Page 21 of Scorpio Season

In her head, she’s been going through the list of things she still has to pack. Probably, she should’ve started two days ago. Now she’s going to be rifling through her closet for clean shirts at two a.m. instead.

“Nervous?” Toni asks.

“Yeah,” Luca admits. She’s been anxious all day. All week, maybe. “You?”

“I think it’ll be fine,” Toni says.

“Yeah,” Luca says again, quieter.

“We have nothing to lose, really. We’re at the very start of our careers. There’s nothing at stake yet.”

“I think Florence would disagree,” Luca dares to point out. “She seems to take this really seriously.”

The evidence is in the sore muscles of her arms and shoulders. They’ve had grueling, three-hour practice sessions every evening this week. Since they’re leaving for tour tomorrow, today is a day for them to, as Florence put it, get their affairs in order. Luca’s affair is picking up her in-ear monitors; when she mentioned it to Toni, she suggested they go run their errands together.

With her arms braced on the counter, braless in a white top with her dark-blond hair falling over her shoulders in loose waves, Toni looks like a ’70s rock star on a Rolling Stone cover. Luca glances down at her own scuffed Converse and wonders if she’s about to spend the entire tour feeling horribly underdressed.

“Flo takes everything seriously,” Toni says. “I don’t think she’s ever been chill a single moment of her life.”

Luca gives a noncommittal smile. “How did you guys become friends? The others told me you studied music at King’s together?”

Toni nods. “We met during freshers’ week.”

“What about Izzy?”

Toni scrunches her nose. The sunlight filtering through the grimy shop window catches on her nose piercing. “We matched on a dating app.”

Luca isn’t sure if Toni is joking or not. With how dry her humor is, Luca sometimes can’t read her tone at all. “Really?”

“Yeah. On our third date, I mentioned to her that our band was looking for a bassist. We’re much more compatible musically than romantically, it turns out.”

Luca combs through her memory for any noticeable tension between the two but comes up empty. “And it isn’t . . . awkward, or anything?” she asks.

“I don’t see why it would be. We only hooked up once.”

It takes conscious effort for Luca not to twitch. She and Florence only hooked up once, and look where it got them. Luca still feels herself blush every time she meets Florence’s eyes. It’s a miracle the others haven’t noticed anything.

Before she can ask anything else, the shop owner emerges from the back room and announces, “Here it is.” He sets a small device down on the counter.

Toni picks it up, turning it over in her hands as she inspects it. She asks him a few questions about it—none of it means anything to Luca—before she pays and they step back into the street.

“I’ve always wanted one of these pedals,” Toni says. “The last one I had was ancient.”

“Nice,” Luca says, for lack of anything smart to contribute.

“Hey,” Toni says. “My girlfriend works three minutes from here. Do you mind if I pop in and say hi?”

“No,” Luca says. “’Course not. Do you want me to wait here?”

Toni shoots her a bewildered look. “What? No. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

For some reason, that makes Luca feel warm. “Okay. Yeah. If you’re sure.”

“Of course I’m sure,” Toni says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.”

Toni’s girlfriend, it turns out, works at a store just off Brick Lane. It sells the kind of stuff that Luca’s mum loves: colorful vases and candle holders and a million different decorative pillows, each of which probably costs as much as Luca earns in tips on a good day. The air smells like vanilla and fresh-cut wood. There are only two customers around, leaving the soft acoustic cover of some pop song to fill the silence.

Toni heads straight for the cash register while Luca trails behind her. The blond behind the counter looks up. “Toni?” she asks. “What are you doing here?”