12Stay || Rihanna
ROXANNE
This is officiallythe farthest I’ve ever been from home. The roof of the bus is warm underneath my thighs as I sit up here with half the tour gang, watching the Rocky Mountains blush red as the sunset slips out of sight behind us.
We got into Boulder yesterday and played the opening night of a brand new festival called Rock the Rockies. This is the farthest west we’ll go before we start circling back up to Canada, and we’ve got tonight off to give Rose a rest before a few days of hardcore driving and scattered gigs.
The rest of the team is off enjoying the festival. I can hear the echoes of the crowd and the hum of the music from here, but I couldn’t miss the sunset. I’ve never seen mountains like this before. They rise up like the armour of the earth, jagged and wild but with a steady kind of weight, a silent kind of power.
Cole is as quiet as the Rockies themselves where he sits beside me, his arm slung over my shoulders. I don’t know if it’s for the benefit of the people around us, and I don’t know whether I leave it there for the same reason or not, but in the days since we agreed to fake this, I’ve tried my best to give up on second-guessing.
Our two weeks is now down to a week and a half. We’ve spent seven years in each other’s lives; I can give us another week and a half.
Cole shifts beside me, his thumb criss-crossing over my shoulder blade. He knows this has an end date. He knows we’re not starting again, so why shouldn’t I let myself lean into his touch?
Cole and I never announced ourselves as being ‘back together,’ but everyone noticed the change between us—the totally affected and premeditated change, that is. Technically only Matt is on the game, but I’m not sure the other guys in the band bought it; they know Cole too well to be as easily fooled as the crew. Still, I think they were happy to go along with the scheme. We’ve managed to get our stage game back, and that’s what this whole fake reconciliation thing was about.
Down on the ground, Rose lumbers over to the bus wearing her usual rhinestone-covered Harley t-shirt and pauses when she spots us all sitting on the roof. Her eyes narrow, and I think we’re about to be told off, but just shakes her head and calls up the French equivalent of, “Your funeral. Don’t break my bus, assholes,” before shutting herself inside.
We stay on the roof until the mountains fade from red to pink to purple. The sounds of the festival get louder and rowdier as the crowd swells. Cole takes my hand when I get to the last rung of the ladder at the back of the bus and jump down before we follow after the rest of the group heading off to the concert.
Tonight’s headliner is just about to go on. We’re too late to get anywhere near the front, so we end up joining all the stragglers who’ve climbed a hill that faces the stage. Our group claims a spot on the grass where we lift up our hands to cheer and scream as the woman who’s headlining walks on stage.
Well, most of us cheer and scream. Cole just claps a few times beside me.
The singer—a wild-haired, leather-pants-wearing woman who performs as just ‘LO’—leads her backing band through half a set’s worth of angsty garage rock tunes that have everyone nodding along before announcing that she’d like to slow things down for a while. She drags a stool to the middle of the stage and starts to play an acoustic cover. It takes me a few bars to recognize Rihanna’s ‘Stay.’
It seems like an out of character choice for her rock chick persona, but her raspy voice somehow suits the longing, desperate lyrics, and she holds the whole crowd rapt with just a single spotlight fixed on the place she sits.
I don’t know whose hand moves towards whose first, but as the chorus starts up for the first time, Cole and I’s fingers end up tangled together in the grass. I’ve always felt drawn to this song, but the confusion it expresses, the haunting push and pull, the fatal repetition streaked with the desire to break free—none of that has ever hit me this hard before. When I drag my eyes from the stage to find him watching me in the dark, I know Cole feels it too.
* * *
“NO! No more ‘Wagon Wheel.’It is outlawed! It is banned!”
Matt gets up and grabs the banjo out of JP’s hands just as he starts strumming the chords we’ve all heard way too many times in the past few days. I don’t know where JP got the banjo from, but he spent the entirety of our drive across Tennessee trying to get everyone to participate in a bus-wide rendition of ‘Wagon Wheel.’
“Mauditfun killer!” JP shouts, waving his beer bottle at Matt in protest. “Why don’t you play something, then?”
It’s well past one in the morning, and we’re all sitting around what is probably an illegal bonfire out in a field behind the bus lot. Empty cases of beer bottles are piled up nearby, and there’s been at least one person playing an instrument ever since we got the fire going, but things seem to be winding down.
“Or we could enjoy the silence of the mountains for a while,” Matt suggests, settling himself back down next to Ace with the banjo well out of JP’s grasp.
Kay’s supposed to join us for a few days, and Matt’s gotten all sulky and impatient about waiting for her. It’s kind of adorable how she makes him act like a teenager with a massive crush, even this far into their relationship.
JP stays quiet for about five seconds before he starts shaking his head. “Nope. I don’t like this. Hey, why don’t we play a game?”
“Here, I have a game.” Ace hunts around on the ground beside him and pulls up a stick before tossing it over his shoulder. “Go fetch, boy.”
JP gives him an eye roll. “Ha ha, very funny. Seriously, though. Let’s do somethingamusante. What was that phone game you guys were playing the other afternoon?”
He directs his question to Sarah, the girl who handles Sherbrooke Station’s merchandise. She ends up explaining an app called If You Really Knew Me. It’s basically an automated version of two truths and lie. It generates questions like, ‘If you really knew me, you’d know that my favourite food is...’ If it’s your turn, you put your answer in and pass it off to the next person in line, who has to guess between the truth and two answers the app makes up.
“Sweet!” JP crows, once he gets the idea. “Let’s do it!”
Everyone’s either down to play or too tired to protest as Sarah starts loading everyone’s names into the game.
Almost everyone.
