Shelter In Your Love (Beatles Fan Fiction)

51. Don't Let Me Wait Too Long

How I love you, baby
So don't let me wait too long

I have to tell George, but I don't want to interrupt him.

He leans back on the sofa, one knee up, head bent over with his hair obscuring his face. He's playing the acoustic guitar he leaves at the flat; practicing, composing perhaps, as I watch him from the floor of the living room.

When he plays like this, he loses himself in it. He concentrates and focuses and goes into his own world, hearing only the music from his guitar, the lyrics in his head that he mumbles or sings to himself. It's mesmerizing to watch him do it. He hardly seems aware I'm here.

I am procrastinating, of course. I could have told him before he started playing. I could have told him when he arrived here an hour ago. I could have told him yesterday, but I didn't.

For the last couple of weeks, things have been so nice between us, I didn't want to spoil it. It's the start of May and it's warm and sunny most days at the moment. George and I have spent hours in the garden behind Elysian House. We've even dared venture to Regents Park a couple of times. We haven't argued or fought. He's making an effort and I am too and it's working. But this is going to make us argue. This is going to make us fight.

George stops and puts his hand on the guitar strings to still them. He huffs, vexed at something, some mistake that I couldn't pinpoint. He plucks a couple more notes then looks up at me, as if suddenly remembering I'm here.

'That was good,' I tell him.

He smiles, sheepishly. 'Yeah,' he replies, quietly.

'Is it one you wrote in India?'

He shakes his head. 'No, over here. I've been working on it a while, but when we were in India, Donovan showed us this finger picking thing...' He plucks a couple of strings. 'I was just practicing that, really.'

'Does it have words?'

He nods, but lifts the guitar from his lap, looking at it, suddenly a little coy.

'Play it for me.'

'I just did.'

'Not with the words.'

He sighs and doesn't move, then lifts the guitar up again, positions his hands and a moment later, starts to play.

I sit and listen. The song is beautiful. The lyrics are really beautiful. I've always loved George's music. He didn't start writing his own songs until a couple of years after John and Paul, but in the last year or two, George's songs have come into their own. This could be one of the best yet.

George plays with his head bowed, not looking at me as he sings through a couple of verses of the song. It sounds like it's nearly finished. He doesn't look at me at all until he reaches the last verse, then he flicks his eyes up at me as he sings --

'...I look from the wings of the play you are staging, while my guitar gently weeps, as I'm sitting here, doing nothing but ageing, still my guitar gently weeps-'

He stops abruptly at that point and puts his hand on the strings again. He smiles and shrugs. 'Lyrics are... I'm still working on it. It might change.'

'It's lovely.'

Another self-depreciative shrug.

'Are you going to record it?'

'Probably. Perhaps. I don't know. Everyone has lots of songs they want to do after India.'

'Yeah, but I bet not many of them are as good as that.'