“Are you fluent in Greek?” she finally managed.
“Eímai,” he replied, which she took as a yes, and which also was so hot she thought she would literally swoon.
After a quick break to grab another round, Niko lined up his final shot.
“Eight ball in the corner pocket.”
Merritt was by his side by this point, staring down at his shoulder blades flexing through his shirt, the long line of his arm stretched in front of him. In one smooth, controlled motion, he sent the cue ball rocketing toward its target. The eight ball sank with aclunkinto the corner pocket. Niko straightened up, turning to look at her, and once again, they were close enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes.
“Why did you stop making music?”
She should’ve expected it, but the tameness of his other questions had lowered her guard. She took a long drink of water, trying to clear her head.
“Can we sit down?”
The band had started their second set, so they reclaimedtheir old booth without issue. She settled in across from him, propping her elbows in front of her and interlacing her fingers.
“How much do you know already?”
He shook his head. “Not much. You were a teenager when you got famous, right?”
She nodded. “My first album came out right before my seventeenth birthday.”
“And it’s been a while since you’ve performed live or put out anything new.”
“Ten years.”
“That’s all I know.”
She drained her glass, debating exactly how much to tell him, and how. She’d never had to do this, she realized—recount the whole story to someone who had zero preexisting knowledge.
She took a deep breath, unsure where to begin. The pleasant buzz from the beer had worn off, leaving her morose.
“So…yeah. I was sixteen when I made my first album, and it just…my whole life changed. It wasn’t overnight, but it feels that way now. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me, but it was also…a lot. Too much. All that attention, all that pressure…it felt like I was always saying or doing the wrong thing, like everyone was rooting for me to fail. They build you up, then they tear you down. And I…didn’t handle it well. I was too young, and too sensitive, and had already been struggling with mental health stuff, even before it all blew up. I felt like one giant raw nerve.”
She paused, looking down at her hands, dropping them to her lap when she noticed they were shaking. “I tried to focus on the parts I loved—on creating, on performing, on how lucky I was to be in that position at all. But as time went on, it only got worse. I mean, it was up and down, but whenever I’d take abreak, I’d be right back where I left off when I came back. I made three albums, and by the last one, I was a total fucking train wreck.”
She glanced up and met Niko’s eyes. Even recounting this to him in the broadest, vaguest strokes possible made her stomach feel like it was turning inside out.
As desperate as she was to find something she didn’t like about him, she was perversely terrified of revealing something that would makehimlose interest inher.
“When my last album came out, I was twenty-five, and I was…really, really struggling. I was fighting with my label a lot because the second one hadn’t done as well as the first, so they were trying to micromanage literally everything about it. And they were about to send me on this huge world tour, over a year long. Touring was especially hard for me. I was basically living on benzos and Adderall to get through the last one. I begged them to let me cancel, and they wouldn’t.”
She looked down at the table, tracing her fingers along the grain of the wood. “The first show was in LA, and I got onstage, and I…I don’t know. I’d been having panic attacks for a while, but this was, like, the mother of them all. I don’t really remember a lot about that night. But that ended up being my last show.”
She glanced up at him again, and even though she’d been able to keep fairly stoic in her retelling, the look on his face made her feel like she was about to crumble.
There was one crucial part of this story that she was omitting—arguably themostcrucial.
But she couldn’t tell him. Not right now. It was too much for one conversation. Better to let him process all of this first and tell him the rest later, if he even still liked her.
“Anyway,” she said, forcefully breezy, “I went to treatment, they let me out of my contract, and they canceled the tour. Andthat was kinda that. Oh, and that’s why I don’t really drink anymore.” She looked up at him. “You didn’t know any of that?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I never paid that much attention to celebrity stuff.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I get it. I don’t, either. When it’s not about me.”
“Iamsorry, though. That you went through that. I can’t imagine what that was like. I told you, I still have nightmares about being a cow.”
