The Breakup Tour by Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka

Author:Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka [Wibberley, Emily & Siegemund-Broka, Austin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

With the end of the chorus, Riley sits down next to me. We’re side by side while the song’s journey continues, one of us the passenger, one of us driving. Neither of us knows who is who.

Her voice remains nothing like the performances. It isn’t wistful or yearning. She sounds vindictive, matching the vengeance of my playing. We’re each pressing deliberately into old wounds, just to fascinate ourselves with the perverse pleasure of the pain.

In the second verse, the lyrics switch to present tense. Whatever my feelings on the song, its structure is fascinating, Riley’s proof of poetry existing in pop. It is my least favorite verse—like she’s writing crime journalism, she diagrams the final day of our relationship. The wording is vague enough for relatability, not to mention discretion, but I remember too well exactly the moments she means.

“The day of, I want you,” she sings. “High roads, see us through.”

She isn’t speaking idiomatically. She means the tour we intended to take. The next step in our musical-romantic relationship, the one she hoped would see us through together.

I urge the melody forward. It’s like we’re arguing. Like I’m seizing the chance to say in chords everything I couldn’t when we left each other’s lives. It was Nashville or nothing? I wasn’t the man you loved if I wouldn’t play music with you?

No wonder you wrote me into song when you could’ve called me, even once, over the past decade.

Of course, you didn’t.

The hurt is only worthwhile if it’s a hit, right?

I get the strangest feeling Riley hears me. Sitting next to me, she presses on, opening her heart in the middle of the second verse. I feel her every movement, her slight sway with every word she sings, the rise and fall of her chest with her every inhalation. The impossible closeness of the skin of her arm right next to mine. Invitation and condemnation.

Her gorgeous mouth, shaping the lyrics I can’t figure out how not to hate.

“You look like you’re hoping I’ll be fine,” she sings. “I know I’m helpless even when I try.”

I know what’s coming. My heart pounds, the waver in my fingers finding its vibrating way into the melody. When I return to the verse-opening notes, Riley will hit the hardest lines for me to hear. We know it isn’t true when you say you’ll see me soon.

She does this pain-stretched note on “see me soon” I can hardly stand to hear onstage. I’m not sure I can manage it now. With my hands still on the piano, I face her, my eyes locking on hers.

She breathes in.

I kiss her.

Everything stops. The sound of the piano ends sharply. The lyric I knew was coming is swallowed under my lips meeting hers.

Every sense hurtles forward in me with head-rush intensity. Her mouth under mine is still half forming its stolen syllables. Her scent, sweet like summer nights, is everywhere.

She kisses me back, and our music changes from melodies into the beating of our hearts, the blood whispering in our veins.

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