Resonance, page 8
I tried to chase him as he leaned back, but I could see the haze clearing like clouds parting after a microburst.
He shook his head. “It’s not a good idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea. Who fucking cares? I’m horny, you’re horny, let’s do this.”
“I’m your boss, and we’re both drunk.”
“Speak for yourself,” I protested, but knew it was a lost cause. Didn’t mean I’d give up, though. “You don’t need to be sober to hook up. In fact, I’d argue this is the better situation since I might actually have a shot at lasting longer than a half second, because let me tell you…” I stopped midsentence and clapped a hand over my mouth, and then narrowed my eyes at him, shaking a finger at the dawning humor in his eyes. “You know what? No, you don’t get the flattery if you’re not offering the goods.”
“So you’re gonna withhold compliments because I’m trying to make the smart choice here? Is that the size of it?” His grip on me loosened, and then fell away altogether.
“I don’t know the size of it yet, because you’re holding out like a prim old Victorian lady.” Okay, maybe I was pretty hammered, but it wasn’t like I was comatose. I was definitely capable of consent.
“It’s a solid piece. How about that?”
I just bet it was. Something about Dan had me of two minds about him. On the one hand I could see him being gentle and attentive and on the other, merciless and rough. Both possibilities excited the hell out of me. The prospect of sex with him was like my own personal Forrest Gump box of chocolates; I had no idea what I’d get, but it was chocolate either way.
“So you say.” I shrugged and examined my hands. “’Course ‘solid’s’ not much good if someone doesn’t know what to do with it.”
Dan shocked the hell out of me by laughing outright. Loudly, too. “Shit. I’ll give you points for trying, but it’s not gonna work.”
I huffed in frustration, sliding off the dresser and straightening my clothes as Dan ran a hand over his mouth, then through his hair, and eyed me thoughtfully until I said, “What?”
He canted his head. “I don’t know. Just wasn’t expecting all that out of you.”
“Really? Even after that night outside the club?”
“That’s not what I—never mind.” He waved his hand and went to pick up his boots, setting them neatly alongside his duffle bag. “Gonna take a shower.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” I let the sarcasm slather thick over the words, and he laughed again. He peeled his shirt off and didn’t seem to care that I was staring. Of course, what else could he do? Tell me to stop? He’d just had his tongue in my mouth while his cock ground against mine. I figured I’d earned that liberty, and I wasn’t entirely sure that extra roll of his shoulders that conveniently contracted his abs wasn’t for my benefit. Tease. He sauntered into the bathroom and shut the door, and as soon as I heard the shower turn on, I unzipped, grabbed a tissue, sat on the end of the bed, and took care of myself lickety split. Totally not the happy ending I’d been hoping for.
By the time Dan emerged in a cloud of soap-scented steam, I was picking a couple of pillows off the bed and tossing them onto the little pallet I’d made in front of the TV from an extra set of sheets and a blanket I’d found in the closet. The blanket was more fuzz pills than actual fluff, but at least it smelled clean.
Dan rubbed the ends of his hair with a towel, and I fussed with the blanket some more so I wouldn’t be tempted to keep staring at his chest. The chest I’d been touching a half hour before. The one I’d gotten denied touching anymore.
Didn’t that qualify as cruel and unusual punishment somewhere?
“Gonna take the floor, then, huh?”
“Looks like it. Concession to old age and all. Can’t have you waking up stiff tomorrow. Or any stiffer than you already are.” I smiled to myself and glanced up for the waft of soap that tickled my nose as he walked past.
“Uh-huh.”
He watched me a moment longer, one hand on his hip, the other stroking lightly over the hair on his pecs. Then he sighed and pulled back the covers on the bed before making an impatient gesture. “C’mon, then. You don’t need a stiff neck, either. We’ve got a lot of shit to get through tomorrow.”
“I was just messing around. I don’t mind sleeping on the floor. Promise. I’ve done it plenty of times before.” I’d long learned to make friends with hard floors and a couple of blankets. I could just call it nostalgia.
But he kept on staring at me—not exactly impatient, just firm—until I picked up the pillows, tossed them back on the bed, and crawled in after them. Screw nostalgia.
