Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (124 page)

“Good to hear,” he said. “Put them away
before you get chicken grease all over them, will you?” I laughed and slipped
them into my purse, still not quite able to believe the surprise that Zeke had
gotten me.

Chapter
Thirty

Zeke

“How many shows have you been to in the last
five years?” I glanced at Natalie as we waited in line outside of the club
where the Frank Turner show would be. I shrugged.

“Not very many,” I admitted. “The last
concert I was at was at that amphitheater that keeps getting a new name.” The
line shifted, but didn’t quite move up. Natalie grinned.

“It’s going to get packed in there, you
know,” she said. She looked me up and down. “You’ll probably be all right;
Frank Turner shows are energetic, but there’s no real punching or kicking in
the pits.” I’d listened to one or two of the albums that Frank Turner had put
out to prepare myself for the show. It was obvious why Natalie liked him: the
lyrics told stories about love and life and sadness, happiness, what it was
like on the road, relationships in their beginning, in the middle, and at the
end. I didn’t know the songs well enough to be able to sing along, but I
figured I would enjoy the show nonetheless.

“I can handle myself,” I told Natalie,
grinning at her. “We’ll have a couple of drinks, sing a few songs, and have a
good night out. What’s to worry about?” She chuckled. She looked more casual
than she had at any of our other dates: tight jeans that hugged her curves, a
pair of sneakers, and a tee shirt—not for Frank Turner, but for another band.

We’d met in the parking lot for the club
about an hour before doors were set to open; even then, there were at least
twenty or thirty people in front of us in line. I saw a few more people
crossing the parking lot to get to the end of the line, which stretched another
thirty people behind us.

After another fifteen minutes or so of
small talk, the line started to actually move. “You do have the tickets,
right?” I glanced at Natalie; I hadn’t even thought to ask her in all the time
we’d been waiting.

“They haven’t left my sight since I got
them,” she confirmed, taking them out of her bag and showing me.

I laughed. “You must have really wanted to
come to this show.”

“I thought it was going to be the first
one I was going to end up missing since I started listening to his music,” she
admitted. “I probably shouldn’t have accepted the gift, but we’ve already
crossed so many other professional boundaries that honestly…” She shrugged.

The people at the door were apparently
good at their jobs as the line kept moving steadily, and in a matter of a few
minutes, Natalie was handing our tickets over to them, almost dancing in place
with her impatience to get in. The club was an enormous cavern: there were two
bars, one directly across from the stage, the other hugging the wall opposite
the door, and a balcony section. Natalie reached back and her fingers closed
around my hand, steering me forward into the darkness. There were graphics
splashed across the stage and crewmembers darting back and forth finishing
their setup.

We found our way to the bar, and I stalled
Natalie’s reach for her purse—and the wallet inside of it—with a shake of my
head. “It’s a session, right? So I’m paying.”

“I’ll just have a cider then,” she said,
glancing at the specials written on a blackboard over the back of the bar.
“Don’t want to get drunk.”

“Make it two ciders,” I told the woman
behind the bar. She nodded and reached into one of the ice bins, pulling out
two bottles. I gave her a twenty and gestured for her to keep the change on it.

We picked a spot in the standing-room
crowd and sipped our ciders, waiting for the first act to come up on the stage.
More and more people crowded into the club, and I could see what Natalie meant
about it getting packed. I stayed close to her; the last thing I wanted was for
us to get separated before the show even got started properly.

“So when did you hear about Frank Turner
for the first time?”

Natalie shrugged. “One of my friends had
his…I think it was his second album?” She considered. “And, she insisted that I
should listen to it. Of course, I did, and it was amazing.” She shrugged again.
“And since then, I’ve been a big fan.” I nodded. “Have you heard any of his
music?”

“I’ve listened to a couple of the albums.
Good stuff.” She grinned and I caught someone looking at me askance, but I
ignored it.

The first band that went up on the stage
had three members: guitar, drums, and bass. I didn’t catch their name, but when
they launched into their first song, I thought I would definitely see about
visiting their merch table in the back of the club. They whipped the crowd into
an early fury, even though no more than maybe half the people in the club
seemed to know any of the songs well enough to sing along. Next to me, Natalie
was jumping up and down with the rest of the audience, occasionally singing
along but not always, clearly already having a good time, and I told myself
that in spite of her comment before about boundaries, the date idea I’d had was
obviously a good one.

While the crew began clearing the first
band’s gear off of the stage, I told Natalie to stay where she was so I could
get us more to drink. I didn’t want to get drunk any more than she did—we both
had to drive home at the end of the night, after all—so I bought us each
another cider and a bottle of water. That seemed like a safe bet, even if it
would mean we had to use the already-packed bathrooms sooner rather than later.

The second band was even better—although
also much stranger—than the first. They set up a laptop and a mixer and one or
two other things I couldn’t identify, and in moments, the two guys—dressed in
matching tee shirts and shorts—started singing along with a basic, demo-type
beat and synthesizer sounds. At first, about a quarter of the crowd looked as
if they weren’t sure whether or not to take the two men seriously, but as the
song wore on, and the men onstage kept shouting to the crowd to sing along with
the simple, almost childish choruses or wave their hands or do some form of
activity, everyone started to get into it. “Who are these guys again?”

Natalie beamed at me. “Koo Koo Kangaroo,”
she shouted up into my ear. “They tour with Frank pretty regularly when
possible.”

Koo Koo Kangaroo’s act heated up quickly,
and they got the audience more and more involved in the singing and dancing,
even going so far as to jump down off of the stage and into the crowd to
instruct people on dance moves. I kept back far enough that I wouldn’t be a
good target for a demonstration, but I found myself laughing and smiling,
singing along, following instructions.

By the time Koo Koo Kangaroo left the
stage, everyone in the crowd was worked up, ready for Frank Turner to come out.
The stage went dark, and a sheet came down over the front. You could feel the
tension building inside of the room as setup seemed to drag on—even though when
I checked the time on my phone, it had only been about fifteen minutes, and
then twenty. The shadowy figures of the crew darted offstage from behind the
curtain, and every light in the club went black for just an instant.

The next moment, the band came out onto
the stage, lit with green and blue, and after a few heartbeats, they launched
into their first song. The screaming and cheering and shouting all around me
was almost enough to make me deaf; Natalie was just as excited as anyone else
in the room, especially when the sheet came down and the band started playing
in earnest. I found myself getting into the music, too, singing along when I
remembered the occasional lyric, dividing my attention between Natalie and the
front man—Frank Turner—onstage.

“This is a song about how I fuck
everything up,” Frank said, and Natalie let out a shriek that was almost
sexual; it was enough to stir something in me, a jolt of heat that had nothing
to do with the crowd pressing against us on all sides. Frank started strumming
and immediately sang, “Just give me one fine day of plain sailing weather and I
can fuck up anything, anything…”Next to me, Natalie was singing along word for
word, jumping up and down, completely and totally absorbed in the song, in the
man onstage.
If we were actually dating,
I’d almost be jealous,
I thought, watching her close her eyes and smile
with satisfaction.

The band onstage went from one great song
to another, and Frank Turner himself had the crowd eating out of the palm of
his hand. The band left the stage after about a dozen songs, and just as
everyone was beginning to get restless, Frank came out again with an acoustic
guitar. He grinned at the audience and meandered through his stage banter in
between songs, and next to me, I could tell that if Natalie had a clear way to
go home with the man, it wouldn’t even take a question to get her onto the bus.

There
is no way that she’ll ever forget this night,
I thought,
feeling a mixture of satisfaction and jealousy. “Speaking of not my finest
hour,” Frank said from the stage, and I turned to look in that direction, “this
song is about another moment like that.” He started playing and next to me,
Natalie almost moaned—not in a sexual way, but something like pain. I glanced
to see that she wasn’t injured, just deeply affected, as the man onstage
started to sing. “I was walking home to my house through the snow from the
station/ when Springsteen came clear on my headphones with a pertinent
question/ Oh, is love really real, and can any of us hope for redemption/ or
are we all merely biding our time down to the lonely conclusions?”

In spite of the fact that I didn’t know
the song as well as Natalie, it was obvious how powerful it was—and how
personal. I nodded along, reaching out for Natalie’s hand; she wrapped her
fingers around mine without a moment’s hesitation.
How much better would this be if it were a real date?
I pushed the
thought aside. I wasn’t going to let myself indulge in that fantasy.

By the end of the night, we were both
drenched in sweat, and Natalie’s voice was hoarse from screaming and singing
and cheering. “We could go across to the bar on the other corner,” she
suggested. “Sometimes Frank hangs out after the show to meet people.”

“I’m too lame to hang, I’m afraid,” I told
her. “But don’t let me hold you back.” Natalie laughed and then coughed, taking
a gulp from her bottle of water—it was nearly empty.

“Then, I guess I’ll say goodnight.” I
leaned in to kiss her on the cheek and Natalie ducked away. I frowned, but I
let her give me a quick, friendly hug before stepping back. I started back
towards my car as she made her way across the lot to get to the other street
corner. As I watched her leave, I thought to myself that if I could just find a
woman who was like Natalie—as close as anyone could possibly be—but who wasn’t
being paid to go on dates with me as practice, I would be a happy man.
You have to let her go. You can’t keep
pining over her. So things didn’t work out with Brigitte; that doesn’t mean that
every woman you meet is going to be boring in comparison to Natalie.
I
climbed into my car, already starting to feel the ache in my neck and back and
shoulders, and watched Natalie dart across the street to get to the bar. I
turned my key in the ignition and promised myself that I would ask another
woman out again soon. I couldn’t afford to keep letting my feelings get all
wrapped up around Natalie.

VOLUME IV

Chapter
Thirty One

Natalie

I stared at the shelf in the pasta aisle, debating
with myself which of the different macaroni and cheese products I would buy for
Brady’s dinner later in the week. At least, I was pretending to debate that,
while my mind was actually on the subject of my most recent date with Zeke.

I had crossed a line. I knew that I had—a
line that even kissing, even sleeping with Zeke hadn’t made me feel like I’d
violated. Those moments had been impulsive and they’d been personal, but the
date felt more like something that a boyfriend would take his girlfriend to,
not something a client would go to with his coach. The tickets were too
thoughtful a gesture. They were too considerate. I had known when he’d shown
them to me that I should turn it down. I had known absolutely that I should
have enforced a professional boundary, thanked him, and suggested that we do
something else. And, I hadn’t.

“Mama! This one!” Brady nearly swung out
of the seat in the cart in his urgency to point at the box of macaroni he
wanted, and I came out of my reverie.

“You want this one?” I reached for the
box: it was a theme shape, with noodles that looked like the characters of a
cartoon that Brady liked.

“Uh-huh, want it!” He practically bounced
in his seat, and I laughed, dismissing—for a second, at least—the thought of
Zeke. I put the box in the cart behind him and moved on to the next item on my
list.
It’s a good thing Brady likes the
grocery store,
I thought, as we passed an aisle where another mother, child
in the cart, was struggling to wrest a box of cereal from the screaming toddler.
Brady liked to help, but I’d trained him when he was even younger to be patient
and to amuse himself with a toy or a game while I got the shopping done.
Fortunately for me, he’d taken to it like a child years older than he was.