Teach me everything. My whole life, I’ve been a good girl. I follow rules like nobody’s business. I obey guidelines like I was born to it. Show me a line, and I’ll toe it.
I’m even a twenty-two-year-old virgin. Good is my middle name.
And then, I break one tiny little rule. Miniscule. Inconsequential.
Next thing I know, I’m trapped with an incredibly handsome stranger. He’s got eyes like cut emeralds, biceps that makes my head spin, and a smile that has me rethinking all my life choices.
We escape a bar bathroom together. We go on an impromptu date. We share the hottest kiss I’ve ever had, one that leaves me panting for more. We promise to see each other again.
Turns out, we see each other the next morning.
In my calculus class.
Which he’s teaching.
My handsome, sexy date is Professor Loveless, and we’ll be seeing each other plenty. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday all semester.
There’s no choice but to call it off. We both have too much at stake: I could lose my scholarship, and he could lose his entire career.
But I can’t call off the way I feel. I can’t call off the way he looks when he rolls up his sleeves and explains imaginary numbers. I can’t call off the heated glances, or the way our hands touch when I hand in my homework, or the memory of his body pressing against mine that night.
I’m a virgin.
He’s my professor.
And if we give in, it could cost us both everything.
Levi Loveless is coming to your kindles THURSDAY! I’m SO excited to finally share him with you guys, in all his bearded, quiet, slightly odd glory.
Anyway, you don’t want me to talk at you, you want the first three chapters. Here they are (unedited, so yeah, there are typos).
Love,
Roxie
P.S. I would completely remiss if I didn’t mention that the first two Loveless brothers are still free in Kindle Unlimited! They’re all complete standalones, so you can start wherever you like.
There’s a crash behind me, and I jump, duck, and look behind me without stopping.
The forest is pristine, still, and silent. There’s no sign of whatever made that noise. Bears? Mountain lions? A bear and a mountain lion doing battle for the honor of being the first to get at a tasty human snack, i.e. me?
I turn back around straight into a mouthful of twigs.
“Augh!” I shout, flailing my hands in front of myself.
“Almost there!” Silas calls over his shoulder, twenty feet ahead of me, utterly unfazed by the wildlife battle that’s clearly threatening our very lives.
“What was that?” I should, grabbing one sleeve of my t-shirt.
“Squirrel or something,” he calls as I push my feet to a jog again, rubbing my t-shirt sleeve on my tongue in an attempt to wipe the tree off. “Could be a black bear, I see ‘em in trees sometimes.”
“Oh,” I call, too out of breath and exhausted to say anything else, because now, in addition to watching every step I take on this narrow hillside trail, I need to watch the trees for bears.
I love nature. I love the outdoors. I love trees and rocks and dirt and… nature stuff. It’s just so peaceful and calm and nice and definitely not full of poison ivy and murderous animals with large teeth.
“We’re almost there!” Silas shouts. “Pick it up, Bug.”
He stops in the middle of the trail, jogging in place, and glances over his shoulder at me as I slog up to him, careful not to trip over rocks or tree roots.
I’m sweaty. I’m sticky. Dirt is plastered to my lower legs from this trail run, and I’m fairly sure there’s tree in my hair. I don’t need to look in a mirror to know that I’m currently fire-engine red, my SPF 50,000 sunscreen dripping down my face and neck in long white streaks.
Okay, fine. I don’t actually love nature yet, but I’m trying my hardest, and that’s why I let my dumb older brother talk me into going on this trail run with him. Because I am not only the sort of person who enjoys going outside and being on trails, I enjoy running on them.
Really. I do. For real. This is great and I’m having a great time.
“Race you?” Silas says, grinning and jogging in place as I finally get closer.
He’s not bright red or streaked with sunscreen. He’s sweaty, sure — it’s eighty degrees, even in the late afternoon, and at least 90% humidity — but he looks like a normal human right now. I guess he got the good workout genes.
“I’ll kill you,” I gasp under my breath, and Silas just laughs. Then he starts running again.
I can tell he’s going slow for me, and I try to be grateful that he’s not just sprinting off and leaving me in the middle of the forest, because even though I’ve declared myself a nature-loving person who loves nature, I’m not quite ready to get that up close and personal with it.
Up until recently, I’ve been a solid run-on-a-treadmill-and-watch-CSI kind of person.
“Watch out!” Silas calls back, still running ahead of me.
“Why?” I pant, my head swiveling side-to-side for the danger. “What’s — AIEEEE!”
I leap backward mid-step, flailing my arms and going off-balance. My foot hits a root and half a second later my ass is on the ground and I’ve tumbled into the trailside foliage.
Across the trail, the tail of the enormous black snake slides into the dense greenery and disappears.
“June!” Silas shouts, already sprinting back to me. “You okay?”
He offers me his hand, and I take it, lifted instantly to my feet. I brush dirt off my butt and step into the middle of the trail, nervously inspecting the spot where I landed.
I just want to make sure there are no more snakes, because those sneaky bastards could be hiding literally almost anywhere and I want no part of it.
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought you saw it.”
I shake my head, still gasping for air, one hand to my chest. My heart is thumping like a two-year-old banging on pots and pans, wild and arhythmic.
“They’re specifically designed to match the dirt, Silas,” I manage to pant. “No I didn’t see it, they’re practically invisible —”
“We’ve got another hundred yards before the parking lot,” he says.
“—they look like sticks or logs and then it turns out they’re alive—”
Silas pats my arm mock-comfortingly.
“C’mon,” he says, then turns around and starts running again.
I follow him, because I’ve got no real choice.
“—they move wrong,” I call. “Things shouldn’t move that way. It’s not right.”
“Sorry,” he calls back, clearly not sorry.
I continue cataloging what’s wrong with snakes — poison teeth, swallow things whole, too smooth — but for once Silas wasn’t lying to me, and after about thirty seconds we’re back at the parking lot.
“—and they strangle their prey,” I’m saying as we step out of the forest and into the small gravel parking area at the Raccoon Hollow trailhead, where I suppress the urge to hug my car. “That’s fucked up, Silas. Any self-respecting animal would just bite their prey to death, but no. Snakes had to get weird about it.”
Silas is resting both his hands on top of his head, taking long, deep breaths.
“Not most snakes,” he says. “Most snakes just swallow their prey whole.”
“Which is also horrible,” I point out.
“Did you see that news article about a snake that swallowed —”
“No,” I say, holding out both hands and waving them. “No no no, no, no. I do not want to hear about this and you know that.”
Silas gives me his best what, innocent old me? grin, which means that he knows he’s getting to me and he’s pleased with himself about it.
“I forgot how much you hated snakes,” he says, semi-apologetically as we walk to our cars. “I didn’t realize that seeing a few inches of one as it departed would bother you so much.”
“I almost stepped on it,” I say, leaning against my bumper. “And plenty of people hate snakes. You know who hates snakes? Indiana Jones, and he punched a whole bunch of Nazis, so I’m in perfectly good company here.”
Silas opens his car, ignoring my snake rant, and pulls two big water bottles out, tossing me one. I catch it. It’s still ice-cold.
We chug water, both leaning against our cars, facing each other in silence, a nice breeze sifting through the trees, the sun on its way down, this side of the mountain in shadow.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes for a moment, and feel the cool air against my sweaty, sweaty skin.
It’s actually pretty nice. See? I love nature.
“I think it’s gonna storm,” Silas says, and I open my eyes again.
Just barely peeking over the leafy green ridge of the mountains behind us is a line of dark gray storm clouds, looking ominous.
“Looks like it,” I agree.
It’s late summer in the South, and that means thunderstorms. This week it’s been pretty much every day: it’ll be sunny until late afternoon, then storm like hell, then clear up right before nightfall. I kind of like it, to be honest, though I’m also glad that I’ll be safely in my car before it starts raining.
“You heading back to town?” he asks.
“Eventually,” I say, pulling my phone out the running armband I had it in and turning it on. It’s close to six p.m., and I have no service.
I sigh.
“Does the ranger station down there still have wifi you can access from the parking lot?” I ask, opening my phone and hoping that while we were running, we ran through a patch of reception long enough to get email.
We didn’t.
“The ranger station has wifi?” Silas asks.
“Useless,” I tease him.
“I saved you from a snake. You’re welcome.”
“You’re the reason I nearly got killed by one in the first place,” I counter, shutting my phone off and drinking more water.
“I don’t think a king snake has ever killed a person before,” he says, grinning his I’m-bugging-my-little-sister-and-I-know-it grin. “They’re totally harmless.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” I point out.
“You need wifi for a gig?” he asks, pulling his keys out of his pocket and tossing them in the air
“Yeah, I just want to make sure my editor doesn’t need anything before she leaves for the day, and it’s forty-five minutes back home,” I say, and Silas just nods.
I don’t mention that “my editor” is actually just Madison, a twenty-two-year-old who’s in charge of the OMG section of hypefeed.com, and my gig is actually a list titled Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl.
It paid. It was something to do, and frankly, at this point in my unemployment I’ll take just about any journalism-adjacent freelance work I can find, hurling or no.
“Cool,” he says, and opens his car door again, tossing the now-empty water bottle onto his passenger seat. “Same time again tomorrow?”
I don’t respond immediately.
“Call it aversion therapy,” he says.
“I’m not averse to nature,” I protest, still leaning against my car. “I’m just not used to it.”
“We’ll have you going on week-long backpacking trips in no time,” he says. “You’re gonna poop in the woods like a champ. Face down a black bear with nothing but a pocket knife and your wits.”
“Well, now I’m averse to it,” I say, and Silas just laughs.
Then he rubs his hand on my head, pulling my baseball cap askew.
“Dammit,” I mutter.
“See you tomorrow, Bug,” he says, and gets into his car. I pull my car key out of the tiny pocket I stashed it in and follow suit, dropping into my driver’s seat like a ton of bricks.
“I should’ve gotten really into wine or something,” I say out loud to myself, leaning my head back against the driver’s seat. “Next reinvention, wine. And cheese.”
Five minutes later, I’m driving the wrong direction along the Appalachian Parkway, listening to an episode of This American Life about [something extremely public radio-y], because I’m going to the ranger station in the hopes that their parking lot still gets enough wifi signal from inside the building for me to check my email.
I don’t think Madison, the twenty-two-year-old who runs the “OMG” section of hypefeed.com, needs me to check in with her. I’m pretty sure that if she wants changes made to Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl, she’ll just make them.
But I need to check in. I can’t help it. I like doing things correctly, so if something needs tweaking in my celebrity dogs article, I want to know.
I pull into the parking lot of the ranger station. The station is closed, because it’s a little past six in the evening, but when I was visting my family a couple years ago and they took me hiking way out here, the wifi worked all night long. That time I was also checking for emails from my editor, only then it actually mattered because I’d just turned in a piece about vandalism and police brutality in Raleigh.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Anyway, there’s still free wifi in the parking lot.
It’s not fast, but it’s fast enough to check my email, and sure enough, there’s one from Madison.
It says: Cool, thanks.
I guess she doesn’t have any notes for me, then, and I should probably leave this parking lot and make the drive back to my parents’ house, where I’m living while unemployed, but instead I go through some emails, learning that several positions I’ve applied for have been filled.
Cool. Great. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m closing in on a hundred rejections. I don’t even know how many I’ve just never gotten a response from. It’s not the best feeling.
I check Twitter to distract myself from my problems. I check Instagram. Facebook. Reddit.
Suddenly, rain smacks against my windshield in big, fat drops, and I look up. I’ve somehow been looking at nonsense on my phone for almost twenty minutes, and the sky’s so dark it looks like twilight.
Oops.
I twist the key, turn the radio back on, and pull out of the ranger station parking lot, heading back the way I came on the parkway, toward town, hoping that I can beat the storm and get home before it gets really bad.
Ten minutes later, it’s clear that I miscalculated and am driving directly into the storm, something I probably should have checked first.
It’s raining so hard that I feel like I’m under a waterfall, my wipers completely ineffective against the onslaught.
Every thirty seconds the sky strobes with lightning, the thunder instant and deafening, so loud and close it vibrates my car. The thick forest on either side of the road is waving and dancing in the wind, enormous trees bending and swaying so much they look like they might break.
“Shit,” I whisper to myself, the steering wheel in a death grip, both palms sweating. Every muscle in my body is rigid, and I’m driving so slowly that it doesn’t even register on my speedometer. I’d stop, but there’s nowhere to pull over, and if I keep going maybe there will be soon.
I have to be almost back to the trailhead, right?
Lightning strikes again, so close I swear I can feel the crackle in the air, and I tense even harder, sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat. Thunder shakes the earth, the road, my car, or maybe that’s me shaking.
“What Juan didn’t expect,” Ira Glass is saying, “was that the girl he’d spent all those months—”
I smack the radio button, and his voice shuts off because I can’t deal with it right now. I take deep breath after deep breath, wishing that I’d stayed in the parking lot or just gone home after the run, because Cool, thanks is incredibly not worth getting struck by lightning over.
You won’t get struck by lightning, I remind myself. All these trees are ways taller than you, and hardly anyone—
There’s another flash and the world goes pink-white, buzzing, pulsing, and for a split second I think I got hit but as the thunder rattles through everything, chattering my teeth, I slam on the brakes and realize that I can do that, and at the exact same time I realize that it was the enormous tree twenty feet away, the crack so loud that it sounds like it’s rending the heavens.
I watch, motionless, as it falls.
“No,” I whisper out loud, powerless. “No, please, come on…”
The tree falls right across the road, ten feet in front of my car..
As it falls the slow-motion scene is illuminated by another crack of lightning, capturing the whole scene mid-action, so bright that I’m temporarily blind when I hear the cracking thump of the tree hitting the ground, something long and black draping itself over my windshield.
It’s the snake, I think wildly, shaking, suddenly freezing. It’s the snake I nearly stepped on, it’s found me and now it’s going to—
It’s the power lines. The tree must have fallen into them, and now they’re draped across my car, probably still live.
As if to confirm it, something sparks in the twilight in front of me, the pinprick of light barely visible through the driving rain. Lightning flashes. Thunder booms. I take a deep breath. I try to make my hands stop shaking. I turn the car off.
And then I stare out the windshield at the downed power lines and the fallen tree and try to remember what, exactly, you’re supposed to do in this situation.
I almost got struck by lightning and then that tree nearly fell on me oh my God if I’d been ten feet further down the road I’d be a pancake —
I take another deep breath, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, and make myself stop thinking about things that almost happened so I can focus on the situation at hand.
There’s no service. I can’t Google it. All I can do is try to remember the electrical safety talk we got in school when I was in third grade.
