Page 26 of Rescue

“You want to get some rest?” I ask Lennon, and he visibly blanches.

“Uh, nah. I’m not that tired.” He gestures at the blankets behind the armrest, wrapped up in their protective plastic bags. “But you can feel free.”

“I’m not really tired either.”

It’s true, of course, if only half the story. But what’s the point of telling him the rest?Actually, I’m never all that tired. And when I am, I can’t sleep anyways. Unless I have a hell of a lot more liquor in me than a glass of red wine. That would make me sound real good.

And why are you so concerned with sounding good to him?I ask myself.

“We could watch a movie,” he says, gesturing at the TV in front of him. His eyes meet mine, dark and clear, and something in my chest lurches in response. He has beautiful eyes. “Or we could just talk.”

“Sure,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. This is probably a bad idea. I should shove some headphones over my ears, focus on a movie. Anything but sit here in the dark, talking to Lennon Ransome. He’s a nice guy—that’s obvious. But nice guys are too easy to hurt. And I really don’t want to hurt Lennon. When I look in his eyes—it’s obvious it wouldn’t be the first time. Something else has hurt this guy, something else has broken him down. If there’s one thing I can recognize, it’s someone who’s seen the same kind of darkness that I have.

He obviously doesn’t need more darkness in his life. And that’s exactly what I would be.

But I don’t turn away, despite the warnings in my head. I don’t turn on a movie. I don’t find some other way of distracting myself. When Lennon reclines his seat a little, I do too. And when he hands me my blanket—a surprisingly comfortable feather duvet—I wrap up in it, mirroring his posture when he lies on his side so that we’re facing each other.

And then we talk. We talk about our bands and our families. I find myself telling him about my mom, about the old days back in Detroit when she would drag me from dive to dive or set me up busking on a street corner. I tell him about meeting James in that coffeehouse all those years ago, about how forming a band with him had been like finding freedom from my mom’s constant, suffocating stage mothering.

In turn, he tells me about his brothers, how they’d been playing since they were kids, how they were raised by their dad—who sounds like he could actually give Jess a run for her money as a stage parent. He tells me about Daisy, Daltrey’s girlfriend and one of Lennon’s best friends. About Levi, a friend so close he sounds more like a brother, their former head roadie and current tour manager.

We don’t talk about the dark stuff. We don’t talk about why neither of us desires sleep as it grows later and later. We don’t talk about the look on Reed’s face earlier or about the reason Lennon looked so tired when we ordered our dinner drinks. We don’t talk about the stalking bombshell I dropped on him at the party. We don’t talk about his breathing technique or my purse full of Xanax.

And somehow, as our plane continues east over the Atlantic, as the sun begins to rise in front of us, I realize that Lennon Ransome has kept the darkness at bay. At least for a little while.