Resonance, page 6
“In his office, being all hot and broody.”
Ru’s smile grew as he glanced behind me.
“Temperature in here feels fine to me. Maybe you need to step outside and cool off? Suggest avoiding the dumpsters, though.” Dan’s gruff voice cut through the music, and I shot a look over my shoulder, heat rising to my cheeks, probably evident to him where he stood leaning in the doorway for a second before shouldering off it and strolling toward us.
He eyed the burritos on the counter while the flush in my cheeks decided to invade the rest of my body for good measure. Damn my sensitive capillaries. “You get me a vegetarian?”
“Sure did.” Ru dug through the stack of burritos, snickering to himself as he inspected them and then tossed Dan one.
Dan eyed the wrapper cautiously before peeling it back, taking a bite and then, after swallowing and wiping his lips, saying, “I need to go over to Arkansas next weekend, help someone value a collection.” Dan was asked to do that on a fairly regular basis. Usually he went alone, but sometimes he took Ru.
“Whose estate?” Ru glanced up from his burrito with interest.
“Ryder Preston.”
Ru ticked a look my way at the same time I shot one over at him, and my embarrassment was immediately forgotten. Our eyes met for the briefest flicker of an instant and then descended on Dan as he tore another bite from his burrito nonchalantly and glanced out into the parking lot where a car had just pulled in.
Dan didn’t talk about Ryder.
Like, ever.
Once upon a time, they’d been a powerhouse bluegrass-country duo. Dan had walked away at the height of their career, and no one really knew why, though rumors were abundant. It was the one topic we never ever touched. Ru told me he’d asked one time years ago and had gotten soundly shut down.
Studying Dan now, though, he seemed only mildly irritated. His gaze drifted back to Ru as Ru muttered, “Damn, I really wish I could, but I booked another showcase that weekend. Maybe I can get out of it, but…”
Dan shrugged. “Nah. Not a deal. I can go myself.”
I was a little stung because, well, I was right there.
Ru glanced at me and before I could shake my head vehemently at him, said, “Take O. He knows Ryder’s entire catalogue. And yours.”
That stupid flush held a lively revival over my cheeks. My obsession with their music was partially what had led me to Dan’s Gatlinburg shop in the first place. I’d originally visited after miserably flubbing an interview at a restaurant and aiming to soothe myself with some classics. Instead I’d begged for a job.
“That so?” His scrupulous stare made my cheeks flame hotter.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “And a lot of others. That’s one of my favorite decades for music, especially country. The sound was…” I tried to collect my thoughts so they wouldn’t come out in a dribbling mess. “Nice.” Nice? That was too much reeling in. Now I just sounded like an imbecile.
“He’s supposedly got quite a music collection, too.” Dan squinted at me. “You get carsick?”
“Depends on your music selection.”
“C’mon now, you realize who you’re talking to?”
“The guy who’s had Terryl playing for the last week?” I made a gagging face.
Dan and Ru exchanged a grin, Ru’s lips thinning into a line as he tried and failed to suppress the laughter that burst out of him seconds later. No doubt over my last encounter with Terryl.
“You’re both assholes.”
“I’ll leave my Broadway collection at home.” Dan smirked.
“Unless it’s Hamilton,” I granted.
Ru slung his arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “Look at our baby elitist growing right up.”
I enjoyed Ru’s weight for a second, because casual affection didn’t happen a lot for me, then shoved him away. Maybe I should try going on a prearranged date rather than just hooking up with randoms like Brent that I met in bars. I kinda missed affection. “You smell like beef burrito,” I told him, and he blew an exhale in my direction with a grin as I nodded at Dan. “I can go with you, sure.”
Dan pulled out his phone and thumbed the screen. “Good deal.”
All settled, then. Never mind the stupid butterflies in my stomach. Didn’t they know it was winter? I wondered if hours on end in a car with Dan would make him want to kill me. But I guess that was his problem now.
I angled toward Ru, considering around a bite of burrito before saying, “I’ll do it.”
“Do what? We on different tracks again?”
“Go out with Marco, like you said earlier. I mean, if he’s interested. But not on a double date. That’s too intimidating. Just me and him.”
Dan balled up his wrapper and tossed it in the trash can beside the register. I felt his eyes on my profile, but kept my focus on Ru as his lips split in a broad grin. “I’m sure he’d be interested. What’s that look for?” he asked Dan, and Dan blinked at him as if emerging from a daze.
“Dan has widened his opinion field to include my love life.” I smiled sweetly at Dan.
“Took you long enough,” Ru said, and when Dan didn’t deny it, Ru narrowed his eyes at me. “Who’s he giving an opinion on?”
“Brent.”
“Positive or negative?”
“Negative. Seems like a little shit,” Dan said.
“Great minds. He’s totally a little shit.” Ru and Dan traded annoyingly chummy smiles. “Marco would be an upward step.”
I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, moving on.”
“Yeah, let’s.” Dan smacked the countertop lightly before wandering toward the front of the shop as a couple of college-aged guys shoved through the door. “We’ll leave Friday afternoon, so be ready. It’s a haul,” he called over his shoulder to me, then greeted the guys.
I took advantage of the view, studying Dan’s tight ass and the broken-in jeans that cupped it lovingly. Well, if there was any sentience to denim, it would have been loving. I might have sighed, because Ru tsk’d me with a laugh.
“What? Looking’s free.”
“Psht. If it was, I wouldn’t have been broke as shit for three-quarters of my adult life.”
CHAPTER 7
I pulled the truck into the drive of the residential address Owen had given me and honked the horn, studying the ramshackle garage in front of me and the house that’d been split into a duplex beside me. To my right was a gleaming new build, too big for the lot, which pretty much summed up a lot of Nashville these days.
As I waited, I wondered if I’d be ready to kill Owen before we got even halfway to Arkansas. I’d never been in close confines with him for an extended length of time, and the shop had enough room for all his energy, fidgeting, and run-off-at-the-mouth tendencies to spread out and dilute. How I was going to handle a concentrated dose of it, I wasn’t sure.
Owen appeared at the top of a flight of wooden steps clinging for dear life to one side of the garage and ran down, a blue nylon duffle bag bouncing against his hip as he leapt the last couple of steps where one of the treads was missing. He wore some beat-up old jeans and a white T-shirt under a denim coat, cuffs pushed up to show a peek of ink on his forearms.
Instinctively, I hopped from the cab of the truck to help him, then shook my head at myself, wondering what the hell I was doing; he could manage fine.
Owen beamed me a bright grin, slinging his duffle around to the front and letting it dangle from his palm by the straps as he stopped in front of me. “Want me to put this in the wayback or inside?”
“Inside’s fine. There’s enough room in the back seat.” I glanced up at his apartment again, the ribbons of blue paint peeling off in thick strips, the crack in one of the windowpanes like somebody’d gotten after it with a BB gun.
“This is where you live?”
Owen looked over his shoulder, squinting at the apartment, then swiveled back to me, serene smile still in place. “This? Nah, this is my helipad. My mansion’s a little farther back.” He leaned in close, dropping his voice to an ominous near whisper, as he breezed past me toward the passenger side. “It’s invisible. Only the Chosen can see it. Too bad for you.”
Yeah, it was gonna be a long trip.
I slid into the cab as he opened the back door and shoved some boxes aside.
“I brought some snacks and stuff, but I was hoping once we get going we could stop somewhere and I could get a Grapico. That’s my road treat.”
I angled a look over my shoulder. “Funny, I was hoping once we got going, we could just… keep going.”
“Ohhhhh, you’re one of those,” he said with something like sympathy. He tossed his duffle into the back seat and slammed the door.
“One of what?” I asked when he climbed into the passenger seat.
“Road trip nazi. Should I have brought an empty bottle to pee into so we don’t have to stop?”
“Didn’t even think of that. Wish I had. I did remember my duct tape, though.” I gave him a sharp grin as I put my seatbelt on.