The mattress sank as Dan sat down on it, then twisted the switch on the lamp. Darkness fell swift and thick. The bed squeaked as he got settled and let out a long breath. A faint tinge of whiskey filtered through my next inhale.
I laced my arms behind my head, a smile spreading over my lips as a faint sense of vertigo tilted the edges of my vision. “What happens if someone tries to cuddle you? Do you have a perimeter alarm? Do you zap people when they get too close with affectionate intent? Ohhh, how about a force field? That would be awesome. Like, people just bounce off of you?”
Dan groaned. “Are you kidding me right now? Go to sleep.”
Squishing the lumpy pillow under my head, I rolled onto my side. Dan’s profile was rimmed in the yellow glow of light seeping in from a crack in the curtain. “But seriously, do you even cuddle?”
“Try and find out.” His murmur was drowsy and muffled, and I was just tipsy enough to think that was a fine idea.
I reached across the mattress and had barely skimmed my hand over what I thought was his arm when…
“BZZZZT!”
“Jesus!” I snapped my hand back as my heart thundered. I’d been prepared for grousing or for him to swat me away, but not him actually playing into it.
Dan’s laughter boomed off the walls around us, hearty and humored and so fucking smug. I sulked for all of a second before I joined in.
We tapered off gradually and then he sighed. “Fuck, I shouldn’t have had that last whiskey. Now go the hell to sleep.”
CHAPTER 9
For as jackrabbit-mouthed as Owen tended to be, he didn’t say squat the following morning about the night before, just prattled on about this and that over breakfast and then continued on in the truck as if it’d never happened.
There was one moment when he looked over at me, caught me eyeing him, really, and I’d thought for sure he was going to mention it. But he merely arched a brow like that was going to be his only comment before he went back to fiddling with his phone. I was the one having a hard time wrapping my head around that kiss. It hadn’t been tired fumbling, false enthusiasm, or like an unavoidable prelude to sex. There was boundless energy in it, a magnetic pull to the sensation of his mouth on mine.
I got my rocks off about as much as I wanted, and I didn’t have too much trouble finding something to satisfy me. When I wanted a man, I tended to go for good ol’ boy types who liked it hard and fast, who’d give me some lip before I shoved my cock in their ass and shut them up. On occasion, a guy who’d do the same for me.
Getting starry-eyed over the bright-eyed twink staring out the window of the passenger side, who I saw and interacted with day in and day out, and who I might possibly have to let go at some point if I couldn’t keep my shops afloat, wasn’t on my life agenda—even if it’d been about the hottest kiss I’d experienced in years. I was trying to simplify, not complicate. So when he wriggled around in his seat and my first thought was how that’d feel on top of me, I spent the next handful of minutes searching for some conversation topic to distract me. Until he did it for me. And a damn fine job of it, too.
“You ever gonna tell me the story of why you walked away? Does Ru know?”
“Ru knows better than to ask.”
Owen didn’t back down, though. The silence that stretched was like a fist to my temple. Goddamned whiskey. “Probably not,” I said eventually. My first answer, the pat one, followed by the second pat answer: “I was burned out, that’s the gist.” It rubbed elbows with the truth.
I felt his gaze on my profile, pensive and assessing. He was an excitable loudmouth, but I’d known from day one he was smart, too. Observant, thoughtful, always absorbing his surroundings. He knew our inventory at the shop probably as well as I did, and more than once I’d overheard him and Ru going on about some album or other, debating the mechanics and sound so heatedly I wondered why he hadn’t put himself through a trade program and tried to get himself into the industry on the production side as much as he loved breaking a song down to its tiniest parts.
“Is it true you and Ryder wrote lyrics back and forth, literally line for line?”
I threw a sharp glance his way, a phantom pain trying to sear through my abdomen. That was old shit, I reminded myself. Over and done with. It was just that no one brought it up these days. I could’ve lied to his face or gotten gruff and closed the conversation, but when I opened my mouth, slivers of truth came out instead. “Mostly. We had a notebook we’d trade back and forth. Leave it lying around and someone’d write something down, the other would come back and add to it. Or sometimes we sat there together and did it, passed it between us or talked it out. I liked collaborating like that, feeling like it was a joint effort. We fought like fuckers about shit, too, but we wrote well together.”
