Blindsided (24 page)

He had been on a bit of an involuntary sexual hiatus, since they hadn’t had any gigs lately except that bullshit ‘intimate engagement’ thing at the club. All the big bands were doing those lately to show they hadn’t sold out. Whatever. They’d sold out, and all the kiddies who were mad about it had never lived on the streets like they had. Otherwise, they’d have understood exactly why they’d sold out. There was something addictive about knowing where you were going to sleep every night.

Too bad Nate had insisted on taking a break after the last tour. That was all fine and good for Nate, who had decided to become a monk or something, but it didn’t work at all well for him. Drummers weren’t exactly celebrity material. They hardly got noticed behind the drum kit, so it wasn’t like they got recognized and idolized everywhere.

But there were certain groupies with a taste for the less popular. They were a drummer’s wet dream. He didn’t know if they had a thing for a man with a good sense of rhythm or just didn’t like the competition involved in going for the singer or the guitarist, but Sean loved them regardless. The blonde in his bed was one of those rare breeds. He had picked her up at a bookstore of all places. She had recognized him in the sci-fi section, which should have put a damper on any sexual thoughts, but she thought it was cute that he was a closet geek. Whatever worked. Sean wasn’t proud. Well, he was, but not when it came to getting laid.

Sean hit print and waited while the printer rumbled and groaned. Nate really needed to get a computer. This calling him every time he needed to look something up was getting old. He looked at the printout. Driving directions, schedules. Jesus, what did Nate think he was, a fucking travel agent? But he owed Nate a lot and it hadn’t taken long. Now he was due back in bed with blondie.

Chapter 12

Seoul baffled Chelsea. There were a dwindling number of places in the world that were new to her, and Korea was one of them. She had visited and written about almost every other Asian nation, but Korea was at the same time so similar and so different from its neighbors that the dichotomy threw her off.

More frustrating than all the new customs and language was the fact that all the newness, all the traveling wasn’t erasing her uneasiness. Before her breakdown, she had loved exploring someplace new. There was nothing like the urgency of survival in a new place to keep her thoughts from running in the wrong direction. Figuring out how to keep herself fed usually took up so much of her mental energy that she didn’t have time for anything else.

Not this time. Ever since she had landed in Geneva, the first stop on this three story trip, she had been feeling uneasy – the same uneasiness she usually only felt when she was back in the States, sitting around. She had felt it writing up her notes about the jewelry market in a café in Geneva. Panic had skittered through her and she had nearly run down the street trying to avoid it. Which meant she hadn’t gotten to finish a delicious cup of coffee.

On top of that she missed Nate in a way she’d never missed anyone. It actually hurt, physically. Taking off from Seattle, there was relief mixed with her sadness. Yes, she would be leaving Nate, but she would be getting back to her real life after far too long away. Finally, all the demons could be shoved back in the closet where they belonged. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. She was still panicking and she didn’t have Nate. Even with the frenetic pace, the things that drove her hadn’t stopped coming.

And so she’d tried to run harder. She hadn’t even bothered to try to sleep except on planes, hadn’t even tried to sleep at night. Her original plan for the trip was to do three stories, but she had taken side trips in both Geneva and Marrakech and written short pieces on both. Since Seoul was her last stop, she was here for two weeks and she had planned three new stories.

Her body was protesting the work, the pace. Chelsea could feel her health slipping, her wellness running off her like water in a shower. It had started even before she left Morocco, and by the time she landed in Seoul, the back of her throat constantly tickled like she had a low grade cold. She felt, if not tired all the time, then at least unenergized. So far, the world had only started swimming and sliding away once. It had been in a club and she had rationalized it away as drunkenness.

She had to rationalize it away, because frankly, she didn’t know what else to do. Her old methods of coping weren’t working anymore. The memories and panic had found a way through. But she was out of ideas, had no Plan B and she was too drained to dream one up.

Standing in front of an enormous gold stature of Buddha at Bongwon-sa Temple, Chelsea stumbled while scribbling about the sound of the birds in her notebook. The stumble seemed to snowball and her feet refused to come back under her. Her body weaving perilously, her vision developing black spots. The world seemed to set her loose and she drifted perilously before a fellow tourist grabbed her arm, righting her and providing support until she could balance again.

She glanced up at him to thank him, and for a beautiful moment, she saw Nate. The man looked nothing like him, but her thoughts were one tracked and stuck on Nate. Her smile and thank you were weak, and she moved away quickly before she burst into tears over the letdown.

Nate had taken her leaving personally. Before she had left, she’d told him over and over again that she wasn’t leaving
him
, but he didn’t seem to understand the difference between leaving him and just leaving. She didn’t know how to tell him that he wasn’t enough to stop the panic, the fear. That was simply too ego-busting to break out on someone you loved.

Maybe if she had told him that, he would have understood, but she just couldn’t bring herself to say it. I love you. So simple, in theory. But to her, it was absolutely horrific. Love required giving up control, and she couldn’t do that. Not now, not ever. Even though she trusted him now, trusted him more than she would have ever believed possible to trust someone who looked every inch the bad boy, she couldn’t bring herself to give up any amount of control. Besides, what was the point of telling someone you loved them if your life was just going to keep you apart?

Now, two weeks into this trip, she was seriously questioning her sanity. She could have tried telling him she loved him, maybe that would have rid her of her panic. Isn’t that how it worked in the fairy tales, in the movies? I love you was a panacea, curing all ills. Her old tactics weren’t working, maybe she should have given the fairy tale standard a try.

