by Jay E. Tria
Songs to Make You Stay
Playlist #3
Jay E. Tria
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
September 7, Monday, night
September 15, Friday, three years ago
September 8, Tuesday, morning
May 23, Saturday, morning
After Hours
September 11, Friday, afternoon
I Still
September 28, Monday, afternoon
September 29, Tuesday, night
October 8, Thursday, night
The Door
October 11, Sunday, afternoon
Make You Stay
October 11, Sunday, night
October 12, Monday, morning
October 16, Friday, morning
Not Much Else
October 16, Friday, afternoon
Haiku Seatwork #1 - 5
October 17, Saturday, morning
October 18, Sunday, morning
Haiku Seatwork #6
October 23, Friday, night
December 18, Friday, night
You Make the Sky Better
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Jay
Excerpt from Songs to Get Over You
Songs to Make You Stay
Jay E. Tria
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any semblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Jay E. Tria
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contact the author: www.jayetria.com, [email protected]
Cover design by Tania Arpa, taniaarpa.com. Photography by Hazel Caasi, featuring Yuki Sakamoto.
Book design by Miles Tan, milestanbooks.com.
Also by Jay
Playlist Series: Songs of Our Breakup | Songs to Get Over You| That Thing Called Closure
Young Adult/Manga novel: Blossom Among Flowers
Young Adult/Urban Fantasy: Majesty
To Maria Cristine,
always the first victim, and the one who said yes to this.
September 7, Monday, night
He knew Jill wasn’t a big fan of surprises. She disliked them the same way she flinched over karaoke serenades in the moonlight, or trails of ruby rose petals leading to a champagne-flute-and-white-tablecloth dinner. All she wanted was a promise fulfilled. A plane ride, going according to schedule. A boy strolling into the Arrivals bay straight into her waiting arms.
But Shinta had failed her on both points. He had broken the promise. And now he was late, by exactly a month and two days.
“Surprise! Surprise. Sur-prise?” Shinta had been muttering different variations of the word, trying to figure out which sounded the least self-incriminatory once it travelled from his lips to Jill’s ears. He tried the next line of his script. “If you think about it, you have been expecting me for over a month, so technically this is not a surprise.”
The guy coming out of a rusty orange pickup truck to Shinta’s right whipped his head toward him. “You talking to me?” he called over the sound of his car door slamming shut.
“Don’t worry about it, my good man,” Shinta said in solemn tones, pushing a firm clap down the stranger’s shoulder. He chuckled at the guy’s bewildered look and proceeded with his onward march.
The rough pavement sloped in a steep upward angle as he went, making each step Shinta took a greater struggle against gravity. Soon he came past a bend, the road plateauing under his sneakers, until he caught the first sights of Commute Bar. More vehicles littered the street, double parked and alternating between one or two stray tricycles. More people, yuppies and college kids in even numbers, were springing out of cars, slamming doors, moving like buzzing moths toward the steady incandescent sign of the old watering hole.
He used to get lost trying to find this place. Even the most road-weathered taxi drivers had trouble tracking it down, buried as it was within the maze of residential Makati. But in the past three years, Shinta’s Tokyo-Manila commute had gained frequency, and he came to memorize the route to his friends’ favorite bar like the lines on his palm.
A few meters more, Shinta braked, his rubber soles scratching against the grains of gravel. He hitched the strap of his backpack up his shoulder, watching the bulky guy in the black wifebeater take the door charge and stamp people’s wrists. Stray guitar notes and hits of sticks against cymbals escaped into the night when the bar’s door opened, allowing more people passage inside. It sounded like his favorite band was in the middle of a set.
Shinta bared his teeth in a wide grin, closing his eyes as he inhaled the humid Manila air. “Tadaima. I’m home.”
A shoulder bumped against his right; someone rushing to the entrance. “Weird Japanese dude keeps talking to himself.”
Shinta burst out laughing, recognizing the pickup-truck guy as he passed him. He needed to find Jill fast. He’d been by himself for not even eight hours and he was already a social sore thumb.
He walked through the entrance, paid his dues to the gatekeeper-in-the-wifebeater. He moved past the crowd under the canopy, the mass of patrons parting to let him pass. Voices faltered to murmurs as he went, ardent gazes trailing him. It’s not because they recognize me, he told himself. He was pretty sure his movies and commercials were bound by Japanese territory and didn’t reach this side of the Pacific. These people were probably only wondering what a foreigner was doing in their corner of Makati, saddled with a giant backpack. Either way, their curiosity was the least of his worries.
His confidence was waning with each stride. His excitement at seeing Jill’s face, at feeling her warmth beside him, mingled with his nerves. Surprise! Surprise? Not really a surprise.
He pushed the door to the bar open, sheets of heat and feedback embracing him. His eyes adjusted to the red, blue, and green lights flashing on the graffiti walls. Trainman—the band, his friends, the indie rock darlings of now—was on the floor, on the tail end of a new song. He knew this because it was a song Jill had written that week they were in Tokyo together, sharing his apartment.
