“Summer. It’s never going to happen.”
I hated the sound of saying it out loud. The words tasted bitter against my gums—like a Creed song.
“Never say never,” Summer said.
“Never.”
I poured the wine down my throat, willing away the tingling in my chest. It was a flutter I had bargained with for the last decade: the possibility that Garrett Scholl was maybe, kind of, just a little bit, absolutely my soulmate.
5
TWENTY-THREE
IT TOOK ME ONLY ONE first Tuesday of the month to gather the courage to run into Garrett at the Parkside Lounge. Except, I didn’t work up the courage to do it honestly. I called the booking manager and begged him for his free 11 p.m. slot. I knew Garrett’s band, The Finance Guys, went on at nine. I was pissed that he hadn’t come to see me play first. Society had taught me that men should try harder than women in the world of romance. But as Summer suggested, “You probably scared the shit out of him when he met you. Men are sad, fragile creatures.”
She wasn’t wrong. That night, I walked into the back room at the Parkside Lounge, the Lower East Side’s oldest dive bar. It was dimly lit, but I could hear his unmistakably husky voice the second the front doors swung open.
I stepped farther into the room, seeing the crowd of females stare up at Garrett as if he could read their fortunes. As his cover of Paramore roared on, he found my face in the crowd. There was an instant catch in his throat as his eyes met mine, and my ego did a somersault. I could throw this confident man off his game, and that meant everything to me.
I went onstage right after him, with no room for pleasantries. Garrett hung around to hear my entire set, but when my eyes brushed against his, something had changed. He didn’t gape at me like he wanted to fuck me; he looked at me like he appreciated my beauty, but was fucking someone else.
Fuck me.
After my set, I walked around the stage and he motioned for me to join him at a high top.
“I loved that last song,” he said as I scooted into my chair.
“Thanks.”
“You wrote it?”
I nodded. “I wrote all of them.”
He smiled even bigger. “Who was it about?”
“My mom.”
Garrett tilted his head, as if surprised by my answer. “‘Did he steal the sparks from your sky/When he waved goodbye’—I didn’t expect that to be about your mom. Is it also about your dad?”
He was trying to understand a verse of my song, which made me feel like he was trying to understand all of me. My insides were throwing a goddamn parade.
“Yeah. My mom had me when she was twenty-one, and my parents divorced right after. And she’s been kind of…a rigid bitch ever since.”
His eyes widened. I shrugged, unfazed. I wondered if my candor scared him. Most men were amused by my vulnerability, but only for a night. Garrett grinned and stretched his body closer to mine.
“Has your mom ever heard that song aloud?”
I cackled, shaking my head. I had written that song before I left for NYU, after a huge fight with my mother. My dad, William, had been her one wild card—the rebellious class clown who she met in college. I was the unexpected result. She gave birth to me right after her college graduation. After I was born, my mom traded in the joker, held on tight to the queen, and returned to a lifetime of serious, well-calculated goals—never taking a gamble again. My mom was so focused on “what’s next?” that she refused to embrace the electrifying romance of “right fucking now.” I was all about right now.
“We were oil and vinegar living under the same roof for seventeen years—and it was mostly a special kind of hell.”
“So, she’s not the kind of mom you sing your stories to.”
“I’d rather die than unleash that song in front of my mother. Actually, I’m certain she’d kill me if she heard it.”
“My dad doesn’t even know I do this,” he said with raised brows—as if he were proud to have something rebellious of his own. “Oh!”—he snapped his finger—“your bridge! That key change, from A minor to F sharp…” He placed his hand on his chest and leaned back. “Knocked me out.”
I fought a smile, afraid that my cheeks would show what was happening under my skin.
“What age did you start reading music?” I asked.
“First piano lesson at four. Then I picked up an electric guitar at nine, and I was done for. It was like breathing.”
His smile was so big I wasn’t sure the table could contain it.
I shifted in my seat, fixed on the way his bright blue eyes scanned my face.
“You never came to watch me play,” I said.
His eyes stayed locked on mine as he sucked in air.
“Well, Maggie May…I really wanted to. But to be honest…” His eyes flickered away from mine, and he stirred a little straw into his whisky with a gentle smile. “To be honest, I started dating someone a handful of weeks ago, and I thought it wasn’t a good idea to fall in love with you. And when you sing, it’s hard to not fall in love with you. So, that’s why I didn’t come see you play.”
He looked up at me with a shy smile, the tips of his ears reddened by the admission.
“Oh.”
The word fell off my tongue like it was acknowledging the death of a loved one. I stared at him for a moment, and then bit down on the inside of my cheeks.
“Well, I should go,” I said.
“Let me buy you a drink first.”
He put his hand gently on my wrist. His skin on my skin felt worse than I had imagined it could feel.
“I think it’s best that I don’t fall in love with you, either,” I said.
I turned and walked away from him, and it felt like my heart was breaking with each step. I recognized I had no right to ache for someone whose middle name I didn’t know. I had no clue where he was born, if he went to college. I knew next to nothing about Garrett, and losing someone I never had was about to make me hold my body in the fetal position on the hardwood of my shitty apartment.
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER, I ELBOWED through the crowd in New York’s hottest Monday night spot: the Trader Joe’s in Union Square. I shivered past the frozen foods cooler, untying the flannel around my waist and throwing it on over my T-shirt dress.
I had come here for one thing: the frozen chicken chile verde burritos, so naturally, I found myself smack-dab in the center of the beer aisle—studying creature comforts that I could not afford. I was more of a wine drinker, but New York state law refused to allow a grocery store to sell wine or liquor—so the Two-Buck Chuck was next door at a separate entrance: the Trader Joe’s Wine Shop. And I was too impatient to brave two lines.
I weighed the can of Boatswain Chocolate Stout in my hand, which seemed more like a gamble than a thought-out beverage. It would either be the greatest invention in the world, or leave me scraping my tongue with a napkin. I knew I couldn’t afford it, but the mere knowledge that it existed was not enough: I had to taste chocolate beer on my tongue. Summers in New York City did the most damage to my lack of savings. It was almost impossible to book kids’ birthday parties with school out—so there went my Saturday morning income, singing “Kiss the Girl” in my cutest Sebastian voice at four-year-olds’ princess parties. My cater waiter gigs moved to the Hamptons for the season, where they preferred to hire local. So, for the past two months, I had taken on a temporary job of bartending at a grungy bar in SoHo. Not one famous singer was discovered there, nor would they be, because there was no stage. I was bartending three times a week and playing music at different coffee shops and dive bars the rest of the time. Monday was my night off from both. I had a hard time coping with nights off. The sun plummeted against tall buildings, reminding me how far away I was from my dream…how my light felt like it might be dimming. Hence: the need for chocolate beer.