Another lightning crack, the sky pink-white, thunder that sounds like the world being torn apart. Everything vibrates. In the darkness after, the only thing I can see is the sparking power lines on the road ahead of me.
I let out a shaky breath and think: there’s nothing I can do. More specifically, I don’t think I’m supposed to do anything.
I don’t think I’m supposed to get out of the car. I don’t think I’m supposed to drive anywhere, and even if I can, the hell with driving right now.
I can’t call 911, so I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to wait until someone else comes along, and then eventually I’m going to be rescued and I’m going to go home and shower and put on my pajamas and I’m going to make hot chocolate and hell yes I’m going to doctor it with rum.
So I sit. And I wait. I shut my eyes against the lightning and breathe through the thunder and after a little while, I stop shaking.
After a little while longer, the storm starts to moves off. The lightning and thunder grow further apart, the flashes more and more infrequent, the trees on the road not swaying as violently. It could be minutes. It could be hours. I lose track completely.
And yet, no one comes down the road. Not a single solitary soul, and the wires are still right there on my car, sparking away, soaking wet exactly like powerlines shouldn’t be.
I wonder if I could just drive away. I wonder if I should somehow leap from the car, since I’m wearing rubber-soled tennis shoes. I wonder if maybe I can put my car into neutral and just sort of roll back down this hill, but as I’m wondering that last thing, a truck pulls up behind me.
“Thank you,” I whisper out loud to no one. I take a deep breath and look at it in my rear view mirror, a green truck with something written across the front.
US FOREST SERVICE.
My heart beats a little bit faster, even as I remind myself that I’m literally in the middle of a national forest, that forest rangers are thick on the ground out here, that there’s a billion of them and the chances of this being one particular ranger are very, very slim.
The truck door opens.
A bearded man gets out.
Not this, I silently beg the universe. Not today. Please?
I unbuckle and turn around in the driver’s seat, leaning through the gap between the front two seats so I can see him better, but before I can be really, truly, 100% sure, he opens the rear door of the truck and leans in.
This lasts for several minutes, me practically in the back seat of my car, the bearded forest ranger rummaging through his back seat, stomping around and doing something that I can’t quite see.
Finally, he closes the door. He’s now wearing thigh-high rubber boots over his work pants and shoulder-length thick rubber gloves over a white undershirt, his unruly hair knotted at the back of his head.
It’s him.
It’s definitely, one hundred percent, not-a-smidge-of-doubt-in-my-mind him.
The shirt is soaked through from the rain, clinging to every muscle and ripple on his tall, broad frame. My mouth goes dry and adrenaline shoots through my veins, because he looks very good right now and I look very not-good, oh, and also, I’m trapped inside a car during a rainstorm and it’s not my favorite way to spend an afternoon.
Levi Loveless, Silas’s best friend and my nearly-lifelong crush, has come to rescue me.
I know I shouldn’t complain about being rescued, but I’d much rather run into him while, I don’t know, effortlessly doing an impressive yoga pose while reciting Ralph Waldo Emerson and being presented with a Pulitzer prize, my hair shiny and bouncy and my face not streaked with sunscreen and sweat.
Levi stops about six feet from my window. He stands there, assessing the situation. It’s still raining. He’s still getting wet. I’m still half goggling at the free wet t-shirt show I’m getting and half trying not to perv on this nice man who is, presumably, about to get me out of this car.
So I wave.
He waves back.
Cool, I think to myself. What a super cool situation I’m in right now.
Levi walks around the back of my car. I swivel my head as I watch him, because what else am I going to do?
“Can you hear me?” he calls from the other side of the car.
“Yes!” I call out, scrambling over the center console and into the passenger seat.
“Open the door.”
I glance down at the door handle, nervous again. It’s plastic, which should be fine, right?
I grit my teeth and pull it, pushing the door open as fast and hard as I can. Instantly I get a face full of rain, but I don’t die of electrocution.
“Hi,” I tell Levi, pointlessly wiping water out of my face.
“Hello,” he says, still standing about five feet away, looking incredibly unperturbed by all the weather happening around him.
Still in the wet t-shirt, which is still clinging to his shoulders and biceps and the dark line of chest hair and happy trail and okay, okay, that’s enough.
“How are you?” I ask, because he makes me nervous and I need to say something.
“I’m well,” he says, raising one eyebrow. “And yourself?”
I wipe water from my face again and look quickly around my car.
“I’ve been better,” I tell him honestly.
Levi just nods.
“The wires are live and touching the metal frame of your car,” he says, getting back to the point, nodding at the thick black lines draped across the hood of my car. “Which makes you getting out a little bit tricky.”
“I jump, right?” I ask, because I’m pretty sure I remember that from third grade, and I’m eager to be part of the solution, not just part of the problem.
I can accept that everyone needs to be rescued sometimes, but I’m not terribly excited to play the part of the hapless princess.
“I think it’s better if I lift you,” he says, taking a step closer. “More control.”
Oh, come on, I think, but I take a deep breath, suck up my pride, and nod.
“Okay,” I say.
“Kneel on the seat and face me,” he says. “I’ll pick you up in a fireman’s carry.”
My stomach knots, but I nod.
“Be sure to maintain control of your limbs,” he goes on, taking another step closer. “Don’t touch the frame.”
I get into position and Levi steps in, towering above me, his boots squeaking quietly even through the din of the rain, and I’m eye-level with his belly button and doing my absolute best not to notice that his shirt is clinging to the happy trail extending downwards.
He bends until we’re eye-to-eye, his serious, thoughtful face inches from mine, his deep, golden-brown eyes searching my face like there’s some sort of answer there.
Thank God for the rain so he can’t hear the way my pulse is drumming against my skin.
“All right,” he says, then crouches. He puts his shoulder to my midsection, pulls me from the car, and lifts while I maintain strict control of my limbs.
We clear the car. His boots squeak as he steps away, into the grass at the side of the road, and for several seconds I’m ass-up and slung over Levi’s shoulder like I’m a sack of dirt or concrete or grain or whatever it is that sexy lumberjack types like to lift.
Then he puts me down, one thickly-gloved hand on my shoulder, rain still pouring down, and he looks at me. He looks at me for a long moment, checks me over like he’s inspecting me for cracks.
“You okay?” he finally says.
I swallow, then nod. My heart’s still tapdancing but I clench my fingers and toes and look down at myself.
I’m soaking wet and I’m pretty embarrassed and I’m definitely wearing too-short running shorts and a bright purple sports bra that’s mostly visible through my now-soaked light blue tank top, and I could really, really use a shower, but I’m fine.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”
“Good,” he says quietly, and takes my elbow in his gloved hand. “Wait in the truck while I put out the flares. It’s at least dry in there.”
Chapter Two
June
He refuses my offer to help put out the flares. He refuses it firmly but gently, guiding me into the cab of his truck while I go on about how I could help, spreading an old-but-clean towel on the seat and then offering me a hand as I climb into the cab.
I admit that I don’t mind being dry and safe.
I also admit that I don’t hate the continuation of the Levi Loveless Wet T-Shirt Extravaganza, even though I feel guilty that he’s all alone in the rain while I could be helping.
I grab another dry towel from the back of the cab, where there are plenty, and watch Levi circle my car with the roadside flares. He does it the way he seems to do everything: methodically, purposefully, as though this is all part of some plan.
He does it this way despite the driving rain, despite the lightning and thunder that are still all around us. I still jump every time the sky lights up and boom sounds like it’ll split the earth in half, but Levi is completely unperturbed.
There are worse things to watch. He’s still got the gloves and boots on, which aren’t exactly what Chippendales fantasies are made of, but the rest?
Yes. Hi. Hello, wet t-shirt and big muscles and broad shoulders.
My younger, hopelessly-and-secretly-crushing-on-Levi-Loveless self is feeling very vindicated right now. She gets even more vindication as he walks to the edge of the forest, ducks inside, then comes out holding up a huge, long tree branch.
His body tenses. His muscles knot. I use a towel to wipe the steam from the inside of the windshield. He reaches out with the branch and nudges the passenger door of my car closed, then drops it back on the ground.
I don’t know when, exactly, I first started crushing on Levi Loveless. He was always hanging around with Silas, so it’s hard to pinpoint.
I just know that one day, my attitude toward Levi was he’s pretty cool and sometime later it was I think I want Levi to kiss me.
I was far from alone in my Loveless crush. If you were a lady of a certain age in Sprucevale, it was pretty much a rite of passage to have a crush on a Loveless brother.
There were five of them, and even as teenagers Lord in heaven were they good looking.
The girls my age were split between Eli, the second oldest, and Daniel, the middle of five. Eli was competitive, smart, and a total wiseass, but mostly nice. Daniel — who was my year — was the hell raiser, always in trouble, down at the Sherriff’s station with some regularity.
He’s got a daughter and a fiancée now. Apparently he’s straightened his act out, because last time I saw him, he gave me the stinkeye for saying damn in front of his kid.
Seth and Caleb were a few years younger, but everyone’s little sister had a crush on one of them. Seth was the second-youngest, good at baseball and so charming he should have had a warning sign. Caleb was three years younger than me, and despite his rugged, free-spirit vibe, he was already taking college-level math classes and the senior girls were lining up for homework help.
Levi was the oldest. The same age as Silas, three years ahead of me, a senior when I was a freshman.
He was the odd one out, because no one but me had a crush on Levi.
To this day, I don’t understand why. In a batch of five abnormally good-looking brothers, he’s the hottest — in my opinion, anyway, an opinion which clearly has not changed.
Levi was nice to little sisters. He rescued baby birds who fell from nests. He chopped wood for grandmothers, a moment that may or may not have contributed to my very first (and, in retrospect, very tame) sexual fantasy.
But then again, Levi was… weird.
In a school that emptied out the first day of deer hunting season every year, he was a vegetarian. He carried a book everywhere he went, and it wasn’t unusual to see him reading a paperback as he walked through the hallways from class to class. There was a solid six months where he wore a corduroy blazer over a t-shirt to school every single day, and I never did find out why.
I have no clue what he and my brother Silas — football star, middling student, obnoxious Big Man On Campus type — saw in each other, but they’ve been thicker than thieves since they were kids, and adulthood hasn’t changed that.
Outside the truck, Levi surveys his work, standing perfectly still in the driving rain, his shirt sticking to him like a second skin. I’m tempted to take a picture, but I know that would be straight-up creepy so I commit it to memory instead.
Then he nods to himself and walks around to the back of the truck, takes off the gloves and boots, flops them into the bed, and opens the driver’s side door.
The water’s just dripping from him: his nose, his beard, his eyebrows, even his hair, knotted behind his head. I have ten thousand dirty thoughts.
“Wait!” I say, and dive between the seats.
Levi says nothing, just waits, still in the rain. I grab two more towels and spread them on the driver’s seat. Lightning flashes, a couple miles away now.
“There,” I say, and he gives me an amused look as he climbs into the cab and finally closes the door after himself. I hand him another towel.
“Thanks,” he says, and rubs it over his head.
“I heard this news story about this guy who was a total workout fiend and got a ton of sweat on the driver’s seat of his car,” I say, apologetically. “And he started having all these breathing problems, and it took his doctor a full year to figure out that it was from the mold growing on his sweaty, damp car seat.”
“He didn’t notice the smell?” Levi asks, pulling a band from his knotted hair, letting it flop wetly to his shoulders.
“I guess not,” I say, trying to remember the details of the story. “I think it was in Russia.”
“Russians can’t smell?”
“Too cold, I guess?” I say. I already feel like I’m in over my head here, the familiar nervous buzz starting just behind my sternum.
You know, the way I used to feel any time Levi talked to me. Back when I was a teenager with a crush, not an adult woman with… not a crush.
“You’d think that would inhibit mold growth,” he says, rubbing the towel on his head one last time, then tossing it into the back of the cab.
“It was Russian mold,” I say. “I assume it thrives on cold, vodka, and stoicism.”
Levi puts the keys in the ignition, looking ahead, but I swear I see the hint of a smile flicker across his face.
“I’ve got two options for you,” he says, his hand on the gearshift, still looking through the windshield. “I can drive you down through Breakwater Gap and back up the west side of the range and into town, or I can take you to my place. I don’t mind Option A, but Option B gets us both indoors and dry a whole lot faster.”
Levi Loveless just offered to take me home with him. In the most platonic fashion possible, of course, but still.
“I like the dry option,” I say, pointing the heater vent at myself.
“I do too,” he says, and shifts his truck into reverse, turning to look over his shoulder. “And the dog will be thrilled.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, we turn from the two-lane Appalachian Parkway onto a narrow gravel lane, the truck bumping over the edge of the pavement.
“Silas made me go for a trail run,” I explain.
“Made you?” Levi echoes.
“Well, he talked me into it,” I admit as the gravel rumbles underneath, the deep forest closing around us. “And, you know, I figure that doing more outdoorsy stuff is kind of a ‘when in Rome’ situation, so why not? Nature is nice.”
I don’t mention reinvention. I don’t mention the shitty past few months I’ve had. I don’t mention the self-help books I’ve read, or the mantras that I’ll repeat for a few days before inevitably deciding it’s stupid, or the sudden, jolting realization I had one night that in order for things to change, I had to change.
Three months ago, I had a very bad day. I got laid off from my job at the Raleigh Sun-Dispatch, along with about thirty other people. I texted my boyfriend, crying. He didn’t text back.
When I got home to the apartment we shared, he dumped me.
He said he’d been thinking about it for a while. He said I used to be fun and cool and now I worked too much and only ever wanted to talk about boring things, like politics and global warming.
And he said he “just wasn’t into it” any more, after over a year together.
There was shouting (me) and there were tears (also me) and after a few hours, he went to stay with his parents.
That night, sitting miserably on the floor of the living room because I refused to sit on any of the furniture we’d shared, I had an epiphany: Brett sucked.
So did most of my previous boyfriends. Pretty much all of them, except maybe Peter, who I just wasn’t compatible with.
There was Tyler, who only ever wanted to hang out and play video games, and who ghosted me after seven months of dating.
There was Connor, who interrupted almost every sentence I said aloud and spent all our time together for at least three weeks trying to talk me into dressing as a cheerleader for Halloween.
There was Noah, with whom I once got into a shouting match about whether women should be legally required to change their names when they get married, and who cheated on me and then acted like I was crazy when I got mad about it.
Finally there was Brett, who acted like my career was a hobby, who’d mope for a full day if I talked to another man in front of him, and who broke up with me the same day I got laid off and then, a month later, held up a boom box outside my window at my parents’ house and asked me to marry him.
