by Nella Tyler
We’d met in the parking lot for the club about an hour before doors were set to open; even then, there were at least twenty or thirty people in front of us in line. I saw a few more people crossing the parking lot to get to the end of the line, which stretched another thirty people behind us.
After another fifteen minutes or so of small talk, the line started to actually move. “You do have the tickets, right?” I glanced at Natalie; I hadn’t even thought to ask her in all the time we’d been waiting.
“They haven’t left my sight since I got them,” she confirmed, taking them out of her bag and showing me.
I laughed. “You must have really wanted to come to this show.”
“I thought it was going to be the first one I was going to end up missing since I started listening to his music,” she admitted. “I probably shouldn’t have accepted the gift, but we’ve already crossed so many other professional boundaries that honestly…” She shrugged.
The people at the door were apparently good at their jobs as the line kept moving steadily, and in a matter of a few minutes, Natalie was handing our tickets over to them, almost dancing in place with her impatience to get in. The club was an enormous cavern: there were two bars, one directly across from the stage, the other hugging the wall opposite the door, and a balcony section. Natalie reached back and her fingers closed around my hand, steering me forward into the darkness. There were graphics splashed across the stage and crewmembers darting back and forth finishing their setup.
We found our way to the bar, and I stalled Natalie’s reach for her purse—and the wallet inside of it—with a shake of my head. “It’s a session, right? So I’m paying.”
“I’ll just have a cider then,” she said, glancing at the specials written on a blackboard over the back of the bar. “Don’t want to get drunk.”
“Make it two ciders,” I told the woman behind the bar. She nodded and reached into one of the ice bins, pulling out two bottles. I gave her a twenty and gestured for her to keep the change on it.
We picked a spot in the standing-room crowd and sipped our ciders, waiting for the first act to come up on the stage. More and more people crowded into the club, and I could see what Natalie meant about it getting packed. I stayed close to her; the last thing I wanted was for us to get separated before the show even got started properly.
“So when did you hear about Frank Turner for the first time?”
Natalie shrugged. “One of my friends had his…I think it was his second album?” She considered. “And, she insisted that I should listen to it. Of course, I did, and it was amazing.” She shrugged again. “And since then, I’ve been a big fan.” I nodded. “Have you heard any of his music?”
“I’ve listened to a couple of the albums. Good stuff.” She grinned and I caught someone looking at me askance, but I ignored it.
The first band that went up on the stage had three members: guitar, drums, and bass. I didn’t catch their name, but when they launched into their first song, I thought I would definitely see about visiting their merch table in the back of the club. They whipped the crowd into an early fury, even though no more than maybe half the people in the club seemed to know any of the songs well enough to sing along. Next to me, Natalie was jumping up and down with the rest of the audience, occasionally singing along but not always, clearly already having a good time, and I told myself that in spite of her comment before about boundaries, the date idea I’d had was obviously a good one.
While the crew began clearing the first band’s gear off of the stage, I told Natalie to stay where she was so I could get us more to drink. I didn’t want to get drunk any more than she did—we both had to drive home at the end of the night, after all—so I bought us each another cider and a bottle of water. That seemed like a safe bet, even if it would mean we had to use the already-packed bathrooms sooner rather than later.
The second band was even better—although also much stranger—than the first. They set up a laptop and a mixer and one or two other things I couldn’t identify, and in moments, the two guys—dressed in matching tee shirts and shorts—started singing along with a basic, demo-type beat and synthesizer sounds. At first, about a quarter of the crowd looked as if they weren’t sure whether or not to take the two men seriously, but as the song wore on, and the men onstage kept shouting to the crowd to sing along with the simple, almost childish choruses or wave their hands or do some form of activity, everyone started to get into it. “Who are these guys again?”
Natalie beamed at me. “Koo Koo Kangaroo,” she shouted up into my ear. “They tour with Frank pretty regularly when possible.”
Koo Koo Kangaroo’s act heated up quickly, and they got the audience more and more involved in the singing and dancing, even going so far as to jump down off of the stage and into the crowd to instruct people on dance moves. I kept back far enough that I wouldn’t be a good target for a demonstration, but I found myself laughing and smiling, singing along, following instructions.
By the time Koo Koo Kangaroo left the stage, everyone in the crowd was worked up, ready for Frank Turner to come out. The stage went dark, and a sheet came down over the front. You could feel the tension building inside of the room as setup seemed to drag on—even though when I checked the time on my phone, it had only been about fifteen minutes, and then twenty. The shadowy figures of the crew darted offstage from behind the curtain, and every light in the club went black for just an instant.
The next moment, the band came out onto the stage, lit with green and blue, and after a few heartbeats, they launched into their first song. The screaming and cheering and shouting all around me was almost enough to make me deaf; Natalie was just as excited as anyone else in the room, especially when the sheet came down and the band started playing in earnest. I found myself getting into the music, too, singing along when I remembered the occasional lyric, dividing my attention between Natalie and the front man—Frank Turner—onstage.
