Page 32 of That Weekend in Paris
“That would be great,” he says. I pull all of the curtains a little tighter, blocking out as much light as possible, and then head for the door.
“I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.”
“Thank you, Dillon.” And I can already hear the medication taking its effect in his voice.
~
I GO BACK to my room. I have to be checked out within an hour. I take my suitcase downstairs and ask the concierge if I might store it for a bit. Once I’ve settled up at the front desk with my bill, I decide to take my laptop and get a cup of coffee in the bar. I ask for a table, a booth in the corner. A smiling, pretty young waitress brings the coffee to me a few minutes later in a silver pot with a white porcelain cup.
“Thank you so much,” I say.
“Please do enjoy,” she says and then leaves me to it.
I open my laptop, type in the password, and pour myself a cup of the steaming brew, taking a sip. It is delicious. I take another sip and then open my email account. I’m expecting a blast from Josh, but surprisingly, I don’t see anything from him. My gaze snags on an address I don’t recognize. I consider ignoring it as I do most junk mail, but something about the name has me tapping and opening it.
At the top of the email is a photo of me ducking into the rehearsal hall yesterday afternoon with Klein. I’m surprised by the picture since I hadn’t noticed anyone around. There might’ve been a photographer or even a regular person snapping a photo of Klein. And then I wonder who sent this. I glance back at the email address. Riley.countrymusicforever. And then I realize it’s Klein’s ex.
I wonder what her motive could possibly be for sending me this. I can’t imagine that it’s just a nice gesture. But would she be jealous? And why would she send it without saying anything? I scroll back up, look at the photo of Klein and me. Whoever had taken it had captured us in a moment of laughter, my head thrown back a little, a smile on my face. Klein is looking down at me with a half-grin on that incredibly good-looking face of his.
Something about this definitely isn’t right. I consider replying with a question mark but decide against it. Whatever issues Riley has with Klein, she’ll have to take up with him. I close out the email. But curiosity prevails, and without letting myself change my mind, I type her name into the Google search bar. The first thing that pops up is an article about Riley and Klein, dated almost a year ago. There’s a photo of the two of them dancing at a club in Nashville.
He’s holding her tight against him, and she’s looking up into his face with utter adoration. I click on a link that takes me to the original article. I read the gossip magazine’s interpretation of the then hot new relationship between Riley and Klein. I glance back at the photo, see that he looks more than a little intoxicated.
Pre-rehab, I assume.
I look closer at Riley’s face and see that she had also been extremely inebriated. I wonder who influenced whom. I go back to my original search and click on her Instagram account. It’s not private, so I scroll through an abundance of photos. Mostly shots of Riley in different locations, different outfits. A dozen or so are photos of her with Klein, of Klein alone. The last one she had posted of him was almost three months ago. Is that when they had broken up?
I wonder who broke it off, Klein or Riley. Given the photo I just received, my guess would be Klein. I look back at the top two pictures on the Instagram page. She’s certainly beautiful. And they’re quite a match.
I click out of Instagram, go back to the search page again, and scroll through the first listing. I then click over to the second page for older references to Riley. There’s a Tumblr account created four years ago. Curious, I tap and find a stream of beautiful photographs, all apparently taken by Riley.
Among the photos are a few of her with Aaron Rutgers. He’d been a promising young guitar player whom I’d met on a couple of occasions with Josh. I hadn’t known he and Riley were ever a thing. The date on the entries indicates they’d been posted a year or so before his death.
I glance closer at one of the photos, and then it hits me that Aaron had looked remarkably like Klein. In fact, the two could have been brothers.
I sit back and consider this, something about it sending off a ping inside me. Maybe Riley was just extremely consistent with her taste in men. But somehow, I have a feeling there is more to Riley than is immediately apparent.
Riley
“A weed is but an unloved flower.”
?Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I’M PRETTY SURE I was a success at the party.
I woke up early this morning thinking of how amazing it had been, how brilliant I had been in my well-planned efforts to make anyone I encountered last night like me and want to know me better. I admit it isn’t something that comes naturally to me. I prefer to talk about myself. I find myself more interesting, and I’m not sure why there’s anything really wrong with that, but apparently, that is not the thing that makes people want to be around you.
It was actually a bandmate of Klein’s who found the nerve to share this point of view with me. One late night on the tour bus when Klein had already gone to sleep.
It was Pete Collins, one of the guitar players who had his eye on me whenever he thought Klein wasn’t looking. I don’t know whether Klein had noticed or not, but I certainly had. Not that it bothered me. I found such information useful and would have used it against him, had I ever felt the need to do so. That night he had poured himself several shots of liquid courage before joining me on the sofa at the front of the bus. I’d been sitting on one end, and he lowered himself down next to me. Way too close.
But I pretended to be interested, curious to see where this would lead. Pete got to his point without much preamble, putting his hand on my knee and giving it a squeeze.
“So, it looks like you and I are the only ones awake. It seems like we could find something interesting to do.”
“You think?” I asked, tilting my head and giving him a look of innocence.
“I can think of a few possibilities we might get around to.”He lifts his shoulders, unconcerned. “He’s asleep. He’s had a few.”
