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Annie's Song
You fill up my senses like a night in a forest
Come let me love you let me give my life to you
...let me give my life to you
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After the concert and a quick (much needed) shower for the guys, we all climbed onto the waiting bus. Zac went straight to his bunk. I know he honestly didn’t feel well, but I think there was also a bit of sulking going on. I think he was still a little ticked at Taylor, Isaac and I. It was the earliest he had gone to bed since the tour had started. Zac’s notorious for getting these horrendous bursts of energy at the most inconvenient, not to mention annoying, times. Translated, he suddenly wants to dance a tango with me when all I want to do is sleep. Still, he was seriously ticked at Taylor and well, he honestly hadn’t been feeling well. At least, I hoped that was all it was. I was still a little blown away by the kiss he’d given me and I didn’t really know if I wanted to know where it came from. Or, if I wanted to deal with it at that very moment.
Ike was sitting at the table playing chess online with his father, while Taylor surfed the Hanson.net site. He kept popping in and out of chats, basically torturing the devoted masses and answering a few of the many, many e-mails they received each day. Tay and Ike were laughing at the crazy instant messages Avie and Mac kept sending them. Apparently, Diana’s leg had been hurting pretty badly so she had gone to bed early leaving Walker in charge. Which means the kids probably had some unbelievably sugary cereal for dinner and had watched a scary movie on TV. This was all done while overdosing on licorice and popcorn washed down with at least 2 or 3 cans of Dr. Pepper. They were up way past their bedtime, playing video games and surfing the ‘net. They would be unbearable tomorrow. Thank God I wouldn’t be their teacher tomorrow! I know this is the scenario taking place, ‘cause I’ve gotten to be a part of many such evenings myself. Walker was pretty much SuperDad as far as Thad and I were concerned. Our father would have no more stayed up late to watch a scary movie with us, than he would wear a dress to work.
I, of course, was sitting with my infamous palm pilot (of doom) and cell phone (from Hell) trying desperately to find a doctor who would see Zac the next day. (Just as an aside, I think the people hired to work for answering services are the nastiest, least compassionate, most hateful people in the universe. They ask you for the symptoms and once you’ve listed what you think is a fairly horrendous list of ailments, they ask in the most condescending voice possible, “Is there anything else?” No, there isn’t anything else, but I think I just coughed up my left lung and ruptured my spleen! Argh!! They simply infuriate me.) That is if I could drag him, he really, really hates doctors. I mean, I cannot stress enough just how much he hates doctors. Zac hates doctors so badly when I fell out of the tree house and broke my leg, it was Zac who passed out in the ER. And, when Diana had her knee surgery right before the tour, he had tried to go visit her, but he couldn’t get through the front doors. So, he waited in my car listening to the radio, while the rest of us went in. Ike used to joke Zac was so traumatized by his circumcision as a baby, he was still scared of doctors.
Once my crisis of the moment was calmed, I turned on a video. At some point during the movie I fell asleep. I honestly don’t know how long I had been sleeping, but a hand on my knee roused me. “Hey, Cleo, don’t you think you ought to sleep in a bunk?”
“Oh man,” I groaned sitting up and stretching my stiff muscles, noticing the lights in the bus were off. “Hey Tay, what time is it?”
“Um...it’s 3:23, Tulsa time.” He said moving my legs, so I was sitting up, then he sat on the couch next to me. I shivered as I pulled my legs up to my chest. “Are you cold?”
“Well, a little, probably cause I just woke up.” I said, goose bumps covering my arms and legs. I was actually shivering. “Speaking of being up, what are you doing up still? I would think you would’ve collapsed by now from exhaustion?”
“Oh, I was reading and lost track of time. And, I had a lot of things to think about.” He said standing and walking back towards the bunks. He reached into his bunk and pulled out a blanket. “You just look too cold.” He said as he wrapped it around me and pulled me against him just like Isaac had earlier in the van. I automatically leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder. He put his arms around me and hugged me. He felt so strong and sure and he smelled so good. “Cleo, can I ask you a semi-serious question?”
“Oh no, another serious question...” I groaned.
“What?” He asked. I could feel his chest rise and fall with his soft, even breathing; I could feel his heartbeat in his neck against my temple. He felt so warm and so comfortable.
“Oh, nothing, it’s just when Zac and I were in the bathroom at the radio station he asked me if he could ask me a serious question, twice.”
“Really and were they? Serious questions that is.” I loved the rumbling of his voice in his chest.
“Yes, they were actually very serious and semi-scary.” I said not really wanting to get into what Zac and I had talked about with Taylor.
“Well, do you mind if I ask you another serious question?” I shook my head. I felt him take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Cleo, I’ve been thinking about what Zac said back in the arena and you know what, he’s right.”
