Resonance, page 9
“Oh, it did. After that I listened to your two solo albums and loved them, too. Especially ‘Morning Call.’ That was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar. Of course, I don’t sing anything like you, but it’s the thought, right? I—” He snapped his mouth shut and flashed her another quicksilver smile. “It’s just really nice to meet you, is all,” he finished softly.
“It’s mutual.” She grinned and waved us inside, where we stood in the foyer, surrounded by rustic plank flooring probably reclaimed from somewhere suitably noteworthy. Another woman appeared, younger than Iona and wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee.
“I had Bridget make up a couple of beds for y’all. The rooms are close to each other. You’re welcome to anything in the house. I figured you could get settled and then I’ll take you down.”
“I can take our bags,” Owen jumped in, reaching for mine as he gave me a meaningful look. “I mean, if you wanted to catch up for a few minutes without me fanboying all over this nice foyer.”
I nodded as Iona chuckled.
“Don’t let the”—I struggled with a descriptor—“overabundance of him fool you. He knows his stuff.”
We both watched Owen and Bridget disappear down the hallway. Then Iona looked back to me, rubbing her lips together like she was spreading her lipstick around. “Trip good?”
“How’s Jacob?”
We spoke at the same time, then stalled out, waiting for each other until I prompted her to go ahead with a lift of my chin.
“He’s good. Wants to move to Nashville, of course. Be a star like his daddy.” She gave me a wan smile. “Y’all get caught in the snowstorm?”
“Sure did. Stopped for the night a little earlier than I intended. It was clear by morning, though. One of those whizzbang things that wallops without much muscle behind it.”
She nodded. “Glad it didn’t hold you up too much.”
We fell silent. Iona hugged her shoulders again, and this time I registered the gesture as discomfort rather than a reaction to the temperature. Her gaze fixed on something to my left, and after a moment, she said, “I’ve been wondering if I made a mistake asking you to do this for me.”
“Funny. I’ve been wondering if I made a mistake agreeing.”
“I know you’ll do a good job, though. Do it like it’s supposed to be done.”
“Gave you my word I would. I’m just surprised Ryder agreed to let me.”
“This isn’t a volatile divorce situation. It’s… just complicated, that’s all. But not vindictive.” A shade of regret passed through her eyes, and then she licked her lips and relaxed her arms. “Did you think about the cost any more?”
I waved a hand, glancing over the foyer, following the metalwork banister that curved gracefully around a staircase. “No charge. I’ll take enough to cover gas and the hotel last night. I don’t need anything more than that.”
“That’s not good business, Dan. You know I can’t let you do that.”
I shrugged. “That’s not your business. And it’s the way I want to handle it. Don’t like it, then we’ll turn around and go.”
“Always so goddamn stubborn.” There was that crackle and snap I remembered. It brought an unexpected smile to my face.
Ryder’s music collection comprised an open room the size of a three-car garage. Maybe larger, and it was practically its own museum. Glass-fronted display cases, plaques and memorabilia, a wide executive desk, behind which stretched a long bookshelf filled with wire-bound notebooks.
“Jesus, this is amazing,” Owen breathed out, starting to lean against a post before he seemed to think the better of it and straightened.
Iona smiled. “He likes things a certain way.” She angled toward me. “I can answer any questions you have. I remember the acquisition of almost everything, in case it matters. That section over there marked with yellow tape is mine.” She pointed it out. “It’ll need to be itemized on its own, I reckon.”
I nodded, unable to detach my gaze from the silvery coils of wire wrapping those notebooks on the shelves. Dozens of them. I’d left all but a few of them in Ryder’s care when we split. Somewhere in there was the song I’d written him.
Iona shifted on her feet. “He’d probably be happy to let you have some of those old notebooks back if you wanted them, you know?”
