Sound Check

*Thanks for reading. I wanted to write something rough and real about that moment when you want something even if it can't last. Hope it hit the right notes for you.*

Roni was twenty-three years old and she could deadlift an amp that weighed almost as much as she did, which was the main reason Jeremy had asked her to be the band's roadie in the first place, and also, she suspected, the reason he was standing there in the parking lot watching her do it with his hands in his pockets instead of helping.

"You just going to stand there or are you going to lift with your legs like OSHA intended," she said, hoisting the last amp up into the back of the van.

"OSHA never met you," Jeremy said. "You're basically a crane."

The engine was already running, which was Dev's doing, because Dev was the kind of guy who believed that if the van was running then people would stop talking and get in, and he had been wrong about that for two years straight. Roni shoved the amp into its spot between the drums and the merch tubs and slammed the back doors, and when she turned around Jeremy was still looking at her, and the air did that thing it had been doing for about six months now, which was get thick and stay thick.

This was the last run. The band was done after tomorrow night. Not fighting done, just done, the way a carton of milk is done, everybody seeing the date on it at the same time. Jeremy was moving to Portland in three weeks. Roni had known about it for three weeks and had told nobody, mostly because every time she tried to say something out loud about it her throat closed up like a bad valve.

"Get in, crane," Jeremy said.

She got in.

The van was cramped and grimy and it smelled like old beer and guitar strings, and Roni climbed into the middle seat because that was where her spot was, had been for two years, and Jeremy climbed in after her and shut the door, and Dev pulled out onto the interstate heading north while the other two guys in the band immediately put headphones on and fell into their phones, which was normal, everybody knew the first hour of a drive was nobody-talks hour.

What was not normal was that Roni's knee was touching Jeremy's knee, and neither of them moved it.

See, normally there was more room. Normally she'd scoot a little toward the window and he'd angle away toward the middle, some unspoken thing they'd both done a hundred times without ever noticing they were doing it. But tonight the van was packed to the ceiling and there was maybe an inch of slack between them, and after the first ten miles Roni stopped pretending there was anywhere to go. His leg was warm through his jeans. Her pulse picked up, which was stupid, it was a leg, she lifted legs all day at the warehouse, she was around human beings all the time, but there it was, her heart doing a little double-time like she'd climbed a ladder.

The sun went down somewhere around mile ninety. The inside of the van got dark, dashboard glow and phone screens and nothing else, and she could feel him more than see him, his elbow bumping hers when the van hit the expansion joints, the two of them swaying together on every curve like they were bolted to the same floor.

"You're quiet tonight," he said, low, under the noise of the road.

"I'm always quiet. You're the one who narrates."

"That's fair." He was quiet a second. "It's weird, right. Last one."

"Yeah." She looked out at the dark fields going by. "Weird."

He nodded, she felt it more than saw it, and neither of them said anything else for a while, and their knees stayed where they were, and Roni spent a good ten miles cataloguing the fact that she was going to remember this exact dumb feeling, knee against knee in a van that smelled like beer, for the rest of her life, and hating herself a little for how long it had taken her to admit that to herself.

Here was the history, for anybody keeping score. Roni had moved in with her girlfriend Rosie when she was twenty-one, and it had ended two years ago, badly, the kind of badly where you learn things about a person on your way out the door that you can never unlearn. She'd moved into the apartment across the hall from Jeremy not long after, mostly because it was cheap and available, and he'd helped her carry boxes and they'd become friends, real friends, the kind where you sit out on the back steps at midnight and split a cigarette and tell each other true things. She had figured out somewhere around month three that the true things she wanted to tell him were not exactly friend-shaped, and she had sat on that for about a year and a half, because he was her neighbor and her friend and the band needed her and you don't wreck a working system over a crush.

Except the system was ending tomorrow. After tomorrow there was no system. There was just a guy moving to Portland and a girl with a forklift certification and a bunch of evenings that used to have him in them.

Around hour two Dev said "pit stop, fifteen minutes" and swung the van into a travel plaza off the interstate, all sodium lights and moths and a smell of diesel that got in through the door before Roni could even stretch. The other guys went inside toward the vending machines and the bathrooms, and Jeremy reached into his jacket and pulled out a little pouch of papers and tobacco, and Roni followed him around the side of the building where there was a bench nobody had stolen yet.

He sat down and started rolling a cigarette, and Roni sat next to him and watched his hands.

She had decided a long time ago that this was what defined Jeremy. His hands. Drummer hands, steady, quick, the fingers moving on the paper like they'd done it ten thousand times, and they had, she'd watched him do this on her back steps a hundred nights, and she had never once let herself watch this closely. His thumbs tucked the seam. He licked the strip. He did the little shake at the end that meant it was done right.

