Also, it didn’t hurt to have a dead rock star helping to write your songs. Clay shrugged, but Savy was determined to prove her point. She popped her case open and lifted out her double-horned Gibson. “Play something.”
“Sav, my energy is through the floor—”
“Shut up and play. I mean it.”
Clay could see that she did, and he dropped into the nearest chair, as she rooted through her backpack, tossing out her phone, eyeliner, guitar strings, the latest Karney and the Demons CD—which some of the Demons (though not Karney himself) had signed after the show—before locating a pick among the loose change. “Vocals too,” she warned.
Clay’s throat was cheese-grater raw from the show, but he managed a decent rendition of “Skeletons at the Feast,” the second song he and Boyle had collaborated on, even doing Savy’s own solo, just to be a wiseass. “See that, Dumbo?” she told him. “The magic feather can suck it.”
Clay smiled. He didn’t know how many of Crissy’s partygoers would remember his performance tonight, but he could see that Savy would; he’d proven something, answered the question she’d been asking about him. And thankfully, it was the answer he’d wanted her to have. “I’m glad you showed up. Otherwise, I’d have spent the night feeling sorry for myself.”
“Talk to Mo,” she warned. “He’ll tell you what a night of me in your ear’s like.”
“Well, I’d take a night of you any day of the week.”
The words were out, cheesy, unfiltered, before Clay could help himself.
“Quarantined” whispered from the record player. Had one of them stepped forward? They were standing close all of a sudden. Not enough air between them to even breathe, really.
At least until Savy turned and sat on the back of the couch. “I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression, showing up here.”
“You didn’t.”
“Because it can’t be that way.”
“I know.” Clay’s voice quivered only a little.
She wasn’t looking at him anymore—given the angle of her gaze, she was probably counting the yellow stitches in his boots. He told her, “I’m just, you know, a little disturbed you think you’re in my league.”
Savy laughed and squeezed his bicep. But as she put her guitar away, Clay was troubled to feel his loneliness returning, worse than before. And he asked her, with even less filter, not to go.
They talked, and talked—about bands, books, films, the state of the world, where they would travel on tour in the next year—and when Savy expelled her fifteenth yawn, Ubering home no longer seemed like an option.
They lay flat on the shag carpet in the loft, staring at the stars through the skylight. With this perspective, Clay could confess how terrified he’d been to play tonight. Savy claimed she felt the same, had always felt terrified stepping on stage. And it was a gracious thing to admit, even if Clay didn’t buy it.
The moon wandered across the night and was gone by the time they nodded off. Clay woke an hour before dawn to find Savy curled up beside him. Feeling the steady warmth of her—the slow labor of her lungs, the dream-twitch of her thighs—was intimate, almost as intimate as if they’d screwed each other’s brains out. Well. No. But it was nice. Even if Savy wouldn’t open her heart to a bandmate, who knew what the future might hold? Two lost souls, on a winter tour in Maine or Minnesota, cuddling for warmth in BadVan. Practically essential.
A creak interrupted his thoughts.
Clay lifted his head. Someone was climbing the stairs. “Dad?” Clay whispered, more for Savy’s benefit than his own. Savy was fast asleep, though, and so was his father, curled up with Essie in the main house. And when the creaks arrived in the loft, they brought no body with them. “Hey, man. Kind of a private moment.”
Boyle ignored him. When he spoke, there was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there since the night they’d used Farewell Ghost on Deidre. What’s this?
At first, Clay assumed he’d meant Savy and opened his mouth to explain that there had been no nookie between guitar players, it was purely a friend-thing under the stars.
Then Boyle lifted Savy’s Karney and the Demons album into the moonlight and, from that moment, everything changed.
“We opened for them tonight,” Clay whispered. “It turned out to be a lot more than a birthday party. I’ll tell you the whole massive story when—”
All the new bands we spoke about. You never told me about this one.
Clay hesitated. His whispers might as well have been a bullhorn in the quiet of the loft. “You never asked what your old bandmates were up to. I didn’t think you wanted to know.” In truth, Clay hadn’t wanted to tell Boyle about it either, since Hank Ooljee was three years dead and Barrett Roethke had gone on to fortune and fame with another act.
The record cover, hovering on the air, turned as Boyle reexamined the band picture on the back. I didn’t even recognize my old drummer way in the back. That’s an additional kick in the groin. I was referring to the ass-fuck taking up ninety-percent of the photo.
“That’s Davis Karney. He holds himself in… pretty high regard.”
He wasn’t Davis Karney when I knew him.
“Wait.” Clay’s pulse took a running leap. He wriggled loose of Savy and started to sit up. “You knew him?”
Small world.
“No. Tell me it isn’t what I’m thinking.”
Back then he called himself—
“Him? Rooster?”
I shouldn’t be surprised. I just assumed The Hailmaker discarded him after he discarded me.
“Jesus, Roc, you’re telling me… Davis Karney was the one who broke in here—”
Clay, stop talking.
“—and forced you to—”
Stop. Talking.
The record fell to the carpet. Boyle drew back.
Clay turned to find Savy’s eyes open. Her head had lifted and she was staring in the direction of Boyle’s voice. “Holy shit,” she moaned, wide-awake in a hurry.
She sees me, Clay.
