I try to make my sigh of relief as subtle as possible.
I guess that’s her signal to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.
She sets her fork down and gives Wilder a pleasant enough smile, a real one, since she doesn’t do the fake shit. “I don’t like you for her,” she drops in a conversational tone. She might as well be discussing the merits of baked versus boiled potatoes.
Wilder doesn’t freak out. I think he saw that one coming. “I know.” He stops eating.
I reach under the table and curl my hand around his thigh. The leather is warm from his body heat, and it seeps into my palm, electrifying me.
“What can I do to change your mind?” Wilder asks. “Do youwantme to change your mind?” He’s not looking at my mom. He’s studyingme. His voice is all smoky tones with a hint of hope trembling around the edges.
I have trouble getting my heart to stop slamming in my chest.Words.Right. I could use some of those. They’re hard to push out, especially when I have no easy answer for that. In short?Yes. But it’s always more complicated than thatin short.Always.
“You know I have a private studio at my house. I’d love it if you’d go there, whenever you’re ready.”
I grasp his leg a little harder, as though I can change the future and the facts and alleviate all my doubts with just that squeeze. “I’m not going to record anything.”
“I thought you might want to watch and listen to me do it. They’re your songs.”
Mom just takes it all in. Silently.
“I know I can’t change your mind overnight,” he continues. “There’s going to be some crazy emotions and a big storm coming when we let the world knowtheband is breaking up.”
I close my eyes against the heat surging straight to them. I knew this was going to happen. I knew it a while ago. But knowing it and hearing Wilder drop those words are two very different things.
It might not be my band, but I was tied to it for a good chunk of my life. And far more than that, I know how this is hurting Wilder, even if he’s good at hiding it. It’s there in the shadows in his eyes, in the way the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his mouth deepen, and in the too-rigid posture he suddenly adopts. They’re his family. Wilder does let some of his pain through, the tiny ouches, but the stuff thatgutshim? He nurses the worst of it in private.
“Is it really?” I have to hear him say it for it to be real.
He nods. “Yeah, it’s happening. We’re going to tell the label this week. Well,Iam. Going to tell them. They left it up to me.”
“Are you going to be—” Okay is such a shitty word, so I stop myself from saying it. “Are you… do you… what do you need?Space? Time? For me to be there for you? A hug?” My fingers curl into his thigh muscles.
He blinks the slow blink he does when he’s trying to contain his emotion. He wants to keep it inside, especially with my mom sitting right there. It might have been a long time coming, but it’s a fresh wound, gaping and bloody. He doesn’t know how to treat it. I don’t either. I just know it’s brutal, and I wish it weren’t.
“All of the above?”
As a friend or as more?It’s the question I can’t ask. I don’t know what he’ll say. I have no idea whatI’llsay.
“I think time is a good thing,” Mom interjects softly.
She doesn’t judge us for what she walked into today. She doesn’t press on the obvious after she said she didn’t like Wilder for me. She doesn’t tell us that we’re being rude for getting lost in each other right now.
She just lets us be us.
That’s the thing about my mom. She’s never tried to control anyone. As a therapist, she probably spends all day helping people come to terms with the fact that the one thing they’re never going to be able to control is other people. It’s important to just let go and let it be, even when people are doing it wrong. She’s going to let me make my choices, as she has ever since I legally became an adult, and even before then. She’ll give me a gentle encouragement or a hard dose of reality in a loving way if that’s what I need, but she’ll wait for me to ask first and be ready to honestly receive an answer.
I shift my hand from Wilder’s leg over to find his hands when he drops them under the table and into his lap. I clench both his hands with mine. I stroke his long fingers, smoothing over the calluses on the tips.
Wilder sees the world in music. That’s the way he understands it. He breaks it down and turns it into chords and lyrics. Musicflows through his veins. It’s in his brain and in his heart. I’ve seen him literally sit through the most uncomfortable press, and I can just tell he’s up in his head, turning the conversation and his responses into lyrics before he decodes them back into reasonable answers for the rest of the world.
“You know, I’ve seen a few therapists in the past,” Wilder says, turning to my mom. His voice gets even deeper and smokier, the tone he seems to save for the most serious times. “I didn’t like it, but I do think I got something out of it. I could let go of… what happened before I lived with my grandma. It’s a complicated profession that evokes a lot of complicated feelings in people.”
My mom searches his face, not impolitely or invasively. She’s just trying to understand what he’s saying beneath what he’s not saying. “That’s very true.”
Wilder doesn’t have to swear anything to my mom. I like that he turns to me, not cutting her out, but speaking while he makes the most intimate and honest eye contact. “I don’t want to hurt you or have something happen to you that you’re not ready for. I’ll do everything to keep you out of the professional part of my life if you decide you do want to be in it.”
“But we can’t just keep walking around in disguise. I can’t go to your place, not even after the hype dies down, and you can’t come here. Someone will figure it out.”
