Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (9 page)

Andrew was the last to come on stage, not because he wanted to make an entrance, but because he was speaking quickly to the girl who had introduced them. He made a motion with his hand to the audience, nodded in understanding, then jumped up onto the stage. The applause was deafening.

His fans were back in droves. He seemed a bit puzzled by the number of shrieking women but just shrugged his shoulders and welcomed the crowd.

“Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be back here at the Skellar tonight. You have a charming city here. I’ve been told that the natives are quite friendly.”

The natives erupted in screams. He grinned back. It still disconcerted her to hear his clipped British accent from the Mediterranean combination of blue eyes, tan skin, and dark hair.

“The first song we’d like to perform for you tonight is from our forthcoming album. We finished recording it back home over the holidays. Hope you enjoy it.”

Christian smiled back at Andrew’s nod, and Simon set the beat on the drums. Zoey let out a whistle of delight, while Margot sat perfectly still.

By the middle of the third song, the audience was feverishly pressing in around the stage. Zoey hauled them closer, not satisfied to have to stand on the chairs to see the band like so many others were forced to.

After the song ended, Andrew put aside his electric guitar and took up his acoustic. The mood of the room shifted with the dimming lights. He stood before the microphone, all riled up from the previous set, his legs still rocking through his tattered jeans. His Doc Martens were tapping a beat, slow and steady. He strummed a few chords and hummed to himself, tuning his guitar.

He seemed ready now. Emily stood straighter, high on her toes, willing his eyes so filled with fire to find hers in the darkness.
Please see me out here. I’m here. I’ve always been here.

At that precise moment his eyes meet hers. His strumming faltered. Emily immediately pulled herself into the shadows, unable to breathe, unable to move any further. Then he blinked as though shaking himself out of a stupor.

“Forgive me,” he said, his voice a bit strained, “thought I might be losing my mind there for a moment. But just in case I’m not mad, this next song is about a girl. It’s always about a girl, isn’t it?” He sighed and glanced at the floor. “Well, this one is, because it has always been about her.”

He began to play.

When the heart breaks there is no sound. There is only the sensation of threads of hope held taut and cut. Then the ghost pain comes, pain that exists in their absence.

She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t stand here and watch him sing of his love for another woman; it was too painful, too humiliating. What had she been thinking? What fantasies had she spun to get her to this point? How ridiculous had she become?

Blindly, she reached for her coat. She had retreated only two steps when she accidently knocked into a group of startled students. One of them, angered at being nearly pushed into a table, shoved back into Emily, sending her flying into a nearby waitress who bore a large tray of drinks. The impact knocked the tray from the waitress’s hands and catapulted its contents clear across the stage. In the uproar, glasses shattered and ice scuttled everywhere. Andrew barely escaped being hit by a beer bottle that crashed near his feet.

Frantic, Emily tried to help the waitress up but was pulled off balance, causing them both to tumble to the floor at the edge of the stage. Skinning her elbow across the cement, she cursed loudly.

Despite the mayhem, Andrew’s eyes narrowed as he scoured the darkness. He muttered something unrecognizable, then his eyes met Emily’s. He froze and his face blanched, “You? No. Christ, it is you! Bloody hell.”

The sharpness of his voice sent a shock down her spine. “What?” she managed to get out, struggling to retrieve her coat from the floor.

“You’re here. How did you find me?” he demanded more loudly now, ignoring the crew attempting to clean up the debris around him. “How?”

She took a step backward. She felt all the eyes in that room glued to the specter she must have made standing there, mortified, holding that blackest of blue coats. She felt his glare most of all, demanding an explanation.

“I didn’t…I’m sorry.”

“But it’s you,” he insisted, beyond vehement now, pushing aside the microphone stand. “It can’t be you.”

Panicked, the memory of her own words haunted her—the words she had spoken on that damp park bench the first night she saw him. He had recognized her after all. His personal stalker had crashed his show. How the hell had she descended to these depths?

Suddenly it all became too much. The riot of her emotions and the crush of the walls closed in on her and choked the air from her lungs. Gasping for breath and desperate for escape, she shoved the onlookers aside and escaped toward the exit. Zoey and Margot shouted her name in confusion.

She did the only thing she could do—she ran. She had to get out of there. Humiliated, she ran into the black, cold, foggy street. She ran until she couldn’t move anymore, couldn’t drag herself another foot. Ten blocks she ran, fighting back tears. She ran until she collapsed against a vacant alley, her lungs on fire, her body bent over and panting.

And there, under the fog and a fizzling street lamp, clutching her coat about her shoulders, she realized: she had lost one shoe. She slumped down the wall and stared up into the night sky, feeling the trail of a hot tear down her cheek. To hell with those stupid fairy tales.

5

B
LOOD
P
OUNDED
I
N
H
IS
E
ARS
as the world spiraled down into a pinprick of soundlessness.
She was here. I am here. She was here. I am here. Here
. Andrew could feel the words echo in the reverb of his guitar and pulsate under his fingertips. He was either hallucinating or truly going mad this time; both were valid options. But he knew, without any doubt, that she—his muse—had stood before him, close enough to touch, and that was the only reality that mattered anymore.