Owen smiled wistfully. “Sounds nice. I’d like to do that sometime.”
“Don’t. Write your own shit, and don’t ever be beholden to someone else.”
“Whoa there, Buddha. Don’t go Nietzsche on me. Lotta people do the same.”
Owen got away with stuff like that, saying shit that’d probably make me snap at someone else and when he said it, made me self-conscious of being an obstinate ass.
“True words,” I agreed as he gave me a half turn of a smile that kept my own on my face. “But like I said, I burned out after a while.”
“Mm-hmm.” When I glanced over again, his gaze had drifted back to the window, and he was twisting a little pendant lying on his chest that I’d noticed last night. “You did that solo album, though,” he mused. “After y’all went your own ways or whatever. It was good. Then you just stopped.”
I rubbed my lips together, felt the tops of my teeth biting into the tender lining. Every word I’d written on that solo album had felt hollow. Every note echoed meaninglessly. It was a decent album, but the music was dead to me. “That was me being a dramatic little bitch, a tantrum because…” I thought about how best to neatly encapsulate my tangled history with Ryder.
“You were in love with him.” Owen glanced over at me as my mouth fell open, then quickly cut his gaze back toward the window. “I know all the rumors obviously. Everyone buys into them, feeds into the enigma or whatever. And there’s just enough out there to make us assume that it’s the old standard: someone wanted a solo career or to branch out. That y’all were fighting over Iona. That’s the one I hear most—a woman broke you apart. But I’ve never thought that was it, ’cause see the thing is, I know your music. I know every album y’all put out. I didn’t find ’em ’til I was sixteen, but man I loved them, pored over them. Old interviews, liner notes. Everything double credited, except that one song on the third album.”
Caught off guard, my heartbeat stuttered.
Owen dragged a finger down the windowpane. “It’s the best one on the album, in my opinion. Got looked over a lot.”
The road ahead of me blurred into asphalt shades of gray and yellow, and I remembered it clear as anything, clear as yesterday, sitting at the little table of our tour bus. Ryder still asleep in the back. Pavement humming beneath us, miles of road all around us. I’d had a cup of cold coffee next to me, his taste still in my mouth, a pen in my hand.
We’d argued when it came time to list the credits. I wanted to double credit it like we always did. Ryder wanted it to be single credited.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“Because it’s from you to me,” he’d replied.
It’d sounded romantic then. Sometimes I wondered if he’d had some idea of what was to come. Some idea that we wouldn’t be forever. I hadn’t. It seemed unnecessarily cruel now, and Ryder wasn’t a cruel man. A lot of fucking other things, but never intentionally cruel.
My vision righted, the road coming back in hard lines, straight and narrow. Reliable. There’d been a time in my life when the road was all I saw. There was comfort in a long road. A steadiness. An endlessness. Sometimes, I missed it. But not enough to ever go back to it.
“I was only twenty-two,” I said, as if that was some kind of answer while I shifted around in the driver’s seat. But Owen caught my drift, I guess.
He pulled on a strand of hair, dragging it across that pretty mouth as he nodded. “Seemed big, though, I guess.”
“Huge.”
He nodded again, just once, and went back to staring out the window.
Ryder and Iona’s place was set off a highway just outside of Fayetteville. I’d been once and seen it in various magazines a half dozen times over the years. The entrance was familiar, though the trees had grown tall, lofting above the drive and spreading in an elegant welcome to their farmhouse spread on steroids. They had horses, a working farm that they themselves didn’t work. Somewhere in the sprawl was a bowling alley. An indoor pool. I remembered studying the pictures in a magazine, thinking maybe I hadn’t known Ryder as well as I’d thought. He’d never been extravagant with me. But maybe that’s what happened when you got wealthy beyond belief and there wasn’t any reason not to have any damn thing you wanted. I’d felt the bitter sting for a long time, but as I pulled down that driveway, it didn’t hit exactly the way I expected it to. Instead, through a vague sense of sadness, I found myself watching Owen, curious what his reaction would be.
