+ JACK +
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Hey, guys! Sorry for being gone for so long - I really hope it won't happen again. (:
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"You look fantastic."
I smiled playfully, feeling my cheeks turn a bright red as I did. I was beginning to sweat like a sinner in church, the fact that I was wearing a t-shirt underneath of another t-shirt (I had no time to change out of my original one) not helping in my desperate need for a bar of deodorant.
"Thanks, Big Guns," I blushed at Mark. He bit on his lower lip when I did, clearly as numb to the nickname as I was. I'd thought it'd be a good thing to bring up at least once more – to be fair, he did have big guns, the kind of big guns that made his muscles look effortless, as if his body didn't have to exercise to earn them, as if they were just there.
He turned to face the crew behind him, one person short of the band posters thanks to his friend, presumably in the ambulance parked out front. Actually, there still was a total of four people; in the patient's place was a girl with skin paler than the moon's, eyes sparkling like the stars, lips tickled pinker than my cheeks. I supposed she was one of those sluts you'd normally see on stage, the kind that would dance around with a shirt two sizes too small, attracting hollers from male (and some female) members of the audience.
"Jack, Felix, this is our crew," Mark explained, gesturing with a hand behind him. Pointing to two guys, he said, "That's Bob and Wade – guitarist and pianist."
"You two are the guys I saw backstage!" Wade immediately blurted out. "The ones who were supposed to help me with the speaker!"
I heard Felix making a hissing noise through the recess between his top and bottom rows of teeth, my throat swallowing with it in perfect synchronization.
Fortunately, though, all bodily noises were silenced when "Wade" smiled, tossing a hand forward as if to say "don't worry about it."
"Any friend of Mark's is a friend of ours," he said.
"Says Wade, the group member most desperate for friendships," Bob snarled.
"Shut up," Wade smiled.
Mark, too, smiled, his eyebrows wrinkling up in response to the rise in his cheeks. He turned to the girl now, face settling nearly immediately – clearly, he knew her well.
"And this is my girlfriend."
"Oh."
His eyes perked up, eyebrows following suit. Wade's eyebrows, too, were hoisted up, his forehead wrinkling rather than his eyes, like Mark's. Bob, too, was staring, and so was Felix, and so was she – it took me a moment or two to realize that I'd so rudely interrupted.
"G-Go on."
He nodded. "Her name's Lindsay."
"Hi, Lindsay," I grinned. I could feel Felix recognizing my fake gesture of happiness as I scratched clumsily at my neck, clawing for anything that could be a slight distraction. "It's nice to meet you, too."
"Likewise," her eyes bloomed. Turning to Mark, she said, "I'm going to go to the hospital with Aaron, just to make sure that he's okay when he wakes up. His loved ones will take a while to arrive, apparently. You'll be okay here?"
Mark gives her a reassuring nod, and she nods in response, as if, for a second, it's their only way of communicating.
Her heels clack past him a few steps, and he calls out to her, saying, "I love you," to which she responds, "Love you, too," perhaps a little faster than I would've thought. Obviously, though, I was looking way too closely into the situation. This was his love life, here – I was being an absolute idiot depicting it to be some sort of Grey's Anatomy drama when, really, it was just a simple romance, the kind any twenty-year-old should hope for.
