Who: Torrie Reed and Luc Flores. Where: The Bar. What: Two acquaintances run into one another and bond over some common ground. It's surprising how much they don't hate one another. When: 2/8/2020, 12:30 PM
Suppose you've gotta do what you gotta do We just weren't feeling how we wanted to You sit and try sometimes but you just can't figure out what went wrong Then out of nowhere somebody comes and hits you with a song
Music sheets, a laptop, and a glass of Coke weren’t much when you thought about it, but Torrie made it cover the space of the tabletop in the corner of The Bar. Furthest from the drunks that were bellied up to the bar, because she didn’t need to try and work while she ignored their commotion. To be fair, she could have taken over the living room and told Lita to deal with it, but sometimes it was nice to get out.
She’d had a rough day with a couple music students. Nothing serious, but the same old perfectionism bullshit that she’d seen in so many music students when she was still a kid, and she just didn’t have a lot of patience for that kind of impatience. Not when she was anxiously going through each step of opening her music venue, on top of the responsibilities her job possessed.
Actually, she was behind with her teaching details, which was why she was camped out. Balancing things was fucking complicated, and she’d let lesson plans drop to the bottom of her priority list for long enough that it was going to be a few hours worth of work to get them in good shape again. She had worked ahead, thank god, so she wasn’t in too much trouble, but she didn’t like the idea that a few more weeks and it would be scrambling to make sure she had her shit together for her students.
The way she’d been humming to herself for the last half hour didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else in The Bar, and it was keeping her calm. She almost wished that she could take a break from work responsibilities to make an attempt at creating a song around the tune.
Luc sat at the booth behind Torrie, their backs pressed against different sides of the same slab of cushioned, leather-upholstered wood. He’d meant to start scheduling out the LBJ district’s private security rounds on his lunch break away from the Capitol but as soon as he heard the humming from the table next to him, he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. It was a hell of an earworm; it buried its way into his mind and drove out all his well-intentioned thoughts about patrols, training, and shift start times. Except, there was something missing in the melody. Luc’s fingers itched for his guitar as his feet tapped along to the beat, trying to find out what was off in the bridge and frame a coda to bring the whole piece together. He was all too aware that he’d squandered a good thirty minutes of his well-earned lunch hour listening to the stranger next to him create something catchy, flawed and sort of beautiful. He sighed; there was no getting his LBJ cabinet work done now. The patrol schedules could wait. He tidied up his papers, placed them in a folder, and stuck them under his arm.
“It needs a harmony,” Luc said, calling over the top of the booth to the other side, earning an unseen eye-roll from Torrie herself. He stood, smoothing out the wrinkles in the slim-fitting suit he wore as his standard bodyguard uniform, and sidled over to the next table. His eyes lit up when he recognized the patron.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said with a grin. Luc’s mind traveled back to Halloween, where he’d met the woman sitting before him now. Somehow, despite not knowing one another, they’d attended the same party wearing corresponding couple’s costumes. He hadn’t managed to take her home but he remembered the conversation they had vividly and with much fondness.
“Hello, cara mia,” Luc said; a callback to their memorable turn as Gomez and Morticia Addams. “Torrie, right?”
Luc wasn’t always great with names but there had been something about this girl that had stuck with him long after the Halloween party had ended.
Most of Torrie’s frustration with the unsolicited musical advice ebbed away once she realized who the advice giver had been. It had been months, but Luc was a hard man to forget. And he’d been one of only a few good conversations she’d had on Halloween.
“Yeah, Torrie,” she confirmed. “Nice suit.” She smirked at him and shuffled some papers around. “Are you James Bond today?” Having a conversation was definitely going to cut into her productivity, but hell, she needed the break. Every plan was starting to look identical and they were supposed to be individualized for each student. It wasn’t required by the school, but fuck, she wasn’t going to try the same thing with everyone and hope it stuck for a few of them. Her music students all learned at different speeds.
“Or wait, let me guess, a Beatle.”
Luc adjusted the lapels of his jacket and grinned, pleased by her comparisons.
“A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B,” he replied with an amiable shrug. The personal security gig wasn’t something he advertised, especially to relative strangers, and Luc figured the ambiguity would fly for the time being. Standing there, it was hard not to take notice of the paperwork stacked on Torrie’s table; Luc recognized the staves, treble clefs, flat signs and fermatas. Even though Luc’s interest in music was mostly a hobby, it seemed he had stumbled across an authority.
“Didn’t know I was offering constructive criticism to a pro,” he said, touching one of the papers idly, reading over the notes and playing them in his mind.
“May I?” He jutted his chin toward the seat opposite Torrie. She nodded, and moved a few things out of the way.
Closing her laptop, she tapped her fingers against the table before she told Luc, “Most professionals know when they need constructive criticism, you know.” She bristled a little at being called a professional, but only because the description still didn’t feel like it fit her again, even if she was making her living teaching music.