“About what?” I said confused. Zac had said and done some things I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around. “Please be a little bit more specific.”
“About how you and I act toward each other.” Taylor said his hand finding mine under the covers. He tried to lace his fingers through mine, but it ended up with our fingers off and felt awkward. He pulled his hand away; instead he just rested it on my stomach. “Think about it, we hardly ever touch one another, but I’ve seen Ike walk by you and kiss you on the forehead. If you walk in and we’re all watching television, you always sit down next to Zac or Ike and curl up around them like a cat. It’s not about sex either, it seems to be about comfort, because even Mackie ends up in your lap if he’s in the same room with you, holding your hand, playing with your hair. What is it that makes you so uncomfortable around me?”
“I don’t feel uncomfortable around you.” I protested. “Look, I’m sitting with you right now.”
“Yeah, but I pulled you over.” He said quietly. “If I hadn’t initiated it, you would still be shivering in the opposite corner of the couch. Or you would have gotten up and crawled in your bunk.” When he stopped talking, I think he wanted me to say something or do something, but I had no response. The silence grew until I began to feel uncomfortable. He sighed deeply. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. “Do you realize we’ve never sat up all night and talked like you do with Ike and Zac? In fact, you and I would never touch or talk if I didn’t make sure it happened.”
Ouch! He was actually semi-right. I never just reached over and ran my fingers through Taylor’s hair, like I did with Zac. I had never greeted Taylor with a kiss on the cheek like I did Ike. When we went to the movies (had we ever been to the movies, just the two of us?), we didn’t spend the entire movie holding hands. My head didn’t automatically drop onto his shoulder when we sat on the couch together. If he had come into my room to take a nap this afternoon, I would have said yes, but offered him the other bed. And I can honestly say when I’m searching for someone to pour my heart out to it’s never him. “Honestly, I don’t know. I guess I just thought it wouldn’t be welcomed.”
“Why?” He asked.
“I don’t know.” I said reaching for his hand and quickly lacing our fingers together, this time they fit. “Maybe it’s because with Ike, he always felt like my brother. Literally, for the first few years of my life, I thought he and Jarrod were my brothers; they just lived in another house. And Zac, when I think of Zac, I see this little blonde 2 year old, running as fast as his chubby little legs could carry him after us. I remember kissing his skinned knees when he fell down. I even remember rocking him to sleep when he was just a baby. He was the little brother I was never going to have. But, when I think of you, I think of... of... um...”
“Let me guess, you think of the time you fell out of the tree house and broke your leg.” He said tiredly. He sounded so sad and defeated, I wanted to reassure him, tell him, no, that wasn’t what I was thinking. But I didn’t want to lie to him. “You know, that’s another thing, you never plotted any elaborate revenge against me. I pulled your hair or ripped your shirt or pushed you out of our tree house and you never did anything to me. Was it because you didn’t care enough about me to even bother?”
“No!” I said urgently sitting up and facing him. “No, that is most definitely not it. It was you seemed so... so... like something I could easily break, so I just never picked on you. You always seemed so fragile. Does that make any sense?” He shook his head. How could I explain this without sounded completely crazy? “Okay, when you were born, your mother told me you had just lived with the angels. So in my 2 and a half-year-old brain, I thought she was telling me you were an angel. And, because I was so young, I was always being told to be gentle and I couldn’t pick you up. I remember thinking you were breakable, something I could never touch.”
“So, because of my mother’s scare tactics, you spent your whole life afraid to touch me or talk to me?” He asked.
“Yes and no. I honestly don’t know any specific reason why I would avoid you, if indeed I was avoiding you.” I said taking a deep breath. Maybe, just maybe I should try telling him the truth. “Okay, Tay I guess you deserve the truth, so here it goes. You are the single most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
“That is such a load of crap.” He said cutting me off.
“I’m not going to tell you if you cut me off so shut up.” I said. “I was always so scared of you and who you were. You always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do. Ike is always so goofy and Zac is just plain insane, but you are so calm and quiet and seemingly sane. Even the horrible women at church loved you because you sang like an angel and you never acted irreverent. I was always the horrible, naughty girl. I was the kid who brought the bottle of fire ants and opened it in the chapel. I hid the frog in the organist’s music box. I made the other kids giggle during the prayer. And you were the kid who told me to be quiet.”
“Man, I was always such dork.” Taylor said. “And you and Thad, you were always in so much trouble. I was always so jealous of how you just did what you wanted.”
“Well, not everyone liked how I acted.” I said absently picking at the balled up lint on his blanket. “One time I heard some women talking about me, they described me as sneaky and said I was so smart it was actually scary to think of what I was going to come up with next. They said they couldn’t believe your mother allowed any of you to be my friend. They both agreed that I would end up in prisoner or become the new and improved Unabomber. I really thought I deserved someone like Jarrod.”