“That was a joke about how much I talk, right?”
“It was,” I confirmed and shifted the car into gear to back out of the drive as Owen pulled out his phone and started fiddling with it.
“Did you even make a playlist?”
I tapped the brake, halting our progress momentarily. “Nope. No playlist, no snacks, no spot all the red cars or out-of-state plates. We’re gonna do this old-school style where you actually just get in the car and drive from point A to B.”
Owen met my stare with a crooked grin. “You’re doing road trips all wrong.”
“I’m doing ’em fast, which I think is the point. Plus I wanna try and get ahead of this storm that’s dropping heaps of snow about an hour behind us.” It was an eight-hour drive, and since we were leaving in the late afternoon and it made no sense to drive overnight, I’d planned on stopping at the two-thirds mark to grab some sleep. I had no desire to get stuck in a snowstorm on the side of the highway somewhere.
Owen fiddled with his phone some more, then unbuckled his seat belt and leaned into the back seat, putting his ass disturbingly close to my face as he scrounged around in his bag. Though the heat in my groin seemed to disagree about the disturbing part. I clenched the steering wheel. “What’re you looking for back there?”
“This.” He dropped back into his seat and brandished a cable triumphantly. “Because I did make a playlist, rightfully anticipating that you would suck at road trips.”
Owen plugged the auxiliary cable into the console, then attached it to his phone. And just when I was about to protest that I wasn’t about to listen to four hours of K-pop or whatever he was into at the moment, the Eagles’ “Desperado” came through the speakers and he stared at me with smug satisfaction. “I dare you to complain about the Eagles.”
And since I couldn’t, I just ignored him.
“Yeeeep.” I could hear the grin in his voice, and goddamn if I didn’t have to work hard to keep it from leaping the gap between us and becoming one of my own.
3:30 p.m.:
“Dan?”
“Yeah?” I blinked a couple of times, having gotten a little lost in the passing of lines on the road and Mick Jagger’s seductive growl on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
“Just making sure you hadn’t fallen asleep.”
“My eyes are open, aren’t they?”
“Well, that’s not always a good indication. I knew this guy once when I lived in… well, actually no, that’s not right. It was when I was in Gatlinburg. But before I met you. Anyway, he swore he slept with his eyes open, and I didn’t believe him until I actually saw it. It was creepy as hell. And they weren’t wide open, sure, but like halfway. Still.” Owen shuddered in my periphery, and I made a snoring sound. “Very funny.”
“Didn’t know I was a comedian, did you?”
4:15:
“Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker?” Owen asked, as we passed one standing near an exit ramp.
“Not that I can recall, no. You?”
“Are you kidding? No way. I’m hitchhiker bait. Me picking up a hitchhiker would be accompanied by the opening credits to a horror movie.”
“For you or the person who picks you up?”
“You’re hilarious.”
“You said that earlier. I think I might’ve missed my calling.”
A few moments later, he rattled the bag in his hand. “Peanut M&M?”
I eyed him sidelong before sticking out my hand. When nothing came, I glanced over again to find him angled in the seat, the bag tucked protectively against his chest. A smile spread slowly as he popped one of the candies in his mouth.
“You’re a brat, you know that?”
“It’s one of my superpowers. But keep that to yourself.”
The smell of chocolate filled the car, and Owen’s smile hung outlined against the backs of my eyelids as I turned back to the road.
A second later, he nudged the bag into my hand.
5:20:
“When’d you get all the ink?” I ticked my chin toward the whorls of color on his arm. There were birds and flowers, a few quotes in script, other symbols that were less determinable.
Owen blinked at me. “Are you actually asking me a question about myself and making conversation?”
“And regretting it already.” We’d been driving in silence for a while, listening to his playlist—which I had to admit was more than decent and filled with old classics mixed with newer stuff I liked just as much. The sky overhead had grown thick with clouds and twilight.