“I mean, fuck, I spent most of my career getting some kind of it.” Every demo that was returned, the producers she had started working with just before the outbreak, all of them had had some kind of input. Half of it wasn’t even really about her music, but her look. “If you were some fucking hack I might’ve told you to fuck off, but you weren’t wrong, so.” Torrie gave him a smile, a little sharp at the edges, but not mean.
“I like to think of myself as an experienced dabbler,” Luc replied, returning Torrie’s razor-tinged smile with one of his own. Luc had been a natural musician as a kid; he could pick up an instrument and, given enough time, nail the basics and become fairly adept. He had no formal training to speak of but he could read music and feel out a melody. In terms of singing, strumming a guitar, and blowing through a harmonica every once and awhile, he was confident he wouldn’t embarrass himself in front of someone with obvious expertise like Torrie.
“Are you Paul or John?” she asked, half-serious.
“George,” Luc replied easily with a low chuckle. Torrie snorted softly. What passed as appreciation for choosing an option that hadn’t been listed. “I can carry a tune and my guitar work is on point so I tend to take the lead. Although I like to think I have the McCartney leading man looks and the Lennon-esque charm.”
Something told him that Torrie might call him on his somewhat overinflated sense of self, which was half the reason he had laid it on so thick. She seemed to be the kind of woman who called you out and kept you honest. Luc had never been able to abide anyone, man or woman, who would just lay down and accept people’s bullshit at face value. He liked to surround himself with the type of people that made him faster, smarter, and better, just by trying to keep with with them and even though he didn’t know her all that well, Torrie seemed like just that sort of girl.
“If you like to think that, it probably isn’t true,” Torrie retorted deadpan, her expression skeptical. “Well, maybe on the looks. Maybe,” she conceded, because she wasn’t actually in the business of tearing people down all of the time. Luc grinned; he could accept “maybe”.
“So, do you just teach?” He might not have formal training but, looking at the papers in front of her, he could put two and two together. “Or do you play as well?”
She had mentioned her “career” earlier in the conversation but, with music, that could mean almost anything.
“Both,” she told him. “Or I’d like it to be. I teach because Austin hasn’t really had a fucking need for musicians.” She shuffled a few papers. “But I’m trying to change that.” And so far nothing had blown up in her face, although she still hadn’t found anyone to actually perform at the venue, besides herself.
“Oh yeah?” Luc leaned forward, interested. Being a native of Austin since birth, he knew how great the city had been. Sure, he’d spent almost the entirety of his youth trying to leave it but that didn’t mean he wasn’t invested in seeing it brought back to some of its former glory. Injecting some much needed arts and culture back to Austin and Luc was an exciting prospect and Luc was all for it.
“I was a musician before the outbreak.” And for the first time in a long time it seemed like she was getting closer to being able to say that again.
“You’re still a musician,” Luc replied in a tone that suggested it was obvious.
“There’s plenty of empty venues around the city, so I applied to reopen one.” More pride crept in. It was one thing to talk to Lita about it, or Kevin, or Mina, but it felt very different to tell a near stranger.
“That is super ambitious,” Luc said, clearly impressed. “Now that people’s, you know, basic human needs are being met, I think it’s high time we inject a little culture into the proceedings. I’d love to see a new concert venue or club open it’s doors and I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels that way.” He paused, appraised Torrie for a moment, and continued.
“We should get together and jam sometime.”
She’d been midway through constructing a snarky retort, but it crumbled quickly, erased by a new suggestion. “Seriously?” Torrie covered up the surge of her excitement with skepticism. Luc didn’t strike her as someone without follow through, but for some stupid reason she didn’t want to seem overeager. “You have a guitar?” He’d mentioned that was his instrument of choice.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Might need a tune up from a professional but it gets the job done.” Luc couldn't remember the last time he had played with someone. Maybe back when he lived at the LBJ? God, that seemed like an eternity ago. He hadn’t realized it was something that he had missed but now that the prospect had been dangling in front of his nose, Luc was raring to act on it. He looked to Torrie’s array of teaching supplies strewn about the table until he located a spare piece of paper and a pen. He scribbled on the sheet.
“This is my number,” he said, pushing the paper across the table and underneath Torrie’s fingertips. “Call me.” It took all of Luc’s willpower not to tell her to call him when she was in the mood to make some beautiful music; he must really be aching to play. That or he was growing up. Probably the former. He glanced at his watch.
“Time to head back to work,” he said, standing. “The other Beatles will be wondering what happened to me.” Torrie wasn’t exactly easy to read; Luc wondered if she would actually call.
“I’m glad we ran into each other again,” he said, and he meant it. “Hopefully we’ll do it again sooner rather than later.”
“Well, I have your number now,” she responded, fighting a smirk. “The rest of the guys might not be real fucking happy with me if I steal you away, though, if you’re actually any fucking good.” That more than anything else made it almost guaranteed that she would call. She only realized after she’d said it that she hoped he was a good musician and not just blowing smoke. She missed that, and it wasn’t like any of her Denver friends would make their way down to Austin.
She didn’t know if any of them were even still alive.
“I’ll talk to you later, Luc,” she told him, adding a small, dismissive wave before she flipped her laptop open again and went back to work.