Unsurprisingly, he refused to take no for an answer. I ended up calling Silas, whose no is quite a bit more emphatic than mine.
Brett wasn’t an outlier.
Brett was part of a shitty pattern, and I had very, very bad taste in men. Enter reinvention, and trying new things, and being open to new experiences, and generally being different from the girl who’d gotten dumped and fired and who fell for men who “didn’t believe” in expiration dates.
Long story short, now I love the outdoors.
“I didn’t know Silas enjoyed trail running,” Levi admits. “Last time he went on about his fitness regimen I believe it was CrossFit.”
“Oh, God, the CrossFit,” I say, laughing. “He once swore up and down that he could bench me and then got mad when I wouldn’t let him try.”
“I can’t imagine why not,” Levi says.
We round a curve in the gravel road, and I catch a glimpse of a building through the trees.
“This is your house?” I ask as the truck navigates one final curve of the long gravel driveway.
“It is,” Levi confirms.
I lean forward, craning my neck for a better view, the building still partly obscured by trees. I’ve never been to Levi’s house, but I know two things about it: one, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and two, he built it himself.
Now we’re in the middle of nowhere, at least a mile down a long gravel driveway, and we’re coming up on what might be the most charming cabin I’ve ever seen in person.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
“Oh,” I say.
Levi just glances over at me.
“You built this yourself?” I ask, just as the cabin comes fully into view.
“Not entirely,” he says, the truck slowing as Levi reaches up, hits the button on his garage door opener. “I hired someone to do the plumbing and electrical work. Silas helped me hang drywall. Charlie helped with the kitchen cabinets. Caleb and I spent a weekend laying the floors.”
“Oh, so only mostly,” I say, still staring at the cabin.
It is, for lack of a better word, lovely. It’s made of wood so rich it practically glows, even in the near-dark. It’s got a wraparound porch and a small flowerbed in the front. There’s a walkway with slate paving stones leading to the front steps. It’s not big, but it’s also not small.
It’s an honest-to-God mountain man cabin, only instead of being ramshackle, crooked, and drafty-looking, it’s beautiful. It looks like it should be on the cover of Lumberjack Real Estate or Fancy Backwoods Vacation Homes or some other magazine I’ve just made up.
“Looks like the power’s out,” he says, shutting off the truck. “Not precisely a surprise, but I think we can make do.”
“Mhm,” I agree. “You built this? Mostly?”
“C’mon,” he says, climbing out of the cab.
I follow, shutting the truck door heavily behind me, eyes still on Levi’s house as I follow him in, a rucksack slung over his shoulder.
Something about this feels like learning a secret about Levi. It feels like he’s invited me to his secret hideout, deep in the woods, his fortress of solitude. I know that’s probably ridiculous, but it’s not like Levi’s known for throwing dinner parties.
I follow him onto the porch, still silent, and he puts his key into the lock, then turns to look at me.
“Watch out,” he says, and pushes the door open.
“For wha—”
I don’t finish my sentence, because I’m hit by a missile.
A furry missile, with a wet nose and a wetter tongue, who nearly knocks me off my feet and then prances in a circle around me as I kneel on the porch, too excited to hold still.
“The attack dog,” Levi says.
“Hey girl!” I say.
She licks my face, tail thumping, and I laugh.
“You remember me? Yes you do. Yes you DO.”
The dog makes a funny little growf noise, like she does when she gets excited.
“Traitor,” Levi says mildly, still standing next to the door as he leans inside and checks something. “Yup. Power’s out.”
I’m now sitting on the floor of his porch — it’s covered, so at least it’s pretty dry — and the dog is still circling me, snuffing and growf-ing and licking me, her paws prancing with glee.
“I may have given her some treats while Silas was dog sitting a few weeks ago,” I admit to Levi, dodging around the dog’s face to talk to him.
“Some?” he says, leaning against his doorjamb, one hand in a pocket. His shirt is now just damp, not soaking wet, though I’m somewhat consternated to report that the change hasn’t made him less distracting.
“It might have been more like several,” I admit.
It was not several. It was a lot. She’s a very good dog.
“No wonder she picked you,” he says. “All I do is feed her, give her a dry place to live, and supply her with toys.”
I glance quickly at Levi, ninety-five percent sure he’s joking. He can be hard to read, and even though I’ve known him for a long time, I can’t say I know him well.
But then the dog is right in front of my face again, paws on my knee, doggy smile filling my vision. I realize there’s a tag hanging from her collar.
“Oh good, you named her,” I say, taking it between my fingers.
LEVI LOVELESS
(276) 555-1212
“You named the dog Levi?” I ask, deadpan, as she licks my hand.
Human Levi sighs.
“I put my contact information on her in case she runs off again,” he explains. “Come on, girl.”
The dog looks at him, and he points her into the house. I stand and follow her.
“What’s her name?” I ask as I go through the door.
“I don’t know,” he says, the door shutting behind us.
It’s dim, but not dark. The pale gray of an afternoon thunderstorm, light coming in through the house’s many windows. It’s deeply quiet: nothing hums, nothing ticks, nothing creaks, no sounds except for our breathing and the quiet padding of the dog, walking across the room.
Near-total stillness.
“You should name her,” I say, breaking the silence. “You can’t just call her dog forever.”
Levi takes his boots off and puts them in a [rubber boot thing, it’s probably got a name], so I follow suit with my sneakers.
“I put more flyers up in Eli’s neighborhood last weekend,” he says.
“Did anyone answer them?”
“Not yet.”
The dog gives the back of my thigh one more lick — okay, thanks — then trots off through the living room and up a flight of stairs, disappearing into a room off a landing.
“They’re not going to,” I tell him. “Someone dumped her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t,” Levi says, walking into his living room and pulling his shirt off, over his head, and tossing it onto the back of a chair.
I avert my eyes, heart suddenly thumping.
“She’s house trained,” he says, opening a closet. “Aside from her paw, she was well-cared-for. She’s friendly. She’s clearly got owners, June, and I’ve got no right to take their dog and re-name her.”
He pulls a drying rack from the closet, opens it on the floor, and neatly arranges his shirt over it.
When he looks back at me, I pretend I was averting my eyes the whole time.
“She’ll remember her old name if they ever come back, which they won’t,” I say. “Just give her a name. You can’t call her dog forever.”
As if summoned by this, the dog comes barreling back down the stairs, a toy held in her mouth, and she trots over and presents it to me so I grab both ends of it and tug, grateful for something to do besides pretend I’m not ogling the shirtless man whose house I’m in.
She tugs back, tail wagging like mad. Levi went camping with some of his brothers a few weeks ago and Silas dog sat, so I got to hang out with her. Turns out she loves doggy tug-of-war.
He sighs, then pulls his hair back with his hands, ties it into a knot again.
“If I name her, I’ll just get attached, only for her rightful owners to return and take her away from me,” he says, walking away from me, across the living room. “Better to just call her dog until that happens. I’ll be right back.”
With that he heads up the stairs, across the landing, and into a room, leaving me and the dog alone in his quiet gray living room, still tugging on opposite ends of this toy.
“Maybe I should name you myself,” I tell her after a minute. She growfs and wags her tail. “Princess. Cupcake. Muffin. Fluffy. Tell me if any of these appeal to you.”
She just wags her tail and tugs on the toy. I tug back, trying to think of more names.
“Bella. Angel. Pumpkin. Queenie. Anything?”
Growf.
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re a Pumpkin,” I say, now sitting on the floor, still pulling back. “Maybe something more dignified, like Peaches, or Buttercup —”
“You cannot name my dog Buttercup,” Levi’s voice says from the loft above me.
“So she’s your dog when I’m trying to give her the dignity of a name to call her own,” I call back.
He pads down the stairs barefoot, wearing navy blue sweatpants and dark green t-shirt with a small Forest Service logo on one side of the chest.
Update: still hot.
“I’d hardly call Buttercup a dignified name.”
“She’s a dog.”
“Even beasts need dignity,” he says, padding off the stairs and through the living room.
“It was good enough for The Princess Bride,” I point out.
Levi stops in front of me. He’s got a small stack of clothes in one hand, and he’s holding them out toward me.
“That’s a movie?” he asks, eyes narrowed.
I narrow my eyes back at him in jest, though I have no idea whether Levi realizes it’s a joke or not.
He can be… inscrutable.
“Technically, it’s also a book,” I say. “About a woman. Who’s a princess. And also a bride, thus the catchy name.”
“Girl, are you a princess?” he asks the dog.
The dog sits, looking up at Levi, wagging her tail and grinning a doggy grin.
“No? What about a bride?”
Same reaction from the dog, and Levi looks back at me. I’m about sixty percent sure he’s smiling, but I can’t quite tell.
Levi makes me feel off-balance and helter skelter, like everything I say is either too much or not enough, like I’m an object of some scientific interest. I am, generally speaking, good with people. I’m good at gauging their reactions to me, good at understanding how to speak and act to make others comfortable, good at saying the appropriate thing for a situation.
It’s why I’m a good journalist. Or at least, it’s why I was a good journalist. I’m good at getting people to talk to me.
Not Levi.
Levi is a mystery wrapped in an enigma stuffed into a crate labeled puzzle, and I don’t think he likes me.
Let me clarify. I don’t think he dislikes me. I just get the feeling that, to Levi, the vast majority of people fall into the neutral feelings category, and he feels as strongly about us as he does rocks or dirt or the sky above.
“These are the smallest things I could find,” he says, and even though he’s holding out a stack of clothes it still takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about, because he throws me so off-balance.
“Thanks,” I say, pushing myself off the floor.
He offers me his other hand. I take it. It’s big and rough and strong, none of which give me any feelings whatsoever.
“I’d offer you use of my shower but I’m afraid the well pump runs on electricity,” he says, pushing his hands back into his pockets. “But I’ve got several buckets of emergency water outside, and if you’d like I can bring some in for your use.”
His eyes.
I’d almost forgotten about his eyes: light brown, the color of deep amber. I’d forgotten the way they always seem lit from within, like candles behind a stained glass window.
“That’s okay,” I hear myself saying. “I’m fine, really, as long as you don’t mind these clothes getting a little gross —”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Carrying buckets of water inside is trouble.”
“Certainly not more trouble than I’m used to.”
“How much trouble are you used to?” I ask, raising one eyebrow.
Levi half-frowns, half-smiles, like he’s amused and consternated all at once.
“More than you might think,” he says, and turns away from me, heads for his back door. “I’ll be right back with the water and there’s nothing you can do about it, June.”
Chapter Three
Levi
June is now nude in my bathroom.
Presumably. It’s a reasonable assumption to make, that several minutes after carrying in two large buckets of water, setting them in the shower despite her protests, and pointing out the soap and shampoo, she has disrobed and is currently bathing.
Silas’s little sister. Naked. Right now. On the other side of that wall.
It’s a thought I shouldn’t be thinking at all, but it’s impossibly distracting. I turn away, toward the dim interior of the house, averting my eyes as if that will help.
It doesn’t help.
June makes me feel like I suddenly no longer understand the world I thought I inhabited. She makes me feel as though I’m walking through brand-new territory without a map or a compass.
She makes me feel as though, without warning, the solid wall that I built with my own two hands might suddenly turn into panes of clear glass. That the world is topsy-turvy and unpredictable and that there are entire dimensions to reality that I’d never even considered before, waiting for me to discover them.
And yet every time I talk to her, there’s that iron fist in my gut, the squeezing heaviness that whispers you traitor, he trusts you. Even though I’ve done nothing.
Besides bring her home. Besides invite her to get naked in your bathroom while you think about the way water would run over her —
“Don’t,” I growl out loud to myself, standing in my kitchen, facing away from the bathroom door.
The dog gives me a look.
“Not you,” I say, and she yawns.
Finally, in the absence of June, she comes over and presents the sock monkey to me. After a few minutes of wrestling, she lets me check her paw, which is almost completely healed, nothing more than a pink line in a patch of shaved fur.
A few weeks ago, my younger brother Eli was hosting a barbecue at his house when the dog wandered up. She was dirty, skinny, and limping, but she was friendly and I’ve got a soft spot for animals.
June was there, along with her brother Silas, who’s become something of an honorary Loveless brother. She helped me bandage up the ugly gash in the dog’s paw, and next thing I knew, I was taking her home — the dog, not June — and letting her sleep at the foot of my bed.
I took her to the vet, got her paw properly looked at. No microchip. I hung flyers all over Sprucevale, posted on all the relevant internet forums. No one was missing a black and white medium-sized female mutt who might be part lab, part shepherd, and part something else.
The fact remains, however, that she was indisputably once someone’s dog. Even though she was dirty and hungry, she had clearly been well-cared-for at one point. She’s friendly, familiar with people.
Most telling of all, she’s housebroken. She sits patiently by the back door when she’d like to be let outside. She doesn’t go on the couch or the bed. She’s never chewed anything that wasn’t a dog toy.
She’s a good dog. Possibly the best dog.
And it’s painfully clear that she is not my dog.
I put her paw back down and scratch her behind the ears, glancing one more time at the bathroom door before I go to the closet and get out the emergency candles and lanterns, set them out on the coffee table and the countertop in case the power doesn’t come back on before it’s full dark.
There’s a splashing sound from the bathroom. I take a deep breath and concentrate on the wood grain of the wall on the far side of the living room, the dark lines graceful and flowing like water —
“Let’s have hot chocolate,” I tell the dog, cutting off my own train of thought and standing.
She stands as well, tongue lolling out of her mouth in pleasant agreement, and I raise my eyebrows.
“Not you,” I tell her, walking into my kitchen. “You’re a dog. If I gave you chocolate I’d have to take you back to the vet, and you haven’t enjoyed your visits thus far.”
Her enthusiasm does not wane. I quickly gather the necessary items for hot cocoa: ultra-pasteurized shelf stable milk, sugar, cocoa, salt, a saucepan, my propane camping stove, and the dog and I head onto the front porch.
It’s nearly stopped raining by now, though the air is still so damp it feels like you could wring it out. I quickly set everything up on a small wooden table between two Adirondack chairs, then settle into one and wait for it to reach the right temperature.
And I do not think about June’s current state of dress or undress. I don’t imagine the look that would be on Silas’s face if he knew what I was thinking. I don’t remember the brief weight of her on my shoulder, I don’t remember the way her running shorts rode up her thighs when she sat in my truck car, and I certainly don’t contemplate the fact that every time I lay eyes on her, my mind goes blank.
I get out of the chair and start pacing back and forth on the front porch instead. I watch two squirrels chase each other around a white pine. I watch some small birds flutter around an oak tree. My mom is always after me to set up some bird feeders whenever she visits, but so far I’ve resisted. They’re wild animals. If I feed them, they’ll come to need it.
