitchen straight and then sat down on my bed while I jumped in the shower. When I came out of the bathroom, I discovered Adam fast asleep on top of the covers. I went around and took his shoes off, laying them on the floor. Then I helped him get under the blanket. I turned off the light and climbed in next to him with my head snuggled against his chest. His arm came over and circled me. I drifted off to his rhythmic breathing.
That was our third date.
Adam didn’t wake up early and make me breakfast. He didn’t wake up and snuggle with me, making me late for work. He didn’t wake up at all. I slid from the covers and threw on some clothes. He snorted and rolled on his side. I grabbed a granola bar and snuck out the front door. I tried to blow my mind with the knowledge that a rock star was sleeping in my bed, but it had lost its impact. I’d watched him scarf down a bucket of fried chicken.
* * *
An entire eight-hour workday lasted approximately ninety-two hours. Adam texted me starting around eleven, asking me to meet him for lunch, then coffee, then begging me to come home and spend the afternoon taking a “nap” with him. He tormented me with offers of hot-oil back rubs and promises to serenade me. Every single text made me ecstatic for exactly ten seconds.
In the first second, the phone beeped, and my heart jumped.
I spent the next two seconds in optimistic hope that it wouldn’t turn out to be Micah.
Second number four brought the confirmation that Adam had hit Send on a text just five seconds earlier.
The next three seconds were the best because everything Adam wrote was perfection.
Knowing he was thinking about me sustained me all the way through a bonus eighth second.
Seconds nine and ten were spent fighting the urge to grab my keys and drive home. But I couldn’t. There was work to do.
So the eleventh second brought a crushing loss and an immediate addictive need for another text. I reread the old texts until they lost the power to distract me from the never-ending day.
Every time my phone dinged, Kelly moved closer. After a while, she said, “I can’t stand it. It’s him, isn’t it? What’s he saying?”
That time the text didn’t say anything too personal, so I read it to her. I just found your perfume in the bathroom. Reminds me of the first night we met.
She nodded. “Yeah, you did smell pretty good when you went out that night. Where’d you get that perfume? I could use something new.”
This conversation spoiled my mood. Thanh had made me spend some time with Glenn earlier in the day, but Glenn no longer showed any interest in me. In fact, Glenn was downright surly. I chalked it up to him feeling embarrassed from the scorning of the week before.
Thanh suggested an alternative. “When was the last time I got you to wear the chemical in here?”
“The perfume? It’s been a week, Thanh.”
He picked up an iPad. “Hmm. A week.” He glanced at a spreadsheet and typed something in.
I grabbed his wrist. “What happens when it wears off?”
He pulled his arm free, oblivious to my internal distress. “We’ll see. I’m currently running longevity tests on the mice.” He widened his eyes. “Oh, but guess what? They’re starting trials on actual people for the first time this week!”
“You mean, other than me?”
All of Adam’s texts throughout the day gave me cause to shrug off some anecdotal evidence that the chemical might have kicked off a one-week fling. I knew I shouldn’t worry that Adam would lose interest in me as fast as Glenn had. After all, Glenn had no reason to carry a torch. It’s not like I’d ever licked the back of Glenn’s neck.
And when I came home from work, Adam was sitting on the front step with my guitar on his knee, strumming and humming. People drove through the parking lot or walked along the sidewalk, oblivious to the guy who, in another context, would have thousands of people screaming for him.
As soon as he saw me, he jumped up. “Can we go now?”
We drove across Staten Island, alternately singing along with the radio and asking each other dinner party questions.
“Okay, so you’re stuck on a desert island.” I looked over my shoulder and changed lanes. “One book, one album, an
d one food.”
“One food! That’s impossible.”
“Answer, please.”
He sucked on his lip, thinking. I was glad to see he took it so serious. “My book would be, uh, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. No, wait. Game of Thrones. All of them.”
“Cheater. What’s your album?”
“You know, Eden, they have these devices now called MP3 players. I could bring an entire library of music. What am I supposed to play an album on?”