“I don’t.” Didn’t even want the possibility in the air. My voice snapped like a live wire, so I tacked on, softer, “I got the ones I wanted back then, is all.” I glanced aside at her, found her eyes glossy and brimming. I should’ve touched her, comforted her somehow, and I couldn’t make myself do it.
She inhaled and nodded. “I understand.”
Owen, god fucking bless him, took her hand. “We’ve got a plan, all right? We’re gonna start with the albums and then move to memorabilia, so could you show me where those are so I don’t get lost? You can stay in here with us if you want, and if you don’t, that’s fine, too. Dan gets all quiet when he’s concentrating on something, which is pretty boring, so I’d be happy to have someone to chatter with.”
That brought a smile to her face, but she shook her head. “I’ll leave you to it. Y’all have free range of the house, like I said. Make yourselves at home. I’ll be making supper, too. Would like if you’d eat with me”—she glanced at me—“but you don’t have to.”
“We will.” I nodded resolutely, dreading it already.
We spent the rest of the afternoon working through the collection. Ryder saved practically everything. We’d been similar that way. A lot of it held only sentimental value, but what was there was well organized and easy to move through.
“You okay?” Owen glanced over from some of the framed album release posters he was itemizing. We’d been at it for a couple of hours, and I realized the last hour or so had been silent between us, each engrossed in our work. My mind swam with the names of musicians, various songs tangling around each other like a jukebox skipping, and I was edgy, the last call of whiskey still faintly throbbing against my temples.
“Yeah.” My first instinct had been to snap out the word, like some animal with its leg caught in a trap, but the sympathy in Owen’s expression erased the instinct before it crossed my lips, and I found myself dully staring at him for a moment before I looked back down at the record in my hands. The one Ryder had released right after I’d walked away. It was a good album. It’d broken my heart all over again, but it was solid music. Lyrics he’d written all on his own. Good ones. “Ghost notes,” I murmured. And it was strange, but I could swear the stack of records in front of me still held Ryder’s scent.
I’d never really made room for anyone else after him. Ragequit the idea of love like an angry teen throwing the controller of a dumb video game. And some days I felt like I didn’t know how to get back. Didn’t know how to open myself up to it again. If I even wanted to. Or if I’d be any good for someone else. God knew I had my quirks. Bossy, opinionated as fuck, set in my ways. My life wasn’t unsatisfying, but I couldn’t ignore the sense of emptiness that crept over me sometimes.
“I hear them, too.” Owen gave me a smile so soft and warm and reverent that I knew he meant it.
CHAPTER 10
After dinner with Iona that night, which somehow managed to be both awkward and not, on account of Dan and Iona treating each other like each had a hot poker in their hand but were trying to be polite about it, I wandered through the house looking for him. He’d said he was going to his room, but when I checked a half hour later, he was gone. Iona and I had lingered in the dining room over a too-long, too-empty table, while she told me stories about her former music career like my own private insider session. I could’ve listened all night, but eventually she’d stood and started to clear plates, saying as I jumped up to help her, “Dan’s a good man. Always was.” I hadn’t known what to say to that.
The hallways were quiet and dark. No one was in the kitchen.
Finally, as I got to the end of another hallway, I heard a sound that led me to a partially opened French door. The scent of chlorine wafted toward me, and humidity enveloped me and made my forehead sticky as I stepped through the doorway to the indoor pool. I glanced up in wonder, jaw slackening. The ceiling was made of glass, the night sky a black backdrop for the rippling reflection of the water beneath. The lights were off except for those in the pool, some fancy ambient lighting system that morphed from purple to green to blue and back again. I’d never seen anything like it.
In the middle of that shifting color scheme, Dan floated on his back, staring up into the nothingness, goose bumps over his chest, his boxers plastered to the tops of his thighs, all of him outlined in wavering lines. I struggled to focus on his face.
Clearing my throat did nothing, but when I dropped to the edge of the pool and rolled my pant legs up, he took notice, shifting upright and shaking his head side to side to clear the water from his ears.
“Are we supposed to be in here?”
