Chapter 16 – Hold On To The Nights

“Asleep?”

Adeline looked over her shoulder, slightly rolling over in the bed.

“No,” she said, seeing Lance standing in the doorway, and rolling back over to place her hand on Liam's leg as he slept next to her. “I don't think I'll get much of that tonight.”

Lance lowered his head, uncrossing his legs and started walking toward the bed.

“I thought you were playing a video game with Justin,” she said.

“He cheated,” Lance said. “I decided to stop before I kicked his ass.”

He laid down next to her, adjusting his body so he was pressed up against her back, and rubbed his hand over her hip.

“You're much prettier to look at than him, anyway,” he whispered in her ear.

She chuckled.

“Just tell me that you didn't have anything to do with her showing up tonight.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she answered.

“Addy, I'm not stupid,” he said. “You and Stephanie would never go to Little Rock without a motive. I know about all of it – going to see Mel's parents, the search...”

“What'd you do, chip me?” she asked with a smile.

“I was thinking about it, but I couldn't slip the GPS tracker into your purse,” he said in her ear. “I'm just not that slick.”

She laughed.

“Also, Stephanie's dad called me,” he said. “He thought it was odd that she wanted him to track down a Catherine and Paul Weston in Little Rock, Arkansas. And then when Steph wouldn't answer her phone, he got worried that she might be trying to get herself in trouble – imagine that.”

“Damn,” Addy said.

“I'm not mad,” Lance said. “But why wouldn't you just tell me the truth?”

She turned her head to look at him.

“'Cause you'd have tried to stop me,” she said. “You tried to stop me when you didn't know the truth.”

“Since when do you listen to me?” he asked with a smile.

She smiled back. “I didn't have anything to do with her showing up tonight. We talked to Cathie and Paul, but we never found Mel. So we gave up.”

“You didn't give up,” he said. “Steph made you give up.”

“Since when does Steph make me do anything?”

“Since...birth!” he scoffed. “She's the love-child of Charles Manson and Evel Knievel without the bad-ass motorcycle. And with half the homicidal tendencies.”

“True,” Addy said with a light laugh. “And somehow...we still managed to screw things up.”

He brushed a chunk of hair away from her face as she turned her head to look back at Liam, who still slept next to them.

“I've never gotten a chance to talk to you about our fight,” he said, speaking softly. “While you were gone, I had time to think about it. You're right.”

“Is tonight really the ideal night to talk about this?” she asked.

“It should be a joint decision to have another baby,” he said. “But if all it's doing is stressing you out...well then I need to respect that.”

She sighed and pushed a stray hair out of Liam's eyes before she rolled onto her back.

“I can't handle being a mom, being a tour manager, and trying to get pregnant at the same time,” she said, looking up at him. “One by itself is stressful; two at the same time is barely do-able. Trying to do all three...I just can't.”

“Then maybe we should reconsider having another baby at all,” he said.

She knitted her eyebrows together in surprise.

“But you want more kids,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I always wanted two or three, maybe even four. I always wanted a family. But then I met you. Things change. Circumstances change; life changes your 'hopes' into reality. What you want becomes what you can reasonably have. We never thought we'd be able to have children. Liam was a fluke. He just happened; he came along at a time when we least expected him. God has given us what He's given us; do we really want to look Him in the eye and ask for more?”

“Don't do that,” she said. “Don't bring God and religion into this. Don't rationalize away what you want from your life because you feel religious guilt. If at one point in your life you had stopped at what you wanted and accepted what God gave you, would you be here today? You wanted to be a singer; you stopped at nothing to get it. You wanted to be free from your old manager's tyranny; you did everything you could to get what you deserved.”

“I also wanted to be an astronaut,” he said with a chuckle. “And you see how that went. I never set foot on the moon. Que sera sera, Ad. Life is what it is.”

“Life isn't fair,” she said softly.

“It never is,” he responded.

They both laid silently with each other, both of them watching Liam sleep next to them. Lance watched his son's light eyelashes flutter, his chest rising softly as he periodically sighed, making a slight moaning sound.

“That look.”

Lance looked down to see her suddenly looking over at him.

“What look?” he asked.

“I saw that look,” she said. “The way you look at him. Almost the same as the way you used to look at me.”

“I don't still look at you that way?” he asked.