She had to focus. She focused on the giant gold Buddha, on the tourists in their standard garb of shorts, sandals and socks. Focused on the resident monks in their gray and maroon robes. This was what she needed to do. Lose herself in the details that made her stories so rich. Her narrowed focus pushed away the black spots and finally, she was able to function without panic, the exhaustion becoming merely a minor annoyance.

###

“Another month?” Nate asked.

Had the woman absolutely lost her fucking mind? Every time she called him, she sounded worse. It was terrible to not be able to see her face. Unlike her face, her voice could hide so much, but even without visuals, Nate could tell she was going from bad to worse. Every day, her voice got brighter and brighter. Today she sounded chirpy. Chelsea was not chirpy by nature. She sounded like someone trying to keep herself from going under.

Underneath the chirpiness, her exhaustion showed. She searched for words far longer than she should, her thoughts were jumbled and disorganized. A pang of fear spiked through him. She was beginning to sound a hell of a lot like she had when she was telling him about the Australian Incident. Sensations and emotions were the only things she had a grasp on now. Great. That was just great.

Okay, so that sounded a little caveman, even to him. He couldn’t forbid her to go, for heaven’s sake. He was her boyfriend, at best. Their relationship had been a bit up in the air when she left. He hadn’t been able to tell her he loved her, still couldn’t, even with her thousands of miles away. Now he wished to hell he had. It probably would have made this easier. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have gone if he’d gotten up the balls to tell her how he felt. Now that was a lovely, gut gnawing thought. One for the regrets record books.

“Nate, you can’t tell me what to do. I’m not about to give up my job and cook and clean for you like some housewife. That’s not who I am,” she said.

Clearly, she had thought his last comment a bit cavemannish as well.

“Give me a break, Chelsea. That is not what this is about and you know it. I don’t want you to give up your job, and I certainly don’t want you to cook and clean for me. Don’t try to make this into some sort of equality thing. I don’t want to find out from Tony or your mother that you’ve had another goddam break down in some remote part of the world.”

He was nearly shouting now. He had no idea how else to get his point across.

“I’m resting, Nate,” she said, “I am.”

“No, you’re not. The stuff you’ve told me you’ve been doing, you haven’t had time to rest. I don’t think you’ll survive another breakdown. You’re still running Chelsea. When are you going to see that?”

Chelsea sipped at her tea and tried to fight back her nausea. Nothing she had done today made any sense, and she was beginning to feel as if she was looking at the world through a fishbowl. Colors and shapes swirled around her without resolving into people or things and the constant movement made her head hurt. All of this was sickeningly familiar, but she just couldn’t stop. She didn’t know how and things were getting worse, not better.

The near constant sound of cards being slapped down on surrounding tables by people playing a card game called go-stop echoed the throbbing in her head. The rhythmic noise was punctuated by the shrill sound of people rapidly speaking a language she didn’t understand. Despite her grasp of European languages, Chelsea had only ever managed to pick up enough of the Asian languages to make her way around. Usually, she found the sing song quality soothing, transfixing. Today it just grated.

On the outskirts of her attention, her uneasiness lingered. She’d made plans to extend her trip by another month. She had to work harder, longer, if she was going to get rid of these feelings.

Nate had not been happy with that news, and she had hung up on him yesterday. She didn’t have the energy to deal with him being a chauvinistic pig. Somewhere, deep down, she knew that he wasn’t, knew he was only thinking of her best interests. Just as it had been easier to clump him in with the bad boys, it was easier now to clump him in with all the men who didn’t think women should work. It compartmentalized him nicely.

She had a job to do, and she forged on. She had three more places she had to go before she could consider the day done and she was still struggling to write up her notes on her morning.

Taking a deep breath, Chelsea tried to arrange her thoughts in some way that approached logical. That morning she had been to a bull fight in the truest sense of the word. It had been bull against bull, the two butting heads and shoving at each other. There was something so innately male about the way the bulls fought. Women, she had jotted down, even those considered aggressive by their peers, were very rarely so impassioned, so arbitrary in their aggression. Men were really little more than animals, she’d thought while watching and getting caught up in the fevered excitement of the crowd.

Halfway through the second match up, Chelsea had felt light, as if her body were made of nothing more than skin. She’d left shortly thereafter, coming to this tea shop to regroup.

A few deep breaths seemed to help the worst of the nausea and Chelsea looked around for some inspiration, some details of the large square to give her readers a taste of what it was like to sit outside a tea shop in Seoul. Small children were playing in a nearby fountain, their voices rising high and clear above the general din. The air smelled sweet, yet pungent, the smell of the teahouse combining with the more acrid scent of the kimchi being sold on the street.

She glanced over her shoulder at the bustling market behind her and felt her stomach lurch. A huge man, white amid a sea of Asian people, towered over the crowd. He wore a black t-shirt, threads of color winding their way up his neck. Nate? She felt saved, a damsel in distress being scooped up by her knight in shining armor. He drew closer and she began to rise out of her chair to wave at him, but he was gone. Replaced by a normal looking Western tourist. The man didn’t even have tattoos.

She was dreaming. She was in her Seoul hotel room, chilled to the bone by the overzealous air conditioning. An overhead fan was creating too much of a breeze, and her arms were cold. Nate was lying next to her, leaning on his elbow and looking down at her, great concern etched on his face.

She blinked a few times and tried to smile at him and the concern eased a little.

“That’s it,” he said, a smile of his own cocking his irresistible mouth, “I’m officially changing your name to Sleeping Beauty. You just can’t seem to stay awake when I’m around.”