Page 42 of Hidden with a Rockstar
The next week is the best week of my life.
Thinking about you.
Same.
She sends a voice note from her commute.
"The guy next to me is eating a sausage roll and I'm jealous of his sausage roll and also I miss your face."
“I’d be your sausage roll if you’d like.”
The giddiness is unfamiliar to me.
And yet here I am, grinning at my phone in the back of a van heading to a session while Sandy is chatting with Jeremy's about hair gel, and my grin is involuntary and constant and obvious enough that Jeremy catches it.
"Good news from a girlfriend?" he asks.
I say no without thinking about what that word means.
Lena:The guy two desks over is eating a sausage roll with such joy that I’m considering a career change
Me:I can be your sausage roll.
Lena: You’re not even here
Me:I could be right there
Lena:Don’t. I’m at work and you can’t say things like that
Lena:Also Gerald asked if I’d thought more about dinner. It felt good to say no.
Me:It felt good to me too, for the record
The good week has a Wednesday in it, and on Wednesday the band meets for a session I’ve been dreading.
Jo hasn't apologized for calling me a manipulator. I haven't apologized for shutting her down. The silence between us has calcified into something structural. But she's there when we arrive at the studio—arrived early, ten minutes ahead of schedule. Coffee is on the desk with a cookie.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey."
We don't hug.
We communicate the way we always have—through bass lines and drum counts.
“That was a good session,” she says afterward, as we’re packing up. “Your low end on the second track. It had a such a good vibe to it..”
“No way. I loved the bridge you did..”
“…Thanks.”
We track two of the arrangements clean and send the stems to Conor—our manager, our producer—who fires back a wall of notes at midnight the way he always does. It’s the most normal the band has felt in weeks.
Lena texts on a Thursday:
I miss you. Do you miss me too? I hope you do.
I miss you too. Let’s do something stupid.