And there she was. Bursts of light and color played on her face, on her shoulders, and on the strip of stomach exposed by the shirt knotted around her waist. She picked up that knotted-shirt thing during their short vacation, walking covertly through the streets under Tokyo’s angry sun. That was a really good idea.
Her eyes met his. “Surprise,” Shinta mouthed on impulse, the word mirrored in her eyes, followed by a flicker of excitement, before the dark pools squinted into a glare.
She turned her gaze away and continued the song. “But I just can’t catch sleep/ I’m wide awake and I wait/ My soul knows you’re worth it—” Jill pushed her guitar away, both hands gripping the mic, mouth launching into the last verse.
Shinta stepped through the crowd, one long stride, two, until he was standing in front of her. He thought Jill realized what he was about to do a moment too late.
He took her in his arms, fingers and palms sliding over the bare inch of skin above the waist of her jeans. Just as the last word of the song left her lips, he replaced it with a kiss. Her mouth answered, her fingers weaving through his hair as he clutched her to him. He heard applause, wolf-whistles, and what sounded like a long disapproving groan, but Shinta was too busy to pay them any attention.
When he pulled back, Jill had arrang
ed her gaze into a glare again. Shinta replied with a crooked grin. “I always wanted to do that,” he said, wet lips brushing her earlobe.
Jill’s bandmates were staring at them, their set halted. Kim’s Stratocaster hung limp from its strap around his neck, but it was Miki who cleared his throat on the mic.
Jill threw a sheepish grin at her best friend. “I’ll deal with you later,” she told Shinta, baleful gaze back on him. “We’re paid to do two more songs, you know.”
He pressed another kiss, and a smile on her lips. “I’ll wait. I’m here,” was his fresh promise.
She rewarded him with a tiny smile, then bit it down in the next second. “Okay.” She pushed roughly at his chest until he released her. She pivoted, her back to the crowd, facing Nino’s drum set and his leering face as he counted off, “ahonetwothreefour!”
Son reached out and pinned Shinta to his side as the new song began, his bass line forsaken. “It’s just not the same without you, my friend. Okaeri, Shinta-chan! Welcome back.”
Trainman’s set ended with a chorus of machinegun riffs and a swinging bassline. Metal refrains merged, broke apart, and collided in the air, Jill, Kim, Miki, and Son’s shoulders jerking to different beats. One final succession of Nino-versus-drums and the last song was over.
The band dispersed into the crowd, Shinta catching Jill’s hand. The rest of the throng slithered away from the floor and out the door, escaping into the cool of the deepening night. They would scuttle back inside when the next band called for them.
Trainman and Shinta grabbed a table too small for six long bodies. Shinta had met them at a music festival in Tokyo three years go. It started with a call from his mother: “I’ve got an indie rock band in my Creative Writing class. You need to get them a gig.” It was a pioneer request, but with the right industry connections, it was easy enough to do. Two songs through Trainman’s set under the high noon sun and he was a fan. One karaoke night at his mother’s house during his next visit and their friendship was cast in stone.
Shinta leaned forward, trying to look for something new, a hint of change in these faces he knew. Nothing apparent. He’d only been gone three months after all. They were still twenty-one-year-olds, a few years his junior. That was still Miki’s favorite Kiko Machine shirt, a bit tattered at the neck. Jill sat close to Shinta though. Her fingers were on his knee, drawing lazy circles, and that was new. Shinta leaned back and performed the same exercise on the small of her back, smiling in her hair.
A tilt of the head from Kim to their friend the barman and soon they were properly tipsy, and in the perfect state to catch up.
The girl at the table to their left was aiming her cellphone camera at them, like a sniper locking onto a target.
Shinta was sure of this. This was a normal occurrence in his profession. He expected this. There was that slight incline of her head, the seemingly casual slant of the phone in her hand, and the carefully arranged expression of boredom on her face. Shinta leaned back in his seat, deciding he was in a good enough mood to make it easy on the amateur. He caught her eye, flashed his best grin, two fingers up in the air for a peace sign.
Click. The girl stared at the captured photo on her phone, bewilderment written on her face. She looked back at him with a grimace. She trained her phone on their table again, angling away from him.
Shinta snorted out laughter. Right. He wasn’t a popular actor in this country.
“What’s happening over there?” Jill asked, her fingers giving his knee a squeeze.
“Deflation of my ego,” he replied cheerily.
“Well, if you’re done with that, come back here and mediate this war you’ve started.”
“Zombies,” Miki was declaring in a firm voice.
“Zombies,” echoed Nino and Kim, flanking Miki on either side.
“Robots,” was Son’s lazy answer, his defiance expressed only by his fist against the table.
Shinta edged forward on the sticky tabletop, cramming his long limbs in with the mess of arms, elbows, and beer bottles crowded around the nacho plate centerpiece. This was a standard exercise in their welcome-back-Shinta festivities. Trainman would grill him on the last movie he’d shot, and he’d try to keep up with the hurricane of events in their rock star lives.
Shinta had started it with a cheery, “So what’s new, Leader Kim?” using his fond nickname for Trainman’s de facto leader and resident grumpy old man.
“Same old.” Kim’s mouth had curled into a grim smile.