It took us a little over an hour to get to Brooklyn.
Adam didn’t bother to knock on the front door of the brownstone. We followed a beckoning sound down the hall to an open door that led to a basement.
A short, muscled bald man with a circus mustache stood up from behind a drum assembly. “Adam!”
We walked across the room, and he put his hand out. “Hi. I’m Hervé. You must be Eden. I’ve heard so much about you.”
He winked at Adam, and I blushed furiously. What on earth could he have told someone about me after such a brief period of time, except—
“It’s nice to meet you, Hervé. Thank you for letting us use your studio.”
He laughed. “Anything for Adam. I have to admit I’m excited by what he wants to do.”
I raised my eyebrow at Adam. “What does he want to do?”
“He said you’re going to do an acoustic duet version of ‘Expulsion. ’ That’s going to be killer.”
Adam picked up a guitar. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. What you did with that song yesterday. It turned the song around.”
“But I just came up with that on the spot. I hardly planned it.”
“Can you do it again?”
I shrugged. “Probably. It was fairly simple. I’m not sure why—”
He took my hand and led me into a glassed-in booth. “We’re going to sit in here. See the soundboard there?” He pointed at another glassed-in room.
I nodded.
“Hervé’s going to be there recording. We may need to do this a few times, but if we can get it in one take, we can post a video to YouTube tonight.”
My stomach hurt. “YouTube?”
Before I could protest, he placed a black guitar into my hands. “Can you play this?”
It was a classical guitar. I sat down on a stool in the booth, put the strap around my shoulders, and set the guitar on my knee. It felt okay. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Great.”
It was moving way too fast. I couldn’t think. How could I record a song without practicing? I wasn’t sure I’d remember the words. He didn’t tell me what to do. He closed the booth door and stood outside the window. A tinny voice came through a speaker. “Okay, Eden. Can you start playing so we can set the levels?”
Relief. This wasn’t the take. I had a moment to practice. I strummed the chords to the song and hummed a couple of bars of the verse. Then I started to sing it. The lyrics came easy once I got going. I closed my eyes and kept playing, strumming or picking arpeggios as it felt right. The structure of the song was beautiful. Some of that was lost under layers of production on the radio version. When I finished the song, I looked up. Nobody had told me to stop.
Adam beamed on the other side of the glass. I spoke into the mic. “Are we ready to do this now?”
Hervé’s voice came through the speaker. “I think we got it.”
“What? But that was just practice.”
Hervé came out of his booth, so I got up and met the two of them in the main room. Adam was picking up a guitar as Hervé gave him directions. “I think it will work best if you can add in the rhythm guitar and sing the bass lines. Can you work with the vocal?”
I stood back as Adam disappeared into the booth. He put on headphones, and at Hervé’s go, he started to play. It was odd to listen to him because his vocals alone didn’t sound like a song. But when he was done and Hervé played it back, the result was stunning.
“That’s us?” I couldn’t believe it.
“I told you we should duet.”
Hervé shook his head. “Your voices complement each other so well. This is gorgeous. What are we going to do with it?”
“Can we mix it and then overlay the video?”
“What video?” I hadn’t seen a camera anywhere.
“Up there.” Hervé pointed into the booth. The camera was blatantly mounted on the wall. I hadn’t bothered to look.
I glanced at my phone. The entire process had taken less than forty-five minutes.
Hervé promised he’d continue to work on it and would have it up on YouTube later that night. We didn’t need to hang around unless we wanted to.
Adam laid his hand on my shoulder. “Hungry?”
“Starved.” We hadn’t stopped to eat any dinner.
“Do you want to go to my place? I may have some food there.” He raised his eyebrows, grinning expectantly.
If I went to his place, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to leave again, and I needed to be at work in the morning. “Can we grab something nearby? I need to be getting home soon. Some of us have a day job.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I know a place.”
We walked six blocks to a dark bar, and he ushered me to a corner table. I scanned the menu, and the waiter took our order.
When we were alone, I had to ask. “Are we always going to date in clandestine out-of-the-way restaurants?”