“Oh good, there you are,” June’s voice suddenly says, and I turn.
She’s standing in the doorway, her dark hair knotted on top of her head, wearing dark green sweatpants that say GO COLONIALS in green down one leg, and a blue sweatshirt that’s got two crossed billiard cues on it and says Cumberland Billiard League in yellow. Everything is too large for her.
“Thanks for the outfit,” she says.
“Sorry I didn’t have anything smaller.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says, shrugging, walking out onto the porch in bare feet. She stands atop the steps, looks out at the forest. I watch her, lost for words, even though I understand the rules of human communication and know that now it’s my turn.
I should say something witty, charming, something that would make her eyes light up with a smile, maybe even a laugh.
My mind goes utterly, completely blank.
“Who’s Joe?” she asks suddenly.
“Joe?” I echo dumbly, trying to think of a Joe. Not a single one comes to mind.
“Joe,” June says again, and points at her breasts.
Impossibly, I maintain eye contact. I do not breathe.
I have the insane, wild thought that I’m being tested. Maybe June’s last breakup sent Silas, always an overprotective older brother, completely around the bend and now they’re somehow working together to test my loyalty to our friendship.
It is not the thought of a rational man, but it’s the thought I have.
“I don’t believe I know a Joe,” I tell her, staring straight into her sapphire eyes.
June is now looking at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.
“Were you in the billiard league?” she asks.
It’s the sweatshirt.
Of course it’s the sweatshirt.
I am an idiot.
“Only briefly,” I tell her, relieved. I maintain eye contact, but I don’t need to look at my ancient Cumberland Billiards sweatshirt to know that, under the logo, it says Knock ‘em in good, Joe. “Back when I had just started with the forest service a few older rangers were in, so I joined. They mostly wanted to smoke and drink beer together, so I didn’t last long.”
For the briefest of moments, I let my eyes flick down to the logo and text on the sweatshirt.
“Also I’m terrible at it. And I never did find out who Joe was, or whether he knocked ‘em in,” I say, stepping across the porch to stir the hot cocoa.
“He probably did,” June says, leaning against the porch railing, her hands by her sides. “Even I can eventually knock ‘em all in, if you give me long enough.”
I taste the cocoa. It still needs a few minutes. Camp stoves don’t tend to be fast.
“Is that hot chocolate?” June asks.
“It is,” I confirm, settling back into the Adirondack chair, crossing an ankle over a knee. “It’s a power outage tradition. My father used to break out the camp stove any time the power was out for a while when we were kids, so I started doing it too.”
June gets into the other Adirondack chair and sits cross- legged, pushing up the sleeves of the sweatshirt as she does.
“Did you ever do it when Silas was there?” she asks, eyes narrowed like she’s calculating something.
“I’m sure,” I say.
“Well, that explains that,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows, wait.
“He tried this once when he was twelve or thirteen,” she goes on, sighing, leaning her head back against the wooden back of the chair. “Only he was an idiot and did it in his unventilated bedroom, where he somehow managed to catch some homework on fire.”
I start laughing, despite myself.
“The smoke alarm and the carbon monoxide detector went off at the exact same time, which is honestly kind of impressive in the worst possible way. My parents grounded him for like two weeks and made him write them a five-page essay on the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning,” she says.
“Can Silas write five pages?” I ask, still laughing.
“You should’ve seen the font size and margins on that thing,” June says, turning to face me and grinning.
“He told me he was grounded for doing flips off the roof,” I say.
“Oh, he did that too,” June says. “He once rode his bicycle off the roof. I don’t know how no one noticed him getting it there in the first place. That one’s on my parents, really. It’s amazing that he survived to adulthood.”
We’re both quiet for a moment. It’s true that Silas could be monumentally stupid when we were younger. So could I, though never quite like that.
The heavy knot in my stomach tightens.
How long have you been friends? Twenty years?
More?
“Remember the time he drove my dad’s truck into the creek because a football fell off the seat next to him?” June says, staring off into the forest. “How the hell did he become a lawyer?”
I lean over, take another spoonful of hot cocoa to test the temperature, glancing at June as I do.
She still doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what really caused that crash.
It wasn’t a stray football. It was a passenger.
Jake Echols, to be exact. June’s then-boyfriend, to be even more exact. He was eighteen and had just graduated. She was fifteen, about to start her sophomore year.
I don’t know the inner workings of the relationship, but I know he gave her a promise ring and swore to make a long-distance relationship work after he left the next fall for West Virginia University. I heard about the promise ring constantly from Silas.
And I also know that he bragged to his friends about getting a blowjob from some college chick.
Silas gave him a ride somewhere. They fought in the car. It got physical. Silas crashed into the creek by accident, and Jake, unhurt, hopped out of the car and ran, leaving Silas to concoct a story about a football.
A week later, Jake up and joined the Air Force, and I don’t think June ever learned why.
There are reasons besides loyalty and friendship that June is a bad idea for me. Reasons like Silas has extensive combat training and Silas is not a reasonable human being when it comes to his little sister.
“It’s ready,” I say, turning off the stove. “Mugs are inside. Shall we?”
Daniel and Charlie’s story is coming next Wednesday, and I’m SO excited that I can barely contain myself.
Because patience has never been my strong suit, I wanted to go ahead and give you a sneak peek! Hope you enjoy <3 (And please ignore the typos – they’re getting fixed right this very moment.)
The officer waves me forward, one hand on his belt, and I step through the metal arch again.
It beeps before my foot hits the floor on the other side. I go through my pockets again, nerves already jittery, resolutely ignoring the line of people forming behind me.
“Keys, cell phone, wallet, beepers, watch, jewelry, belt, no weapons in the courthouse,” the guard drones. “Do you have any artificial body parts?”
“No,” I say for the second time that morning.
I dig to the bottoms of my pockets. Nothing. I pat my back pockets, but there’s nothing there either; nothing in the pockets of my suit jacket.
Someone behind me in line sighs loudly. I ignore them.
“Could be your shoes,” the guard offers, still speaking in a monotone. “Those steel-toed?”
I look down at the wingtips I spent an hour polishing last night.
“No,” I tell him. “They don’t even make — wait.”
I pat the breast pocket of my suit and realize what the problem is.
“Found it,” I tell him, and walk back through the metal detector. It beeps again, and I pull a charm bracelet out of the pocket. Another guard holds out a small plastic bowl, I drop the bracelet in, and he runs it through the machine.
I finally step through without issue and gather my things on the other side: wallet, phone, belt, keys, briefcase. At last the charm bracelet comes through, all alone in its small plastic bowl. It’s still warm from my body heat, and I pick it up and tuck it safely back into my chest pocket.
I feel its small, heavy weight as I head for the elevators. I know every charm on its short length by heart: a book, a ballet shoe, a musical note, a tree, a heart, a tiny Eiffel Tower, a radiant sun. Her mother gave her the Eiffel Tower. I gave her the sun.
Rusty nearly missed the school bus this morning because she almost forgot to give it to me to take to court. She was already out the door and halfway down the driveway when she came sprinting in, backpack bouncing up the stairs, out of breath as she shoved it into my breast pocket saying Dad I almost forgot! and then sprinting back down the driveway just as the bus pulled up.
I take the elevator to the second floor, walk along the polished marble floor to Courtroom 220. I’m twenty minutes early, so I sit on one of the wooden benches outside it and wait.
A moment later, my phone buzzes.
Charlie: Break a leg.
Me: I’m going to court, I’m not in a play.
Charlie: Then don’t break a leg.
Charlie: Unless you think it would get you sympathy with the judge. Then maybe it’s worth a shot?
Me: Or he decides that having a broken leg makes me an unfit parent and takes custody away.
Charlie: I thought it was a visitation hearing, not custody, can he even do that?
Me: If he’s in the mood, probably.
Charlie: How about if I just say good luck?
Me: Thanks 🙂
Charlie: So picky.
I put the phone back in my pocket, smiling to myself. Charlie — short for Charlotte — is terrible with dates, but she’s always remembered every court hearing I have. She must write herself a million reminders. The thought always makes me feel a little better.
People are walking by, congregating in small knots throughout the hall. Most are wearing suits. Some are wearing what are clearly the nicest clothes they own — khakis and polo shirts, sometimes a button-down shirt. Then there’s the small smattering of people who could barely be bothered, wearing jeans and t-shirts, sweatpants, hoodies.
I pace. There’s no way I can sit still. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been here, in this courthouse, for the exact same reason, at least twenty times. I still get anxious. I still need to move back and forth, do something other than sit.
It’s just visitation, I remind myself. Crystal’s going to bitch about something or other, you’ll all agree to some new schedule, and next month she’ll be making excuses again about why she can’t see her kid.
Just then, a man wearing cutoff jean shorts and flip flops wanders past, and I stare after him.
His outfit isn’t what gets my attention. It’s the giant tattoo on his calf.
I swivel my head, blatantly staring after him, double and triple checking that I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
Then I grab my phone, because I have to tell Charlie about this.
Me: Someone in this courthouse has a huge tattoo of Barney the dinosaur butt-fucking a unicorn.
Charlie: Please tell me it’s a lawyer.
Me: He’s wearing cutoffs. Unlikely.
Me: Also, he has a tattoo of a beloved children’s character having anal sex with a unicorn, so he may not have graduated from law school.
Charlie: You say that like lawyers can’t be perverts.
Charlie: Also, how can you tell it’s anal? Is it that detailed?
Me: I don’t know. He’s gone now.
Me: Barney just had a really dirty look on his face.
Charlie: I have so many questions about this.
Me: I have no answers.
Charlie: Was it a good tattoo?
Me: Depends on what you’re into.
“Thanks for being on time,” a voice says behind me, and I turn.
“I know you’re always on time,” Lucinda, my lawyer, goes on. “But lately I’ve been trying to encourage good habits in my clients. You look good. Half-Windsor?”
I touch the knot in my tie.
I like Lucinda. I’ve liked her since the moment I first walked into her office, six years ago, and we’ve been a team ever since. We’re a somewhat odd pairing — a middle-aged black woman and a white man in his late twenties — but Lucinda’s a godsend, as far as I’m concerned.
“It is,” I say.
“That’s a good choice,” she says, then finally smiles. “How are you doing, Daniel?”
“I’m well, Lucinda,” I say, smoothing one hand over the front of my jacket. “Yourself?”
“Also well,” she says, then sighs and gestures to a bench along a wall. “We should sit.”
My palms suddenly start to sweat, my heart rate jumping up. Lucinda never tells me to sit for good news, but I do it anyway, the wooden bench cool.
“Holden Hughes is going to be the judge on this case,” she says bluntly, her tone of voice making it clear that this is bad news. “I’m sure opposing counsel managed that somehow, and I don’t like it, but we can’t change it.”
I simply nod, spine perfectly straight, hands folded in front of me, and wait for more.
“Judge Hughes has a certain reputation,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He’s old school, conservative, and frankly he wishes it were still the Eisenhower administration, so he doesn’t like me much,” Lucinda goes on.
I detect the tiniest of eyebrow quirks, as if somewhere, deep down inside, she takes pride in that fact.
“Most pertinent to our current issue, he has a long history of siding with mothers over fathers,” she goes on, and she looks me dead in the eye as she says it.
I nod sharply. Lucinda never sugarcoats things, and I love her for that.
“It’s widely known that he believes in a traditional family structure,” she says, waving a hand. “The usual, married parents, father goes off to work at the office, mother stays home with the children, she vacuums while he golfs, et cetera. And he’s not exactly keen on updating his views, from what I’ve heard.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. There’s a sharp look in her eye.
Shit, Lucinda hates Judge Holden.
The buzzing anxiety in my chest starts to rattle, like someone’s taken my heart and is shaking it. It feels like it’s going to shake a hole straight through me, and I realize that I’m rubbing my hands together over and over again, trying to calm the feeling.
“What do we do?” I ask, amazed at how calm my voice sounds.
“We do exactly what we were going to do,” she says, steely-voiced. “We show her visitation logs, how often she’s cancelled at the last moment, how willing you are to meet her more than halfway.”
I nod, my heart still rattling.
“We show the court your daughter’s report cards, her school records, the statements from her teachers, her dance instructor. We prove that she’s thriving in her current situation. And Daniel,” she says, lightly touching my arm. “We remember that this hearing is only a petition to change the current visitation arrangement.”
I nod, swallow. I’m still rubbing my hands together. I can’t stop.
“Of course,” I say. I still sound perfectly cool, calm, and collected, even though I’m anything but.
Going to court rattles me like nothing else. It always has. Every single time I put on a suit and walk through these doors, I’m instantly and inescapably aware of two things:
One, I don’t belong here, wearing a suit and tie, looking like a stockbroker or something. This is the only suit I own. This tie took me at least twenty minutes to get right. I may look the part but really, I’m a fraud. I don’t know how to tie a tie very well and I don’t know how to parent any better, even though I thought I would by now. But I don’t. Every single day I’m making it up as I go along, even though everyone else at the PTA meetings seems to have a plan.
Two, they could take her away.
That’s it. That’s the very worst thing that could happen to me, and it could happen here, ten minutes from now, and the judge that Lucinda hates could be the one to do it. I can tell myself a million reasons that it’s unlikely, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a possibility.
I could walk into that courtroom with full physical and legal custody of Rusty, and I could walk out with nothing.
It’s unlikely. I know that. But as long as it’s even possible, I’m going to hate coming to this place.
“Don’t worry,” she says lightly. “This is all perfectly routine.”
* * *
At ten fifty-five, they let us into the courtroom for our eleven o’clock time slot. Before I enter I text Charlie one last time: going in. She texts back a string of emojis, hearts and smiley faces and crossed fingers, and I shut my phone off.
Opposing counsel isn’t there yet, so I soothe myself with my pre-hearing ritual, taking all my notes, the statements, the documentation, everything I’ve collected in my favor, and stacking it neatly in front of me on the wide wooden table. Having the weight of evidence right there, within easy reach, always soothes me.
Last but not least, I take out the drawing.
It’s a different drawing every time, because Rusty’s always making new ones, but I always bring one. This one’s got the two of us as stick figures — her, small, long-haired, wearing a bright green skirt, me twice her height and wearing only shoes for some reason — along with several trees and a small blob with feet that she told me last night was a wombat.
Rusty’s really into wombats right now. Last week I told her that she couldn’t have one as a pet, and ever since then, she’s been casually mentioning various wombat features that would just happen to make them perfect pets. For example, their poop is square, so it’s stackable.
