Page 43 of A Crazy Kind of Love
“Micah gets tanked off a pint of Ultra Lite.”
They all behaved like family, and I realized I had no idea who anyone was. “Micah, could you introduce your friends maybe?”
His eyes widened. “Oh, God. Sorry. Right.”
He stood and banged on the table until the room quieted, and everyone looked up to him. I wondered if I was getting a glimpse into how band practice went down. “Everyone, this is Josie Wilder, the photographer from theDaily FeedI told you all about.” This was met with a mix of shouted greetings and catcalls. I might have to reassess my earlier judgment. Maybe some drunk people were fun to hang out with.
“And I’d like you all to meet her friend, Zion, who I believe also works at theDaily Feed. So we have double the spies in our midst. Bear that in mind, folks.” His Cheshire grin disarmed the insult.
He pointed at the red-haired cutie facing me at the adjacent table. “This here is Shane. You’d best stay outside a four-foot perimeter from him because he has a long reach. By that I mean, he’s our drummer.” Shane nodded his head as though he were acknowledging a lady at a ball.
“That fat bastard is Rick, my bass player. He’s off-limits. Not because he’s married with two kids, but because as I just mentioned, he’s a bass player.” Micah pretended to shudder as though that were self-explanatory.
“Noah, our lead guitarist, is the only one of us with a lick of talent. The only reason he hasn’t abandoned us for another band is because he’s so damn ugly.” Noah was in fact quite pretty, but he laughed in a way that only someone with no issues of self-confidence could.
“And let’s see if I can get anyone else’s names right.” He then proceeded to mis-introduce the girls in the room, leading me to hope he hadn’t slept with either of them.
The door opened, and servers brought trays of food in. The conversations changed course like a flock of birds in flight, converging, diverging, chaotic, yet responsive. The room never fell silent. Shane lit into Zion with loud but hilarious complaints about tabloid coverage, and I turned my gaze back to Micah.
As gregarious as Micah had been with the introductions, he didn’t engage with the debates and reminiscences of his bandmates. He sat quietly across from me with his chin on his hand and an elbow on the table, eyes on me.
“What?” I asked. Self-consciously, I touched my face expecting to find something stuck to it.
“Nothing. I was just wondering why it took such an elaborate ruse to get you to come out with me.”
“This was a ruse?”
Splotches of red appeared on his cheeks. “I’m exaggerating a bit. But you have to admit, you make it tough on a guy.”
My own cheeks felt warm. “How do you mean?”
“You’re kind of hard to read.”
I shot him a pot-calling-the-kettle-black look. “And you’re not?”
He opened his mouth to say something more but then thought twice and turned his eyes away with a small smile playing across his lips.
Zion shoved a plate toward me, and I took my eyes off Micah. Zion had carefully chosen a variety of appetizers that would make a decent late night snack for me: a couple of boneless wings, celery, three corn chips and spinach dip, and more celery.
“Uh, thanks Zion.”
He nudged me. “Eat.”
Micah watched the exchange and asked, “Does he usually do that?” He started piling food on his own plate.
I took advantage of the situation and shoved a round ball of fried chicken in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to answer. Zion filled in the silence. “Girl’s high maintenance.” He knocked my shoulder with a laugh and twisted around to return fire with Shane.
Maybe I should have just explained it all to Micah right then. Why Zion was watching me like a hawk after last week. Why I refused to order a simple pint of beer. But it sucked. It sucked to be the one who couldn’t do everything everyone else wanted to do all the time. It sucked all through high school to have kids think I wouldn’t drink because I was uncool. It sucked to drink anyway and then spend the night in the hospital. And it doubly sucked to get left out of everything when people learned why. I knew by now that a drink wouldn’t kill me, but I fought hard enough to eat right. I didn’t need to factor in the added complication.
And I didn’t need to complicate Micah’s view of me when he barely knew me.
But Micah didn’t let it go, and as we ate, he peppered me with questions about how Zion and I met. “So how long have you two known each other?”
“Almost ten years, now. There weren’t many students pursuing a BFA in photography, so we saw each other all the time and eventually started hanging out. We had almost nothing else in common, but when you’re away from home, the strangest people become family. Emergencies happen, and you fall back on each other. Bonds are forged.”
“Emergencies?” He glanced at my plate. “I get the feeling he took care of you.”
I blotted the corner of my lips with a napkin and took a drink before answering. “We watch out for each other. When school ended, he moved up here, while I found a job in Atlanta. It’s funny that neither of us appreciated how strong our friendship was until we were miles apart. We always knew we were friends, you know, but it always still seemed like we were from different worlds and we’d return to our respective corners when we were no longer forced together. But as it turned out, we have more in common than we realized. He’s been trying to get me up here for years.”