He shrugged.
I continued. “Because I know you don’t always hide when you go out.” I leaned forward. “You don’t have a problem being seen with notable people.” Or Adrianna.
His eyes grew big. “You think I don’t want to be seen with you?”
My turn to shrug. “Seems that way.”
“Oh, God. Eden, no. It’s just that—” He looked up at the ceiling. “You don’t know what you’d invite in if you went out with me in public.”
“You’re about to post a video of us on YouTube.”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
I didn’t understand at all. “How so?”
“Well, first of all, gossip rags don’t give a shit about what I do professionally, and they won’t pay much attention to that video. Fans will. They may not like it, and they may say horribly nasty things about the song, but they won’t find out where you live and go through your garbage to figure out your worst secret.”
“And if I go out with you publicly, you think that will happen?”
“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t want to find out. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Are you ready to climb into this bubble with me?”
I relaxed. It sounded reasonable. “But you know, I don’t want to hide forever.” I heard the presumption in that statement and was glad the dark hid my blush. “I mean, if—”
He caught the meaning. “Oh, right, well, if—”
Thankfully, our food arrived and saved us from an avalanche of filler words.
After we ate, he walked me back to where I’d parked my car. It wasn’t too late, but driving home would take time, and I’d gotten up early. He held my hand as we walked. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Working. You?”
“Not much. I’ll hook up with Micah and make sure they’re getting ready to come with us. My guys will meet up to rehearse later this week, but we’ve been touring the U.S. for the past eight months, so most of our prep will be in the logistics of getting our stuff to Dublin.”
We reached my car. “How long will you be gone?”
“A month. We’ll start in Dublin, and then we go elsewhere. I’ll have to pay attention so I don’t say ‘Hello, Frankfurt’ when I’m in Paris.”
I laughed. “A month doesn’t sound too bad. But do you realize I’ve known you less than two weeks?”
He pushed me against the car. “I know. I don’t know what it is about you, Eden Sinclair.” He dropped my hand and traced up my arm to my neck. He leaned in for a kiss, and my knees buckled. I knew I needed to get in the car and drive home, but my hands were under his shirt
, running up his back. He pulled me in tighter and dragged his fingers through my hair.
I turned my head to kiss his wrist and smelled something familiar, something . . .
“Adam, are you wearing my perfume?”
He hesitated.
I pulled his arm closer and breathed in. “You are, aren’t you?”
“No. I mean, just a little.” He shrugged. “I was missing you, and I found it, so I touched a little here. It’s not that weird.”
It smelled different on him somehow. It smelled delicious. I kissed his wrist again, then pulled him closer, kissing his lips, wanting him.
He drew back. “You sure you can’t come to my place? It’s not far.”
My breathing came ragged and fast. “I can’t stay the night. I need to be at work this week.” I fumbled in my purse for the key and pressed the Unlock. All the doors clicked open.
He took a step back, and I reached for the driver’s side door. His lips grazed the nape of my neck, and I shrugged my shoulders up.
“You smell so nice.” He spun me around and took my shoulders, kissing me so hard, my back pressed against the car.
He stopped and looked at me. “Is this normal?”
No.
“Have you ever—?”
“No, never—”
He ground himself into me “Do you want—?”
“Yes . . .”
My legs trembled. There was no way I’d be able to drive away, safely anyway. I turned, despite his groan of disappointment. But I opened the back door and pushed him to get in.
When the door closed behind us, I wiggled out of my pants and unbuttoned his. He let me undress him. I glanced out the window onto the deserted street and sidewalk and yanked his pants to the floor. The physics of the backseat worked against me, but Adam didn’t seem daunted. He sat there with his erection pointing sky high. His eyes were dilated, and his face was splotched.
“Shit. Condom.” He panted the words.
I cuffed my purse and knocked it upside down, shaking the contents everywhere. There in the pile of pens and movie stubs, I spied the corner of a wrapper. I snatched it up.
“I come prepared.”
Some Kind of Magic Page 13