Liam’s mouth flattens as his eyes search mine.
Is he also thinking about the last time we talked? About the specific how and why everything imploded? I can admit the irony of it is poetic, stacked up against the how and why I’m running for him now.
“Come with me.” Liam grabs my hand, leads me through the sparser crowd of VIP guests.
Now that we’ve made initial contact, my brain is screaming that I’ve made a grave mistake. Liam was a lifeblood for me; he made me feel more like myself. But when things ended, I had to quite literally scrape my body off the floor and figure out hownotto lose that version of me without him. To keepherthrough the absence ofhim—which was like healing pneumonia with nothing but an old English tincture.
Why would I do that to myselfagain?
Then I look past his shoulder to the stage—the instruments, the speakers, the sound waves—and out to the crowd. Thousands of people belting the lyrics to a song that came out fifteen years ago but will outlive the people who made it. I remind myself what it’s like to be at a live show for an artist I love, performers giving their whole hearts to strangers each weekend because they can’t not, because it’s who they are.
That’s why,I tell myself.Because music is what makes you feel human.
It is pretty much the only thing that’s ever made me feel corporeally human. In silence, I have a phantom limb. When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I was first drawn to songwriting in quiet hours, when the rooms around me started to feel like a still life painting. I craved the noise of my sisters fighting, their music, the TV, our dog barking, the squeak of my dad’s boots on the hallway floor.
Liam pulls me through the crowd to the front of another fence line, this one bumping up against the stage. He moves behind me, sets one hand on my shoulder, and stretches his other arm past me so he can point at the back corner of the stage.
“You see that ramp?” he says near my ear.
“Yes.”
“I’m going up there because I have to manage the stage resetbetween performers. You might lose sight of me as I move around backstage, but that’s where I’m going to be, okay?”
I nod, and Liam’s warm breath grazes the side of my face. “There are only two more acts, maybe one hour of playing, and then I have to make sure everything’s squared away for tomorrow. It’ll take another thirty minutes, probably.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Will you? Do you promise?”
I turn to face him and catch the worried lines between his brows, the chiseled horizontal question mark of his lips.
“I’ll wait for you, Liam.”
He doesn’t look convinced. “Still angry at me?”
“Only because I’m stubborn.” It’s completely true and feels amazing to say out loud. “But I’m not done fighting with you.”
He offers me a desultory smirk and nods at the security guard, who opens the gate for him. Liam gives me one last curious glance before he disappears up the ramp and out of sight.
After Eric Church leaves the stage, Luke Combs plays and then Tim McGraw closes the show. I hum along, detaching myself from my current reality. I’ve always been able to do that with music. It suspends time, delineates it. But when the concert ends and fans begin their mass exodus, my nerves settle in again, like cloud particles gathering moisture before a storm.
“You are waiting here for Bishop?” the guard asks me. He, too, is Russian.
“Yes, if that’s okay.”
“You can wait in the lounge.” The guard cocks his head at me, then opens the gate and points to the breezeway in the corner that leads to the football locker rooms.
“I don’t mind waiting here.”
“It will start raining in thirty seconds,” the guard says. He continues to stare at me.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
I wait him out, counting in my head.
It starts to rain.