The snow was no more than a fringe of white on the grass, and Owen cracked his window, drawing in a deep lungful of chilly, pine-scented air as I guided the truck slowly up the drive.
“What do you think, Sidewinder?”
“Sidewinder, huh?”
“You were wiggling all over that goddamn bed last night.”
“I don’t know how you noticed, taking up two-thirds of it. It was like sleeping with an ogre.” His lips quirked as he looked back out the window. “It’s my first time in Arkansas. For some reason, every time I go to a new state, I think it’ll smell different. Like there’s this clear scent boundary for different places.” He glanced my way and gave me a self-conscious smile. “I know that sounds dumb. One of those childhood things that carried over, I guess. But sometimes I think it’s real. Texas, for instance. Smells like sun and dust. And Tennessee, pungent green and dark soil, like the loose kind you put in a flower bed.”
“Yeah?” I was kinda charmed by the oddity of it. “So what’s the verdict on Arkansas, then, Mr. Oenophile of geography?”
Owen grinned. “Not sure yet. Something like tall grass, and there’s a little bit of pine scent and wet dirt.”
Smelled like regret to me. Regret I hadn’t told Iona to find someone else, because as we got closer to the house, I didn’t feel like I had any business being here, touching all of Ryder’s shit, being dragged down a dusty memory lane treacherous with potholes I’d forgotten the locations of.
“You have a smell, too,” Owen mused. “I mean, everyone does, obviously, but maybe no one pays attention to it the way I do.”
“Why do you pay so much attention to it?”
Owen twisted in his seat to face me, pensive for a moment, then shrugged. “I always have. My first memories are smells. I can still remember the smell of this blanket I loved as a kid and dragged around with me everywhere.”
“Very Linus of you.”
He snickered. “I know. I wore it down to a nub, and the scent wasn’t even all that nice in between it getting washed, but it smelled like mine.” He fiddled with a strand of hair, rubbing the golden sheen between his fingertips. “Ru smells like cedar and mint, Ivy’s like coffee grounds and cinnamon.”
I quirked a brow. “And? Who else gets their own scent?”
“See, you’re into it now, dying to know what I’ve assigned you.” He laughed. “Oh yeah, look at you trying to fight it, Mr. Cool, playing casual.”
“Nah. I had an itch.” I rubbed a thumb over my jaw demonstratively.
“Mm-hmm. Well, I’m not gonna tell you now.”
“I’m sure that’s my loss,” I deadpanned, and shifted the truck into park at the top of the drive.
Iona emerged on the front stoop of the large farmhouse as Owen and I got out and stretched. They’d added on since the last People spread. There was now a meeting of modern and classic in the glass-and-wood wing that stretched off one side of the house, somehow seamlessly incorporated with the rest of the structure.
Iona, too, had changed, had grown softer in the decade plus since I’d last seen her. More flesh to her cheeks, evidence of Botox in the smoothness of her forehead. But still as beautiful as she’d always been.
She lifted a hand to us, then wrapped her arms tightly around her shoulders as we retrieved our bags and headed toward her.
“Been a while, stranger.” She greeted me with a smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes. It tried, though, same as mine.
“A little bit, yeah.” I set down my bag, and we did an empty shuffle of social politics before seeming to silently agree on a stiff hug. She patted my shoulder a couple of times before stepping away, her gaze flitting to Owen.
His eyes were bright as he pumped her hand vigorously. “It’s such an honor to meet you. When you did ‘Southern Cry’ with Ryder… I mean Mr. Preston… it was so great. That big soaring chorus and the almost raspy-sad quality of your voice, it just… wow. It was golden. A perfectly golden sound. Like light made into song—except that doesn’t really happen, I guess.” He glanced down and let go of her hand with a self-deprecating laugh, while I drew in a long breath and held it to keep my mouth shut.
Iona glanced over at me, eyes twinkling, before looking back at Owen. “I’m honored it made such an impression on you.”
