“You put your phone on silent?” I nodded my answer to Fran’s question. We’d made it to Enriqueta’s and grabbed some food before retreating to a shady spot about half a block away where we could smoke and enjoy our meals.
“I had about thirteen missed calls or texts, apparently,” I told her, twisting my lips into a wry grin. “You?”
“Still coming in,” Fran told me. She shook her head, putting her purse down to take a sip of coffee.
“What do you want to do about the situation?” I took a bite of an empanada and chewed on it while I waited for Fran to consider the question.
“I just want to let it blow over,” she said after a moment. “It can’t be that big of a story, can it?”
“It’ll be as big or as small as we end up making it,” I said with a shrug. “If we don’t really talk about it they’ll lose interest eventually.”
“Which I guess brings us around to whether we want to actually…you know…be together.” Fran took another sip of her coffee.
“Did you not want to be together?” I set my half-eaten empanada aside. “I mean, I won’t exactly take it hard if you decided that you wanted to be single, but I’d like to know.”
“The thing is…” Fran took a deep breath and put her cup of coffee down. “I don’t want to be single. I want to be with you. I just…” she shrugged. “I don’t want it to be a marketing gimmick, or for people to think that I’m just doing it to get more attention.” I snorted.
“Well, unfortunately, people are going to think that,” I told her. “Some people, anyway. Nothing you can do about that situation.” I pressed my lips together and considered.
“Do you think I only hooked up with you for attention?”
“Of course not,” I said, shaking my head. “If you were going to hook up with someone to promote the band, you’d have gotten with Nick or Alex or someone.” Fran laughed.
“Okay, that’s a decent point,” she said. “So, what do you want to do about…” I shrugged.
“I want to keep seeing you,” I said, taking a sip of my own coffee. “What you want to call it—that’s just window dressing. I want to keep seeing you, and I want to work on music together.”
“You do?” Fran raised an eyebrow.
“That song you showed me before—it’s a good song. It deserves to come out. It deserves to be heard. I want to help make that happen.”
“You don’t think it’ll just get bashed as a John and Yoko thing?” I rolled my eyes.
“If anyone was going to get bashed as a Yoko figure, it’d be Mary,” I said, shaking my head. “Alex is closer to being John Lennon than I am. I’m more…” I shrugged. “I don’t know. But if people want to talk shit about us, why should we even fucking be bothered?”
“What’s the label going to say?” I shrugged again.
“I don’t really care. They don’t have a lock on our personal lives, for one thing. It’s not like we’re in contract with them all of the hours of all of our days. We make records for them and we do promotion for the records. We tour. That’s the only hold they have on us—on you, for that matter.”
“The label sent Alex to rehab, didn’t they?”
“The band sent him to rehab, with Ron and the label backing us,” I told her. “That was a whole separate deal. Besides, Alex came out of it with a girlfriend and a big reputation. So, he won out in the long run.”
“Do you think they’re going to think you’re trying to go solo if you do this with me?” That was a good question. I finished off my empanada while I considered it, and lit a cigarette.
“They know I’ve got a bunch of music I’ve written on my own,” I told Fran. “I can do both. I can work with you on stuff and work with the band.”
“But can you do both while our bands are working together?” I smiled.
“It’ll make it easier that way, won’t it? We’ll work on our stuff in the off hours—we’re going to be renting the studio for like two weeks. There’s no way there’s not going to be time for us to do our own thing in it.”
“I’m actually kind of more excited by that than by the fact that I can fucking date you openly now if I want to,” Fran said. We both laughed and, acting on impulse, I leaned in and kissed her. If someone took a picture of us, I didn’t give a single fuck.
“We’ll make it work,” I told her. It was the first time that I had actually said that to a woman; I had always been the person to hear it. I could only hope that I would be better at making it happen than any of the women I’d been involved with who had said those words to me. I kissed Fran again. “Eat your damn sandwich before I do,” I told her, taking another drag of my cigarette and another sip of my coffee. “Then let’s go back to my place. It’s actually clean for once.” Fran laughed.
“Now that we don’t have to sneak around?” I nodded.
“We’ll just do whatever we feel like, won’t we?” Fran took a bite of her Cuban sandwich and her eyes gleamed. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle with the label—but she didn’t know that, and I didn’t intend to really tell her. She’d find out soon enough.