She couldn’t believe it when that tidbit didn’t sway me.
“Did you get a dog?” Lucinda asks, glancing over at the drawing. She’s seen plenty of Rusty’s artwork over the years, though this is the first time in about eighteen months, since things with Crystal have been relatively quiet lately.
“It’s a wombat,” I explain.
“Did you get a wombat?” she asks drily.
“Not yet,” I say. “Though if Rusty has her way…”
She chuckles. A door opens.
Pete Bresley, the bailiff, steps in. He sees me and nods quickly, then steps to his usual spot and folds his hands in front of himself.
“All rise for the honorable Judge Hughes,” he intones.
We rise. The stenographer rises. The officials sitting off to one side rise.
The plaintiff isn’t here yet, and I admit to feeling a not-small amount of satisfaction on that account.
Before I can gloat, Judge Hughes sweeps into the room. Not all judges wear robes for a visitation hearing, but this one does.
Judge Hughes is on the short, stocky side, but I’d bet money that he’s ex-military. He’s silver-haired, white, his face lined but still stern.
“Be seated,” he commands as he sits, then finally looks up at everyone in the room. His face betrays nothing as he glances over Lucinda and I, but his gaze settles on the empty desk to our left.
He laces his fingers together.
“The plaintiff isn’t here yet?” he asks, pointedly looking at the clock on the back wall.
“No, Your Honor,” answers Pete the bailiff.
The judge is still glaring at the clock.
“Well, thank you to everyone who managed to make it on time today,” he says, more than a note of irritation in his voice. “If the plaintiff has not shown up by five after, then we’ll have to table this matter and reconvene —”
The door swings open, and we all turn.
It’s a man I don’t recognize. He’s got on a dark gray suit with a dark blue tie. His briefcase is black and shiny. His shoes are black and shiny. He’s white, tall, probably in his fifties, and he smiles easily at Judge Hughes.
The judge’s face softens.
“Apologies, your honor,” the man says. “You know how it is with all the construction on the roads these days.”
For a moment, I think that Crystal’s just sent her lawyer and hasn’t come herself. I actually let myself get optimistic.
Then the door swings open again, and she comes through.
Belly-first.
My jaw nearly hits the floor. I barely even notice that she’s followed by another man, this one younger but just as well-dressed as the lawyer.
Crystal’s pregnant.
Crystal’s seriously pregnant, far enough along that it’s obvious, though the way she’s got both her hands splayed over her swollen belly does call attention to it.
When the hell did that happen? I think. My heart is rattling again, inside my chest, faster and more desperate than before.
I just saw her six weeks ago, when I dropped Rusty off for a few hours. Was she pregnant then and I didn’t notice?
She must have been.
The belly’s not the only thing.
It’s not even the thing that alarms me the most.
Crystal’s wearing a suit. It’s a full-on pinstripe pantsuit, complete with heels, a nice-looking purse, and a string of pearls.
The woman who once left a six-month-old Rusty home alone in her crib so she could go out and get hammered with her friends now has a brand-new lawyer and looks like a Stepford wife. The last time we came to court, a year and a half ago, her lawyer was considerably shabbier and she was wearing torn jeans.
My palms start sweating. I have to remind myself to breathe. My heart feels like it’s being wrung out. Something is going on, and I don’t know what.
“The hearing began at eleven o’clock, Mr. Winchester,” Judge Hughes says, but his voice doesn’t have the same stern note that it did a moment ago. “Is everyone prepared?”
Crystal, her lawyer, and the other man sit. The judge moves some papers around.
“Yes, your honor,” her lawyer finally says.
“All right,” the judge says, and picks up a piece of paper, looking at it through reading glasses. “I hereby call to session the matter of Partlow vs. Loveless, Virginia case number…”
He goes on for a moment with the formalities, and Lucinda finally catches my eye, raising both her eyebrows the tiniest fraction, an expression that I’m pretty sure means Did you know?
I shake my head ever so slightly. She turns her attention forward again.
“…so if counsel for Ms. Partlow would please begin?”
“Thank you, your honor,” the other lawyer says. He stands. He buttons his jacket in a smooth, practiced gesture, then stands behind the podium between the two desks. “First, as Ms. Partlow is now known as Mrs. Thornhill, I move that we include that in the record.”
I sit bolt upright, my head swiveling toward Crystal, across the room. She’s looking back at me, a smug, satisfied look on her face.
I look down. There’s a huge diamond ring on her finger, the man sitting next to her patting her hand comfortingly.
I feel like the courtroom is tilting. Now I’m sweating everywhere, not just my palms. Crystal getting pregnant is one thing. If she got knocked up again by accident, I — the first person to accidentally knock her up — wouldn’t exactly be surprised.
But getting married is different. That takes at least some amount of intention and forethought, two things I wasn’t sure Crystal was capable of.
I couldn’t care less that Crystal’s married. Good for her. But if I don’t know, that means she didn’t tell Rusty, either.
She didn’t tell her own daughter that she has a new stepdad.
She didn’t tell her daughter that she’s going to have a new sibling.
Cold prickles travel down my spine.
“Furthermore,” continues her lawyer. “I’d like to make an amendment to the petition.”
“What is the amendment?” asks the judge.
“I’d like to change this from a visitation hearing to a custody hearing,” the lawyer says.
I feel like the floor from under me. Lucinda’s already on her feet.
“Your Honor,” she says, but the judge holds up one hand.
“That’s highly unusual, on what grounds?” Hughes drones on, like a bomb didn’t just go off in his courtroom.
“Mr. Thornhill has accepted a job offer in Denver, and the Thornhills would like to amend custody in light of that,” the lawyer goes on.
I’m out of my chair before I know it.
“No!” I say.
Lucinda’s grip is on my arm like steel, but I ignore it.
“You can’t take her to Denver,” I say, my voice already rising. “She lives here. Her life is here, her family, her friends, her school, you can’t just —”
“Ms. Washington, please control your client,” the judge booms over me.
“Daniel,” Lucinda says, her hand even tighter on my arm.
I close my mouth, mid-word, but I haven’t broken eye contact with Crystal’s lawyer, my heart pounding wildly out of control.
Denver. It’s two time zones away. A thousand miles. Fifteen hundred?
“Daniel,” Lucinda says again, and I swallow hard. “Come on.”
I sit, slowly. I’m amazed that my hands aren’t shaking.
“If I may continue?” the lawyer asks in a tone of voice that makes me want to commit violence. “We’re requesting full custody, with Mr. Loveless getting the standard ninety overnights of visitation per year.”
I can’t breathe. I can’t. I bring one hand to my mouth because I think I might vomit, the courtroom closing in around me, but I don’t say anything. Already I’m afraid that I fucked myself over with my outburst.
“Your Honor,” Lucinda is saying, still on her feet. “This is highly unusual. Mr. Loveless has been the sole legal and physical guardian for nearly six years, and a change of this magnitude would be incredibly —”
“Thank you, Ms. Washington,” the judge says, and Lucinda presses her lips together, eyes blazing. He redirects his attention to the slimeball behind the podium.
“I do happen to agree with opposing counsel on this, Mr. Winchester,” he says. “This is an extraordinary request made with no warning. I’m sure you’re fully aware that the court is in no way prepared to make a ruling at this hearing?”
“Of course, your Honor,” he says, smoothly as ever.
Denver. Ninety overnights. That’s three months; that means that they’d have her during the school year, and maybe I’d fly her out for vacations and the summer.
I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine a life where I don’t wrangle her out of bed and onto the school bus every morning, a life where I don’t help her with homework at the kitchen table, a life where she doesn’t complain while I try to untangle her hair after she bathes.
“May I briefly go over the change in circumstances?” the lawyer asks.
I sneak another glance over at Crystal. She’s rubbing her belly like it’s a crystal ball, like she’s trying to draw attention to it.
“Proceed,” says the judge.
The lawyer clears his throat. My undershirt is damp, clinging to me with sweat.
“There are several major life changes of note,” the lawyer begins. “First, my client was married one month ago to Mr. Thornhill, an executive at Prometheus Mining. They’re currently residing in Holmes Creek, where they own a home.”
I glance at Lucinda. She’s taking notes, and circles Holmes Creek. My stomach writhes. The houses there start at six hundred grand, and I have no idea how high they go.
“In addition, Mrs. Thornhill is currently several months pregnant with her second child, and plans to be a stay at home mother to both of her children.”
At the other table, Crystal nods piously. She’s still rubbing her belly.
It feels like a hand grabs my heart and twists with jealousy. Not for me, but for Rusty. I can’t imagine Crystal ever rubbed her belly like that when she was pregnant the first time. I can’t imagine that Crystal made a single accommodation for her first daughter.
Hell, she admitted to drinking and smoking pot through her pregnancy with Rusty. God only knows what she didn’t admit to.
“In Denver, Mr. Thornhill will be a Vice President of Prometheus, and they’ve already selected a home in an exclusive neighborhood. Rustilina is on several waiting lists at top private schools, where she would be taught by some of the state’s best —”
The judge holds up a hand.
“You don’t need to advertise the schools to me,” he says. “Are there any other life changes?”
“Mr. Thornhill has a brother in Denver, so both girls would grow up with their cousins,” he finishes. “Again, family is very —”
“Important, yes,” says the judge. “Thank you, Mr. Winchester.”
The other lawyer gathers his documents and leaves.
“Ms. Washington, would you mind answering a few questions on behalf of your client?”
She steps smartly to the podium. I lace my fingers together on the table in front of myself, hoping that I look cool, calm, and confident, even though I feel like someone’s taken a wrecking ball to my insides.
“Let me just run down a few facts here,” the judge says, looking at his papers. “Does Mr. Loveless still reside with his daughter in the house owned by his mother?”
Lucinda clears her throat.
“Yes, your honor,” she says. “Mrs. Loveless is a strong presence in —”
“Thank you,” he cuts her off. “And she’s attending Burnley County Public Schools?”
“Yes.”
“Is Mr. Loveless still in the liquor business?”
“He co-owns a brewery with his brother, your honor. In fact, Mr. Loveless has four —”
“Thank you,” he cuts her off again. Lucinda’s lips thin, but she stands there patiently, respectfully. “And has Mr. Loveless experienced any life changes not noted in these documents? He isn’t also married and expecting, is he?”
He’s half-smiling, like this is some joke. Like the possibility of taking my daughter away from me is somehow funny.
“No, your —”
“I’m engaged,” I say, standing suddenly.
I say it before I can think, the lie out of my mouth and in the courtroom before I can claw it back.
Total silence follows. It feels like my heart stops beating.
“Congratulations,” says the judge, barely looking at me. “It seems that you didn’t inform Ms. Washington?”
I button the button on my sportcoat to give my hands something to do while my mind races, going ten thousand miles a second while Lucinda looks at me, one eyebrow raised.
Instantly, I know I fucked up.I fucked up and I can’t take it back, because I just lied to a judge who’s considering taking my daughter away from me.
I take a deep breath and dig my hole deeper.
“I had understood this to be a visitation hearing,” I say. “Your Honor.”
“My client didn’t realize it would have any bearing on this matter,” Lucinda says smoothly.
“May I have the lady’s name?” the judge asks, pen poised.
I hesitate, but only for half a second.
There’s only one name I can possibly say.
“Charlotte McManus,” I say.
From the corner of my eye, I see Crystal’s head whip around to look at me.
Don’t panic.
Even though you just told a judge that you’re engaged to your best friend.
“And what is Ms. McManus’s occupation?”
“Carpentry,” I answer.
“Are you co-habitating?”
“We’re not,” I say, the first truthful thing out of my mouth since I stood. “We believe in waiting until after marriage to live together.”
That part’s just to make myself sound better. I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve never been in a position to cohabitate with anyone and definitely not with Charlie.
Charlie, who is going to kill me.
“Do you have a wedding date?” he asks.
“We’re thinking next summer.”
The judge just nods, writing.
“Is that all, Mr. Loveless? Ms. Washington?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Lucinda quickly adds.
“All right, then,” Judge Hughes says. “In that case, I’d like for the plaintiff to write up another petition and have it to everyone no later than…”
I look down at the table, at Rusty’s drawing of us with a wombat.
I just fucked up.
I panicked. I never panic, except that I did just now, faced with losing Rusty to exclusive neighborhoods and private schools, to a mom who’s suddenly claiming to be someone I know she’s not, to a stepdad who could probably afford to actually purchase and house a wombat if he felt like it.
I, who live with my mother and own a business based around alcohol, lied to a judge.
I, who send my child to public schools and will only ever be able to afford public schools, lied to a judge.
Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
I’m nauseous. My undershirt is soaked with sweat, because I just told a bald-faced lie to the man who’ll decide whether my daughter stays here or moves across the country.
Unbelievably stupid.
I try to listen to what the judge is saying now, what the next steps here are, but I can barely hear him over the pounding of blood in my ears. I grab a pen and write down a word, a phrase, here and there, but I can barely listen.
Maybe it will be fine.
It doesn’t have to be a big deal. No one outside of this courtroom knows, and Crystal doesn’t even live in town any more.
Get Charlie a fake ring, talk her into coming to the next hearing with you, and it’ll all be fine.
Totally fine.
No big deal.
“Dismissed,” the judge says, and everyone else stands. A moment later, I stand, and the judge leaves the room through a back door.
Lucinda turns to me immediately, her lips still a thin line.
“Congratulations,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say automatically.
At the other table, Crystal, her new husband, and her lawyer all stand. They file out, one by one, Crystal glancing over at me, her hands no longer on her belly now that the judge is gone.
We lock eyes. Hers are cold, blank, unreadable.
“Daniel,” Lucinda says, her voice grave.
The knots in my stomach tighten so hard I think they might break. I feel like a kid about to get chastised at school, but I also know that I deserve it.
I clear my throat.
“Yes?”
“You know that lying to a judge during a custodial hearing would reflect far more poorly on you than being a single father, don’t you?” she says.
I swallow hard. I shove one hand through my hair, my nerves jangling anew.
Fuck. Fuck!
“I panicked,” I admit, closing my eyes. “I didn’t mean to. But he was talking about letting her bond with her baby sister and having a real family and sending her to private schools and giving her ice skating lessons and buying her ponies and —”
“—all of which is simply talk from the plaintiff, they’ve got nothing to back up those assertions—”
“—and I panicked,” I finish. “That’s all. I panicked and said something stupid and — oh, fuck me running, I can’t believe I said that.”
Lucinda sighs.
Then she puts one hand on my arm.
“Is Charlotte at least a real person?”
I just nod, mutely.
“Think she’d be willing to put on a ring and come to a hearing?”
