The Wrong Name, The Wrong Love novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Loading Door

A stranger in a cap at the stage door gives her a floor pass and a rule: no names.

I landed in Lisbon at ten in the morning with one carry-on and no hotel.

I took a bus to the arena by the river and walked around the back, where the trucks were.

A loading door stood open between two black cases.

A guard in a yellow vest stepped across it before I got within ten feet.

"Not open," he said. "Crew only."

"I'm not crew." I held up my phone with the screenshot of my plane ticket. "I'm here for the show. My friend was supposed to put me on the list. She put someone else on it."

He looked at the screen, then at me, and shook his head.

"No list. Tonight, door at seven, like everybody."

"Then I'll buy a ticket at the door," I said. "I just need to know where to stand."

"Tonight, seven."

I stepped back.

I had been awake for twenty-three hours and my eyes felt sanded.

I did not cry.

I looked up at the stack of speaker cases and, because there was nothing else to do with my mouth, I sang the first line of the song.

I did not sing well.

I sang it flat and quiet, the way I sing it in the clinic when the dogs are scared.

"Dear T., the mail came late today."

"That's the wrong note on 'late,'" somebody said behind me.

I turned around.

A man in a gray ball cap and a rain jacket was standing at the corner of the building with two paper cups of coffee.

He looked tired and ordinary, and he had stubble that needed shaving.

He had hands I knew from his album covers.

"It goes up," he said. "On 'late.' It goes up a little, like you're asking."

"You're him," I said.

"Before noon I'm mostly a guy who needs coffee."

He held out one of the cups.

I took it, because my hands wanted something to do.

The guard said something to him in Portuguese.

Eli McCarthy said something back, and the guard went to stand on the other side of the door.

"What's the story?" Eli asked me. "You've got the face."

"What face?"

"The face of somebody whose evening got cancelled."

I should have told him everything.

I should have said, I am the T. in that song, and the woman who got off a plane this morning with her sunglasses on is not.

But I had been told about forty times in one day that I was making things up, and I could not make my mouth say it to the one person whose opinion mattered.

Nobody believes a vet tech from Ohio who says she's the girl from the song.

So I said, "My best friend gave my ticket to my boyfriend."

"Both?" Eli said.

"Both. Two times."

He did not laugh.

He turned the cup in his hands.

"That's a rotten thing to do to a person," he said quietly.

"It is."

"What do you want?"

I thought about it.

"I want a place to stand tonight, where I can't see them."

"I can do that."

"And I don't want to be a person with a story," I said. "No names. Not mine, not theirs. And no talking about the letters, or the song, or any of that. I just want to hear it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Something moved across his face and was gone.

"No names," he said. "No letters. Done."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Sing the line again."

"Why?"

"Because I want to see if you go up on 'late.'"

I sang it again.

This time I went up.

His mouth twitched at one corner.

"There," he said. "That's it."

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a laminated pass on a black cord.

It said *FLOOR / GA* and had a hole punched in the corner.

"Standing room, far left, by the barrier," he said. "Wear something I'll recognize."

"You'll recognize me?"

"There'll be a lot of people. I'll look for a shirt."

I glanced down at the one I had on.

It was my own old tour shirt from his first album, bought secondhand, the print cracked from years of washing.

"This one?"

"That one."

He lifted his cup to me and walked in through the loading door, and the guard shut it behind him.

I stood there holding a coffee that tasted like real cream and a pass I hadn't paid for.

For the first time that day I felt like I could sit down.

I found a bench by the river and slept sitting up.

At six I woke, washed my face in a café bathroom, and joined the line for the doors.

I was nearly at the gate when two men in black came out of a side door, carrying a framed sign between them.

They set it on an easel beside the VIP entrance, where I could see it from the line.

It was a big glossy photo of a blonde woman with her hand over her heart.

Across the bottom were two words in silver script.

*Meet T.*

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend