One Night Only (Season 1: Deni's Story)

Chapter Twenty-Three

I'm right about the illusion of time slowing down during the days Hunter is gone. It doesn't help that the weather clouded over the first evening he was away and thunderstorms rolled in during the night. The storms continued all day yesterday, stretching on for hours into early this morning.

The thunder out here is the loudest I've ever experienced. We don't often get storms in Los Angeles, and when we do, a few rumbles and some rain are usually it. Last night's storm made me understand why they're called electrical storms, with thunderclaps intense enough to make the cottage walls shake, raindrops pelting furiously against the roof, and lightning forks reflecting off of the lake's surface and illuminating the night sky. It was either the crashing thunder or lightning flashes lighting up my bedroom that woke me from a dream-filled sleep and caused me to bolt upright in bed at least twice.

My first thought each time was that something had exploded. Unexpected thunder appears to have the same effect on me as other loud noises now do, even though I calmed down faster than I did when I heard the car backfire in L.A.

Two nights of broken slumber layered on top of my other sleeping issues caught up with me this morning. When Mom peeked her head into my room to ask if I wanted to join her on a quick trip into town to get a few things from a store, I mumbled an answer about not being able to pry my eyelids open and buried my face in the pillow, not yet ready to get up and face the day. I must have drifted off again while she got ready, because she's nowhere to be found when I get out of bed. The Jeep is gone, too.

The clear sky and sunshine I glimpse through the living room window reveal that better weather has returned. Even so, now that I've splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, and exchanged my pajamas for black yoga pants and a T-shirt, I'm still in no hurry to do much of anything. Instead, I take my guitar out of its case, check its tuning, sit down on the sofa and begin to play for the first time since the night before my ill-fated last tour rehearsal back in L.A. It's the longest I've gone without picking up a guitar since my first music lessons, years ago.

I start with the songs I could play in my sleep after performing them night after night on tour and in rehearsals. I stick to strumming the chords on my guitar at first, but habit takes over and I'm soon belting out the familiar verses.

Singing some of my oldest songs from my debut album normally brings up happy memories for me and all of my music career firsts, taking me back to when that part of my life felt shiny and new. Everything was still an adventure waiting to happen. Today something falls flat, so I switch it up and strum a melody no one but me has heard. It's a new song I was writing before everything happened at my show and with Bowie and the tour. I haven't worked on it in weeks.

The chords and the lyrics come back to me after a few tries. On my fourth time through, I sing the verses with the kind of confidence I have for the songs on my existing albums and wish I had my phone to record myself. After running through it two more times, I reach into the guitar case for my notebook. I scribble a couple of reminder notes and then position my fingers over the strings again to move on to another song.

"Wow. You sound like the singers on the radio. Better, actually."

My head snaps up at Hunter's voice and I stop playing, mid-strum. His voice came from what sounded like behind and to the side of me, which would put him at the sliding door in the kitchen that opens out to the veranda. I turn my head in that direction.

It's the first time I've noticed the glass door is cracked open a couple of inches, with the screen behind it closed. Mom must have opened it before she left to let fresh air inside, which means it's been that way the whole time I've been playing.

"Hi." I hope I don't sound as startled as I feel. "I didn't realize the door was open or that anyone could hear me."

I don't know how Hunter got up the stairs and around the veranda without Alfie or me hearing his footsteps, but he's here and now my mind has gone from relaxed to all over the place. I mostly want to know how long he's been standing there, listening to me play and sing.