This will be live tomorrow – but in the meantime I couldn’t help but give you this sneak preview. Hope you like it <3
Chapter One
Trent
She’s fucking nowhere to be found. We’re on in five minutes and Darcy’s wandered off somewhere and left no discernible trace, at least not that I can find. Her phone’s going to voicemail. None of the small army of people wearing black and talking into earpieces has seen a dark-haired, blue-eyed girl in a vintage dress, ripped fishnets, and combat boots, so I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to find her.
“Call time was ten minutes ago,” Nigel is saying, as if telling me will magically make Darcy appear. “I told her this morning—”
“I know,” I say, cutting him off.
“Is she lost?” he says, his graying eyebrows knitting together with a level of concern only our manager can produce. “She hasn’t gone to the wrong stage, has she? She knows it’s at the main one?”
If I fucking knew I’d have found her by now, I think, but I manage not to say it out loud.
“I’m gonna go look for her again,” I say. “Text if you or Gavin find her.”
“I’ll check the loo!” he calls after me.
Backstage at Grizzly Fest is a throbbing mass of people. There’s the assistants and coordinators who make everything run, all wearing headsets and carrying clipboards. There are the festival-goers who somehow got backstage passes and then wandered out of the designated ‘backstage’ area so they could stare around, goggle-eyed, and get in everyone’s way.
There’s the ‘talent,’ half of whom are dressed more or less like me — shirt, jeans, shoes — and half of whom look like they’re from a Vegas show about Ziggy Stardust.
Darcy, our bass player, is somewhere in this shitshow when she’s supposed to be going on stage in less than five minutes, and since everyone knows we’re best friends, finding her is now my job.
I step out of the stream of humanity and into an alcove, just for a moment, letting some stagehands carry a huge upholstered pair of lips past. She’s obviously not here. One, I would have found her already, and two, despite having played arenas for a couple years now, she still gets nervous before every single show. She’s probably somewhere quiet, by herself, and lost track of time.
With that in mind, I head away from the zoo. I open a door, push through some curtains, go around some set pieces, and suddenly it’s quieter. I can still hear the hubbub — they can probably hear the hubbub two hours away in Seattle — but it’s a dull roar, not ear-piercing. I’ve got the feeling I’m closer.
I walk past a tiger painted on plywood, a cage with a stripper pole in it, a giant plastic cloud, and suddenly I hear her voice.
“The graduation ceremony from explosives school must really be something,” Darcy says.
There’s a pause. I duck around an enormous painting of a half-naked woman giving the finger, and there she fucking is, talking to some guy. He’s got his arms full with spent fireworks, and he looks like he might drop one at any moment.
“We didn’t really have a graduation ceremony?” the guy says, sounding kind of baffled. “We just, like, got the certificate and went home the last day.”
I don’t think he got the joke.
“Darce,” I say. “We’re on.”
The guy jumps a little, and Darcy turns toward me.
“Oh, shit,” she says. “Already?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” she says. “I already turned my phone off and I lost track of time.”
“Hey, wait!” the guy says, so excited he drops a cardboard tube that he’s holding.
Darcy flinches, and I look at the side of it. Definitely a spent firework, which you’re definitely not supposed to just fucking drop.
“Listen, I know you’re like, going on tour and stuff, but if you’re ever in Tallwood again and you want to hang out or something…”
He leans down, depositing the rest of the spent fireworks ungracefully on the floor. Darcy takes a step back, toward me, as he searches his pockets.
“Fireworks school didn’t teach you not to drop those?” I say.
I fucking know not to just throw those things around, and the extent of my education was lighting bottle rockets off in the desert until the cops showed up.
“Sorry,” he mutters, then rips a label off of one, then scribbles something on it against his leg, stands up, holds it out to Darcy.
“But, like, call me if you’re ever in town again?”
She takes the torn label. It’s got a phone number and a name: Phil.
Phil. Fucking Phil.
“C’mon,” I say to her, shooting him a glare. “We’ve got a show.”
“Um, thanks,” she says, folding the scrap of paper between two fingers. “Nice meeting you!”
Phil smiles hopefully as Darcy turns and ducks behind the naked lady painting, shoving the phone number into her pocket. I can hear Phil fumbling with the cardboard tubes as we walk away and I wish I could tear his fucking number up.
I’m not jealous, he’s just clearly a fucking idiot, so there’s obviously no reason for Darcy to bother keeping his number. That’s all.
If you read this one before, it’s nearly the same book, though this one has a (new, longer) ending and a few minor tweaks throughout. But I got a new cover, and it’s about 5,000 words (two-ish chapters) longer overall, so I decided… what the hell, let’s give Alex and Tessa a proper sendoff.
Here’s Chapter One! If you want to make extra sure that you get this for 99¢ when it’s released, just sign up for my mailing list – I promise I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.
“Come on,” the brunette says to her friend. “You wanna do a body shot?”
I grin and lean back in the leather booth. The music from the club below is pumping up through the floor, making the soles of my feet vibrate as the blonde pretends she’s not sure about doing shots off her friend in front of me.
She’s sure. She wants to. They always do.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Live a little. Bottle’s on the table.”
The brunette looks over at me, her plump red lips pursing, and lifts the Patrón off the table, along with a shot glass, then makes a show of pouring it out.
“Where should I put it?” she asks me, her voice low and slow. The glass hovers over her barely-covered cleavage, but then she moves it to one shoulder. “Here?”
“Lower,” I say.
She balances it on a collarbone, swishing her hair out of the way.
“Here?”
“Lower,” I say again, my eyes on her firm, round breasts, her nipples obvious through the tight dress she’s wearing.
“Here?” she asks, finally nestling the shot glass between them.
“Perfect,” I say, and my voice comes out a throaty growl.
The blonde looks at me again with that faux-shy blink, then puts her hands behind her back, presses her face between her friend’s tits, and does the shot with practiced ease.
“Mmm,” she says. She licks her lips slowly, looking at me from the corner of her eye. “That was delicious.”
The brunette is backed up against the table in front of me, and now the blonde presses herself into the other girl, biting her lip and looking her up and down.
“Can I get a taste of you?” she says, stroking the other girl’s hip.
“With him watching?” the brunette says, with the same pretend modesty.
The blonde kisses the brunette, open-mouthed, lots of tongue. She slides her hand down the brunette’s breast and tweaks her nipple.
I’m halfway hard already.
The brunette moans theatrically, and I grin. I know when a show’s being put on for my benefit.
“Do I get to have a little fun?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
The brunette opens her mouth to answer me, but there’s a racket on the stairs to the VIP area and she turns her head.
Someone is bellowing over there. It sounds like a fucking animal’s gotten loose.
The blonde looks over, alarm on her face, and a drunk guy charges up the stairs and throws himself past the bouncers, practically roaring.
“Whore!” he shouts, pointing at her.
He’s a total meathead, almost steroid-level jacked. His face is bright red and the veins are popping out of his forehead, like a cartoon or some shit.
“You fucking slut, I knew I’d find you up here—”
“Dylan, please,” the blonde says, her hands out in front of her.
I’m already out of my seat and heading toward this asshole. My brass knuckles are heavy in my pocket but I’m not gonna need them.
Guys like this go down easy.
“Who the fuck are you?” he says, looking me up and down. “Fuck off, you cholo motherfuck—”
I hit him right in the nose, the crunch of cartilage satisfying under my knuckles.
He reels backward, stumbling. Blood spurts out and onto his ugly shirt, and for a second he just looks confused.
Then he looks mad again, and I swear to god his face turns purple.
I do my best not to smile, but I don’t think it works. This guy might go to a boxing gym once a week, but I grew up in the roughest neighborhood in East L.A.
He doesn’t stand a fucking chance.
“Motherfucker!” he shouts and charges toward me, coming in heavy with a wide right hook.
I dodge. When he swings past me he throws himself off balance, just enough for me to come in close and hit him as hard as I can in the solar plexus, right beneath his rib cage.
He goes over like a domino. The whole thing didn’t take thirty seconds.
I hope I haven’t killed him or something, but I’m not quite concerned enough to check. I look at the knuckles on my right hand, flexing them.
Bruised, but I missed his teeth. I’m not bleeding.
At last the guy heaves a breath. He sounds like a goddamn dying fish, and security closes in around him.
“Are you okay?” the blonde asks breathlessly.
Her fingertips brush the back of my knuckles as she presses her body against me.
Right, I think. The girls.
Nothing turns a woman on quite like beating up her ex. This kind of woman, at least.
“That’s why they call him the Scorpion,” the brunette says, keeping her voice low. She’s on my other side, and I can feel her heat on my body.
“He’s fast and lethal,” the brunette goes on, one pert nipple sliding along my bicep. I look down at them, and the erection I lost during the fight comes back in full force.
The blonde looks at me, and this time her uncertainty is real. She wasn’t sure I was the Scorpion, and she’s really not sure that her friend was supposed to say it out loud.
I’m dangerous, after all. Lethal.
“I’m fine,” I say.
I slide my hands down their bodies until I’ve got one cupping each ass, and I give them a slight squeeze.
“Now, where were we?”
A couple of the guys are looking my way, making sure that I’m good, but they see that I’ve got two girls, shrug, and look away again.
Just another night out.
The girls exchange glances, and then the brunette folds herself into my semi-private booth, tugging me and the blonde with her.
“I think we were here,” the blonde says.
I’ve got one kneeling on either side of me, and they kiss again. I reach up and pull their tops down, watching their tits bounce out as both girls giggle, the brunette tossing her hair and lifting her hand to the blonde’s nipple.
I lean back a little, grinning. This night’s going even better than I anticipated.
Then, out of nowhere: my fucking boss’s voice.
“Alejandro.”
Goddamn it, I think, and close my eyes for a moment, hoping that maybe I’m hearing things.
When I open them both girls are bright red, tugging up their tops and staring at Manny.
He’s short, squat and has the worst fashion sense I’ve ever come across. Right now, he’s wearing socks, sandals, plaid shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt that couldn’t be louder if it had a megaphone.
Manny is also one of the most dangerous men in Los Angeles.
“Any chance this can wait?” I ask.
“Sorry,” he says, his gaze flicking to the girls and back to me. “I promise it’s important.”
The girls look at each other, slowly standing, wobbling on their high heels.
“Give me a few minutes,” I say, winking at them. “Don’t go anywhere, all right?”
“Hurry back,” the brunette purrs, giving me a sultry look before I follow Manny toward the office at the back of the club.
“How many kids you got now?” he asks, half-joking.
“Can’t get someone pregnant through the mouth,” I say.
He snorts, unlocking the office door. It’s a nice office, with a wide mahogany desk and a massive one-way mirror, the whole nightclub visible on the other side.
When he shuts the door, the music pumping behind us vanishes to a hum, and he gestures at a leather chair in front of the desk before collapsing into the matching one behind it.
“You should watch out,” he says. “They got DNA tests and everything these days.”
“I’ve seen Maury,” I say. “I’m not knocking anybody up.”
That gets a faint smile out of him, and then he’s all business.
“I need you to go to a wedding,” he says.
Not what I was expecting.
“A wedding?” I say, frowning.
I’m not really a wedding guy. I mean, I like open bars and horny girls as much as anyone, but I’ve got a bad habit of getting caught balls-deep in someone else’s girlfriend in the bathroom. That means I’ve also got a bad habit of giving out black eyes.
“They found the accountant’s daughter,” Manny says. “And she’s attending a wedding tomorrow night.”
Well, at least that’s good news. Sort of.
“Accountant still missing?”
Manny just nods, looking tired.
About a year ago, we hired a new accountant, a guy with less morals than money, to do the cartel’s books.
Fast forward, and we hear a rumor that he’s had a change of heart. He’s thinking about spilling everything to the feds, and that would be very, very bad for us. Naturally, we’d like to convince him otherwise.
Then he disappeared before we could find him, so we’re doing the next best thing: taking his daughter until he can be convinced to see reason.
“You need me to take her a message?” I ask.
“I need you to take her,” Manny says.
I stare at him for a couple of seconds.
“I know I promised you,” he says. He flattens his hands on the desk, and I think about how many guns are inside that thing. Seven or eight, easy.
“Isn’t this what we’ve got foot soldiers for?” I ask.
I thought I was done with this. I thought I’d been promoted out of just being muscle for the cartel, the guy who they call when they need damage dealt.
“You’re not wrong,” he says, lacing his fingers together. He’s got three massive rings on each hand, and they catch the dim light. I wonder how much blood and whose is still in the crevices on those monsters.
“This is a delicate situation, Alejandro,” he goes on, the only one besides my mom who ever calls me by my full name. “This girl’s our last resort. You know we don’t kidnap civilians, at least not in the States, but her dad’s left us no choice. I need someone I can trust doing this for me.”
Flattery will get you everywhere, I think.
“Besides, the wedding is at the Beverly Hills Resort,” he says.
My eyebrows go up, and I let out a low whistle. There’s expensive, and then there’s Beverly Hills Resort wedding expensive.
“I need to send someone who can blend in,” he says.
“You need someone who doesn’t look Mexican,” I counter.
Most of the guys are full-blooded Latino, but my dad was white, so I’ve got blue eyes and black hair. I can pass as a well-tanned Caucasian guy most of the time.
“I need someone who doesn’t talk like he drove there from Chavez Heights in his El Camino,” he says, calmly. “And I’ve heard that they’ll be serving some very good Scotch.”
I don’t like it. I’ve got one fucking rule — I don’t hurt women — and Manny fucking knows it. And yet here we are, and he’s telling me to kidnap this civilian girl.
I’m not surprised by that. If I’m surprised by anything, it’s that Manny likes me well enough to respect my rules until he really needs me to do something.
We both know I’m going to do it, because I don’t have a choice. But I can still push back some.
“What about Diego? He could pull it off.”
“Awaiting trial in Stockton.”
Right.
“Hernandez brothers?”
“You mean the guys who once robbed a liquor store but came back with tomato juice and margarita mix because they were too stupid to actually take anything alcoholic?”
Manny’s looking at me with sincere, practiced patience, and I know from experience that I’m testing it.
“All right,” I finally say, giving up since I know how this is going to end. “What do I do with the daughter? Hit her on the head and drag her out like a caveman?”
Manny reaches down and opens a desk drawer. I think he’s smiling a little, but he’s got the best poker face in California.
He places a vial of white powder next to a photograph on top of the desk, and I lean forward to look at it.
“That’s her,” he says. “Tessa Fulbright.”
I don’t say anything for a moment, because I’m just staring at this photo, caught totally off-guard.
Tessa Fulbright is smoking hot.