“She said make yourself at home.” He shrugged. “I get the idea it probably hasn’t been used in a while.”
I wiggled my toes in the water, then decided fuck it and stood to unzip my jeans. Dan looked away as I shucked my pants, which I was glad for since I felt self-conscious about my knobby knees in the face of all the meaty curves of his body. I eased into the water and then ducked under in one whoosh.
“So you’re one of those,” he said when I surfaced.
“One of what?”
“There are two kinds of people: the ones who jump right in and the ones who gradually ease in.”
I shrugged.
“I always thought it was kinda funny, because you’re getting wet either way, right?”
“Which kind are you?”
“I jump right in.”
My expression must have shown my surprise—I’d figured Dan to be the type to wade in slowly—because he grinned, then leaned back against the edge of the pool, ducking his shoulders under once before stretching his arms along the tile as he inclined his chin toward the roof.
“It retracts.”
I glanced up to the glassed roof panels, occluded by grime, impossible to see through with the light coming up from below.
“You’ve been here before.”
Dan submerged his shoulders, settled his head back against the tiles, and closed his eyes. “Once. A little after Ryder bought the place. We were still working out the details of the split on our albums. He added this immediately. A wedding gift to Iona, but it was really for him. He used to talk about it, saw an indoor pool in some movie mansion when he was a kid. It was an emblem to him. I never figured out if he was actually interested in seeing the stars or just what it meant that he could.” Dan’s mouth twisted briefly with something like hesitation and then relaxed. “Guess I could’ve had something like this if I’d stuck with it.”
“But would you have wanted it?”
He skimmed his palms over the surface of the water and looked around while I tried hard not to stare too long. He wasn’t hairy, not full-on bear, but there was a healthy representation of testosterone thick on his chest, slicked down by the water and laying dark and flat over his pecs. His nipples were tight and lighter by comparison. Most guys I knew shaved or waxed or were less hairy to begin with. I found those dark whorls of hair unexpectedly sexy.
“Hmm,” Dan murmured, his gaze sharpening on me so fast I wondered if I’d been caught staring before I realized he’d sort of drifted off and was now homing back in.
“Maybe,” he began, then paused again. “That first year we were playing it was all velocity. Breakneck speed trying to make a name for ourselves, and then when that happened it was on to the next goal and the next. And they switched, these goals; somewhere along the way it became a financial measure for Ryder.” He glanced around again. “Obviously.”
“But you?”
Dan shook his head. “I wasn’t sure what I was chasing. If it was the music or the success or the money or recognition. All of them? None of them?” He squeezed the ends of his hair, watched the droplets ripple through the water below. “Sometimes I thought maybe I wasn’t after anything at all, that I was just caught on the hamster wheel, pride and ego telling me more and bigger and no goddamn reason behind it aside from my own internal drive toward some invisible carrot stick I couldn’t understand. Success itself became the addiction, I suppose. Like booze. Like pills. The rock bottom for that is just harder to recognize than an alcoholic falling down on the street, I reckon.” He waded toward the stairs, laying one hand on the rail, then sat down on the top step, bending to cup some water, splash it over his face, and slick back his hair. “All of which made it easier when I decided to stop. Stop chasing. I wasn’t really that invested by that point. It was just ego. Got tired of that, too.”
I inched closer and rested my chin over my forearms on the edge of the pool, canting my head to see him. “You don’t feel like you gave up too soon?”
Dan chuckled, studying me sidelong. “I didn’t give up. I quit, and there’s a huge goddamn difference. People will say there’s not, but there is. Giving up, that sounds like an act of hopelessness. Quitting is a conscious decision.”
“And one that protects someone’s sense of pride, I guess. If they’re the type that thinks there’s a big difference between giving up and quitting.”
“Maybe so.” He stared at me another few beats, then stood, squeezing water from the bottom of his boxers and shaking it from the dark hairs on his legs. “Gonna warm up and go to bed. Good work today.”
