Snippet #2777831

Valentina hadn’t expected this. Really, she hadn’t expected anything, because expectations required thought, and she had absolutely not thought any of this through even a little. She didn’t know what to expect from the way Ada said her name, from the way she looked at her with that weird smile, didn’t know what any of it meant—she also, for that matter, found that she didn’t particularly care. There was an anticipation, a breathlessness, eager and almost aggressive, that chased away any thought of worry or anxiety like an unchained bulldog barreling after a trespasser. Even when Ada reached out to take her by the hand and tug her closer to her, the little jolt of energy that coursed through Valentina’s veins that normally would have converted itself into nervousness instead became more of that vivid, combative fervor that Valentina didn’t have a word for just now.

And then Ada raised the glass to her lips, and she drank, and it was like the release of a bowstring under tension. The same triumphant grin Valentina had hurled at the bartender’s back earlier crossed her face again. She stifled it quickly, reasserted control over the muscles of her face and marshalled them back into neutrality, but the feeling didn’t go away. She’d snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Or, uh, she’d grabbed the jaws of—point was, she’d won. Why bother overthinking it when she could just bask in the sensation of having triumphed?

Heck, she was so pleased with herself that when Ada introduced her to Lionel, she managed to handle it somewhat like a normal human being. “Yeah, I remember you,” she said. She didn’t notice it herself—she wasn’t exactly at her most observant just now—but, three beers down, the southern accent that always seemed to haunt her words was out in nearly full force. “From Sturm. I’m Valentina Diaz.” She stuck out a hand, but Ada turned that strange smile of hers back on Valentina at just about the same time, and if the way Valentina instantly withdrew her hand and turned to face Ada was any indication, she pretty much immediately forgot Lionel existed.

Somewhat like a normal human being.

“So can I buy you another drink?” Ada said—and it didn’t escape Valentina’s notice that Ada’d turned her little dare against her, was challenging her just as she had challenged Ada. “Or are you good?” Valentina turned her head slowly, almost mechanically, to follow Ada’s finger to the three empty bottles at the bar. Then she turned her head, just as slowly, back to Ada.

“Hell yeah,” she droned. “Let’s have another drink.”

A NEW DAY

Later that night, having become far more intimately acquainted with the inside of her toilet than she was comfortable with, Valentina decided she had made a series of terrible mistakes. The skull-fracturing nightmare of a headache that ensued the following day only lent further credence to that assessment.

She sat in the passenger’s seat of Izzie’s car, her guitar case between her legs and her forehead pressed against the headstock, as if in hopes that it could relieve the pain. Her recollections of the night before were hazy at best, and she was confident in saying so, because she’d spent the entire morning in a state of borderline panic racking her brains for embarrassing memories. None had surfaced, which was clearly not evidence that they didn’t exist, because Valentina knew herself, and she knew she was perfectly capable of making an ass out of herself without alcohol lending a helping hand.

Her doldrums hadn’t escaped Izzie’s notice. Hell, it had been damn near the first thing Izzie had asked when she had pulled up in front of Valentina’s apartment building to find the younger Martinez standing out front with an expression of biblical suffering on her face. Even now, as she sat caught between anxiety over last night’s potentially catastrophic events and a pounding headache that seemed determined to occupy her every waking thought, she could see Izzie glancing at her out of the corner of her eye.

“Okay, look, you’re obviously not alright,” Izzie finally spoke up. She’d shown Valentina the tender mercy of sparing her any NWA—or any music at all, for that matter—and Valentina almost didn’t register her voice over the roar of the Chevy’s engine. “Something’s bothering you, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were hungover to hell and back on top of that.”

Somewhere underneath the churning maelstrom of anguish in her head, Valentina felt a muted pang of fear and guilt. She’d managed to wriggle out of answering Izzie the first time she’d asked, but she wouldn’t get away with that again, and she certainly wasn’t going to lie. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” she mumbled into her guitar case without looking up. “Okay?”

“Alright, I’m not forcing you,” Izzie said. “How about this, though—join us for dinner tonight. I’m cooking.”

Valentina forced herself to raise her groggy eyes up to meet Izzie’s. “What’re you making?” she asked blearily, and Izzie snorted.

“I assure you, it’ll be at least on par with the five-star meals you’re accustomed to having for dinner.”