“This is a song about how I fuck everything up,” Frank said, and Natalie let out a shriek that was almost sexual; it was enough to stir something in me, a jolt of heat that had nothing to do with the crowd pressing against us on all sides. Frank started strumming and immediately sang, “Just give me one fine day of plain sailing weather and I can fuck up anything, anything…”Next to me, Natalie was singing along word for word, jumping up and down, completely and totally absorbed in the song, in the man onstage. If we were actually dating, I’d almost be jealous, I thought, watching her close her eyes and smile with satisfaction.
The band onstage went from one great song to another, and Frank Turner himself had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. The band left the stage after about a dozen songs, and just as everyone was beginning to get restless, Frank came out again with an acoustic guitar. He grinned at the audience and meandered through his stage banter in between songs, and next to me, I could tell that if Natalie had a clear way to go home with the man, it wouldn’t even take a question to get her onto the bus.
There is no way that she’ll ever forget this night, I thought, feeling a mixture of satisfaction and jealousy. “Speaking of not my finest hour,” Frank said from the stage, and I turned to look in that direction, “this song is about another moment like that.” He started playing and next to me, Natalie almost moaned—not in a sexual way, but something like pain. I glanced to see that she wasn’t injured, just deeply affected, as the man onstage started to sing. “I was walking home to my house through the snow from the station/ when Springsteen came clear on my headphones with a pertinent question/ Oh, is love really real, and can any of us hope for redemption/ or are we all merely biding our time down to the lonely conclusions?”
In spite of the fact that I didn’t know the song as well as Natalie, it was obvious how powerful it was—and how personal. I nodded along, reaching out for Natalie’s hand; she wrapped her fingers around mine without a moment’s hesitation. How much better would this be if it were a real date? I pushed the thought aside. I
wasn’t going to let myself indulge in that fantasy.
By the end of the night, we were both drenched in sweat, and Natalie’s voice was hoarse from screaming and singing and cheering. “We could go across to the bar on the other corner,” she suggested. “Sometimes Frank hangs out after the show to meet people.”
“I’m too lame to hang, I’m afraid,” I told her. “But don’t let me hold you back.” Natalie laughed and then coughed, taking a gulp from her bottle of water—it was nearly empty.
“Then, I guess I’ll say goodnight.” I leaned in to kiss her on the cheek and Natalie ducked away. I frowned, but I let her give me a quick, friendly hug before stepping back. I started back towards my car as she made her way across the lot to get to the other street corner. As I watched her leave, I thought to myself that if I could just find a woman who was like Natalie—as close as anyone could possibly be—but who wasn’t being paid to go on dates with me as practice, I would be a happy man. You have to let her go. You can’t keep pining over her. So things didn’t work out with Brigitte; that doesn’t mean that every woman you meet is going to be boring in comparison to Natalie. I climbed into my car, already starting to feel the ache in my neck and back and shoulders, and watched Natalie dart across the street to get to the bar. I turned my key in the ignition and promised myself that I would ask another woman out again soon. I couldn’t afford to keep letting my feelings get all wrapped up around Natalie.
VOLUME IV
Chapter Thirty One
Natalie
I stared at the shelf in the pasta aisle, debating with myself which of the different macaroni and cheese products I would buy for Brady’s dinner later in the week. At least, I was pretending to debate that, while my mind was actually on the subject of my most recent date with Zeke.
I had crossed a line. I knew that I had—a line that even kissing, even sleeping with Zeke hadn’t made me feel like I’d violated. Those moments had been impulsive and they’d been personal, but the date felt more like something that a boyfriend would take his girlfriend to, not something a client would go to with his coach. The tickets were too thoughtful a gesture. They were too considerate. I had known when he’d shown them to me that I should turn it down. I had known absolutely that I should have enforced a professional boundary, thanked him, and suggested that we do something else. And, I hadn’t.
“Mama! This one!” Brady nearly swung out of the seat in the cart in his urgency to point at the box of macaroni he wanted, and I came out of my reverie.
“You want this one?” I reached for the box: it was a theme shape, with noodles that looked like the characters of a cartoon that Brady liked.
“Uh-huh, want it!” He practically bounced in his seat, and I laughed, dismissing—for a second, at least—the thought of Zeke. I put the box in the cart behind him and moved on to the next item on my list. It’s a good thing Brady likes the grocery store, I thought, as we passed an aisle where another mother, child in the cart, was struggling to wrest a box of cereal from the screaming toddler. Brady liked to help, but I’d trained him when he was even younger to be patient and to amuse himself with a toy or a game while I got the shopping done. Fortunately for me, he’d taken to it like a child years older than he was.
But even as I browsed the supermarket, going from aisle to aisle, checking off items on my list—milk, vegetables, fruit, chicken, beef, and staples—my thoughts kept turning back again and again to the subject of Zeke Baxter and our strange personal-professional relationship. I had actually had sex with him. I had gone on dates with him with my son in tow. Zeke had gotten closer to me in some respects than my husband had been in the last months of our marriage before we’d divorced—definitely he was closer to me than any of the men I’d tried dating on my own while working as a coach for the matchmaking service. It went without saying that I was much closer to Zeke in all respects than I had been with any other client that I’d coached. I’d never even been tempted to let any of the other men I worked with kiss me, and I certainly wouldn’t have ever let them into my home.
