what i can't have | JENLISA

Chapter 4

Lisa dropped her legs into the pool, letting the cool water wrap around her calves and ankles and feet. She'd always wanted a pool, one that she could just walk outside and jump in, instead of having to drive to a community pool or a YMCA. It was her favorite part of hotels.

When she couldn't sleep, she'd slip out of her room and wander outside to the pool, hopping the locked gate and settling on the deck, the lights in the pool illuminating the dark night. It reminded her of being a kid and sneaking out for a night with friends or a quick bike ride around the neighborhood to clear her head. If she'd planned a little better and known there would be hotels and pools and sleepless nights, she probably would have brought a bathing suit, just to feel her body suspended underwater, weightless.

"Tits," Jennie cursed under her breath after stubbing her toe against a pool chair.

She had definitely had a few more whiskeys on the bus ride to the hotel, which had helped convince her it was a good idea to bother the woman she saw by the pool through the window of her hotel room. But those whiskeys made her a little clumsier than usual, so she knocked into a second pool chair as she made her way over to the pool's edge.

"You okay?" Lisa asked, preparing herself to jump in the pool if Jennie stumbled all the way into the water.

The singer somehow gracefully, dropped down onto the edge by Lisa's side, her bare legs slipping into the water and her guitar resting in her lap.

"You told me to play you something meaningful," Jennie said with a slightly furrowed brow, her words just a little slurred from the whiskey. 

"I did," Lisa nodded. "Your song tonight was meaningful."

"But I did it. I got unstuck," Jennie explained, holding up her journal with a hesitant smile. She set it down next to her boxers-clad hip, opened to the page she'd been scribbling words onto ever since Lisa had left her in the dressing room tonight. "I don't have a full song yet. It came in flashes, you know? Just words painted in my mind that I had to get down."

"I'm glad you got unstuck," Lisa said softly, watching Jennie intently and loving the excitement on her face about this new song that she was working on.

"Want to hear it?" Jennie asked with a beaming smile on her face, her fingers hovering over the strings of her acoustic guitar.

"Absolutely," Lisa replied, almost matching her smile with her own.

"It's only three lines, and it- it's probably not the chorus or anything-" Jennie started to say as if she were now backtracking.

"Don't make apologies before I've even heard it. Just play," Lisa breathed out, turning her full attention to Jennie and not the pool. She hadn't seen the lead singer this nervous before. She hadn't seen her jittery, but she also didn't know if Jennie had ever really been nervous with the other songs, the ones that were simply hits without much meaning behind them.

The singer let out a long, shaky breath, looking deeply into Lisa's eyes for a moment as if she were searching for something. And then, as if she'd found it, she looked down at the guitar in her hands.

She tapped the neck of the guitar twice before she let out another deep breath. And then she started to strum, her fingers moving tenderly over the strings and producing a soft melody.

"I don't know how it'll start. Something sweet. Something that'll pull you in and make you think I'm going to sing about something that'll make you smile," Jennie hummed, plucking at the strings.

"You gonna catch people off guard?" Lisa asked, loving this side of Jennie.

"Love also starts sweet, doesn't it? Before it turns bitter," she observed, her eyes shut as she reached a part in the melody she was strumming where she changed up which strings she played. The softness made way for something equally tender, but heart-wrenching and haunting.