This got him to at least look at her, but it didn’t lighten his mood. “I’ve got a girlfriend,” he snapped. “Sarah. Remember?”
“Still, it’s nice to be wanted, isn’t it?”
“Not by Hannah. Remember Lilah Bell?”
“Yeah.” Everyone remembered Lilah Bell and the crazy obsessive way she’d stalked Jules Turnbull. It was the most exciting thing to have ever happened at Chris Columbus High. A warning story people told themselves when they felt themselves slipping toward making bad, bad decisions. “But—”
Jake cut her off before she could finish her sentence. “You want that to happen to me?”
He was just impossible today. “Jake,” she said. “Why so defensive? This is me you’re talking to.”
She locked eyes with him and danced her head around, trying to coax a grin out of him. When it finally came, halfheartedly, she could tell Jake was just appeasing her. She sighed and rolled her head back to look at the imitation bamboo ceiling.
“When you want to talk,” she said, “I’ll be here.”
“Will you? I hope so. You might be too busy.” Before she could ask what that was supposed to mean, he tapped the table once with his fingertips and walked to the stage to tune up his guitar.
As he wandered away, she realized that this must be a reference to her online chats with Harlow. Was that it? Was Jake jealous? But why? It wasn’t like some guy she’d met online could ever come between them.
Beneath his carefully cultivated casual stage persona, a destructive energy surged in Jake’s blood. He felt out of control in a way that he usually never did. He wanted to take the water bottle next to him and whip it across the room. He wanted to pick up his stool and shake it above his head, roaring at the audience, scaring them with his rage. He wanted to smash his guitar over Elena’s head. Or his own head, because really, he wasn’t mad at her, he was mad at himself. Nathaniel was right. He was a coward. And with this Harlow guy in the picture now, he’d lost his chance yet again. Jake was the kind of guy who swallowed his emotions, endured and suffered and lost and lost again.
As he sang the first song in his set, a ballad called “I’m Here” that he’d written years ago, Jake ignored the crowd and stared moodily at his fingers. They wouldn’t notice. He often looked inward as he played his music, disappearing into the feelings he conjured out of his instrument.
He played “Nothing Doing.”
He played “Wake Me When You’re Home.”
All these old songs he knew so well he wouldn’t have to think. Thinking was too much for him right now. It was like white light, blinding and obliterating him.
Every time he felt the urge to look up, he felt Elena’s presence at the side of the stage and knew he’d gravitate to her, staring, his feeling of hurt and rejection bleeding out of him. He imagined her projecting this Harlow character into the romantic scenarios his songs described. It was too much for him. He could just imagine what an idiot he’d look like if he played the new song he’d written for her.
He launched into “Misunderstood,” which pretty much summed up his feelings right now.
When this one came to an end, he knew he couldn’t ignore the crowd much longer and he finally looked up and, leaning into the mic, said, “Thanks for coming out tonight, folks.”
Forty or fifty faces gazed back at him. His fans. It was ironic—he should have been happy to see so many expectant, appreciative people here to see him, but somehow they and their devotion didn’t count. All that counted was Elena, and she’d gone and found some random stranger on the internet to swoon over. Jake tried to block her out of his vision, but he couldn’t. She’d dressed in her best spunky clothes—her pink Docs, those skintight black tights that made it so hard for Jake not to stare at her luscious legs, those layers of tank tops in differing colors and degrees of looseness that seemed always to be on the verge of falling off her body. It wasn’t fair. He knew she’d gone to this effort for him. And she was so unfathomably beautiful, sitting there, watching him play.
The next song on his playlist was “Driftwood.” He doodled on his fret board, procrastinating, knowing that revealing his love now, in an achy, moony emo song, would be just about the worst move he could make. She’d laugh at him. She’d think he was joking. Worse, she’d think he was endorsing her new quasi-relationship.
Jake was glad not to see Nathaniel’s smirking face in the crowd. He didn’t want to admit it, but Nate had been right. The good guy always lost. You had to be an asshole to win at love.
He brought his hand crashing against the strings, a loud power chord like he almost never played. Maybe if he took Nathaniel’s advice, she’d see that he was worthy of her attention. She’d see he was capable of surprising her too; that he wasn’t the asexual platonic BFF she saw him as.
“I’m going to mix it up a little now,” he said. “This one goes out to Elena.”
He threw her a defensive glance and she beamed back at him, that pure joyful smile she sometimes allowed herself brightening her face, framed adorably in her wave of black ringlets. Every time Jake saw her smile like this he was stung by its beauty, its tenderness. Nobody, not even his dad, believed in him the way Elena did. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Protecting his friendship with Elena meant he was perpetually frustrated by the distance between what they had together and what he wanted.
“Wednesday’s Girl.” That’s what he would play. It was one of the first songs his dad had ever taught him. A mean little Bob Dylan–inspired thing his father had written about the woman who’d broken his heart before he met Jake’s mom.
He strummed quickly at his guitar, generating a vigorous rumble of sound, and then he sang:
On Monday, when the world was new
She marveled at a bird that flew
Through her doorway, into her room
And spread its wings
To show her all its precious things
Oh, I warned her it was too good to be true.
I said, he’s not pretty, he’s just new
Glancing up, he could see from the crimson color of her face that she was hurt by this. It gave him a little thrill to think that she might experience a touch of the rejection he was feeling. He strummed on. He strummed harder. He broke a string, he strummed so hard.
On Tuesday, he was in her bed
Cooing softly, spinning thread
He bit her ear until she bled
And still she wanted to believe
In him and all his precious things.
Hearing an abrupt thump from the corner of the room where Elena was sitting, Jake looked up. She’d stood up. She was slamming shut the flap on her messenger bag. She was stalking out of the café.
“Hey … Elena, wait,” he called after her.
But with a flip of the bird behind her back, she was already gone.
Jake felt like an idiot. The urge to chase after her and apologize was so strong that he almost fell off his stool. But he kept on strumming. He was trapped on the stage, and anyway, he had a responsibility to his fans.