“Nobody deserves Jarrod.” Tay said. I could feel him stiffen as he started to talk about Jarrod. Jarrod hated Taylor; he always had and probably always will. Jarrod thought Taylor was a pansy suck up, especially because all the mothers and fathers in the neighborhood thought he was such a good guy. And really, there was no love lost with Taylor. It had always struck me as strange how the two of them could hardly stand to look at one another and yet, they had spent much of their lives together. “Nobody deserves what Jarrod did to you.”
“Well, I thought what those women thought of me was right.”
“You should know better than to let small minded women affect you.” He said shaking his head, pulling me into a tight hug. “You are smarter than that.”
“Am I?” I asked. “I don’t know, maybe they could see something you can’t see. And you? You were always so perfect and I’m so imperfect.”
“I’m not perfect. You of all people should understand that.” He said quietly.
“Oh, but you are. Why else do you think I covered for you when I fell out of the tree house? I couldn’t let you get in trouble,” I said closing my eyes. Until I had spoken those words, I wasn’t even aware that’s how I felt. “Even your imperfections make you perfect. I mean, even your insane self-confidence fits. You are every girls dream. You are so handsome and kind and thoughtful and talented. You are only good adjectives.”
“That is so funny, ‘cause I always thought you were the perfect one.” Taylor said laughing. “You are beautiful and smart and tough and funny. You have always had the guts to do exactly what you wanted, you were never afraid of what other people thought of you.”
“Maybe I should have been.”
“Okay, I have a confession.”
“A confession? What could you possibly have to confess?”
“You remember how on the day you fell out of the tree house, I kept insisting it was an accident?” I shook my head. He had turned a ghostly pale and began to cry when he saw the sharp, raw bones sticking out of my leg. He had seemed so freaked and I was in shock by the time the ambulance arrived. I had insisted over and over it was my fault, I had slipped while acting stupid, and basically I had fallen. “Cleo, I pushed you on purpose.”
“What?” I had always thought it was an accident. He had even told me he had slipped and he slammed into me. We had jokingly started saying he had pushed me, but none of us would have ever believed he had purposely pushed me.
“I saw you standing there teasing Zac and Ike with the rope ladder after I had asked you if you wanted to go up with me.” Tay said quietly. “I had invited you up, ‘cause I wanted to be alone with you. I had finally built up the courage to try and hold your hand, maybe even kiss you. I wanted to talk to you uninterrupted. And you wanted to be with my brothers. I was so jealous. I thought maybe, just maybe if I did something to you, you would have to pay attention to me. So, I pushed you out of the tree house.”
“You pushed me on purpose? You always insisted it was an accident.” At his confession, I actually felt a little dizzy. This was huge: Taylor Hanson had done a truly mean and hateful thing.
“Yeah, I’m not really all that proud of it.” He sighed deeply. “ I guess that makes me no better than Jarrod. I mean, he broke your arm and I broke your leg.”
“No, what you did was nothing like what Jarrod did. Jarrod was mean and a bully and you, you were trying to force me to pay attention to you. And I completely missed it. Wow, I take all the times I called you a wimp back.” I said. “Of course, you could have found a little less painful way to get my attention.”
“Well, it didn’t work, did it?” He said wrapping a strand of my curly hair around his finger. “You didn’t even tell on me, you covered for me and you convinced my brothers to not sell me out. And you just pretended it didn’t happen, unless you wanted to humiliate me.”
“But Taylor, I was protecting your reputation as only good adjectives.”
“You know Cleo, you’re only good adjectives too. You remember that John Denver song about his wife...” He began to sing softly, “You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest.” He leaned his cheek against my head. Even his quiet singing was overwhelming, his voice was so beautiful. “Well, you do that to me, you fill up my senses. You smell so good.” He said taking a deep breath, his nose buried in my hair. “You feel so good.” He said rubbing his hands up and down my cashmere covered arm. “You even look good despite the boxers, or maybe because of them.” He said laughing deep in his chest.
“Oh shut up!” I said laughing. They were always trying to get me to laugh, ‘cause they said I had the best laugh. I think it sounds something like a chipmunk, but it always sounds like I mean it.
“You sound good.” He said as I sat up to give him a dirty look. “The only thing I’m not so sure of is how you taste.” With that he leaned forward and planted a kiss squarely on my lips. His lips were so full and so strong; I forgot I shouldn’t be kissing him. “Wow,” he said breathlessly. “You even taste good.” He leaned back down and began to kiss me again. And again, I forgot I shouldn’t be kissing him.