“It just seems weird that you guys were friends—or whatever—all of a sudden, and now you’re not again.”
God, he sounded like Kat, who kept nagging him to bring Gloria’s midwife back to dinner. “We’re not not friends,” he started, but then stopped because were they in junior high? Next Jack was going to ask if Dax liked Amy or like-liked her.
Jack didn’t answer for a while. Just looked out the window. But then, suddenly, he turned and said, “This is the part where I go all older brother on you and tell you that if you hurt her—or if you already have—I will make your life very unpleasant.”
Dax held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “There’s no hurting. She isn’t in relationship mode now.”
“And if she were?”
So not only were they in junior high, apparently they were junior high girls who were going to hold hands, talk about their feelings, and then exchange friendship bracelets. “She’s not.”
That was as much as he was saying, and thankfully, they’d arrived at the dive in question, so Jack didn’t press the matter any further other than to say, as they hopped out of the taxi, “I just want you to know where my allegiances lie.”
Dax raised his eyebrows. “Sheesh. Totally unnecessary message received.” Not that he blamed Jack. Amy was his long-standing and trusted second-in-command. And Jack was the kind of guy whose loyalty, once earned, followed a person around forever.
And Amy was the kind of girl who deserved that loyalty.
He shook his head as he pushed open the door, trying also to shake off this heavy, unsettled feeling. He wasn’t sure if it was the weird conversation he’d just had with Jack or the prospect of seeing Amy that had him out of sorts. He needed a drink. Conveniently, a huge bar lay between them and the stage up front, which was currently unoccupied as the sound system pumped out a non-karaoke version of some pop thing he didn’t recognize.
“I’m going stop at the bar,” he said to Jack. “I’ll catch up with you.” As he stood trying to grab the bartender’s attention, the emcee’s voice broke into the canned music and introduced a singer. He didn’t really pay attention to the man. He also didn’t pay attention to the opening swells of some other pop thing he didn’t recognize.
Until he did recognize the voice singing it.
He didn’t know what to do. Would she want to see him? Would she want to see him seeing her sing?
He stood, unmoving, staring at the back of the head of the person sitting on the barstool in front of him, while his skin slowly heated. Her voice wrapped itself around him, a girlish python gently but surely squeezing the air out of his lungs.
She had a good voice. Not a professional one. It was a little shaky, but in tune as it sang a story of some kind of victory against the odds. It described crowds going wild, and he was transported back in time to the baseball game. To the joke proposal, when they had colluded in stealing poor Julie and Jason’s romantic night out.
Others joined in on the chorus, their voices emphatic in the way only drunk friends can be. Then for some reason, he thought about Amy driving them around in her little red car, concocting a crazy caper to trick his mother into moving. It had been another great joke they’d shared, conspiring against everyone.
Amy had been really fun to scheme with. Somehow, with Amy, the world was full of inside jokes. And if you were very lucky, you got to be one of the insiders.
As the laughing, happy chorus reached its peak, he was suddenly able to put his finger on what had been wrong with him lately.
He wanted to be an insider.
Everything was more fun when he and Amy were sleeping together.
Was it possible he had made a mistake? He abandoned his quest for a drink and began to move away from the bar, letting the voices of her and her friends wash over him.
He cleared the bar, and there she was. God, there she was. Exactly as he expected, and yet nothing like he expected. She was wearing that purple silk dress again, and a small braid ran along her hairline, framing her face, which, as he watched, went from a wide smile to a serious, almost pained look. For a moment, he thought she’d seen him, that he had inspired that change in mood. But, no, she hadn’t. It seemed to accompany a similar change in the music.
Her backup singers grew serious too, letting their voices fade out as she picked up the verse. It was about saying good-bye, about life taking the narrator and the person she was singing about in different directions.
She looked up then, almost as if she had felt the weight of his gaze, and met his eyes. The sad part of the song was over, and what he assumed was the final verse was crescendoing. Her friends were doing most of the work now, though. She was singing, but she was phoning it in.