There was certainly a part of Valentina that wanted to demur—a part of her that fully intended to spend the evening curled up on her couch, groaning and moaning and generally trying not to think about Ada and alcohol and Sturm and a myriad of other things. She chose to override that part of herself for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Izzie’s cooking was pretty good, both by normal standards and by Valentina’s ‘Safeway doughnuts for dinner’ standards. “Okay,” she muttered. And then, for reasons she could only attribute to her headache and general state of discord, she added, “Thanks.”

Sure enough, Izzie gave her a weird look. “I’m not doing you a favor. You know you’re welcome any time.” The words brought with them another twinge of anxiety underneath the headache—that familiar old fear, that haunting possibility of a time that she wouldn’t be quite so welcome. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead back into her guitar case. Why couldn’t she stop feeling like this? For the first time, she found herself missing the way she’d felt the night before.

“Yeah,” Valentina said quietly, as Izzie pulled into the studio parking lot. “I know.”

.

.

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Christina awoke to a phone call.

That in and of itself was distressing, since the last thing Christina was ready to do right after waking up was talk to people. She liked to take her time waking up—which was to say, she liked to repeatedly reset her alarm and go back to sleep about a dozen times before conceding defeat and dragging herself out of bed. Even then, she didn’t consider herself in a state to be interacting with other human beings until she’d imbibed copious amounts of coffee. In the case of this particular phone call, she’d had the opportunity to do neither—mostly because of the second reason the call was distressing, which was that it woke her up at half past six in the morning.

The third reason made itself manifest when, groaning, she slapped at the bedsheets around her until she found her phone, brought it in front of her (very reluctantly open) eyes, and read the words ‘Rasmus Kjær’.

For just a second, she considered rejecting the call and going back to sleep. Heck, her fingertip was already on its way to doing just that. But no—she’d done that the last couple of times Rasmus had called, and the last time she’d actually accepted one of his calls, he’d taken her to task for it. Frankly, that only made her even less enthusiastic about accepting this call, but after a couple of seconds’ deliberation, she finally bit the bullet.

“Brother dearest,” she intoned pleasantly, doing what she personally felt was a very good job of sounding awake and alert. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’d say that’s an oddly formal way to greet your twin brother, but you take my calls so infrequently I don’t have much to compare it to.” She could hear the thrum of the occasional car in the background—on his way to or from a meeting, no doubt.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Christina said. She laboriously heaved herself up to a sitting position, and then hoisted her legs off the bed so she could stand. “Things’ve just been so busy since we started recording the new album.”

“As they always are,” he replied, unconvinced. “You know, Mom and Dad get worried when you don’t return their calls. They start fretting about whether or not you’re making enough money to eat.”

Phone balanced between ear and shoulder as she hopped on one foot and tugged a sock onto the other, Christina rolled her eyes. “Well, Rasmus, I am twenty nine years old and I have been living on my own for the better part of eleven years. While I may not be living the high life like you are, I promise you I’m not at risk of starving to death.”

“Still, if you could bring yourself to take their calls every now and then—”

“Did you call to talk about something or did you just want to lecture me?” she cut in, injecting the words with as much good humor as she could muster. She dug around the piles of clothes arranged around her bed for a clean shirt.

“Mostly to lecture you,” he quipped, earning him a good-natured ‘go to hell’. “But also, I did just want to catch up—ask how the new album’s going, how things have been since we last spoke back during the reign of Frederick IX.”

The chuckle that joke earned him was genuine, at least. “Sure, sure,” she said, putting the phone on speaker just long enough to tug the shirt on. “But look—I was just about to head over to the studio as it is, so it’s not a good time. I’ll ring you later in the evening, okay?” When his only response was a skeptical silence, she restrained the urge to scowl, and added, “Really, I will. As blastbeats are my witness, I promise.”

“I have no clue what that means, but I’ll hold you to that. I’ll even stay up for it. Give me a ring around… six, your time?”

That’d be about midnight back in Aarhus. Man, he really is determined to talk to me, she mused, feeling rather like he was a puppy who wouldn’t stop licking her—annoying and endearing, but mostly annoying. She never liked talking to the same people over and over again. Considering she and Rasmus had grown up as twins without any other siblings, she figured she’d gotten her fill of talking to him in the womb.

“Sure,” she said. “Talk more then. See you!” She hung up, looked down at the clothes she’d just finished putting on, and collapsed back into bed.

The extra sleep helped: she was back to her usual high spirits by the time she arrived at the studio. Ted’s car was already there—couldn’t win every time, she supposed—and so was the big old muscle car that, she had since gathered, belonged to one of the members of Cirrhosis. She parked her Honda next to Ted’s car and headed in to start the studio session off right: with a metric ton of caffeine.