The Road Back To You {COMPLETED}

Chapter 30

Sully stared at the ring of condensation stamped on his napkin as the guy behind the bar refilled his glass of Dr. Pepper. He touched an index finger to the napkin and pulled it closer to him. It was like an artifact from younger years, when he’d written songs on napkins during school lunch, lost in a cyclone of creativity until the bell rang and he realized he hadn’t once touched his food.

He was writing songs now, too. Or attempting to at least. He glanced to the weathered spiral-bound notebook in front of him where five lines of lyrics were scribbled across the page. Two of them were scratched out. He tapped the end of his pen against the counter with one hand and raked his fingers through his hair with the other. It was only too bad this place didn’t have creativity on tap.

He and Dash were at the venue for tonight’s gig, a miniature music hall tucked away in a sleepy New Jersey town a stone’s throw away from warehouses with broken windows and factories with smokestacks that seemed to tiredly exhale their signature white clouds. Despite its grit, or perhaps because of it, it was a place where a number of greats had played shows since the 1950’s. They even had a literal hall of fame here, a long stretching corridor where framed pictures hung of all the giants in the music industry who’d once taken this stage.

Sully found it never mattered whether a venue was at the center of a vivacious city or on the quiet outskirts of an industrial zone. There were times when the venues filled past maximum occupancy, two hundred bodies pressed together to listen to good music, and then there were times when they were lucky if a few dozen patrons had turned out for the show.

“Whenever the crowd is insanely big,” Dash said to him once, “I go ahead and assume it has to do with you. People want to catch a glimpse of the Romeo of the airwaves.”

Sully wasn’t so sure but then he would be proven wrong whenever the stream of inquiries came following every show. As he didn’t have merchandise of his own to sell, he’d help Dash with his own CD’s and shirt’s, and that’s when the questions began:

“Were you ever able to find your girlfriend?”

“How’s Cadence doing?”

“Are you two back together now?”

Dash later told him that even after Sully had stopped doing the radio interviews, several small stations like the ones run on college campuses had eventually stumbled upon the story and aired the recordings for their own audience.

“Great,” Sully said in his best unenthused voice. He could think of a few hundred things he’d rather do than explain a dozen different times in a dozen different ways that he was not in fact back together with Cadence. Some might’ve considered it the perfect foundation for a rebound—a girl or two typically offered him a slip of paper with their name and phone number after the show—but Sully wasn’t the ‘random hookup’ type of guy and besides that, his heart still belonged to Cadence, even if she didn’t want it.

“How’s the songwriting coming along?” Dash assumed the bar stool beside him and stuck a cigarette in his mouth but let it hang idly from his lips without lighting it.

“It’s not really getting anywhere.” Sully flipped over the cover and pushed the notebook away from him.