“It's changed over the years,” she said with a smile. “You know, when it was still all new for us.”

“Things aren't that bad, are they?” he asked

“No,” she said, slightly shaking her head. “No, they're not that bad.”

He smiled as she leaned in, kissing him.

“You know,” she whispered against his lips. “Just because we agree we're not trying, doesn't mean we can't still have a little fun...while we're not trying.”

She pressed her lips to his again.

“You may not have made it into space,” she whispered. “But you can take me to the moon.”

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“She just...kissed you? And then moved on, like it was nothing?”

JC and Joey stared at Chris from across the lounge.

“I'm an ass,” Chris said, holding his head in his hands.

“She wouldn't have kissed you if you were an ass,” Joey said.

“Oh really?” Chris raised his voice, looking up. “'Cause why – women don't kiss asses?”

“Generally speaking, no,” JC said. “Usually in relationships, it's the man doing all the ass kissing.”

Chris huffed.

“I was only partially trying to lighten the mood,” JC said. “But it really is true. Were you an ass? Yes. Did it matter? Well, she kissed you before she left, so apparently not. Not as much as you want to think it does, anyway.”

“Why would I yell at her like that?” Chris asked, his hands splaying as he spoke. “I've waited for this day, I've dreamed of this day, this day that she'd walk in unexpected and I could see her again, touch her, talk to her. And when it happens, against all reason and logic, I get mad and yell at her.”

“That is reason and logic,” JC said. “You're upset. She could have walked in two months ago and you'd have still yelled at her. Five more minutes and the two of you would've been making out on the couch. Forgive and forget.”

“She didn't give me five minutes,” Chris said. “I doubt she even stayed for the show.”

“She did,” Joey said. “I saw her and her friend. They were both bawling during 'My Heart Will Go On'.”

“Half the crowd was bawling during that,” JC said. “How could you tell the difference between the girls and the rest of the audience?”

“The one girl, the one with Mel? She hit on me,” Joey said.

“She hit on all of us, except Chris,” JC said with an eye roll. “Even if you weren't married, she was way more into Justin than anybody. You didn't stand a chance.”

“I'm taken, you're taken, Justin's taken,” Joey said. “Doesn't matter. She still hit on me.”

“Congrats,” JC retorted. “The Italian Stallion rides again. Can we get back to the matter at hand?”

“Long as it's understood that I still got it,” Joey said with a proud look.

Chris couldn't help but scoff and shake his head.

“Things never change around here,” he said.

Suddenly, he felt a buzzing from beside him, and looked down to see his phone lighting up. He reached down and picked it up, looking at the unrecognizable number on the screen.

“Who is it?” JC asked.

“Number I don't know,” Chris responded.

“Probably Justin,” Joey said. “He does it to me all the time – Lance goes to bed, Justin can't sleep, gets bored, uses a website to prank call me. Little bitch.”

Chris hit the 'end' button on the phone, silencing the buzzer and letting the phone automatically take the caller to his voicemail.

“I'm never going to get this opportunity again,” he said as he sat the phone down at his side. “This was my one last chance and what'd I do? I blew it.”

“Maybe not,” Joey said with a shrug. “Hey, now we know where she is, right? That's something to go on.”

“And how exactly would that serve a purpose?” Chris asked.

“Tour's not gonna last forever,” Joey said. “Little Rock looks like a good place you could...vacation.”

“Vacation?” Chris asked.

“You know...vacation,” JC said with a smirk. “Hit up a few of the bars, go out and meet some people. You might like it so much you want to move there. It's a small big city. Surely you're bound to bump into somebody, sometime.”

“That's...cunning,” Chris said. “And sort of idiotic. You two are horrible at this. I'll let Addy and Steph plan my genius 'accidentally bump into Mel' scenario.”

Chris looked down as his phone buzzed again, showing he had a new voicemail. He reached down and pressed a button, starting the call.

“Those two are pistols,” JC said as Chris put the phone to his ear. “How have we not caught on to their secret plans yet?”

“We're men,” Joey said. “We're stupid – and they're pretty. We fall for it every time.”

“God, that's true,” JC said.

Chris smiled as he punched in his voicemail code.

“You have one new voicemail message,” the automated voice said. “Saturday, April twenty-six, two-thousand-fourteen, one-thirty-six AM...”

