And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 51: Short Tops And Shorter Tempers

a/n! Finally—a new chapter! Note—Danny and Cora have dated in the past, if you want a refresher you can check out chapters 20 and 28. With all my love I give you this chapter!

"Morning, love." I opened my eyes to Danny's smile, his brown hair falling in waves around him, the white sheets of a hotel bed surrounding him. He was a mixture of brown and blue in a sea of white. I smiled at him sleepily, stretching slowly and letting the sheets fall off of me to reveal my top still on. Danny's jeans were off. My eyes widened when I saw his bare legs and he said quickly, "Sorry, darling, it got uncomfortable trying to sleep in jeans."

    I looked down at my skirt still on. Everything seemed to be in place. I suddenly moved my head and felt a pain. "Shit."

    "Hangover," Danny explained. "Bloody nasty one. I've got one too," he said and his mouth stretched into an amused smile, backlit by the morning sun. I slowly moved towards him and curled against him before we decided we had to go before anyone got worried.

    He drove slowly, his eyes slightly bloodshot, me staring in concentration at the road even though I wasn't driving, feeling oddly like George and Pattie when they drove home on LSD. I kissed him goodbye—"Love you lots"—and crawled through my front door, miraculously managing not to wake mum up.

***

    Michael had stopped showing up. I mentioned this to no one, seeing as every time I had brought him up I was in a drunk condition, or someone else was. I didn't miss him. Maybe it was his reminder that this whole thing could be a dream as well as a time machine gone wrong, or maybe it was his eye-blinding neon pink and blue jacket, but I didn't wish for a return visit from the 1980s.

    Instead, I focused on other things. John and I usually liked to go out, just the two of us and big ready-to-explore Hamburg, but around a week into arriving Paul organized a trip for all of us to go out to Soho to buy a whole outfit: cowboy boots, jeans, and black leather jackets and pants. "The lilac jackets are old threads. We'll go to Spielbudenplatz 9—and then a tailor's shop at Thadenstrasse 6. I hear that these are the latest fashions," I heard as I walked inside their door on my way back from the toilets, passing a plate full of ten cent pieces—pfennigs—and rolling the silver about in my hands before letting the coins drip like a waterfall from my fingers into the plate below. I had played a show the night before and didn't bother going home; it was too late, so I had crawled into bed with John and shut my eyes and had woken up at the Top Ten. I wondered if I was going to be spending less and less time at the pastry shop and more and more time at the Top Ten.

    "Thanks, Mimi," John retorted at Paul from his bunk bed. I walked over to him and sat next to him, waiting for his arm to curl around my waist, feeling his familiar heat.

    "You want your own pair of pants, go out and buy it yourself," Paul retorted.

    "Lay off, Macca, was only kidding around," John took his statement and deflected it, running his hand casually down my side. "Where are the birds anyways?"

    "On their way," I told him. Anna was bringing Emilia to shop with us; they would act as our tour guide for the day. "Anna said she would be here at around eleven."

    "Bloody early hour," John remarked. "Not usually up till twelve." He put a bite of bread and jam into his mouth. "Look at my breakfast. Saving all the quid for the fashions, so I can look like Stu." John snickered and pulled out a photograph: Klaus, Stu, and Astrid all standing together, Astrid looking like a fashion icon as usual, Klaus with a strange ruffled thing around his neck which made him look like Williams Shakespeare, and Stu, gazing defiantly into the camera, wearing a sort of black crop top which tied in the front. You could tell he was so comfortable here, among his artist friends, his James Dean sunglasses absent like in the usual Beatles photos on stage in the Kaiserkeller or the Indra, his smoke screen sunglasses missing.