“When did you do that?”
“Last night,” I replied, smug. “When you were all stumbling to bed. It only took a minute.” Reaching in, I grabbed them and held them out to her. “Here. You can go first if you like?”
“You …” Mac looked from the taps in my outstretched hands to my face. “Teach me,” she breathed as she took them, clutching them to her chest like a pair of Manolo Blahniks. “I need to know all your tricks.”
I flopped back on the bed. “I have a few more up my sleeve. Henry will soon regret asking me to stay.”
“Rubbish. Henry needs you here keeping him on his toes.” Mac shuffled over and sat down beside me. “I’ll be honest with you, Grace. I feel like he’s slowly losing his way. Like the bigger the band is getting, the more he’s withdrawing. I don’t know why. I can’t put my finger on what it is, and I admit we’ve all been so busy I’ve let it slide hoping something would change, but it hasn’t. That was why I jumped all over the idea of having you here. I’m not good at all those bullshit heart-to-heart talks. Maybe you can do what I can’t.”
“Oh.” I exhaled at Mac’s admission. It felt strange that I had no clue what was going on in his life. “I honestly don’t know, Mac. I’ll talk to him while I’m here.”
“Thanks, Grace.” She patted my leg before getting to her feet. “I better get in the shower before Henry finds those pliers.”
Mac left the room and I picked up my crumpled pile of sheets off the floor. Shaking them out, I put them back on the bed and crawled back underneath them, planning to doze while Mac was in the shower. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw Casey, anger making his eyes sharp as he led me from our table last night. His big, warm palm clutched me to him as we wound our way through tables before eventually ending up in some dingy, badly lit corridor.
“I’ll get you back for this when you least expect it, Beanhead,” Henry growled, once again interrupting my reverie of last night.
“Uh oh.” I whipped the covers off my face, hair falling in my eyes as I gave Henry a look of mock fear, his empty hands evidence that he had no luck finding a pair of pliers. “I know you mean business when you resort to nasty name calling. I’m scared.”
He flopped on the bed beside me as the tinkling sound of water came from the shower. Mac had obviously screwed the taps back on and was taking advantage of Henry’s unexpected misfortune. “You mock me, Grace, but this is war now, you understand.” Lifting the sheets, he crawled underneath and pulled them up over his chest.
Thinking of Mac’s plea to “teach her,” I laughed. “You know what they say. The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy. I think it’s pretty obvious I got that covered.”
“Yeah?” Henry raised his brows. “You know what else they say? Sometimes we need to lose the small battles in order to win the war.”
My breath hitched because Henry’s words reminded me my own war was coming and I’d be fighting it alone. Knowing he was watching me, I forced a smile. “That’s a good one, Henry.”
He grinned. “I thought so.” After a quiet moment, Henry yawned and said, “You did good last night. You only stumbled over a few chords and no one noticed. “Wild heart” was probably one of our most complicated songs, so if you can master that in one afternoon, the rest should be a piece of cake. We’ll practice every day, starting with the set list for this coming weekend.”
“Today too?”
“No. Mondays and Tuesdays are usually our days off from everything, but with Frog out of action, we’ll start rehearsing Tuesdays so we can get you up to date on the songs.”
“Sounds good.” When I realised I couldn’t hear the shower running anymore, I began inching unobtrusively off the bed. “Oh hey, I wanted to ask, the big, blue Hilux I saw in the drive yesterday … that’s Evie’s car, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
I feigned a stretch. It gave me a credible excuse for gaining a better position to beat Henry for the bathroom. “I wanted to buy a bicycle.” That was a total lie but the idea was to distract him with conversation. “I thought it would be a cool way to exercise and I could ride to the beach and stuff. I can’t do that from my inner city apartment in Melbourne. I’d get mowed down by cars.”
“That sounds good, Grace. I’ll give you her number if you don’t have it and you can call her this morning. I don’t think she’s doing anything today.”