“You’re late,” Ada said as soon as she opened the door to her motel room.
“You said around seven,” Alonzo said. “It’s seven-fifteen.”
“Around seven means seven on the dot.” She walked back into the room and sat on the bed. She was wearing a teal short set thing that didn’t show off more skin than yesterday but did hug her hips and breasts in a way that her dress had not.
Not that Alonzo was looking.
“Does it?” he asked, stepping tentatively inside Ada’s motel room and closing the door softly behind him. He was gripping his bag of clean clothes and toiletries tight in one hand, even tighter when he was not looking at Ada’s backside. He kept turning toward her and glancing away quickly. She was too beautiful to stare at head-on, especially after a night of dreaming freely about her.
“Yes, it does,” she said, drawing his gaze to her again. “Bathroom’s that way.” She tilted her head back, and her big gold hoops brushed her bare shoulders.
Alonzo turned away again. “I won’t be long.”
“Take your time.”
He stopped and frowned at her. “But you said I was late.”
She turned away from him and picked up a small mirror on the bedside table and a tube of mascara. From this angle, he could see a hummingbird tattoo on her left shoulder, a delicate outline and soft shading that made his fingers itch. He stared at it because it seemed like a safe space to rest his eyes, but it wasn’t. There was so much of her beautiful skin on display, and he wanted to touch it all.
“I like a clean man,” she whispered, carefully raking the mascara wand through her eyelashes.
Alonzo’s eyes lifted to the mirror in her hands, and he could swear their eyes met. He opened his mouth to say…something, but no words came out.
“Hurry up,” she said.
He exhaled loudly. “I wish you’d make up your mind.”
Her laughter made his chest constrict. “Boy, you wouldn’t know what to do with me if I made up my mind about you.”
Alonzo turned and walked toward the bathroom. “We’ll see,” he muttered just as he closed the door behind him.
Her laughter fell away.
The sun wasn’t high in the sky yet. The morning air still had the tiniest bite to it, not cold but crisp. It felt fresh and sharpened everyone’s anticipation as they streamed back onto the fairgrounds. Even though Ada had been annoyed that he was late, they’d arrived at the festival right on time for her to start taking pictures as the grounds filled with people.
Last night, Alonzo had gotten back to Toonie’s car with a plan to follow Ada’s advice and come up with a vision for his story. But as soon as he’d crawled back into the car, he’d fallen into a fitful sleep littered with dreams of Ada’s face.
He didn’t enjoy being back at the concert without a vision, but he couldn’t deny that yesterday, Ada had freed him. He might not have a clear plan for his story, but he wasn’t worried about mimicking Stu any longer, so he directed her and her camera in a way that fit his style, half-formed as it was.
“This is my favorite part of a show,” he said.
She snapped a couple of quick pictures before she turned to him. “What part? Morning shows?”
“No, I mean just before the band takes the stage, when everyone’s waiting around, unsure of what to do with themselves and all the energy they brought with them.”
“Why?” Alonzo liked the way Ada asked questions, straight to the point, no chaser, no explanation, with full assurance that she had the right to do so.
“It’s all about the energy,” he said, his eyes scanning across the lawn to make sure he didn’t linger on her. “I like taking it all in. I like thinking about all the different kinds of people one show can pull into the same room. Black folk from the flats, fancy Negroes from the hills, people with money, people counting loose change to buy a bottle of beer. The people in the front row who know every word to every song. The ones you know are ‘bout to sing at the top of their lungs for the whole night. The cats with a slim cigarette behind one ear who just wanna lean against the bar and catch a groove.”
The camera shutter closed, and Alonzo turned to find Ada’s lens trained on him again. He blinked at her as she lowered her camera.
“And which one are you?” she asked.
He swallowed and smiled shyly. “The square in the corner nursing a drink and watching everybody else get down. What about you?”
A slow smile parted her mouth. Alonzo’s eyes dipped down at the flash of her pink tongue, wetting the crease of her lips. He hadn’t meant to look, but once he had, he couldn’t look away.
“I’m the drunk one in the front row singing every word,” she said, giggling lightly.
Alonzo met her eyes and tried to laugh with her. He also tried not to look at her with heat in his eyes, but since she was looking back at him with something that he could have sworn mirrored his own expression, he decided to follow Ada’s lead at least for a few seconds.
“You wanna get closer, Alonzo?” she asked in a husky whisper.
He nodded slowly.
“Well, come on,” she said and then turned away.
“Wait,” he whispered in confusion. “Oh. You meant closer to the stage.”
She was walking backward again as if there wasn’t enough time to stop and talk, but she wasn’t ready to leave him just yet. Her smile had dipped into a grin. “Of course, I did. What did you think I meant?”