Like holy shit hot, walk-across-boiling-lava-for-a-chance-at-that hot, and she’s not even my type.
The picture was obviously taken from far away, because she’s crossing a street in black pants and a blazer. She’s looking to her left, her auburn hair drifting in front of her face, but I can still tell that she’s got killer green eyes and perfectly plump lips.
“That’s Ned’s daughter? The one who’s an architect?” I ask, mostly thinking about those lips wrapped around my dick while she looks up at me with those big green eyes.
I’ve met Ned, briefly. The girl clearly got her looks from her mother.
Manny just nods, then pushes the vial toward me.
“This’ll knock her out,” he says. “Just get some in her drink. She’ll think she’s too drunk, so you play the gentleman and assist her out of the wedding.”
I give Manny a long, hard look. Drugging a girl is even fucking worse than just kidnapping one.
“I don’t drug women,” I say.
“This is an emergency, Alejandro,” he says.
He leans forward over the desk, sincerity beaming from his gentle brown eyes.
“I swear I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
I know perfectly well that it doesn’t make any sense to have some ridiculous sense of chivalry toward women in this business, but I do.
I have to draw the line somewhere, right?
“And I get her to the guy waiting in the SUV?” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “Then you go back to the wedding and…”
He waves one heavily-ringed hand in the air, and we both know he means get your dick wet.
“Do as you like,” Manny says. “She won’t remember you when she wakes up in a safe house.”
I don’t like it. I don’t fucking like it at all, but I know what happens to people who refuse Manny’s orders. Let’s just say I’ve got more fingers than they do.
It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman, I think to myself. Why the fuck should it?
But I can’t shake the feeling.
“If Ned talks, we’re fucked,” Manny says. He’s right, and I know it.
“Just this once,” I say, reluctantly.
I reach out and take the vial, putting it in my pocket.
“Just this once,” he says solemnly.
That’s why this man is so dangerous: not only does he have an armory the size of a mansion, command a ruthless paramilitary organization, and have a shocking number of cops on his payroll, but he could sell ice to an Eskimo. He’s that convincing.
I look at Tessa’s picture again, trying to memorize every line of her face and every curve of her perfect body. I wonder what she’d look like naked, beneath me on a bed or even on top, riding my cock as her tits bounced.
God, what does she sound like when she comes, does she talk dirty or just moan—
“You’re good?” Manny asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“I’m good,” I say, standing.
For a moment, I want to ask if I can take the picture with me — for research — but I know I can’t be found with it.
“You’ve got a tuxedo fitting tomorrow at eight,” he says. “Get some rest before your big day.”
I nod, then walk to the door. As my hand touches the knob, Manny speaks up again.
“Alex,” he says. “Thanks for doing this. We’re really in a bind.”
I turn around and thump one fist against my left pec, just below my collarbone.
Manny does it back.
We’ve got the exact same tattoo in that spot. Everyone in La Carretera does.
I turn and head out the door.
The two girls are still standing by the booth, talking to each other, while the other guys ogle them but don’t approach. They know better.
Suddenly I don’t feel like it anymore, even though they’re right there, ready and waiting. It’s almost two in the morning, and this wedding is actually fucking important.
If the accountant goes to the feds, shit’s gonna get ugly, so I should get some sleep.
Tessa Fulbright and her sensible business outfit don’t have a goddamn thing to do with it.
I turn and take the back stairs down to the street, then drive home with the stereo blasting.
I open the waist-high beverage fridge and crouch slowly, my head hammering and my stomach sloshing. The guy behind the counter of this liquor store, a skinny kid with a scraggly goatee who looks barely twenty-one, watches me with a mixture of suspicion and concern, like I’m either going to rob him or pass out on the floor.
The second one’s much more likely. I don’t rob stores to begin with, but after last night, passing out on this grimy tile floor sounds like a fucking relief, not that I have time. I’ve got to be in the Senator’s office at ten on the dot or I’ll have blown the very last chance I’ve got.
Then I’d be well and truly fucked.
I reach in, pushing aside a red bottle of Gatorade. The movement wobbles me a little off-balance, and I go down on one knee. Then I go down on the other, because kneeling in front of this fridge is better than crouching in front of it.
I pause, closing my eyes, letting the blessedly cool air wash over me. I’ve taken four Advil already this morning, and even though I somehow kept them down, they haven’t done a goddamn thing. I still feel like someone’s filled my skull with rocks and shaken it.
Probably shouldn’t have gotten stumble-drunk wasted at the Best Western motel bar last night, you dipshit, I think.
And hell, I knew that as I was doing it. I didn’t even have a good time drinking shitty whiskey until I was porch-crawling sloshed, I just knew that it was my last chance to do it before I spent a couple of months babysitting a stuck-up princess of a Senator’s daughter and living on the estate of a man so famously prudish he probably showers in long johns.
Just get through it, Kane, I tell myself. You’ve gotten through shit before.
Slowly, I reach my arm out and start going through the fridge. I move aside bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. I move aside orange and red bottles of Gatorade, then the green Gatorade, getting more and more frantic.
Where the fuck is it? They have to fucking have it.
Don’t tell me they’re sold out or some shit.
I start pulling bottles out and putting them on the floor. Soon there’s a line of them next to me on the dirty off-white tiles, and even though the kid behind the counter is clearly getting agitated, I ignore him.
He can fucking try whatever he wants, because even hungover as shit I can kick his skinny ass from here to Georgia. I just need my fucking blue Gatorade and then I’ll fucking get out of here.
I’m about to give up, the fridge almost empty, when I finally see them. Bright electric blue, a color no fruit has ever been or ever will be, huddled together like the final two survivors in the very back of the bottom shelf.
I grab them both, open one and chug a third of it. I don’t give a damn that I haven’t paid for it, because even thinking about any other color of Gatorade just makes me more nauseous.
Blue Gatorade. It’s the one true hangover cure.
Damned if I know why, but it is. I chug another third of the bottle, still kneeling on the dirty tile floor, then finally put everything else back and stand. Already I feel a tiny bit better, like maybe I’ve got a chance of rescuing this stupid fucking day from being the shitshow it’s looking like right now.
Bottles in one arm, I grab a couple energy bars from the shelf behind me. I think about getting just a little something to take the edge off, hair of the dog and all that, but the thought turns my stomach so I head to the register instead.
There’s a short line: a man paying for something in a paper bag, and a blonde woman with a toddler holding one hand, a pint bottle of vodka in the other, wearing a frumpy jean skirt and a sweater that’s a couple sizes too big.
And yet, I still fucking stare. I’ve got no goddamn idea what it is about her, but for a moment I stop in my tracks, eyes glued to her denim-tented ass, the lumps of her sweater over where her waist ought to be. Call it a sixth sense for smoking-hot women — god knows I’ve seen more than enough of them that by now I can just tell, even if they’re wearing a cardboard box.
Even if I’ve more or less taken a vow of celibacy for the next couple of months.
“Beebee!” the toddler shouts excitedly. “Guess what I am now!”
He didn’t call her Mom, I think, and the woman turns to watch him, his arms held out stiffly as he starts spinning. There’s a display of Fireball whiskey behind him, and it makes me a little nervous, but he’s still a couple of feet away.
I was right about the woman. A space suit can’t hide that kind of hot — curves to make a man curse his own mother, paired with sharp cheekbones, wicked green eyes, and plush lips just begging to be bitten.
“A bat?” she says, nervously tapping the vodka bottle against her leg, and even though she’s crazy hot, a bad feeling starts to gather in the pit of my stomach. A woman with a toddler — hers or not — buying a single bottle of vodka at eight in the morning?
No women for a couple of months, remember? It doesn’t matter whether she’s a hot alcoholic or not.
“Wrong!” the kid says, laughing.
“A bumblebee,” she guesses again.
“NO!” the kid shouts, nearly in hysterics.
“Are you an airplane?”
The kid just squeals, spinning faster.
“Beebee!” he yelps.“I’m a—”
And he careens into a corner of the whiskey display, clipping a bottle and toppling it from the shelf.
I don’t think, I just drop the energy bar I’m holding, leap forward, and catch the bottle before it falls. My stomach lurches with the sudden movement, but I put the whiskey back on the shelf, gritting my teeth and swallowing hard.
Don’t save a bottle of whiskey just to puke on the floor. Keep it the fuck together, Kane.
When I finally turn, all four people — three adults and the kid —exhale in unison, all looking at me.
But I’m looking at the woman again, because it’s like she reflects all the light in this shitty liquor store, somehow fucking gorgeous despite her clothes, the setting, the vodka, everything. There may as well not be anyone else here.
And she’s got this almost-ethereal thing going on, like the dinginess of this shitty liquor store isn’t touching her. Despite myself I think: if I couldget that ugly sweater off, underneath she’d be all curves and dimples and fluttering eyelashes.
Meek in the streets and a freak in the sheets. Like she’d rake her nails down my back and leave me with scars I’d be proud of later.
A shiver travels my spine. Like fingernails, only I’m in this shitty store and staring at a girl I don’t know, who might be this kid’s mom. No wedding ring, though.
What’s my fucking problem? I turned down both those girls last night, no big deal, and that was a sure thing if I’d wanted it.
“Isaac,” she says.
The kid looks at me, his wide eyes nervous.
“Sorry,” he whispers.
“It’s all right,” I tell him.
“Thank you for catching that bottle,” she says to me.
We make eye contact. Another thrill goes through me, hangover notwithstanding.
“No problem,” I say.
The man at the counter turns back and continues counting out change, and I walk back to the line, standing next to the blonde woman.
“Rough day ahead?” I ask her, giving her my best charming, cocky smile.
I’m not hitting on her, because I’m fucking celibate, but I can’t help turning on the charm around a beautiful woman. It’s second nature.
She tilts her head slightly and gives me a slow, considering look, her green eyes studying my face intently. I suddenly feel like there are lasers going through my skull.
I’m too fucking hungover for this.
“Not rougher than your night was,” she finally says, a smile teasing at the corner of her eyes.
“My night was pretty good,” I tell her, raising one eyebrow. “It’s this morning that’s the rough part, but I’ll get over it.”
The guy at the counter finally takes his paper-bag-wrapped booze and leaves. The blonde puts her vodka on the counter and pulls out her wallet, glancing down at the kid next to her.
“Celebrating?” she finally asks me as she pays.
“Last night of freedom,” I say.
She takes her change and glances at me again, her green eyes cool.
“Well, I hope your wedding isn’t until tonight,” she says, giving me a quick up-and-down. “Looks like you could use some more recovery time.”
I just laugh.
“It’s a new job, not a wedding,” I tell her. “And it’s going to be a full-time months-long fucking nightmare, so I had a last hurrah. But I’m single as hell, sweetheart.”
Her back straightens, and I can tell I got to her, just a little. I don’t know why, but I like it.
She takes her change from the cashier and sticks the vodka in her purse, then glances at me again, eyes flashing for just a split second.
“Good luck with that,” she says, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “And thanks for catching that whiskey. Isaac, come on.”
And with that, she walks out the door and back onto the street, the toddler running, skipping, and jumping after her. For a moment I think about leaving the Gatorade and snacks there, following her, and at least getting her number, but I don’t.
It’s been one damn week, I tell myself. At least give yourself a chance before you fuck everything in this town, too.
Women are why you’re here in the first place, in this shitty town with this shitty job.
Well, more specifically, one woman.
And no, she wasn’t worth it. Not even close.
Slow Burn is coming Wednesday, May 24th – join my mailing list to make sure you get notified! (You also get a free novella.)
Thanks for stopping by! I know I’ve kept this work in progress pretty close to the vest… and I know I’m still not showing you the title or cover, but I can’t help it. I really love surprises.
But I’m super excited for this book, and I think you’ll all like it too. I know I say this about every couple, but I had a blast writing Ruby and Gabriel. So without further ado…
Chapter 1
Ruby
My hair sticks to my neck as I scoop the sticky, bubbling, pink-orange goop into the funnel, making sure to leave half an inch of air between the jam and the top of the jar. I tap the funnel gently on the side of the jar, dislodging any leftover peach chunks, and as I lift the funnel from the jar, my sister Pearl takes it and wipes the top rim with a damp paper towel.
She hands it to Joy, who drops a seal onto the jar, then puts it on the kitchen counter, next to thirty other identical jars.
We do it all in silence, like we’re a well-oiled machine.
“Even through Jim’s campaigns and his work in Washington, it’s always been my top priority that I remainat home, raising our children and running the household,” my mother says in her soft, quiet voice.
The reporter following her makes a noise of agreement.
“Right now we’re making peach jam from the very last of the peaches in the family orchard,” she goes on. “So many homemaking skills are becoming lost as a result of today’s society that girls are growing up not knowing the simple, basic homemaking tasks that made this country great in the first place. These are the valuable, much-needed arts that become lost when women are forced into the work place and out of the home.”
I’m facing the window, but I can hear the reporter tapping his pen against his notepad. I’ve lost track of which newspaper he’s from, but it’s something fairly small and fairly local, which means he won’t be pushing back too hard against my mother’s outrageous claims.
“Mrs. Burgess, there are many women who would say that they prefer to work outside the home,” he says.
I don’t have to look to know she’s smiling a soft, pitying smile at him.
“Of course there are,” she says, in her most sympathetic, understanding voice. “But when I go out with my husband to his speeches and rallies, and I talk to the strong, hard-working women of South Carolina, what I hear over and over again is that so many of them have a desire to return to traditional life and values, to be keepers of the home. I’m sure some women enjoy doing a man’s work in a man’s world, but modern society has robbed wives and mothers of the chance to truly make a difference in the lives of their husbands and children by serving them at home.”
I blob more peach jam into a jar. Pearl wipes it. Joy plops the lid on. All three of us have heard our mother’s canned responses so many times that we know them by heart and could quote them verbatim.
“Yes,” the reporter is saying. “But aren’t there women out there whose desire isn’t to stay at home, but to…”
This one’s got more backbone than I expected, I think, scooping more jam. Usually they only pretend to argue for a sentence or two, then roll over and accept everything she says about a women’s true purpose in life being to serve her husband’s needs and focus the rest of her energies on her children.
None of them have the nerve to ask about me, of course. That’s a surefire way to ensure that whichever news outlet you work for never gets another interview with Senator Jim Burgess, any member of his staff, or any member of his family, ever again.
As my mother is quietly, sweetly, and kindly answering another question, the kitchen door opens and my father’s aide Mason steps through. He’s wearing khakis and a long-sleeve Oxford shirt, despite the September heat.
“Miss Burgess, the Senator would like to see you,” he says.
