1989
Patrick remained silent a little too long, so I walked away. I followed those lyrics that bled into me like the ink on his skin. They branded me in a way. A montage of moments took over, and I ran. My feet pounded against the ground. Up the road. Around streetlights. Beneath neon lights. In front of bars that rang out with noise and cheers and past open mic sessions and the comforting thrum of a guitar. Memories followed each movement.
David filled every one.
Us when we were little hanging out in a pillow fort with brooms for lightsabers. Whispering beneath the cover of our built shelters. Falling asleep on his shoulder. Trying a joint his friend handed me. Watching the smoke fly into the sky with my screaming dreams. Racing down the shore alone with him. Crashing into each other and falling to the sand.
I flew up the stairs of the hotel, past the startled man and his vest of the day in the lobby. The door to David’s and my room swung open. He was going out as I was going in.
“David,” I breathed, hands on my knees and hair falling in sheets around me.
He scanned behind me, out into the hall. “Someone chasing you?”
“Patrick didn’t write that song.” His forehead creased, and I reached into my blouse. I handed him the paper.
He didn’t look at it. Just passed it back. His gaze was far more closed off than those open-hearted lyrics. David. David had written this for me.
“Tori . . .” he began, and it sounded wrong. He didn’t call me T. There was an edge to it. My name in his voice ricocheted around us.
Without finishing his sentence, he walked right by me. He moved out the door and into the hall. The rooms were positioned in this rectangular shape, and he wove around to the alcove where they kept the vending machine.
“David!” I called. “Where are you going?” I sped after him, and he stopped to insert some coins. A bag of chips fell out.
I leaned beside him against the counter that contained an old coffee maker and lipstick-stained mugs. In my peripheral vision he was golden hair, long lashes, a goofy patterned shirt.
“What’s going on? You just wrote me a song. Why did you walk away?”
“Of course you thought it was him.” He turned to me. “Of course you wanted it to be him.” The betrayal in his irises was deeper than I’d ever seen it.
“I didn’t want it to be him.”
“Words and actions say different things.”
“They usually do.”
“This isn’t a joke, Tori.” There it was again. Tori.
“If it was, I missed the punch line.”
His eyes said I’m the punch line, and I wanted to tell them to shut up.
“You’re always in motion,” he said, grabbing the chips and setting them on the counter behind me, busying his hands with getting coffee I knew he wouldn’t drink. “I’ve always admired that about you. But this summer, it was supposed to be ours. And he’s here, and—”
“He’s part of the dream. My dream. This band.” But he walked away from the music.
“I get that.”
“David, I want to be a star. He’s part of that.”
“You’re always the star,” he said, and it wasn’t bitter. It was matter-of-fact.
“I’m sorry,” I told David. Meaning it. Not sorry for being the star but that I hurt him.
His Adam’s apple dipped. “And you’re so alive here. I thought . . . I don’t know. That maybe this summer wasn’t ours anymore. That you were settled and wouldn’t want to go anywhere else . . . with me. But I hoped you’d keep your promise for once.”
“What do you mean for once?” I refused to admit the part of me that had wondered how much this summer was really ours. When the day came to head to New York, I knew I could leave. I would leave. But not yet.
Anger sparked in his tone for the very first time. He’d never been angry with me. “When do I stop being second place? When do I get to mean as much as Patrick? All I’ve ever wanted was to be there for you, but it’s hard when you don’t care if I’m here at all. You fall asleep practically on top of me. Sneak into my room back home. We share a bed here. You look at me sometimes and I think I mean something, and I try to show you how I feel with those lyrics, but . . . you just don’t care when it’s from me. You thought it was him.”
“How can you say that? Of course I care.” Tears rose in my eyes. He was David. Good, sweet, thoughtful David from Sunset Cove and neither Tori Rose nor Tori Peters could ever stop caring about him.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m not trying to fool you.” I took a step closer. “I didn’t know you wrote that song, yes, but you’re not second place. I didn’t write every song about him. He didn’t slide into the lyrics when I was Tori Peters dreaming about being a star. Dreaming about you. He wasn’t the green-eyed boy I thought of. He wasn’t the constant when I was flying everywhere just to be somewhere. Patrick is not who I write my songs about. And where does that leave me?”
He stared at me. “I—”
“I care too much about you. And that could wreck everything.” Tori Peters reared her head inside of me. She stole my tongue to tell him about the girl who once dreamed of him before she dreamed of everyone and everything. He was the only person she trusted with her heart. And the person I trusted least to keep mine a free spirit.
“Tori . . .” He stared at me. And because he was David and no one else, he took my hand, even in his hurt. “It’s not Nashville that makes or breaks your gift. It’s not Music City that made you a star. It’s not the miles between you and that town. It’s not forgetting who you are to be someone new. The star’s inside you, T. She has been all along. Just, please don’t make it me or your dream. You can have both. You can.”
It sounded so good when he put it like that. It sounded like a new sort of dream. I thought of all those days David listened to my songs. The way he’d joined me this summer with hardly any question. How he came to every show. How he stood, looking at me.
“David,” I said, and his eyes were so hopeful. “Can I kiss you?” Every moment I almost had, but hadn’t, came back. Those times were ghosts. I didn’t want to turn what was between us into something that’d haunt me.
David didn’t even nod. He just kissed me. His lips fell open under mine. It was better than flying in truck beds. Jumping off bridges. Gelato on the beach and leaving graduation.
It was almost as good as the music.
His arms wrapped around me, and he spun me so he was leaning into me and I was leaning into the wall. He lifted me, and I wrapped my legs around his hips. His pulse skipped against my chest. My fingers slipped under his shirt, traced the smooth skin of his stomach. He broke for a breath, but then our mouths found each other’s again. My hands tunneled into his hair, and I tightened my calves around his hips, tilted my head to get closer. Years of wanting this surfaced in every missed breath.
And for a second, he didn’t feel like the past. Not when his fingers were gently tracing over my rib cage. Not when he was holding me like this.
Someone cleared their throat.
We both looked over his shoulder at a little old woman. I didn’t know what she was doing in Music City, but she was here with a floral nightgown and curlers. She held up a quarter for the vending machine and looked completely scandalized.
I slid down from David’s arms.
“You done?” the woman asked.
I glanced at David, and his eyes were shining. My smile was ill-kept. The music, if possible, was louder than ever inside me.
“Sorry ma’am.” He choked on laughter.
Walking around us, she huffed. David left his chips to take my hand. He breathed the lyrics he’d written for me, and I wanted every inch of him when he shared them with me. Just that night, I let Tori Peters and Tori Rose collide. My best friend and I ran down the hall, and we lost any composure we had.
When we reached our room, I pressed him up against the door. Held him there with my hands and hips. I kissed the life out of him. We stumbled backward into the room. We fell onto our bed.
And I whispered against his skin, “I never want to regret you.”
The next morning, I woke up with my arm across David’s bare chest, curled into his side. Smiling at the night before, but knowing the day meant something else. The few inhibitions I had left came thundering back, and they were all about him.
Sunlight danced across his forehead. His verse for me played over and over as I slid out of bed with more care than I’d ever felt. I shuffled into a thin hotel robe and climbed out the window to the rickety balcony where we’d stood that first night.
It cut into my feet, and I stared out at the city that was already awake beneath the dawn in a way that Sunset Cove never had been. I looked back at David, and I thought of New York and then of the town that I knew he would one day return to. I knew, if I followed him, I’d be pulled back too.
He’d said it wasn’t him or the dream, the past or the future. In the rush and heat of his kiss and those intoxicating lyrics he’d penned in my name, I’d believed him.
But now? Come morning light, I wasn’t so sure.
Patrick waited for me in the hall with his guitar. “I’m ready,” he said as soon as he saw me. And I knew more than ever the choice that lay ahead.
The night of that performance, the one after which everything changed yet again, I stood with David at a tall table. We laughed as we fought to claim a spot to rest our arms that wasn’t laden with sticky beer stains. His breath brushed my cheek as he whispered to me, but I didn’t catch the words.
Across the room, the band warmed up. Edie played with the speakers, and Sara leaned against the drum set, talking to Mateo. Patrick was ready to introduce a song he’d written that had only half the heart of the one David had so effortlessly created.
In a minute, I would join them. The pull between a Summer of Dreams with David and my dream here tugged at me again, and I knew I had to tell them all the choice I’d made. I remembered how David made me believe everything was right there for the taking.
I turned to him, ready to sink into this performance. This song.
But he was already looking at me.
“What?” I nudged him.
“The play I’m writing,” he said softly, and he traced a spot of freckles on my shoulder before kissing each mark on my skin. “It’s about a girl and a boy and a Summer of Dreams.”
Oh. Oh God.
The mic shrieked up on stage, just like it had the evening Patrick fell into my life at the hands of the universe, and David squeezed my hand.
“David . . .” I trailed off. Fate broke me up inside. Destiny made a fool of my name.
“Tori!” Edie called across a restless bar. “You coming?”
“You can read it after.” He smiled a little, and I’d never seen him look shy. “If you want.”
“I want,” I stumbled over words. “Yes.”
“Tori!” Edie hollered with hands cupped around her mouth.
“Coming,” I said, as I made my way across the room to the band. Unspoken words now all my own, I cast one last glance at David over my shoulder.