It's All Happening [h.s.]

July 1973 - entry no. 6

"What a fuckin' show!" Bryan hollers from the doorway of the green room. Frankie watches as he interacts with each member of the band, even offering to take a hit of the joint Jett extends towards him. Rod even gives him a hug, and Frankie is just as confused as ever.

"Let's celebrate!" Rod agrees, grabbing Cherry by her hips and bringing her towards his front. He drowns her giggles with a bottle of whiskey.

The band convenes in the middle of the green room, passing around a whiskey bottle and planning on throwing an after party in their hotel rooms. Eddie asks Bryan to upgrade their rooms so they can fit more people, and Jett agrees, telling Cherry's friends to invite anybody in the area they know. Frankie ultimately feels like an outsider, having no desire to go out and drink with people who barely even wanted her around in the first place.

As she begins to gather her belongings and throw them into her tattered messenger bag to retreat to her own hotel room for the night, Frankie sees the tips of black leather shoes touch her white sneakers. She looks up slowly, her breath practically catching in her throat when she notices Harry peering down at her, a faint trace of a smile on his lips.

"Fancy that interview, Franks?" Harry says softly, and Frankie suddenly is at a loss for words. She's unsure if it's from his close proximity to her face, or the fact that he actually is ready to allow her to interview him, but she just nods slowly.

"You don't want to party? I think you earned it," Frankie mutters back, offering him an out.

Harry doesn't take it though. "Nah, let's get out of here," and with that, he loops her messenger bag around his broad shoulder and places a large hand at the small of her back, tracing her out the door.

Frankie offers to conduct the interview inside Bernie, but Harry just shakes his head, "I'm sick of sittin' on the bus." When she mentions her hotel room being on a different floor than the rest of the band's, Harry just wiggles his eyebrows suggestively, "Tryin' to take me to bed already?" Frankie just rolls her eyes, wishing her skin was a darker shade so her blush wasn't so prominent. Harry smiles, enamored that he can get her riled up so quickly, and drags her towards a small staircase on the top floor, a sign reading NO ENTRY in bright red letters.

Frankie pauses and Harry just laughs, opening the door with his hip and grabbing her wrists with his long fingers. "Live a little, Franks," he whispers, dragging her up the staircase and onto the roof of the hotel.

The dark sky looks so vast from the roof, and Frankie cranes her neck back to take in all of the glittering stars above. She never gets to see the constellations through the LA smog, so from this vantage point, Frankie doesn't hesitate to take it all in, her hair shining in the moonlight.

Harry doesn't hesitate to take Frankie in, either.

"Ready, Franks?" Harry's voice bursts Frankie's imaginary bubble, and she fumbles around trying to grab her notebook and recorder before sitting across from Harry over a skylight. She doesn't meet his eyes because she's scared that if she does, she'll forget everything she wanted to ask him.

"So, Harry. Why music?"

And it's as if a dam has broken, split completely in half, and Harry's words are the water that flows from the cracks. He tells Frankie that he started the band with his brother in small town Manchester, England, and they were shit at first. Tells her how the idea of a band came from the 1961 Ice Blue Fender Musicmaster their dad left behind when he left his mother when Harry was a boy. How the first few songs he wrote were about his fear of abandonment, and when he lost his virginity, all he could write about were girls and hearts and lips and feelings. He tells her things that Frankie didn't even need to pry from him, instead, he willingly tells her how he was nervous to have five members in a band, nervous to leave England, nervous to be the frontman of a group when he was the youngest one. And when they were sat on the forty-fifth floor of a high-rise building with walls of windows in New York City, signing their recording contracts, Harry never felt more out of control in his life.