Owen gave me a sideways glance, almost coy, head tipped at an angle and a tousle of blond falling to one plane of his cheek. I fixed my gaze back on the road. Kid was a flirt in his own quirky way, and I didn’t need to be looking at him like that, feeling his gaze that deep in my core. It’d been happening all afternoon.
He leaned forward, wriggling out of his denim coat and tossing it to the floorboards.
“I didn’t get them all at once. Just added them over the years whenever I could afford it or had an in with someone. It’s what I remember most about my dad when I was little. The ink on his arms. And not that I ever want to be like him, but some things just stick with you, I guess. His were shitty prison tattoos, but…”
“What was he in for?”
“All kinds of shit, off and on. Mostly petty crimes. The longest stint was for car theft.” Owen shrugged when my lips set in a firm line. “I just thought it was a neat idea, I guess, to commemorate things on your skin. I moved around a lot. Got used to stuff getting lost, so when I turned eighteen, the first thing I got a tattoo of was this.” He pointed out an antique gold watch with a chain that wrapped around his wrist. “Supposedly it was my grandfather’s. My mom gave it to me. I don’t know what happened to it, but I remember playing with it a lot as a kid. And then one day it was just gone. I never found it, either. For all I know, my mom pawned it off. Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Either way, when I moved in with my grandma, it wasn’t with my stuff anymore. I was five, maybe.”
“And you remember it?”
“I remember a lot of stuff, yeah, but especially that watch. Now?” He lifted his forearms and turned them side to side for me to see. “Nothing gets lost.” A vibrant hummingbird shifted with the movement against the bouquet of music notes it suckled at, and a quiet ache stole through my chest.
The first fat flakes started falling near Brinkley, and as we passed beyond Little Rock, it got worse. Thick, pelting snow whirled around the truck and made the interstate a kaleidoscope of white, black, and red. I didn’t think it’d stick too long because the ground hadn’t gotten cold enough, but it was blinding and traffic slowed to a crawl. I sighed, inching forward another few feet and concentrating on the road ahead.
“Think we should just stop?” Owen wiggled around in his seat and leaned forward, staring out the windshield at the field of white interrupted occasionally by the red of taillights.
“Reckon so. I was hoping we’d get an hour or two farther in, but…” I shrugged, surprised the interstates hadn’t already been closed. The South wasn’t known for handling snow well.
Owen thumbed toward his window. “How about that exit? They’ve got some fast food and a… Motel 8?” He read off a big green sign that indicated an exit a mile ahead.
“Must be the redheaded step child of the Motel 6?”
“Or a cousin or something. The one you dread coming to Thanksgiving because they smell like pee and are always red-faced and snotty from crying over something.”
“What kind of Thanksgivings were you having as a kid?”
“I had a cousin just like that. God, he sucked. And he grew up to be such a dick, too.”
I pulled off on the exit, chuckling. “I swear you have a story for everything.”
The Motel 8 wasn’t a shithole, but it wasn’t a Marriot, either. Hell, it wasn’t even a Motel 6. I’d planned on getting Owen his own room, but all the other travelers going our way had the same idea we’d had. The motel was packed, and I’d been lucky to get one of the last rooms they had. The second counter clerk was turning someone away as I pocketed the key and ambled back toward the front entrance. That there was only a king bed was something I was gonna have to figure out. I reckoned I could sleep on the floor. Or better yet, Owen could.
As I exited the lobby, Owen came around the side of the building, cheeks glowing with the chill in the air and a big grin on his face. The ends of his hair were damp with snowflakes that crystallized and gleamed on his shirt. “They’ve got a little restaurant bar thing, too, and they’re doing karaoke tonight. We should totally go.”
“No.”
His smile pitched higher, damn him. “You’re looking at me like I just told you I’m into cannibalism. We have to eat at some point, and what’s wrong with karaoke?”
“Karaoke is a wart on the asshole of humanity.” It inevitably made me think of smoke-filled rooms that smelled like Jäger, and ear-gouging, heart-filled renditions of “Purple Rain” by people who thought louder was equivalent to better.
