“Where’s Annie?”
He inclined his head towards the opposite side of the stage. “She’s with Kat and Derek. They’ll be glad to see you.”
Jo leaned in and pressed a kiss to Gideon’s cheek. His throat and cheeks immediately flamed bright red. “It’s good to see you, too, Giddy.”
Getting from one side of the stage to the other proved harder than she had expected. Storm Chasers were no joke, and no one was willing to cede even the tiniest bit of ground as she tried to move through the throng. On stage, the song ended, and Nico elbowed Zach in the side, tilting his chin towards Gideon. Jo glanced behind her to find Gideon giving the band some kind of signal as Zach’s familiar voice boomed through the sound system.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, his words immediately swallowed by cheering. “In a few minutes, we have a very exciting announcement to share with you all, something you’ve been waiting for since we had to call off our last tour.” The screaming was deafening. Jo’s ears rang with the intensity of it. “But first, we wanted to do something a little different.”
Behind Zach, Jackson and Beckett set their microphones in stands and retrieved their guitars from the backstage area. Logan and Nico arranged stools at the center of the stage, careful to leave the space in front of the screen clear.
“We’ve been testing out some new material,” Zach said, taking a seat on the stool next to Nico. “We wrote this one a few weeks ago while we were in California. We were inspired by the story of the woman who built the Hotel Bellwether. Legend has it, after she died, her estate found love letters she’d written to her husband. Hundreds of them.”
“Thousands,” Nico put in.
“Thousands,” Zach agreed. “Most were written after his death. No one can find those letters now, but we think they might have said something like this.”
Beckett and Jackson began strumming their guitars, a quiet, melancholy melody out of place in the overcrowded bar floating through the air. It was haunting, like joy and sadness coiled tightly together, dancing between shadow and sunlight. And when they sang, the harmonies raised goosebumps along the back of Jo’s neck, their voices blending so perfectly that a whole chorus of overtones rang out around them, multiplying their voices as though there was an entire ghostly choir singing along.
The screen slowly filled with an image of the band around the table at The Poison Place their last night at the Hotel Bellwether. An image she’d taken. It dissolved, transitioning through some kind of low budget effect to a selfie of her and Annie on the beach, the faintest outline of a wobbly purple smiley face still visible on Jo’s cheek.
Jo’s breath caught in her chest, her lungs burning as image after image scrolled by, some she’d taken and other she didn’t recognize, like the photo of her and Annie asleep on the couch in the cottage, the shot of Nico with his arm around her waist as they examined photos on her phone backstage at the NostalgiCon panel, the picture Derek had snapped over breakfast one morning of her laughing and putting her hand up as if to block the camera.
Photo after photo of their trip to California.
Of her.
A blurry shot of Derek kissing her in the doorway to the cottage. One of them talking outside the stage door to the ballroom, Derek’s hand planted on the wall by her head, their bodies too close to be professional. Another with his hand on her waist, his fingers curled in the fabric of her sundress.
Tears slid down her cheeks as she watched each picture flicker by, punctuated by what appeared to be PowerPoint slideshow transitions, spinning images and splits and dissolves. She could hardly process the words of the band’s new song, but she was lost in the music all the same, cradled by the aching tenderness in their voices, the longing of each chord.
And then it was over. The screen paused on an image of Derek and Jo walking through the poison garden, Annie between them, one of her hands in each of theirs. As the music faded away and the crowd broke into raucous applause, the image held, then faded. She wanted to snatch it back, to keep it forever, to hold it close to her chest until her heart stopped hurting.
“Jo, are you here?”
At the sound of Derek’s voice, she snapped her gaze back to the stage, tearing it away from the now blank screen. He held a microphone, one hand shielding his eyes from the lights as he looked out over the crowd.
“I don’t think she’s here,” he said to the band, not quite tilting the microphone away enough to keep the words from being broadcast.
“I’m here!” She shot her hand into the air, waving wildlyas she pushed through the crowd towards the raised platform serving as a stage. “Derek! I’m here!”
Gideon appeared at her side, parting the audience for her, guiding her through the throng to the stage. Once more face to face with Derek, she forgot how to speak. Even with the dark circles under his eyes, he was beautiful.
“You came.” A sad sort of smile curled his lips.
“Annie made a very convincing argument,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder to where Annie stood at the edge of the stage with Kat. The little girl bounced in her seat, barely able to contain her excitement. He took Jo’s hand and led her to a stool at the center of the stage, the band moving to gather with Kat and Annie.
“She might be the best wingman I’ve ever had,” he said. “You see, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to figure out how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“I have something I need to say.”
“To me? Or to them?” Jo gestured to the audience and they hollered in reply.
“To you,” Derek said. “I love you, Joelle.” A hush fell over the crowd at her startled gasp, but Derek was undeterred, his eyes focused on her despite the tremor in his hand as it clutched the microphone. “I am in love with you. I think I have been since the moment you climbed on that bar,” he gestured to the bar in question, “and into my life. You are the best bartender-slash-model-slash-nanny-slash-social- media-manager I’ve ever known. You’reeverything.” Jo laughed, wiping away a fresh rush of tears. “And I would be the luckiest man in the world if you were mine.”