The band played a couple more songs, wowing the crowd and ratcheting up my qualm-o-meter, before breaking for a quick intermission. They’d demonstrated they could shift seamlessly from edgy rock to British band punk to haunting melody, and it was all brilliant. I had no doubts that this band—Sean’s band—was going to make it big. The rest of the world was going to know their names. Sean’s voice would be forever imprinted on the minds of many. He’d never belong only to me.

“Fill us in on the ‘lost Wednesday.’ ” Gabe’s voice broke through my subconscious as I pondered my dubious sharing skills.

“Um, okay,” I agreed, blinking the room back into focus. “I’m now the proud owner of a Weird shirt.” I smiled, oozing forced optimism. “Sean bought it for me, and I wore it yesterday. I’m official!”

Gabe cut his eyes around at me in disbelief. “Lucy! You’ve got some ’splaining to do!”

A laugh bubbled out of Beck as I answered. “What?”

“You’ve never worked up the gumption to buy your own Weird shirt, but suddenly you’re letting some guy—a virtual stranger—do the deed?”

I glanced at Beck, whose lips remained sealed despite the unexpected euphemism.

“Yesterday tipped the scales.”

“But you were already wearing it yesterday.”

Damn. I’d hoped that little detail would slip by him.

“True.” Stalling ... stalling ... “But my whole week has really been kinda out of the ordinary. I figured I’d earned it.”

“Good enough,” Beck pronounced cheerily, leaning in on her elbows. “So Sean’s the lead singer slash man on guitar, right?” Her eyes were dancing, her lower lip was tucked between her teeth, and she was glowing a radiant, otherworldly pink.

I nodded, returning her smile. “That’s him.” Then I darted in with a question of my own. Letting my eyes flick back and forth between them, I said, “Looks like you guys are getting along pretty good.”

Gabe shot Beck a glance of irritable affection and answered first. “We are,” he said, “but Beck wants me to keep my membership active on We Just Clicked and quiz her with the same questions I fire at potential matches. Naturally it’s irrelevant that I have no interest in any of these potential matches.”

Beck slid her index finger through the condensation rings on the table and countered with careful nonchalance. “I’m just curious to see whether he would have picked me out of a lineup,” she clarified, faced with Gabe’s and my blank stares. “And so far, I’d say it’s going pretty well ... ?” She made this into a question and lifted her eyebrow, waiting for Gabe to weigh in.

“It’s hard to say since you won’t ‘lock in’ your answer,” Gabe said with a wry twist of his lips.

“I’d think that would impress you, Mr. EPIRB. I want to weigh my options, choose wisely. The question isn’t quite as cut and dried as Olga seems to think.”

Faced with my avidly curious stare, Gabe elaborated while Beck sat quietly, her lips pursed and waiting. No doubt for my condemnation of Olga.

“Olivia’s question,” Gabe informed me, “was, ‘If you had to be an animal, which would you be?’ ”

Evidently unable to stand it any longer, Beck leaned in to interject, “She also asked, ‘Which flavor of ice cream would you be?’ An animal I get, but ice cream? What’s the underlying question there—‘Would you choose to be whirled with nuts, fruits, or some other ill-conceived mix-in before being frozen and eventually consumed? ’ ”

Grudging smile from Gabe, twitching lips from me. “She probably meant to ask my favorite flavor, not which one I’d be. And what’s wrong with a dolphin?” Gabe was clearly smitten, not giving a flying fig about the questions so long as Beck kept answering them.

“I don’t particularly care for that high-pitched squealing way they communicate. Imagine listening to that all day.”

Gabe and I shared a look, neither of us really believing we were having this conversation in a Sixth Street establishment during a SXSW showcase intermission. But Beck’s voice was ringing out through the din with you-better-believe-it attitude.

I couldn’t help it, I had to ask, “What sort of creatures are on your short list?”

“The naked mole rat is currently a front-runner,” she informed us. Faced with our no-doubt matching expressions of horrified curiosity, Beck added, “What? Hairless and buck teeth doesn’t appeal to you? Fine. I’m joking. But you know, they live in colonies—one queen and bunches of little worker mole rats doing sexual favors. Doesn’t sound too shabby.”

“Picture yourself as the queen,” Gabe insisted. “I dare you.”

Beck smiled sweetly and started shaking her head, as if she could avoid the image locking on by simply staying in motion. “I’d rather picture you as a worker rat. Stick your teeth out,” she insisted, grinning, reaching up to cup her hand under Gabe’s chin to pull him in for a spontaneously happy kiss.

I tried to hold back my smile as I waited for Gabe to look my way. Once upon a time we made a pact outlawing PDAs, particularly in the company of each other. And while I might have broken it many times over in the course of the past week, I hadn’t yet broken it in front of Gabe, so I was still one up.

But my smug smile fell quietly away as they were both instantly distracted by something behind and above my head. As I tipped my head up and around, I got a sudden, unexpected view of Sean’s face before he swooped down to bestow an impressively thorough PDA of his own.

When I finally tipped my head back down, I was gasping, shaky and unsettled. Looking deliberately away from Gabe and Beck, I noticed there were any number of other pairs of eyes gazing at me with amused interest. Note to self: A PDA with a rock star is like polishing off a huge hot fudge brownie sundae—unbelievably decadent, sweet and satisfying, but capped off with a queasy, what-did-I-just-do sort of feeling. Not for the faint of heart.

“Sean MacInnes.” The words went right over my head as his hand settled around the back of my neck, his fingers skimming through the little wisps of hair there. He reached his hand out first to Beck, then to Gabe. “Good to meet you. Glad you could come along with Nicola. We’re set to do one more song tonight, and then shall we all have a drink? On me.”