Chris divided his attention between JC and Joey's conversation in front of him and to the voicemail message on his phone, fully expecting Justin's voice to play back to him with a classic, yet lame, “Is your refrigerator running?” joke, if only in an attempt to raise Chris's spirits after the night. But once he heard a familiar, soft tune coming through the speaker, his eyebrows knitted together.

“Shhh!” he harshly shushed the two men in front of him, who looked up startled.

“Just when I believed, I couldn't ever want for more...This ever-changing world pushes me through another door...”

He listened as Richard Marx's voice sang back to him.

“I saw you smile, and my mind could not erase the beauty of your face...Just for a while, won't you let me shelter you?”

It was when the next verse came on that he understood.

“Hold on to the nights...hold on to the memories...I wish that I could give you something more...that I could be yours...”

As the verse ended and the melody started playing, he heard an abrupt click.

“To erase this message, press one,” the automated voice said again. “To save this message, press two...”

Chris pulled the phone away from his ear and clicked 'end', cutting off the connection.

“What was it?” JC asked.

“Uh...” Chris hummed. “I don't know, wrong number I guess.”

“Didn't look like a wrong number,” JC said, his eyebrows raised.

Chris looked at his friends. He knew one thing – he'd had a good enough glance at the number on the phone to know that it was a Little Rock area code. The fact that it was unverified and not in his address phone meant it could be anybody.

But he knew it wasn't.

But he also knew that if he told JC and Joey that it was Mel leaving a song as a message for him, they would do anything to convince him that he was wrong.

“Telemarketer,” he said, shaking his head. He threw his phone on the sofa next to him, away from his body, and leaned back into the couch. “Selling magazine subscriptions, or internet service...I don't know, something.”

“Calling at fucking one-thirty in the morning,” Joey said, glancing at JC and shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Guess I need to renew my subscription to the No-Call list,” Chris said. He pushed himself off the couch. “I'm turning in. We have a full day off before the show in Shreveport. I plan to take advantage of it.”

He grabbed his crutches from their place propped against the couch, hobbling into place to put them under his arms.

“Night,” he said to the two before he started walking his way toward the hallway that would take him to his room.

“Good night,” JC said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

Chris laid in his bed for an hour with an open copy of a Harry Potter book in his hands, halfheartedly reading over the same pages he had read many times already. His cell phone sat next to him, and he couldn't help but glance at it several times.

He waited, and finally at almost three in the morning, he heard JC and Joey finally leave the lounge room they had been in and each one of them close their doors to their pseudo-bedrooms. He waited another fifteen minutes until all he could hear was the rhythmic rolling of the bus's wheels underneath him.

He closed the book and sat it beside him, reaching to pick up his phone. He bit his lip as he brought up his recent calls, and scrolled to the unrecognizable number.

Should he call back? He couldn't be sure it was actually Melissa – all he had to go on was a couple lyrics of a song and a hunch. If he called and reached someone who had accidentally called him while trying to reach another person, and woke them up at three in the morning, he would feel like an idiot.

But if by some random chance it was Mel, he couldn't ignore the message. He had to somehow tell her he had received it.

He reached over to the stereo and turned it on. It just so happened that he had been listening to a CD lately that expressed his feelings completely.

He pressed the button on his phone to call the number, and as he put it to his ear and listened to it ring, he skipped forward to the third track. It only took two rings for the pre-recorded, robotic sound of the voicemail to pick up, which meant she was probably asleep and had her phone off.

Once he heard the beep, he placed the phone up to the stereo's speakers, letting the song say everything he wanted to.

“A hundred days have made me older, since the last time that I saw your pretty face...A thousand lies have made me colder, and I don't think I can look at this the same...But all the miles that separate, they disappear now when I'm dreaming of your face...

“I'm here without you baby, but you're still on my lonely mind...I think about you baby, and I dream about you all the time...I'm here without you baby, but you're still with me in my dreams...And tonight, there's only you and me...”

He swallowed the emotions in his throat as he pulled the phone back to him, pressing the 'end' button. He closed his eyes, continuing to listen to the music.

“The miles just keep rolling, as the people leave their way to say hello...I've heard this life is overrated, but I hope that it gets better as we go...”

He silently sat his phone next to him and let his mind relax, the soft music starting to lull him to sleep. He could only hope that it would get better.