Alonzo felt Ada’s gaze all over his skin. “No, I knew what you meant,” he said, ducking his head and smiling. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and jogged to catch up with Ada once again.
“Mmmhmm, sure you did,” she teased.
They spent the afternoon darting in and out of the crowd.
Technically, they didn’t have to stick together. Ada was more than capable of getting the shots she needed or thought Alonzo might need on her own, but she never mentioned them separating, and Alonzo certainly didn’t want to bring it up, so they wandered around the festival hip-to-hip.
Ada Carr smelled like peaches and cocoa butter.
That wasn’t what Alonzo was supposed to be thinking about, but he was. And that wasn’t what he wrote in his notebook, thankfully, but it wasn’t far off. They sat under a tree, enjoying a reprieve from the scorching sun and eating a lunch of fried fair food, water, and beer. While Ada changed the lens on her camera, Alonzo tried to do his job. He updated the concert lineup in his notes and jotted a few lines about the crowd’s reaction to Janis Joplin’s set with Big Brother and the Holding Company. He busied himself working while Ada sipped on a beer.
He’d gone back to looking at her out of the corner of his eye. And when he was done taking notes he’d have to decipher back in Oakland at his typewriter, he turned to a blank page at the back of the notebook and tried to capture Ada in words, but there weren’t enough. Ada was music on two legs, and the pounding of his heart provided a beat. But he couldn’t tell her that, so he wrote it down instead.
“So, what’s your vision?” she asked, shocking him out of this moment.
He looked at her and then quickly away, clearing his throat before he spoke. “What’s the first song you ever remember hearing?” he asked.
“What?”
He turned back to her. It was probably a bad idea, but he couldn’t stop himself. “First song you remember hearing. Doesn’t matter how old you were.”
She furrowed her brows and frowned.
At first, he thought the look on her face was judgment, but he realized after a few seconds that it was consideration. She was taking his question seriously, and that made him feel…something.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Must’ve been a lullaby. I think. Okay, yeah, absolutely. I don’t know what it was, but I can remember my Nana Pat singing to me all the time when I was a baby. Sometimes she didn’t even sing; she just hummed.”
Alonzo was so happy he’d let himself look at her because as she spoke, Ada’s eyes drifted away, and a small innocent smile brightened her face. She was so beautiful he held his breath.
When she focused back on his face, her smile faltered. “That probably doesn’t count.”
“It does,” he rushed to say. “Now, what about high school? What’s the first song that comes to mind?”
She did that adorable brow-furrowing thing again, and her smile was wobbly, but she didn’t take nearly as long to answer. “Senior year. Mary Wells. ‘Two Lovers.’ I musta wore that forty-five out.”
Alonzo’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s a hit.”
“Sure was.”
“Family?”
“His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.
“Grew up in the church?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. So, what’s your point?”
He licked his lips and straightened his back. “I’ve been thinking all day that this lineup is…eclectic,’ he said, trying to be diplomatic.
“Chaos,” Ada corrected firmly.
“It’s all over the place,” he said around a soft chuckle. “If I hadn’t been sent down here, ain’t no way I’d’ve bought a ticket, you know?”
Ada nodded.
“But I’m looking around, and it’s different crowds jamming to different music and then ceding the lawn for other people to jam to the music that moves them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.”
As he spoke, Ada turned to look at the fairground green as if she was seeing it differently. Even though she’d spent hours and multiple rolls of films documenting it all, she took it all in with brand-new eyes, but he watched her.
“I think some songs just imprint on us. They sear themselves into our memories, and for the rest of our lives, whenever they come on the radio, we just go hurtling back to that moment. You’ll hear that lullaby one day and remember being with your Nana Pat or sitting in church with your family or singing Mary Wells with your friends on the way to class.” Her smile was pure light. “I think this concert could be one of those moments. In a year or ten years, someone’s gonna hear a song by one of these bands, and they’ll come hurtling back here in their minds. They’ll remember this sun and the taste of cotton candy and warm beer. They’ll remember the bonfire smoke in the air. Peaches and cocoa butter,” he whispered before he could stop himself. “I want a piece that evokes that moment, but not in a year or ten years, right now.”
She turned, and they locked eyes.
“I want to write about what it feels like to know that this moment is going to matter. That the rest of our lives will have spun on the needles of this weekend, these songs.”
She blinked at him a few times before speaking. Her voice was hoarse. “That’s your vision?” she asked. “That’s what you see?”
He didn’t have to lie because he was looking at her; all afternoon, Alonzo had done nothing but see Ada. “Yeah,” he breathed. “That’s my vision.”
“Not bad,” she teased. “Not bad.”