Gabe’s “Sounds great,” and Beck’s “Definitely” were garbled in my head.

“Excellent.” Sean’s voice speared through my mental fog, and I turned again to look at him, realizing too late that I might be carelessly tumbling into a PDA ambush. “Back in a sec, luv,” he said, offering only a wink this time. A wink that made every nerve ending stand up and salute.

Thank God the happy couple didn’t try to chat, because I was ill equipped for small talk at the moment.

Back up on stage, Sean stepped up to the microphone. “This is a new song for us, recently written, hardly practiced, so I’ll ask that you bear that in mind.”

As his voice carried through the crowds, softly persuasive and achingly beautiful, it occurred to me that Sean was like a magnet working on my personal compass, throwing me off, sending me in directions I’d never intended to go, with no guide to follow. I could only assume that eventually there’d be a point at which I could go no farther. And there’d be no going back to the way things had been. It was that day that worried me.


After Thursday’s journal overload, Friday morning was refreshingly Fairy Jane Free. I’d stayed up late last night, poring over the entries outlining the Changeling’s experiments and discoveries—her thoughts on Jane Austen and the magic of the journal (inconclusive), and her scientific approach to finding a man (success!). Fascinating reading.

Personally, I wasn’t yet ready to go another round with Fairy Jane, having not yet cracked the code on her last little directive. And beyond that, I didn’t have anything to say, at least nothing I wanted to reveal. I wasn’t too proud of the fact that I’d choked a little my first night out of the gate with Sean, the two of us as a couple. I’d been overwhelmed and hadn’t handled things particularly well. But that was a thing of the past. Today I was once again swept up in the wowza factor of this relationship, and it was infectiously exhilarating.

Even running into Brett in the hallway didn’t faze me. Admittedly I didn’t spout off about Hooky Wednesday, the Weird shirt, the sex, or SXSW, but I almost wished I could. It all sounded so good in my head! We even made plans to go to lunch next week—as friends (at least on my end). I figured I’d just play things by ear. And in the event that those awkward silences had a flirty undercurrent, I’d decide which part of the fairy tale to tell him over our separate checks.

In honor of the changes in my life, I whipped up papaya-coconut cupcakes with mango pastry cream after work, and I must admit, they were very tasty. I felt very tropical parked in the purple papasan, beneath the odd assortment of novelty lights and that perfect ice cream scoop of moon. The Pendleton blanket I was curled beneath was sort of cramping my style, but you have to roll with the punches. That might as well be the motto of Friday night karaoke at Laura and Leslie’s, and yet, I had to admit the calendar’s latest quote had me a bit on edge. It read, “ ‘Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.’ Emma.” I couldn’t agree more: I’d never been big on surprises simply because you couldn’t plan on surprises. I did my best to just sit back and relax. Sean had been thrilled to come along with me tonight, and the girls took to him from the get-go—he even managed to snag Leslie’s approval.

“Tell me this,” she demanded of Sean, “are your intentions with regard to Nicola honorable?” With raised eyebrows she warned, “Consider your answer carefully.”

I missed his answer, but judging by the cacophony of laughter and Leslie’s “that’ll do, pig” attitude, it was spot-on. Hardly a surprise.

It seemed my fledging relationship was nearly perfect. And yet ... I had this odd feeling that something was off.

Sean was in his element, effortlessly charming and at the same time strategically self-deprecating. Listening to him work the patio, one could almost imagine that he understood these women’s frustration with men and that he empathized with their decision to switch teams. And then he’d offer up an encouraging wink, a boyish grin, or a playful lift of his brows, and it seemed—to me as a spectator—as if they froze a moment in frantic, ponderous thought, wondering if they’d made the right decision. It was like magic ... or momentary hypnosis ... just how far a dollop of charm could carry him.

It had definitely gone the distance with me. But as devil-may-care as he appeared, I got the impression that Sean hadn’t abandoned that original “now or never” mind-set and its associated urgency. He’d seemed anxious to tell me something earlier, but Leslie had shanghaied him the moment we’d crossed the fence line. I hadn’t had a moment alone with him since. With the whole weekend stretching empty ahead of us, he should have plenty of time. For lots of things.

It was during a pleasant little daydream that Leslie sidled up and perched herself onto the edge of my papasan. For anyone unfamiliar with papasan geometry, it’s a circular chair with spherical depth—no edge and no perch. Leslie started sliding immediately. And speaking as the girl at the bottom, it was a slippery slope indeed.

“He’s got a cute ass,” she informed me, gesturing with her margarita glass. A bit of the rim salt tumbled down to join the cupcake crumbs on my blanket.

Glad to have settled on a topic we could both agree on, I turned eagerly in his direction. My gaze fell first on the profile of his face, etched with shadow and light against a twilight sky. He turned at that moment, as if sensing our eyes on him, and sent a curiously amused smile back in our direction, toasting us with a longneck beer.

Leslie leaned in farther until she was hovering over me, precariously balanced on her hipbone. Avalanche conditions.

I’d psyched myself up for the papasan extrication—one fluid motion, up and out—when Tawny Brown, a rare talent in the backyard karaoke set, stepped up to the microphone.

“Okay, ladies. I know you’ve been waiting. Our token male of the evening, Mr. Sean MacInnes,” she swept her hand around him like he was a showcase on The Price Is Right, “is going to give us a little sample of what a man can do with our equipment.”

Wild and wolfish whistling ensued, and Sean took up the gauntlet, accepting the microphone from Tawny. I took the opportunity to extricate myself from the papasan.