The three Misses Burgess in the room turn, as does Mrs. Burgess, but he’s looking at me. I raise my eyebrows. Mason nods.
“Excuse me,” I say to everyone in the room, wipe my hands on a kitchen towel, and follow Mason. He holds the door for me and I step into the hallway, which is about fifteen degrees cooler.
It’s an incredible relief. It doesn’t matter that it’s over eighty degrees outside or that the air conditioning in our antebellum house doesn’t work very well, I’m wearing a high-necked shirt with long sleeves, a denim skirt that goes below my knees, and pantyhose.
That’s something I miss about being married: Lucas didn’t require me to wear pantyhose at all times.
I follow Mason across the house and up two flights of steps in silence, because there’s no point in asking him why my father wishes to speak with me. Either Mason doesn’t know, or he knows better than to discuss it with me.
Besides, there’s no way it’s anything good. I think the last good conversation I had with my father was a year after I got married, back when the situation was only uncomfortable and unsatisfying, not a complete wreck.
My father’s home office has a huge, wooden double door. It’s original to this house, and he’ll tell anyone visiting the story of how his great-great-great-great grandmother used this house as a field hospital during the Civil War and hung bloody sheets over all her beautiful, hand-carved door frames so the Yankees wouldn’t loot them.
It might be true. I have no idea. I just know my father’s a politician, and finally, at age twenty-six, I know better than to believe everything he says.
Mason pushes the door open and nods me through to the Senator, who’s sitting at his immense desk in his shirtsleeves, busily writing something.
“Thank you, Mason,” he says without looking up. “Ruby, you may sit.”
I do, silently, crossing one leg over the other, and wait for him to finish whatever he’s writing. Probably yet another letter to a donor, thanking them for their important working in stemming the tide of moral decay in modern America, blah blah blah. Finally he places it in his inbox and looks at me.
“I’m afraid your situation has generated a great deal of undesired attention,” he begins. His tone isn’t exactly accusatory, but I can tell whose fault he thinks this is.
I swallow and say nothing. There’s no point in arguing.
“And while this family has weathered the storm of your disgrace, and will continue to weather that storm as a strong, stable unit, I’m afraid a new problem has presented itself and it must be dealt with accordingly.”
My stomach twists and my pulse speeds up.
Crap. What else did he find out?
“What’s that, father?” I ask, keeping my face as perfectly neutral as I can.
Without answering, he reaches into a desk drawer and produces a small bundle of letters, letting them plop on his desk.
“You’ve received a substantial amount of mail from a single correspondent,” he says. “Of course, I took the liberty of reviewing your letters, given your situation — “
My blood boils, but I force myself not to show it.
Keep sweet, I tell myself. Just smile. Keep sweet.
“—And I’m afraid that what began as misguided interest has escalated into some very disturbing accusations and threats against your safety.”
I blink. I was expecting yet another lecture on my behavior and attitude.
“What kind of threats?” I ask, doing my best to channel my mother and keep my voice soft, quiet, and meek.
He frowns.
“I won’t be discussing that with you,” he says. “They’re completely unsuitable for a woman to read, but they’re very upsetting. After extensive discussions with my security team, we’ve decided that you’ll be receiving your own detail for the time being.”
He pauses. I pause, and for a long moment, my father and I just look at each other.
“You’re giving me a bodyguard?” I ask, finally.
Now my stomach is clenched into a knot, fury raging inside me.
Just because I’m sheltered and naïve doesn’t make me dumb. My father has a way of getting what he wants without making himself look back, so I’d bet almost anything that the letters aren’t real.
Either they’re empty, or my father wrote them himself. He knows it’s not normal to hire someone to keep watch on your daughter twenty-four-seven, and if he did it would look weird to the press, so this is his excuse.
My bodyguard’s real job isn’t going to be guarding me. It’s going to be watching me and reporting back to my father.
“Yes,” my father says. “Since I’m your guardian once more, it falls to me to protect you from harm, and these —“ he taps the bundle of letters, “—constitute potential harm. Despite your life choices, you’re still my daughter, and it’s my duty to ensure your safety.”
Not I love you and I’m worried, but your safety is my duty. I swallow, my mouth dry.
“Thank you, father,” I say.
“His name is Gabriel Kane,” my father says. “He’s a former Secret Service agent and he’ll be arriving tomorrow.”
And he’ll be on you constantly, following your every move, I think.
It’s moderately interesting that they chose a man for my bodyguard, but not that surprising. On one hand, my father would prefer that I literally never be alone in a room with a man who isn’t related to me, but on the other, his opinion of women is so low that I doubt he’d trust one to guard me.
Besides, I’m already damaged goods. It isn’t like my father has to defend my innocence or something. Everyone knows that’s long gone.
“I expect that you’ll show him proper hospitality,” my father goes on, leaning back in his massive leather chair. He’s flanked on either side by tall windows, the heavy curtains pulled back to reveal the rooftops of Huntsburg and the thick, lush forest beyond. “And I also expect that you’ll continue to uphold the standards of the Burgess name, as befits my eldest daughter.”
His stare could cut through iron right now, but like he just said: I’m his daughter. His blood runs in my veins, and his stare isn’t doing a damn thing to me.
I think he means don’t have sex with your bodyguard, because my father seems to think that all women, if allowed the slightest bit of freedom, will simply lie back and open their legs to any man who happens by.
As if I’m going to be interested in whatever ex-military meathead he’s hired to keep tabs on me. Thugs who report on my behavior to my father aren’t exactly my type.
But I don’t say any of that. I smile sweetly at him, hands clasped atop my knee, and answer, “Of course, father.”
Before he can respond, there’s a knock on the door, and then Mason’s face pokes through.
“Senator,” he says. “The photographer from the Sun-Herald has arrived, and Mrs. Burgess asked me to fetch you.”
My father nods, then stands. Mason’s face disappears, and my father pulls on his sport jacket, slicking his salt-and-pepper hair back with one hand. I glance one more time at the bundle of letters that he’s left lying on the desk.
“We’ll be meeting here at eleven sharp tomorrow,” he tells me, and we both exit his office, the heavy door shutting behind him.
My father and Mason both turn and walk down the stairs. I walk slowly in the opposite direction, along the upstairs hallway, pulse quickening as I listen to their footsteps and voices fade.
He left the letters sitting on the desk, instead of locking them away somewhere. The letters he thinks I’m too delicate to read.
The moment their voices are gone, I turn back, push the heavy office door open and shut it behind myself. I’m holding my breath and willing my heart not to beat so loud, because if I get caught in here, there’ll be hell to pay.
He can’t kick me out onto the street — not until the election is over, at least, because it would look absolutely awful to the voters — but he’d make my life even more locked-down and unpleasant than it already is.
I tiptoe across the plush area rug, past the chair where I was sitting. Suddenly the curtains stir and I freeze in place, a deer in the headlight, but it’s just a breeze from the window and I exhale.
My hands are shaking as I reach for the bundle, memorizing its exact location on the desk before I pick it up. I take three: one from near the top, one from the middle, one from the bottom, and pray he doesn’t notice.
It’s risky, but I have to know. I have to read these letters, see whether I’m actually in danger or whether my father’s invented the whole thing.
I pull up my shirt and cram the envelopes into the top of my pantyhose, which traps them flat against my belly. At least it’s good for something.
With meticulous care, I put the bundle back exactly how I found it, sweat leaking down my neck. Then I turn, tiptoe to the door, and slip out silently.
There’s no one in the hall, and a burst of polite, forced laughter comes up the stairs as I pull the heavy door shut.
Then I practically run down the hall, to my room, where I can hide these until I can read them later.
My parents tried. They really did. I’m supposed to be meek, subservient, sweet, and trusting, but that’s just not how I turned out.
Marisol needs the money, and I need a nice girl to parade in front of the cameras.
No feelings. No strings. No falling for anyone.
I’ve been clean for months, but my record company’s not satisfied. Apparently it isn’t enough to only kick a heroin addiction – they’re insisting that I find a girlfriend as well.
If I don’t, they pull Dirtshine’s massive record deal.
It’s supposed to show that I’ve changed my ways, that I’ve turned over a new leaf, all that rubbish. But I’ve had it with suit-wearing wankers telling me what I’m to do, so I’m on the verge of telling them to go f*ck themselves.
And then she shows up.
Marisol locks me out of my own concert by accident. She’s wearing a suit at a rock show, searching for her lost law school textbook, has no idea who I am…
…and for the first time in years, I’m hooked.
She’s smart, driven, and utterly gorgeous. The sort of girl who earnestly believes in following the rules and hates when others don’t.
I’m a huge rock star, recovering addict, and general f*ckup.
Our relationship is for show, and that’s all. But with every smile, every laugh, and every breathtaking glance at her curves, I want her more. Two months is all we agreed to. But it’s never going to be enough.
Valerie holds her finger on a button, her body perfectly motionless as the blinds lower slowly, cutting the sunlight down by about half, though it’s still too bloody bright in here. Hell, everything in Los Angeles is too bloody bright.
Wake up in the morning: sun. Go for three-mile run, one of my new, healthy, replacement habits, and there’s sun. Lunch, dinner, when I go into the studio: fucking sun, sun, sun. The only respite is at night, though the whole city is lit with screaming neon then, so it’s not too terribly different.
It’ll make a man miss his rainy gray motherland, that’s for sure.
“There we are,” Valerie says, and walks to sit at the head of the conference table, facing away from the window. Larry and I sit as well, him in his five-thousand-dollar suit and me in my nicest black t-shirt and least-ripped jeans.
Can’t say I haven’t made an effort. I rejected two other pairs of trousers as I was getting dressed. Across the table, our manager Nigel is wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a windbreaker, so at least I’m dressed better than someone.
“Is Miss Fields running late?” Larry asks, checking his Rolex. He couldn’t be less subtle about it.
Valerie’s face doesn’t move. I’m not sure it can move.
“A few minutes, yes,” she says, her voice perfectly placid and calm. Her dark hair is parted neatly in the middle, both sides waving gently away from her perfectly smooth, even face.
She makes me think of a porcelain doll come to life, if porcelain dolls were particularly crafty, manipulative, and bossy — and since she’s the band’s new Public Relations manager, I consider those things compliments.
“Tonight is Gavin’s first show since the tour ended,” Larry says, lacing his sausage-like fingers together on the table. “We can’t wait forever, you know, and he should be arriving early at the venue, making sure everything is—”
“I’m fine, Larry,” I interject before he can really get going. “It’s been three minutes, surely we can give her three more.”
“I’m just saying, your time is valuable, and if—”
“I’m known to be late on occasion as well,” I say, starting to get impatient with my lawyer. He’s good at his job, but he’s set on having the advantage in every situation, even one like this.
“She’ll be here very soon, I’m sure,” Valerie says, her tone still neutral and pleasant.
I hate this.
I hate this sterile, shiny, bright conference room and I hate that now I’ve got to listen to people who tell me things about my image and my brand. Once upon a time I played guitar too loud in tiny clubs and howled at the top of my lungs and didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, but now I’m here. With these wankers.
My old self would make fun of me now, that’s for sure. At least until he saw the house I live in. That might shut him up.
Larry sighs dramatically, checking his watch again, but just as he does the door swings open and four people enter: a man, two women, and a girl.
My heart plummets when I see the girl, like a ball of lead straight into my gut. If I had doubts about this already, now they’re doubled. Tripled.
She’s blonde and blue-eyed, practically cherubic. I don’t think she’s old enough to drink legally, but she’s got that calm, blank affectation that people who grew up in front of the camera tend to have. As if she only comes alive when someone’s recording.
One of the women leans over the table, and I stand to shake her hand.
“Margaret Sorenson,” she says, all business. “I’m Daisy’s PR person. This is her lawyer, Michael Warren, and this is Karen Fields.”
“Lovely to meet you,” I say automatically, though she’s already moved on to Larry.
I look at Daisy Fields, then at Karen Fields, who must be her mother, and I realize two things.
One, she brought her mother to a meeting; and two, Daisy Fields is her given name. I’d assumed she changed it when she went on television, but I guess her parents actually named her Daisy Fields.
They must have really wanted their little girl to go into showbiz, as they say out here.
Then Daisy herself is across the table from me, leaning forward, holding out her hand. It’s small and soft, and she barely grips me at all. It’s like shaking hands with a mitten.
“It’s so nice to meet you!” she bubbles.
“You as well,” I say.
“I love Half-Asleep!” she goes on. “It’s just such a beautiful love song.”
It’s Half-Awake, not Half-Asleep, and it’s not a love song, but I let it slide.
“Thank you,” is all I say.
We all sit, and Valerie starts talking, but I’m hardly listening, my mind swirling.
I can’t do this. There’s no way I can do this, not with her. I’m sure Daisy Fields is nice, but she’s a child. She brought her mother to this meeting, and even now, she’s watching Valerie intently, as if she needs to hang onto every word that comes out of the other woman’s mouth or she might lose the thread of conversation.
“And that’s all amenable to you?” Valerie asks Daisy’s side of the table.
Wide-eyed, Daisy looks at her mother. Karen nods, then Daisy nods too.
That’s it. I’ve had it.
I no longer give a single fuck about rehabbing my brand or making over my image or any of that.
I’m not doing this. I’m not pretending to date a former child star who might not even know where Britain is so that the music-buying public will think I’ve turned over a new leaf and discarded my old, sordid ways.
I have. They’re gone. It’s been months since I so much as had a drink, but I’m not hauling this girl around town on my arm to prove it.
I stand, shoving my expensive leather executive chair back, all eyes on me now.
“Larry, Nigel,” I say, my tone clipped. “A word?”
I don’t wait for them to answer, just walk out of the conference room and into the hall. Both men follow, and they shut the door behind them.
“Gavin—”
“I’m not doing this,” I say, gesturing at the door. The wall dividing the hall from the room is frosted glass, so I know they can see me, but I don’t care.
“Come on, Gavin,” Nigel says, holding his hands out like he’s trying to console me. “We talked about this, and you know the record label isn’t—”
“Was I unclear?” I ask, my voice rising a little. “I’m not pretending to shag that sweet moronic poppet so that housewives on Long Island will buy my records, and fuck the label.”
Nigel’s face drops, his mouth sagging at the corners. Next to him, Larry’s face is perfectly, carefully neutral.
“Gavin, this is what we—”
“How can I get you to yes?” Larry interrupts, a phrase I’m certain he learned from some negotiation seminar.
I didn’t think I could hate this moment more, but now I do.
I just shake my head and push one hand through my hair, the thin leather straps around my left wrist sliding down. There’s seventeen of them, one for each week I’ve been clean.