"You're staring at my hands," he said, and he didn't look up, but he was smiling.

"No I'm not!"

"You have been for like two minutes. I could feel it." He finished the shake and turned his head, and he held her gaze, and he did not stop smiling, and the ground under the whole evening tilted a couple degrees. "It's fine. I have good hands. It's a drummer thing, people stare."

"People stare at your hands."

"Women stare at my hands," he said, and lit the cigarette, and breathed the smoke out sideways, and looked back at her. "You especially, maybe. Tonight."

Roni felt her ears go hot. There it was, sitting between them on the bench, and she could either laugh it off like she'd laughed off a hundred almost-moments over two years, or she could not. Three weeks. Twenty-one days until Portland.

"Well," she said, "maybe I've been practicing. You leave in three weeks and I want the memory."

That came out more honest than she'd planned, and she watched it land, watched his eyebrows go up, watched the smile change into something less easy.

"Roni," he said.

"I know."

"I've been staring at your hands too," he said. "For like two years. Just so we're even."

The moths kept banging against the light overhead, and somewhere out on the interstate a truck went by with its jake brake screaming, and neither of them moved. His knee was a few inches from hers on the concrete, and she thought about the van, the dark, the warm leg.

"Say something useful," she said finally, "because I'm about two seconds from doing something with this whole situation."

"Like what," he said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way she hadn't heard before.

"Like asking me something, maybe."

He turned toward her on the bench, the cigarette burning down forgotten between his fingers, and Roni watched him take a breath like a guy at the top of a diving board.

"Can I kiss you," he said.

She let one full second go by, on purpose, so she'd have it later.

"Yeah," she said. "You can."

He leaned in slow, giving her the whole way to change her mind, and she didn't change her mind, and his mouth found hers soft and a little tobacco-sweet, and the moths kept at the light, and three weeks stopped feeling like a lot and started feeling like not nearly enough.

* * *

The motel was the kind of place where the office also sold bait, and the guy behind the desk rented them two rooms without looking up from his phone, and Dev said "load-in's at nine, don't be dead" and took his bag and disappeared down the walkway with the guitar player and the bass player trailing behind him like ducklings. That left Roni and Jeremy standing in the parking lot at one in the morning with the whole night between them and load-in, and Jeremy said "I've got the beer Dev left in the cooler, you want to not sit in the van for once," and Roni said yes to that so fast it was embarrassing.

His room was the same as hers would be, one bed, one lamp with a shade that had a burn on it, a TV bolted to the dresser that probably got four channels. He sat on the edge of the bed and she sat next to him because the only chair was by the door and it felt like a chair for someone who was leaving, and he popped two cans of the cheap beer and handed her one, and they drank and didn't say anything for a minute, and it was not the bad kind of quiet. It was the back-steps-at-midnight kind, except indoors, and closer, and with a bed right there doing absolutely nothing to help her think.

"To the band," he said, and tapped his can against hers. "It was a real band, for a while."

"It was a real band," she said. "I moved an entire drum kit every weekend for two years, it better have been real."

"You did. That kit weighs a ton. You deadlifted it like it insulted you."

"Half of it insulted me. The kick drum and I have history."

He laughed and drank, and she watched his throat move, and she thought, well, here we are, and here we've been for two years, and one of us should probably say it out loud before Portland takes him away.

"You know I almost didn't come on this trip," she said. "When you told me about moving. Three weeks ago. I went home and sat on my floor and thought, don't do this to yourself, don't ride four hours in a van next to a guy who's leaving."

"Why'd you come?"

"Because I'd have thought about it every day for the rest of my life and hated myself either way. This way at least I hate myself in a van, with a soundtrack."

"That's very healthy," he said, and then he set his can on the nightstand and turned so he was facing her, knee half against her knee, and the easy thing about him was gone again, the way it had gone at the bench. "Can I say a true thing? Since we're doing true things now."

"You've been doing true things all day, don't stop now."

"The staring at your hands thing. It's not new. I've been watching your hands since the first load-in, two years ago, you carrying amps bigger than you are. I used to tell the guys I was checking your grip technique. That was a lie. I just liked watching you."

Roni looked at her own beer. She took a drink to have something to do with her mouth.

"I know," she said. "I mean, I didn't know know, but I hoped. For about two years I hoped, which is a long time to hope about a guy across the hall, let me tell you."

"You hoped."

"Jeremy. I moved across the hall from you. Who does that. I found an apartment forty feet from your door and then I knocked on it with cookies like a normal person."

"You brought cookies."

"I brought cookies, that's not the point." She set her can down next to his, and now both her hands were free and she didn't know where people put their hands when a thing like this was happening, so she put one on her own knee like it was 1950. "The point is I've had this whole thing in my chest for two years and I never said anything because the band was working and you were my friend and I figured I was