I sink on my knees behind him, laying my cheek against his back.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
Neil shrugs. “Nothing. Just thinking. There won’t be any quiet once we get back to Seattle and then on the road. No time to think.”
No time to think. Sounds like heaven to me.
“Do you want to hear something silly?” I ask him and Neil makes a small laugh. “I’ve never been camping before. Does this count as camping?”
Neil laughs harder. “Sort of. God, you have been raised a completely deprived girl.”
I look over his shoulder and make a face at him. “Pretty much. Why do you want a deprived girl?”
He kisses me lightly. “Because I love you.”
My vision clouds from the power of emotion with which he says that.
“We’re going to be OK, Chrissie,” he whispers.
I place my lips on his back where my cheek had been. I don’t know who Neil is trying to convince; himself or me?
“I know,” I murmur. “We’re both going to be OK.”
He springs to his feet and holds out his hand to me. As we near Josh, I lean into Neil and whisper, “I’m going to hate that van before this is through. All you guys in there at once. With only Josh it’s a nightmare.”
Josh picks up the stove from the table. “Don’t worry, Chrissie. We’ve already decided we’re going to draw up straws each night to see who gets to share the bed with you.”
Shit, he heard me.
Neil gives him a tap on the chest. “Don’t fuck with my girlfriend.” Josh laughs. Neil looks down at me. “We’re doing ten months on the road opening for Scream. The US leg of their world tour. An arena tour, Chrissie. No van. Tour bus. Road crew. Everything.”
My brows hitch up and my eyes widen. I knew things were going well for Neil, but I didn’t know how well. And God, why didn’t I ask him? I’m ashamed that in our month in Berkeley, I hadn’t really asked him anything about the band or his life in Seattle. We’d been too consumed with my shit.
“Chrissie, we haven’t done touring in the van for a year,” Josh says, tossing the stove inside and then closing the cargo doors. “Neil just drives this thing because he fucking likes it. Don’t think you’re going to get him to get rid of it. He won’t.”
“Fuck you, Josh. I like the van. It was more fun when we toured in the van.”
“The only one who liked the van was you, Neil,” Josh counters. “I’m with Chrissie. I hate that fucking thing.”
Neil laughs and opens the side door. “I’m going to get an hour’s sleep, Josh. Then we can head off on the road again.”
I let Neil pull me up into the van with him and I notice how tired he looks. Maybe he didn’t sleep last night. He settles on the mattress, pulling me into the tuck of his body.
He kisses my cheek. “Don’t let me sleep more than an hour, Chrissie.”
“OK.”
I lie against him, wide awake, but in a couple of minutes Neil is sound asleep. In the quiet of the van everything suddenly feels different, inside me, inside him, and all around us. There is a strange sense that life is about to change in some unknown way for the both of us, and in the air there is that feeling of companionable sadness and despondent hope in me and in Neil.
A vision of him sitting on the beach rises in my head. I know where the deeply buried sadness within me comes from, each moment of my life that makes it an unrelenting part of me. But after nearly four years I don’t know its source in Neil.
It should feel different, not good, when I touch him and feel what it is in me in him as well. Neil is still-water, in most moments of his life, an alluring at-peace soul, but for a moment I felt me in him.
I wish I understood what it is I’m feeling in him. I wish I understood why he loves me. I wish I understood why in this companionable sadness we sometimes share we always feel our best to me.
We feel good together. Right. Almost enough. But not quite.
It’s not Neil’s fault. He’s a wonderful guy. It’s me. I’m lost in a void. Going somewhere. Going nowhere. Having everything a girl should want. Having nothing completely fill me. Thinking of a whispering voice saying Chrissie as I let Neil hold me and sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Something pulls me from sleep, and I slowly give myself over to waking, when I don’t really want to. Our first five days in Seattle have been exhausting. We take off on tour in two days. If the grind is anything like this, I won’t ever survive ten months on the road with Neil.
I’d forgotten the pace of life here, so different than in Berkeley. Neil and I are hardly ever alone. The days pass in long hours with the guys jamming in the rehearsal space or just hanging out in the apartment together. The nights are filled with parties and music. Life here exists in a never-ending torrent of creative fervor and camaraderie, a nocturnal existence of hungry musicians and artistic obsession. The center of the music world is in Seattle, and the entire city pulses from it.
I feel around in the bed for Neil. Gone. I look at the clock on the nightstand. 2 a.m. Why would Neil go out in the middle of the night? Why would he want to?
Every part of my body is limp. We went to bed early and fucked a long time. There has been something feral and frantic in both of us, a strange internal chaos that has been building and building since we arrived in Seattle. We were both crazy in our bodies last night and by the time we ended the fucking everything inside me was quieted for the first time in a very long time. Neil was passed out on his pillow the minute the sex ended.
Why isn’t he here with me, still asleep? We fucked ourselves into quiet.
I sit up in bed and notice the light coming from the living room. I pick up my panties and Neil’s shirt from the floor, pull them into place, and exit the bedroom.
My eyes widen. Neil is sitting on the sofa, fully dressed, lacing up those hideous black army surplus boots so popular up here.
“Where are you going?” I ask, crossing the room to him.
Neil shrugs and doesn’t look up. “Just out for a walk. I’m kind of restless.”
I become aware he is tense and agitated.
“Do you want me to dress and come with you?”
“You don’t have to do that. I’d rather go out alone. I need to be alone sometimes, Chrissie.”
Coldness prickles my cheeks from the edge in his voice and how he nearly snapped at me. I stare at him.
Neil closes his eyes and exhales slowly. “It’s not you, Chrissie.”
I sink down on the sofa beside him. “I didn’t ask if it was me. Why were you so quick to say it wasn’t?”
He shakes his head, brushing his messy chestnut waves back from his face, and then smiles. “Because I know how you think. You don’t need to say it for me to know what you are thinking.” He leans in and drops a fast kiss on my lips. “I won’t be long. I’m just going to walk for a while.”
“OK.” My eyes follow him to the door, but this feels strange to me and I don’t know why.
At the door, Neil pauses. “Go back to sleep, Chrissie. I won’t be long.”
The door shuts and I sit, staring at it. That was odd. Really odd. But then, there has been a lot of oddness since we got to Seattle. Being in Seattle has always affected Neil strangely, he hasn’t explained why to me, but I shouldn’t be surprised by the brief flashes of weird Neil while we’re here.
I try to dismiss my sense of unease. It is illogical and Neil would never do anything to me that should make him wanting to walk at night alone something I should be suspicious of. Neil is not a slip-out-to-cheat kind of guy. He’d be honest with me. He would confess. He wouldn’t be able not to.
I consider going back to bed, and then sink deeper back into the sofa. I’m wide awake now. I click on the TV and turn the volume down low, since I’m not sure if Josh or Les Wilson are asleep in their bedrooms.