Maybe Shinta shouldn’t have asked him that while he was seated hip to hip with Jill, Kim’s ex-girlfriend. Kim and Jill had shared seven years, indelible firsts, and near the end, fights that added up to more than the number of working days in a month, winding down to the grand finale of a breakup text from Kim.
Or maybe Shinta knew exactly what he was doing.
“We should’ve had a pool going for this,” Jill quipped, dunking a cheese-drunk chip into her mouth.
Shinta lifted his finger to the corner of her lips, saving a stray string of cheese and popping it between his teeth.
“Gross,” Jill drawled out. Shinta laughed, licking his finger clean.
Thunder rumbled out of Miki’s throat, loud enough for Shinta to hear over the Pavement song blaring from the bar’s speakers. Miki’s eyes were on him, but were swiftly averted with a pound of fist against tabletop.
“Zombies will totally win,” Miki roared from across them.
Shinta had never seen Miki fired up like this over a topic, much less a zombies-versus-robots-in-a-movie argument. Miki had always been the group’s peacemaker. He was an underlying constant—from the cut of his jeans, to his default sneaker brand, to the girl he loved.
“One bite. One scrape of infested teeth on your flesh—” Miki waved a nacho chip in the air like a threat, beef and grease dripping on the table. “And just like that, you’re one of them. That’s exponential multiplication!”
“Math wins,” Kim agreed.
“Robots are made of metal,” Son slurred, on his fifth bottle. They knew he wasn’t drunk though. He just liked the lowered expectations attached to the state. “There is no flesh to infect.”
“These are humanoid robots, yes?” Miki turned to Shinta, eyes blazing.
“Yep. Some fleshy bits here and there.”
“If not a pool, we should have at least made these guys pay for an Evil Overload Nacho refill. Since we have to endure this debate.” Jill nudged Shinta’s elbow, looking on as Nino mopped the plate clean with the last chip before popping it in his mouth.
“Is this why it took you a month longer to fly back here, Shinta?” Nino spoke in between chews. “The movie people couldn’t put a stop to the hungry-corpse-versus-pseudo-tin-man argument that they eventually stopped caring and nothing else got done?”
“No. He had a press conference, ad shoots, magazine shoots, and a gazillion interviews,” Jill enumerated stiffly.
“Just tell us how the movie ends,” Nino implored, looking like he was on the verge of death by boredom. “You die in this one too, right? How morbid is your death scene? On a scale of graceful beheading to slow obliteration of organs?”
“Hey wait, why don’t you have a convenience date tonight, Nino?” Shinta looked back at their neighboring paparazzi girl. Maybe she was eyeing Nino. He was usually the fangirl’s pick, mostly because he was an open target.
“He’s in his period of atonement.” Jill snickered. “Remember Suze? Lovely girl. From college sweetheart to long distance relationship. Nino can’t keep up so he kissed another girl. Awesome breakup followed.”
“Thanks, Jill, for the very succinct summary,” Nino said with a bob of his head. “So, you and Shinta. Long distance too, huh? And you’ve been together for what, three measly months? The majority of which was spent over emails and video calls. I wonder who won’t be able to keep up. The hot celebrity who’s always surrounded by other hot celebrities, or the indie band girl from the dirty city? If I’m to place my bet, I’d h
ave to say—”
Jill pushed her bottle against Nino’s face, the sweaty glass surface scrunching his nose. “Call it even?”
Nino clinked his beer against hers, grinning. “Good deal.” And they drank, draining the contents in one long gulp of air.
Shinta had caught it though. The flicker of panic in her eyes, her gaze darting to catch his, then away, swift as instinct. No, things were far from even.
“I think we should leave now,” Shinta murmured in her ear. Better leave now before more glugs of beer loosened Nino’s tongue. Shinta would be left with no choice but to stuff Nino’s big mouth with the bar menu.
Jill smiled at him, her gaze swimming in a fresh wave of alcohol. “We should. Your mother’s been texting me nonstop, asking when I’ll take you to her.”
“Don’t deliver me to my mother just yet.” Shinta pressed his forehead against hers, his hand on her back, travelling up the hem of her shirt. “We could go someplace else.”
There was a crash of metal against stone floor, and Miki was on his feet.
“I, uh. I have to…” Miki trailed off, his thumb pointed to the exit. His eyes landed on Jill, and with a flick of his head he was gone.
“What was that?” Jill demanded, following the back of Miki’s shirt with her eyes until he was swallowed by the crowd.
Shinta knew the answer to that. When you’re a constant, people eventually figured you out.
“Miki is being extra Miki tonight,” Nino told Jill. His answer did nothing to erase the deepening line between her brows.
Well, most people figured you out. But not necessarily the one who should.
“Is he alright?” Shinta asked, according to the usual script.
Kim stood too, picking up Miki’s stool from the floor as he went, head craned toward where Miki was seen last. “It’s just work. Mars wants to talk to us outside.”
Jill’s eyebrow hooked upwards at the mention of the band’s manager. “Mars wants to talk to Miki? About work?” Kim only nodded. “Doesn’t Mars only have the patience to talk shop with you?”