Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1084 Am I The Same Girl

Am I The Same Girl

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And now on to today's actual chapter!

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I think a few more days went by, long adagios of sitting with Claire broken up by sudden cymbal crashes of phone calls that would ultimately fade back to silence. Maybe a week. The phone calls didn't tell us much, just who Barrett or Carynne or our lawyers had talked to, but nothing much was said. Meanwhile, Ziggy gave up harping on working on the non-existent song. I found I could only practice on building up my calluses again when he wasn't there.

We almost had a fight about it when I tried to tell him. "Could you go on an errand with Court or something?"

He'd just gotten out of the shower and was toweling off with the door open to let the steam out. "What errand?"

I felt really anxious about asking this and when he challenged it my throat tightened. "I dunno, just something."

He sat on the edge of the bed, white hotel towel across his lap, and looked up at me. He looked calm, but... "You need some time to yourself?"

"It's not that. I need to practice and... I just can't when you're here."

"It's not like you to be self-conscious."

"Yeah, well, it's not every day you try to come back from something like this." I held up my hand, but it was closed in a fist pressed to my chest. "And it's not about me. It's just that... you're too distracting."

Now a little smile curved his lip. "Should I go sit in the lobby and read for a while?"

"I'll spend the whole time thinking about how you're sitting in the lobby, though." Which was probably all right if all I was doing was trying to give my fingers a workout. I knew I wouldn't be able to write a song, though, if I was distracted thinking about him. Well, unless the song was about him, maybe.

"But you won't if I go somewhere else?"

"Don't ask me to explain how my brain works, please." I found myself standing between his knees, him hugging me around the middle. "I think about you all the time, even when you're right here."

"Then does it matter where I go?"

"Yes, because it's just different." That was about as much of an explanation as I could make.

He stood up and kissed me. "No one likes people listening to them practice," he said. "You're not crazy."

"I'm not worrying about being nuts, just about getting my practice in," I said.

"I'm taking my book and going to the lobby, okay?" He pulled on some clothes, half of which were probably mine. "I'll come back when I get bored if you don't come get me first."

So he took his book, which was some kind of fat thriller—set in Japan, maybe, judging by the title?—and kissed me on the cheek and left me alone.

The good news was that I could play for a good fifteen to twenty minutes before my fingers hurt enough to be a distraction of their own. I was starting to work through a lot of routines that I had used as a teenager and in music school. Many of them I hadn't played in years, but it was like my brain riffled through the piano bench in the back of my head and dredged out a bunch of half-forgotten things.