Commitment (48 page)

Chapter Ten

Hote
l living was losing its appeal.
He
used to love being on the road; the
unfamiliarity of each new place, even the antiseptic smell of the suite
s
, the crispnes
s of the sheets, and the women.
Especially the women.
They
were different in every city.
The way they talked, the way they dressed
, the way they wore their hair.
All different and all good.
Every morning
used to feel
like an adventure
and
every evening,
after
business was over with, he
and
Brendan would hit two or three
night
clubs, picking up female companions as they went, enjoying the attention and VIP treatment,
exploiting the hell out of it.

Nightclubs were where h
is music came alive.
Watching people experience it in the real world instead of
at a concert was indescribable.
From the VIP spot
Shawn
listened to
the shouts of appreciation when one of his songs came on; he watched women grab their girlfriends by the hand and rush to the dance-floor if they didn’t already have dance partners, and t
he guys’ heads bopping on beat.
Each and every time he witnessed it, it amazed and humbled
him that so many people could care so much about
anything
he played
a
role
in creati
ng.

But the nightlife was a double-edged sword; no matter what city it was,
d
udes sometimes got aggressive.
They got drunk and
wanted to prove to their boys or their girl that they were too cool to be impressed by him, that they weren’t afraid to fight h
im.
Women
were aggressi
ve too, but in a different way.
They followed him to the Men’s Room, tried to literally back him into corners or handed him their numbers written on napkins, receipts and once on
a pair of white satin panties.

Even women who came with
their
men tried to get to him.
They
made
eye contact
with him
over their boyfriends’ shoulders and walked by
his table more than necessary.
Sometimes there were as many as
ten
women who
repeatedly walked by
for no discernible reason other than to be noticed.
He and
Brendan used to joke about it.
They called it
the Livestock Show
.
Now he went to clubs and didn
’t even notice the “livestock”. At least not most of the time.

Instead, h
e found
his mind wandering, thinking
about stupid things like the
sight of his
wife stepping out of the shower;
those few
precious
seconds when lying in bed, he spotted her naked
as she
reached for her robe
.
Or the way she sometimes
dived
back
under the
covers
,
damp
an
d cool and clean,
complaining about having to go to the office when he could sleep in
; her favorite
light citrus
scent
lingering in the
bedroom long after she’d left.
There was no way some chick in a short skirt with too much make-up and a waist-length hair weave could compete with that
.
So he ignored the livestock.

Ignoring Keisha on the other hand, was a little more difficult
.
Even
while he was
in California, she
still found ways to get to him.
Mike and Darryl were along for the ride promoting the tour, so Shawn figured that was how she’d gotten
his number
.
Now she was calling almost every day and it had gotten to the point where everyb
ody was making jokes about it.

Sometimes,
Darryl told him,
y
ou have to fuck ‘em to get rid of ‘em
. 

Shawn had looked at him evenly.
Maybe that works for you, son.
But with me, that’s what makes them want to stick around.

Despite his best efforts,
occasionally, he would wonder
what it would be like to tap that, just
one
time
.
And the funny thing about it was that he could see how it would almost be possible to have Keisha and leave wha
t he had with Riley untouched.
The two women were so different they didn’t even seem like they
were
part
of the same species.

With Keisha, it would be
straight fucking – some buck-
wild, triple-
X type shit.
But it was bette
r not to entertain that thought
p
rocess for too long.
He almost slipped up and
mentioned it to
Brendan but
when it came to Riley, lately his boy
had turned holier-than-thou.
In his own way, B had fallen in love with her too and now had a brotherly protective instinct
toward
Riley
that
made
it
very
unlikely
he would
commiserate.  

The best Shawn could do where Keisha was concerned was
to
avoid her.
For every
five
calls s
he made, he answered
maybe
one.
And
in fairness,
he did start out every conversat
ion intending to get rid of her
but somehow after a couple minutes she would h
ave him talking about his music
and she quietly listened to all the minor details that made his wif
e’s eyes glaze over in boredom.
The last time he’d spoken to her,
s
he asked him why
Riley
hadn’t flown out to the West Coast with him and he almost answered, because
the separation
didn’t really sit we
ll with him in the first place.
It was something he would have happily complained about to a willing l
istener b
ut he caught himself in the nick of time
and cut that shit
off before it became habitual.

I don’t talk about my wife with anyone
, he told her. 

That shut her down for a couple seconds, but
she hastily
recovered, and laughed. 

Dag
, she said.
I was just making conversation.
 

Yeah, right. 

It helped
that he called
home
every night and sometimes
he and Riley
talked until
one
of them fell asleep.
Her voice in his head was always the last thing he heard.
Being away from
her
was still uncomfortable
and he kept waiting for the complacency that peopl
e said came from being married, but s
o much about her still felt elusive, which was
probably what kept him hooked.

When he called, she wasn’t always home, and she didn’t always have time to talk to him when he
reached
her
on her
cell phone either. Last week he’d called as she was about to sit down to a lunch meeting, so she’d only answered long enough to tell him she would call him back later. And just before she hung up, Shawn heard her greet the person she was meeting with.

Wow
, she said.
You look great! I haven’t seen you since
that
. . .

And then the line went dead.
He’d spent
the better part of the next hour
obsessing about who this phantom lunch date might be and what the occasion was when Riley had seen them last. It was
the dumbest thing
, but he was
almost
jealous
of her past, of every single day she had spent without him and every single person who had known her when he had not. And more than that, he didn’t quite know what to make of the fact that
while his life had been turned upside down,
she seemed to have folded him into her life just fine, continu
ing
on just as before.

For years in this business, he’d watched the girlfriends and wives of
other
performers
literally quit their lives to
focus one hundred percent on their man
.
Jobs, friends, homes, and familiar places all left behind
so they could
guard what had become their most important as
set – their
relationship with a star.
The only thing they seemed to take t
ime out for was making babies.

Riley showed absolutely no inclination to follow that pattern
–
she was about as interested in his work as the wife of a
country doctor might be
.
And as
f
or making babies
,
she hadn’t even breathed a word about that which was just fine with h
im.
For now.
Her writing was he
r baby as far as he could tell.

She didn’t always tell him about the projects she was working on
and he didn’t always ask
,
b
ut t
his afternoon when he called
Chris
and
found out for the first time that
Riley
was
going
by his office to do an interview the next morning
, it felt like a line had been crossed
.

Why didn’t she tell him that?

Shawn wasn’t sure how to feel about this unexpected intersection between his personal and work lives.
He’d been fine with Riley meeting Chris, but this,
this
was something else altogether.
For starters, he wouldn’t be there.

A
cross the hall
,
Mike and Darryl were
in
their dressing room, hollering
and
playing music and probably drinking
much more than they should
.
They were opening for him until their
CD
dropped, and then depending on how they did, shit
, he might be opening for them.
Their flavor
was
East Coast raw
.
Heavier bass, no background
dancers, minimal pyrotechnics.
Just pure rhyming skills
and some serious thug attitude.

The press they were getting for naming themselves Gl
ock was creating buzz about their music
even though half the tra
cks hadn’t even been mixed yet.
And the last two shows they did climaxed with them emptying bottles of malt liquor on
the people in the front rows.
For awhile
those two idiots were talking
about
making
that
part of every show
until Brendan and the tour manager
put
the kibosh on
the
plan, telling
them that they were “exposing
the show
to litigation
”
.
Not to mention that Mike and Darryl were underage and had no business being in possession of alcohol in the first place.
Personally, Shawn thought the whole thing
was u
nnecessary drama.
Whatever happened to
letting
the music speak for itself?

“What you
doin
’ sittin’ in here all by yourself,
man
?”