Grabbing a towel off one of the hooks on the wall, Dan held it in one fist as he put his back to me and peeled his boxers down his legs with the other hand. God he had a nice ass, thick and sculpted, manly, like a rock-hard shelf over the backs of his thighs where the hairs lay down flat from the weight of water.
He eyed a panel outside of what looked to be a sauna, then fiddled with it a second, making adjustments before he flicked on the light and opened the door, disappearing inside.
I swam a couple of laps, trying to outrun the tingly feeling in my stomach, then gave up, floated awhile, and finally crawled out, too. I grabbed a towel, shucked my boxers, and headed toward the sauna. I’d never been in one before, but I’d seen plenty in movies. I’d always associated them with country clubs and gray-haired men with potbellies talking about golf stats and the stock market.
Inside was a two-tiered bench running along the back and side wall, and a stack of rocks to the left, banked in a wire cage along another wall. Dan sat on the lower bench, loose-limbed, arms stretched out behind him on the upper.
The scent of hot cedar proliferated and bathed me in dry heat. Rivulets of sweat streamed down the sides of Dan’s face, crawled over his neck, and skated down his torso.
He opened his eyes at my approach. “S’nice.” He pulled his arms into his lap to make room for me and then patted the bench beside him.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted, coming to a stop in front of him and tucking the end of my towel tightly around my waist. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, just that whatever it was made my heart thunder in my chest. “I can tell you’re hurting.” It was subtle, but I’d felt it emanating from him ever since we’d arrived. Not overpowering, but faint, like the breeze that remained after a big storm had blown through and moved on. A somberness that made him more withdrawn than usual.
Dan’s gaze focused sharply and suddenly on me. His mouth thinned as he pressed his lips together. “I’m not…” He shook his head and ran a hand through the ends of his hair, then along his jaw. “Yeah, it still hurts a little bit. All this time and it still fucking gets me. Not bad, not like I’m gonna die or crawl in a hole or anything. “
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Do you?” He studied me.
I expected some sort of skepticism, but he seemed to take my answer at face value when I nodded. And maybe I didn’t understand it exactly the same way he did, but I knew what longing and ache and disappointment and regret felt like. And I knew I was right about him and Ryder whether he wanted to admit it aloud or not.
Barely breathing, I reached down and when he didn’t stop me, took his hands and lifted them to rest on my waist. His fingers danced over the towel, rubbing against the plush cloth, then trailed up and down the sides of my thighs in a light caress.
“What are we doing here?” he asked, those lines tracing over the outer corners of his eyes as he looked up at me with his Big Dipper gaze, a molten warmth in it, an openness that I wanted to keep right there.
“Are you asking an existential question or a more immediate one?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Yeah. And I think you know the answer, too.” It had to be one of the oldest methods of diversion on earth.
Dan arched a brow, a smile hooking one corner of his mouth and fading slowly as I reached again and pulled his towel open. His cock lay thick and gratifyingly semi-erect along his thigh. The slow stroke of my hand over it made it twitch and jump in the air as he let out a soft, measured exhale. Placing one knee to either side of his thighs, I lowered onto his lap unhurriedly, brushing aside the ends of my towel to accommodate the spread of my legs.
Hands still on my thighs, Dan’s gaze went fierce and dark, but he spoke in a quiet drawl. “You wanna see if I know what to do with it? That’s what you said last night, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, a thrilling shiver running up my spine as blood rushed south. “Very fucking much.” I hesitated for a second before taking his chin in my hand and brushing my lips over his. A soft stroke side to side, not even really a kiss. He slipped his tongue out and ran it along my lower lip before clamping his teeth down on the tender skin until I tensed in his lap and let out a hissing breath. When he let go, I kissed him hard, forced his mouth open with mine, and sucked the tongue that barreled between my lips. Dan caught me by the throat and pushed me back, a savage kind of gleam in his eyes. “I don’t always play nice, kid.”