The real question in my mind was what to do about the situation. I’ve been telling myself that I can still be objective, and that I can still assess and evaluate him like any other client—but is that really true? I had technically lied to Katie about the situation between Zeke and I, in the sense that I hadn’t told her about kissing him, much less about having sex with him. I knew that there had been a few other coaches who had gotten inappropriate with their clients. Katie had mentioned them to me in passing during my time at the agency. How the company handled the situation varied, but I was pretty sure that the fact that I hadn’t come clean with the information right when it had happened would stand against me.
It was hard to tell myself—honestly—that the opinion I had of Zeke’s progress had nothing at all to do with the fact that we’d kissed, or the fact that we’d had sex, or especially the fact that he’d essentially rescued me from a prospective client who could have seriously harmed me in an attack. It was hard for me to try and say that I was able to be objective about my coaching, especially after the tantrum I had thrown during the practice date we’d had when Zeke had talked up the girl he had gone on a real date with. If I was going to be scrupulously honest with myself—something that the agency was big on—I had to admit that I wasn’t objective when it came to Zeke. I was deeply, thoroughly subjective. I couldn’t separate my feelings towards him from the progress he was making, or my emotions from the coaching I gave him.
There were two options in my mind: either I could go to Katie, admit that I had developed feelings towards Zeke, and ask to be taken off of his case, or I could leave my job. As I wandered around the produce section, trying to decide which vegetables I could make that Brady would happily eat—and which I might be sick of and not want to eat for a while—I thought about each of the options carefully. I knew I couldn’t tell Katie the extent of what had happened between Zeke and me. I could go so far as to tell her that I wasn’t able to be objective anymore. In fact, I would be surprised if she wasn’t expecting me to admit that I had feelings for Zeke, after my report about the assault. It was exactly the sort of thing that would cement a general sense of liking a person into something much more serious and difficult to ignore.
If I got myself reassigned, I would have to stay away from Zeke. I would have to break the news to him and tell him that I couldn’t even see him socially anymore because if I did, it would get back to Katie, and it would look like I was violating a boundary. I couldn’t coach him, and I couldn’t have anything to do with him. I would keep my job, and I would—I hoped—move on with my life, but it would be a miserable few weeks of dealing with other clients who weren’t as good as he was, as quick as he was, or as charming as he was. I’d be frustrated and lonely again.
The other option would be to quit my job and be with Zeke. The possibility was exciting and terrifying all at the same time. There was no way to know how soon I would be able to get another job—or if I would be able to get another job—and that would put Brady at risk. I definitely wouldn’t be able to go to any of the other agencies in the city. If I quit, I would have to give an explanation why and there wasn’t really one that wouldn’t make me a bad hire for another company, even if I lied about my connection with Zeke. I’d have to go into another field, and it might take months to get something.
The other terrifying aspect of that option was that I had no idea of Zeke was even serious about me. I knew that he liked me—that was obvious—and he even liked Brady, but he was still working with the agency. He was clearly still interested in dating someone he could get married to, someone he could form a real relationship with, instead of the weird in-between thing we had going on. Never once had he suggested to me directly that he wanted more than what we had together, even if he had been the one to make the first move. If I quit my job and moved onto something else—likely something that didn’t pay as well—and then found out that Zeke didn’t actually want to be with me, I
would have tanked my career for no reason. I would be putting my son’s food and shelter and clothing at risk only to get nothing in return but heartache.
“Mama, look out! Look out, Mama.” I shook myself at the sound of Brady’s voice. I had nearly run into a display of Cheez-Its, I’d been so lost in thought.
“Thanks, sweetie,” I told him, leaning in to kiss his forehead. “Mama’s got a lot on her mind. You’re being such a good lookout!” I gave myself another shake, thinking to myself bleakly that I hadn’t even decided what I was going to do about Zeke and I was already putting my son at risk.
“Mama,” Brady said, looking thoughtful. “Are you lonely?” He had asked me that before, and I couldn’t help but wonder why my toddler son was so stuck on the idea.
“How can I be lonely when I have you?”
Brady shrugged. “You’re sad sometime,” he told me. “Like with Daddy.” That made something inside of me cringe. Brady barely had memories of his father anymore. Alex had no interest in cultivating a relationship with his son, and since he’d left, I could count the number of times he’d been around Brady on one hand. But of course, Brady was a little sponge, just like any young child—he noticed any change in me, any shift in mood. He would have noticed the way I’d been before the divorce, and he’d notice the difference in how I acted around Zeke, no matter how hard I tried to be professional and platonic.
“I’m not lonely, sweetie,” I said, wondering once again where my son had come up with the concept of loneliness. “I’ve got you, and I’ve got all my friends, and Miss Katie…”
“And Mr. Zeke?” He looked up at me, almost anxious.
“And Mr. Zeke,” I conceded, feeling the blood rush into my face at the mention of him. “He’s one of my friends.”