“I really like you, Rachel,” he said softly.
Because he was so tall, it took him a long time to slowly lean down to my face and I had time to decide I would dismiss what he’d said about the weed and the acoustic. He kissed me on the lips, and I was so nervous and not sure how I felt about it, but I tried to kiss him back and hoped I came across as being calm and cool instead of the bag of fluttering nerves I felt like. He straightened back up again and took my hands. “I think you should come back to my hotel tonight,” he said.
“No,” I said immediately, and then cleared my throat and started again. “Chris, I mean, I really like you too. I just, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I mean not right now. Not yet. I’m just, ah, I guess I’m just not ready for that.” I was babbling, and the fact that we’d kissed was giving me this weird, overwhelming feeling of intimacy with him and I felt myself yearning to tell him what had happened, what had happened to me and Fern, because he would understand, and he would care, and he would hate it, and he would want revenge — he would understand everything. Hot tears prickled in my eyes; I was desperate to tell him what they had done to us.
“I understand,” he said, gazing at me, not noticing that I was almost crying. “I respect that. I hope I didn’t offend you by asking.”
“No,” I whispered.
He looked out over the ocean, his hair gently blowing. I wanted to reach up and touch it, but he was too tall. It would’ve been awkward. “You’re really special, Rachel. Really beautiful. I want us to get to know each other. And we can take things as slow as you want.”
I didn’t point out that we lived on opposite sides of the continent and that our tour would end in just a few more weeks. I was content to just stand there, holding his hand, looking out over the ocean. It really was a nice moment, one of those ones you don’t forget.
FORTY-EIGHT
Fern was back. She was always smiling, she stayed up and watched movies on the bus and laughed and ate a lot. I hadn’t noticed how fucking skeletal she’d become until she started eating normally again, wanting to share ice cream with me. Onstage she was totally psychotic, playing with more energy than ever, taking on this amazing persona and leaping and darting around, almost manic. She was close with Edgar again as well, and suggested that we start working on new music. She became the life of the party on our bus, and more than once I caught that little moron Timmy staring at her with a stupid grin on his face.
As the next two weeks passed, things with Chris sort of developed into a routine. We’d smoke together outside the buses, we’d watch each other perform (I still tried to do it discreetly), and sometimes we’d go for a short walk after the show and hold hands. The guys in his band started being friendly to me, except for the grizzly old grey-haired Chick, who just seemed completely disinterested in everything to do with our band and breezed around backstage as if he had important places to be.