“Okay, yeah. I’m not but promise you won’t laugh.”
She looks at me, with her brown eyes.
"Okay I won’t."
“I’m terrified.”
“Of what?”
"That this physical reality is going to ruin it.” I point between me and her. “I think we text so much that you’ll see that I'm not the person I am in texts. That I'm just a total scam."
"Oh, Lena." She steps closer. The backstage chaos is still moving around us but it feels far away now. "I came to your apartment when I was dying. I was vulnerable and scared and you looked after me. That's not ruining anything."
“Come back to mine,” she says, and the invitation is careful, like she isn’t sure she’s allowed to want it. “It’s across the city. It’s small. Nobody knows where I live. I’d like you there.”
I think about the airbed at Jani’s, aggressively inflated, and my sister’s late studio night, and the cover story I’ve already built. I think about how much I don’t want this evening to end.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Yeah.”
“I’m out,” she tells the room—Jeremy coiling a cable, Ana on her phone, Sandy long gone. “Long day. Jeremy, can you run load-out and the merch count? I’ll owe you one.”
Jeremy gives her a look that says he knows exactly something is up and has decided not to ask. “Go,” he says. “I’ve got it.”
Rhonda transforms at the venue’s side door—hat tugged low, black mask up over her nose, collar flipped, bassist to rumour in under ten seconds. She scans the street twice before the cab pulls in, then holds the door for me anyway. She gives the driver an address I don’t know, somewhere across the city, and it lands on me all at once that I’m about to see where she lives. Her left knee comes to rest against my right as the car pulls away. Denimto denim. Neither of us moves. The streetlights sweep orange across our laps, and I count three of them before I trust my voice.
“You know the mask makes you more conspicuous, not less,” I say. “You look either famous or sick. There’s no third option.”
Her eyes crease above the fabric. “Says the woman who wore a masquerade mask to the Siren’s concert.”
“Mine was art.”
“Yours is in a drawer in pieces,” she says.
“And whose fault is that?”
I laugh loud enough for the driver to check his mirror.
She pulls the mask down to her chin, and in the dark of the cab it feels ceremonial, one more layer coming off. “Sandy vanished the second we finished the set,” she says. “An after-party. I didn’t ask where. I’ve learned not to ask.”
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is. But it's her thing. I can't control her thing. And honestly? I'm glad she's happy, even if it's a mess. At least she's not pretending."
The cab moves through traffic. City sounds filter through the window.
"The mix between Jo's voice and the instrumental arrangement," I say. "It's changed. It's sharper now. When did that happen?"
"A month ago. I was thinking about what you'd said on a voice note—about how Jo's vocals could shine better if we gave it morespace. So we stripped back the organ line in the first verse. Let her sit more forward."
"That’s a big change."
"Yeah. I wasn't listening to you before. Or I was listening but I wasn't really hearing. Now I hear you. Everything you say, I'm thinking about it in the studio, thinking about it on stage, thinking about you when I should be sleeping."
I feel my face warm and hope it hides in the dark. “I—yeah me too.”
"Really?" She says as the cab turns down a street I don’t know.
"Yeah, I think about what you say all the time."
