I’ll Wait For You

“Think they’ll be invited back after this?” Karen said casually, grinning at Elinor, fluttering her large eyelashes.

“Only if they signed a deal with the devil, and it sounds like they’re trying that out right now,” Elinor said, causing one customer slumped by the bar to snort in laughter.

“You staying, afterwards, or hiding back at home?”

“Home would be great, but Tina and Peter insist they want to chill with me in the café. They’re probably gonna try and make me sing.”

“You can sing?” Karen said, suddenly interested. She quickly filled and pushed a drink towards a waiting customer. “That’s something you’ve never mentioned to me before. Like, ever.”

“It’s because I’m not that good a singer,” Elinor said wryly, finding amusement in Karen’s sparkling blue eyes. They were a darker shade of blue than the man with the tattoos, and softer. She served up one more customer as well, before checking to see if anyone new had entered and sat down. “I dropped it years back.”

Along with five years of a rocky marriage. Irritation coursed inside. She had given everything for Aidan. He needed help with his rent, and she had decided there and then to finally stop on the singing, which her parents additionally viewed as a nice hobby, but not something that would pay the bills, not with the thousands of talented singers out there. She just wasn’t special enough, never mind it to be something she once found cathartic, relaxing her through exams, distracting and sometimes destructive friends, and the pressure of what she needed to do with her future.

It wasn’t the singing, though that did it. Not really. It was the time spent composing lyrics, having words pulled out of her brain to fill up the empty space – words that could be strung together in song. She liked imagining her favorite singers go on stage and burst out a rendition of her lyrics. She imagined how proud she would feel, to have the thoughts and emotions locked deep inside her sung for the world to experience every time they listened to the entire song. She certainly relished the idea of someone having a hard time, putting on their headphones, and allowing her words to bring them from the brink of misery to somewhere safer.

Everyone dreamed, once in a while, of something that might be impossible to achieve. People used to praise her singing voice. The truth was, though, she just wanted voice to be given to her words.

And she had given that all up to make sure Aidan could live through his months without worry or fear of paying the bills. Her parents, of course, were ecstatic. They loved invited her and Aidan around for dinners, drilling him for information, believing him to be a good fit for their (though they never said it out loud) shamefully single daughter.

So, of course, they had married. Spare time that once gave itself to singing, poems and lyric construction turned into working and loving, and doing everything possible to make sure their marriage worked. She wanted children, of course, but Aidan had been desperate for them. Aidan had reached those twilight years where he felt bereft of the fact that no genetic legacy of his walked the earth – and love making soon turned into baby making. Mechanical. Boring. Lifeless.

Then the bad thing had happened three times, and she felt partially convinced that the misery which came from it was what broke up the marriage.

If only her body hadn’t betrayed her.

“Looks like your friends just turned up,” Karen said, pointing over to the figures of Tina and Peter as they ambled into the small café. “Better hurry and end your shift.”

“Yeah,” Elinor said, going back into her tasks with a will.

When she finally clocked out, she sauntered to the table where her friends sat, and noticed Tina wearing penguin-decorated earplugs. Karen made an excuse to come over and serve them, and they exchanged a round of greetings.

“You know, if you’re going to be wearing earplugs every time you come here on a Friday night, it might be a sign that we should go someplace else,” Elinor said to Tina. Tina raised one eyebrow and winked at her friend.

“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you over the sound of how much I don’t want to hear these people at the moment.”

Tina shared the same tone of dark skin as Elinor, light chocolate that hinted of a fair sprinkling of mixed ancestry. Tina’s grandmother was white, and Elinor’s father was white, and they had ended up being dumped together at kindergarten. Of course, they hated each other at first. She used to pull Tina’s hair, Tina liked to whack her in the face with whatever happened to be lying around, whether it be a toy truck or a cooking pan (Elinor still had the scar from that incident on her shoulder). Somehow, though, through their excessive and awful treatment of one another, they had decided one day that it wasn’t worth it and maybe things could be easier if they became friends instead. Elinor remembered that day still with a smile upon her lips.

“No! Don’t hit me!” Tina had squeaked, glaring at the then five-year-old Elinor. “I want to draw this!” She had been furiously destroying a blank piece of paper with purple crayons, eyebrows scrunched together like a bloodhound’s wrinkles.

This had massively confused Elinor. “But I want to hit you. I don’t like you. You always hit me.”

“I don’t like you either!” Tina continued drawing spirals, the crayon clutched in her fist. Elinor had been standing there with a toy truck raised, and the assistants weren’t looking their way at this point in time, since if they had been, they would have likely dragged the two children into separate rooms. Eventually, Elinor had lowered the truck, watching the aggressive smudges form on the paper.

“If I stop hitting you, will you stop hitting me too?” Elinor offered the generous proposal to Tina, who looked up from her drawing, and contemplated the suggestion for a moment, tongue poking through her teeth.

“But I like hitting you.” She allowed her brain to leap forward in five-year-old logic. “But I don’t like you hitting me.”