Then she had vanished and left him speechless, holding his guitar and what little remained of his sanity. The empty place that she had filled narrowed to a kaleidoscopic lens with each frame holding her image, the backdrop ever changing, her clothes different in each view, but always with the same expression on her face—as if she were staring at an old photograph, the kind you would hold to your heart long after you had finished gazing at it.

Without thinking, Andrew threw his guitar to the ground and leaped off the stage. The shocked audience stumbled apart to make way for him, then surged back in a wave, not wanting to miss any part of the excitement. Shoulders smashed into his and long nails tore at his hair as he struggled to pass. The last thing Andrew heard as he made it to the exit was Christian’s voice announcing, “Going to take a break, folks!”

At the door, the bouncer gaped in confusion at the sight of the wild guitarist, but Andrew ignored him and pushed past the velvet ropes and out into the night. Immediately, the chill and fog hit him square in the face, and his eyes teared and fought to adjust to the darkness. All he could see before him was a street littered with the dregs of people out on a Saturday night, almost translucent under the streetlamps.

Scrambling for what to do next, he felt his legs begin to pump. He ran. Harder and harder. But to where? Up two blocks, back down three.
Where are you? Where are you?
Was he shouting the words, or was he thinking them? He couldn’t tell.

Like a madman he scoured the streets for her, for that black coat, that delicate face. She couldn’t have gotten very far; she had to be near some storefront or trying to flag down a taxi, something. But all he could see were the ghosts of Haight Street, hands shoved in their pockets, as though each was wanting to be somewhere else.

After several more futile minutes spent searching for her, he slammed his foot against a nearby newspaper stand, then cursed and collapsed down on the curb, listening to his heart pound out in three quarter time:
she—was—here, she—was—here, she—was—here
. A lifetime of searching and he had finally seen her. The realization should have instilled in him some sense of vindication, should have made him want to climb up to some rooftop and proclaim it to the world.
See, I’m not mad. I’ve been right all along. Screw you all!
But having the contents of his mind made manifest before his very eyes only kept him cemented to the curb. It was one thing to deal with the desires of one’s subconscious, but quite another to have to handle a living, breathing girl. How was he going to approach her? How was he even to say hello? What happened if she wanted nothing to do with him and kicked him to the curb where he sat huddled now? Hell, how was he even going to find her?

The fog clamped down around him, and he felt colder now than he ever had in this beastly town. It had never occurred to him that she would run from him, or worse yet, refuse him. In all his plans, he always believed that once he had found her, everything was going to be brilliant.

“Where is she? How am I going to find her?” he muttered to himself. “How?”

Suddenly he was startled by a sound from a few yards in front of him. A homeless man stood picking through the contents of his grocery cart. His hair and mustache were matted and plastered onto his head in patches of brown and gold. Fingerless gloves covered his hands, and it appeared as though he wore two or three threadbare coats. His sneakers were tied onto his feet with twine.

Moved by the sight, Andrew reached into his pocket and tucked a few dollars in the paper cup by his cart. The man grunted something in response and continued rummaging through old newspapers and layers of orange tarp.

Just as Andrew was about to turn away, a hand reached out to grab his arm but missed. The eyes that had been shielded by the brim of his cap peered at Andrew from behind grimy spectacles. They were white, entirely white, and made the hair on the back of Andrew’s neck stand straight on end. The blind man leaned forward and whispered, “You’re making it way harder than it has to be, kid. Dames ain’t that hard to understand. Every one of them wants to be pursued, to be wooed. Don’t matter what they say, they want you to work for it. All romance requires a level of suffering, just don’t step on your crank too much while you’re going about it ’cause you’ll end up looking like a schmuck and make me look bad. And trust me, you don’t have time for that.”

Andrew stared at him, not knowing what to say, but then spoke somberly, guessing the man was either completely mental or a mind reader. Still, his eyes were so unsettling, but it could be a trick of the light. “Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t, but you will eventually.” He chuckled dryly. “You’re so damn young—still believe all your choices are up to you, don’t you? Well, keep believing that as long as you can, kid, that’s my advice to you.”

“I don’t need advice, thank you.”

“Oh, I think you do. But don’t worry, I won’t let you screw up too badly.”

The honk of a passing car caught his attention, and when Andrew looked back the homeless man, his grocery cart, the orange tarp—everything was gone. A wave of shocked dizziness overtook him, and he spun around in a vain attempt to locate the panhandler. Hands to knees, he took several deep breaths, willing his clouded vision to clear. A panic attack. He knew the symptoms. That, or someone had slipped something in his water bottle at the show. Was he tripping out after all? He pinched his arm hard until it hurt. No, he was here, now.

Before he could worry any further, other images began to flash into his mind: an abandoned room full of paying customers who were probably demanding their money back, not to mention the
what the fuck?
glares of Simon and Christian. Those were real—nothing eerie or supernatural about them unless a vision of his own imminent murder classified as one. He took one last look around the street for a sign of the homeless man and began his return to the Skellar.

Think
, he told himself, he had to think rationally. Whatever delusions he might be suffering, he knew someone at the club must know her. Maybe she had come with friends? After the show he would ask, ask anyone he could get his hands on. The bartender, the bouncer, someone had to have talked with her. The whole way back he plotted.
Because she was here. Here.