28

“You’re quiet today…” I told Emma as we sat outside of the venue and ate boxed lunches that had been delivered to us by a local caterer who was a fan. We’d somehow managed to find a spot where we could sit outside to eat, and smoke, without fans hanging over a wall ogling at us screaming my name and taking pictures of us with our mouths full of food.

“Am I?”

“Just a little bit. Looks like you’ve got something on your mind… anything you want to talk about?” I was going out on a limb, but I didn’t care.

She ate a pickle chip and shrugged, “I told Nick I’d have dinner with him tonight…”

I didn’t expect her to tell me what was on her mind, let alone tell me that she was going out to dinner with Nick… very interesting. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah… he found me after the sound check and wanted me to have lunch with him. But I told him I had plans with you and he promptly asked me to go to dinner with him.”

“And you said yes.” Duh. I knew she had, but I was apparently channeling all of my former therapists and their ways of repeating things I’d said so I could hear them back.

“I think I said it before I thought about it. Then he was grinning so big I couldn’t take it back.”

“Did you want to take it back?”

I watched her as she pushed potato salad around in a small plastic container with her fork. “I don’t know… not really. I just don’t want to give him the wrong idea.”

“Which would be, what?” Yes, I was practicing to be a therapist once my voice gave out and I couldn’t shake my moneymaker anymore.

She looked at me and smiled, “Are we playing therapist today?”

I laughed, “I didn’t mean to… Sometimes it just comes out that way.”

“It’s okay…” She put her fork down and then sat the rest of her lunch down on the grass between us. “I just get the impression that he’s a little more interested in me than he should be. And, well… you know how I am. I’m not exactly Miss. Social.”

“You’re more social than you were when I met you…” I told her with a gentle smile.

“Yeah…” Her voice was distant when she said it, kind of like she wasn’t sure about herself. I took it as my clue to stop pushing.

“You want this?” I asked her pointing to her uneaten food between us.

“Knock yourself out…” she said and nudged the box toward me.

I looked through her box for the pickle I knew she hadn’t eaten, “You draw anything today?”

That brought her smile back and she reached for her sketchbook that I noticed she pretty much always had with her. “Here…”

I opened the book up toward the back where I knew her newest sketches were and I found the drawings she’d showed me the day before. When I turned the page I found her new masterpiece and chuckled, “This is brilliant…”

“I was really bored in my meeting this morning and for some reason Marcus was in my head. I wanted to capture his softer side in the picture though, not the tough-guy bodyguard.”

I chuckled and called out to Marcus who was wandering about nearby, as usual. “Yo Marc?”

“Yeah?” he said as he looked over at us and shielded his face from the sun with his hand.

I motioned for him to come over and I smiled at Emma as she lit a cigarette and watched me. “Check this out…” I said to Marcus and held the book up to him.

“Holy shit…” he said with a rumbling chuckle. “Where’s this from?”

“Emma’s an artist…” Emma groaned as I called her an artist and took a drag of her cigarette. I winked at her and looked back to Marcus. “Good, huh?”

“Very good…” Marcus said with a nod and then looked at Emma. “May I look through this?”

She nodded ever so slightly and looked out across the scenery, “Sure…”

Marcus let out a soft whistle as he looked through the drawings in her book, “Wow…”

My eyes met Marcus’ as he looked at me over the edge of Emma’s book. He knew just as well as I had that what he was looking through was not the work of an amateur, nor someone who should have been selling tee shirts on a concert tour. I nodded at Marcus as if to say, “Yeah I know, I see it too…”

Once he was done looking through the book he handed it back to me and quietly thanked Emma for letting him see it. Then he went back to being the bodyguard and moved away so not to seem like an intruder. I always thought that being a bodyguard must have been the weirdest job, being a huge part of someone’s life like that. Knowing practically everything about them and yet not being a real part of things. Marcus was my friend though, over the years he’d become a really close friend to me. I never understood how he managed to shut off the natural tendency to be a part of my life when he was just supposed to be protecting me from rabid fans. He was a damn good listener though, and I knew that if I happened to ask him anything about Emma, he’d know all about it. He may look like he’s not paying attention to what I’m doing while he’s keeping watch, but he’s a lot better at it than you’d think.

“You got quiet on me again…”

Emma smiled and then turned her head to look at me, “Sorry…”

I shook my head, “No problem…”

“Tomorrow’s a road trip… did you and Nick give any more thought to the three of us sharing a bus?”

I laughed, “He mentioned it when he got up this morning. I think he’s going to actually make us go through with it.”

“It could prove to be rather interestin’…” she said with a shrug. “Several hours locked up together in a big moving room with no witnesses other than the bus driver.”

“Yeah, I guess…” I nodded and laughed at the images that flashed in my head.

“I just have one request though…”

“What’s that?”

She smiled and held up her half-gone cigarette, “We’ve gotta take your bus so we can smoke…”