“I want you to kiss me all better,” she said. “Can you kiss me all better?”
“Oh, Queenie,” he said. Then he stood and gathered her in his arms, carrying her to her bedroom. He laid her on the bed and kissed her forehead. “There is nothing I’d like more than to kiss you all better, but not like this. I’ll leave some water and Tylenol on your table. Sleep well, beautiful.”
Emily closed her eyes, and the world started to spin. She opened them again as Rob put pills and a glass on the table next to her.
“I love you,” she told him.
“I’ve always loved you,” he answered.
A few moments after he left her room, she heard guitar chords strumming. Then Rob was singing:
Kiss me all better
You said
You said
Kiss me all better
As I tucked you
Into bed
Emily closed her eyes again and this time his music grounded her and made the world stop spinning off course. She fell asleep cradled in his song.
58
The next morning, Emily woke up at dawn with a headache. She looked over and saw the water and Tylenol to her left, took both pills, and drained the glass. It had been a long time since she’d woken up hungover. It made her feel like she was in college again. She didn’t want to be in college again. She turned over and went back to sleep.
* * *
—
A few hours later, she woke up again, feeling more like a human. She ambled out of the bedroom to get some more water and a cup of coffee and found the villa empty. There was a note on the table from Rob: Meeting with Diana, be back soon.
She wasn’t sure when he’d left, so she wasn’t sure what soon meant. She twisted her hair up into a messy bun that she secured with the pencil he’d left next to the note, then brushed her teeth and washed her face. She felt like she’d traveled back in time to the days of waking up late after drinking too much the night before. She remembered the roar of applause, the on-stage kiss, her off-stage request, and Rob tucking her in. It really was like she was twenty years old again. But she wasn’t. She was thirty-three.
“I am an absolute mess,” she said aloud. She wondered if she should take some paper and start journaling again, write a letter to try to gain perspective. But instead she picked up Rob’s guitar. He’d taught her the basics in college, and though she didn’t remember much, she did remember the mnemonic for the strings: Elvis Always Digs Good Banana Eating. It was what his teacher had taught him, when he first learned to play. They’d spent a night once trying to come up with other sentences that worked. Everyone Always Dumps Garbage Bags Empty. Ellen Ate Dan’s Great Big Elephants. Every Austinite Does Goddamn Big Erections. Then they’d gotten distracted by Rob’s goddamn big erection and ended up in bed.
Ostensibly, knowing those notes, Emily should be able to make music somehow on the guitar. She plucked one string, moving her fingers down the frets, raising the notes a half step as she went. If she did that, she realized, she could use the guitar like a keyboard, using single notes to stand in for chords. She focused on the A string and started messing around with the song she’d been writing in her head for the last couple of days, changing the words again, trying to make them sound right.
There’s love in your heart
For everyone but me
You row across the water
While I drown in the sea
And when I reach for you
You just don’t see
Because there’s love in your heart
For everyone but me
And they say you’re kind
And they say you’re good
And I know it’s true But they say the same
About me to you
When you look for me
Have I already flown?
When you want me there
Are you all on your own?
When I slip up
Is that all that you see?
Is there love in your heart
For everyone but me?
And they say I’m kind
And they say I’m good
But I know it isn’t true
Because of how I treated you
There’s love in my heart
That’s waiting there for you
There’s love in my heart
That’s big enough for two
If we reach for each other
I hope you can see
That there’s love there waiting
For you, from me
It would’ve been easier with a keyboard, but Emily was making do with the guitar. She incorporated more of the strings, slowly playing the whole chords she would have used on the piano. She’d started again, pulling the pencil out of her hair so she could write it down, when she heard the door open behind her. Rob was back.