His lips push forward, in an attempt not to smile. “Golf clothes are a mark of civility. If you were from a better family, you’d know this.”
“Wow,” I say, picking up a roll, fully prepared to pitch it at his head. “I can’t believe you went there.”
“I can’t believe you think lobbing food at me in the middle of The Four Seasons will prove me wrong.”
I close my eyes as I laugh, and when I open them, Six is standing at the head of the table.
“What did I miss?” he asks, and it feels as if I’ve been caught doing something I shouldn’t have, which makes no sense. Six would love a food fight in an upscale restaurant more than anyone.
“I was just saying you look like idiots in your golf attire.”
“Josh does,” says Six, “because he’s too fucking big and he has no tattoos.”
“Yes, he does,” I reply too quickly.
“One,” Six says. “On his arm. Big deal.”
Josh actually has two, but I say nothing, as I wouldn’t know about the other one if I hadn’t been watching him climb from the pool way too closely for the last several days.
“What are you going to do all day without me, babe?” asks Six, taking the chair beside me and wrapping his arm around my back.
Josh’s gaze freezes on that arm for a moment. A vein pulses in his temple. “You should work on your song,” he says, his eyes moving to mine.
Six frowns. “What song? She doesn’t write her own shit.”
I’m not sure why I was willing to let Josh know but don’t want to discuss it with the guy I’m actually dating. Who’s a musician. “Just something I’ve been playing around with,” I reply.
“Babe,” Six says with a laugh. “You don’t even play an instrument. Leave the songwriting to the pros.”
I feel something silvery and cold slide into my blood. He knows I started out performing my own stuff. With as little as we’ve discussed about our respective pasts, I know he’s heard this much, and he’s either forgotten or just feels this strange need to take me down a peg, to put me in my place. And I suspect I know which it is.
“I could play guitar and piano before I could read, as a matter of fact.”
“So eleventh grade?” Six cracks. It’s mean. It hurts. But my first thought is Don’t overreact.
Stop being so dramatic my mother must have said a thousand times, whenever I was upset about something Richard or his father had done.
But Josh has gone perfectly still, like a snake about to strike. I’ve never seen him so furious, which tells me my anger and pain might not be an overreaction after all.
“I know you didn’t just say that to her,” Josh snarls. His hand is gripping the coffee cup so hard he risks crushing it.
“Settle down. It was a joke,” says Six, turning to me. “But babe, lots of people claim they can play, but that doesn’t mean they can actually play. So you see where I’d have to call you out a little.”
I climb to my feet. Beth and Jim are approaching, but I’m too furious to stop myself. “I actually play as well as you do,” I reply. “And by the way, I’ve never seen you play an F chord correctly live. Not once.”
And with that, I march away from the table. This is normally the point where I’d worry I’ve gone too far, but Josh’s reaction to what Six said is burned in my brain—like he simply couldn’t believe the words he was hearing. It leaves me wondering if maybe I haven’t gone far enough. If maybe I’ve been letting a lot of people walk on me for a very long time, because the worst things they say about me aren’t nearly as bad as the things I say about myself.
So I’m going to let myself stay mad a while longer. And the only thing to do in the meantime is get out one of Six’s precious guitars, which he never tunes right, and write my fucking song.
I’m at the beach that afternoon, half-asleep, when I hear the sound of a towel unfurling beside me.
Josh, out of his dumb golf clothes. Shirtless. Bare skin, for a moment, is all I seem to see. He’s so chiseled that his abs look like boulders stacked one atop the other with a perfect line running straight to his navel, and below it, leading to that small happy trail I’d love to…Gah. Stop, Drew, for the love of God, stop. I roll over and turn to face him, but I try to keep my gaze north of where it was.
“How mad is your brother?”
Josh shrugs. “He was pretty mad this morning, and then he got drunk while golfing, and I imagine he’s sound asleep in your room and will have forgotten by dinner.”
My lips press together and I squeeze my eyes shut. “I shouldn’t have said it,” I say softly. “I do that—get my feelings hurt and lash out. Which might have something to do with the fact that none of my family is currently speaking to me.”
“Did you call them all raging cunts?” he asks with half a smile.
The breeze picks up and I pull my baseball cap lower. “Basically.” I blow out a tired breath. “I’ll apologize to him.”
He runs his hands over his head as if he’s frustrated. I’m momentarily distracted by the pulse of his tricep. “Don’t. He can be jealous of your career and your fame all he wants, but he doesn’t get to speak to you like that. He doesn’t get to belittle you. Ever.”
I laugh. “He’s not jealous. He just has no respect for my career, and I can’t even fault him for it when I don’t respect it either.”
“He wants what you have,” Josh says. His head turns toward me. “I can’t imagine why, because until you dyed your hair and got a little privacy, your life looked miserable, and I imagine it will go back to being miserable. But it’s definitely what he wants. And you take way too much shit from people.”
I frown. Josh would never say that if he spent a moment with me around my family. “I don’t really see myself as taking shit from anyone.”
“You take it from him,” he says. “At that party last summer, a friend of my dad’s asked for an autograph and Six said something shitty about it, something totally demeaning, and you just laughed.”
Look at her rack, is what he said. If you want to know what it takes to be famous in this country, I offer you exhibit A and exhibit B. And yes, I laughed. He was joking, mostly, and it wasn’t entirely untrue. I’m not about to delude myself into thinking I got where I am based on talent alone.
“He was just drunk. He makes stupid, tactless jokes when he’s drunk. The nice thing about your brother is that he doesn’t give a shit about my money, or my fame, so when he’s nice…I get to know he means it. And I’d like to point out that you’re the one who convinced me to stay on this trip yesterday.”
He blows out a breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I know. And I shouldn’t have. You deserve someone who worships the ground you walk on, Drew. Someone you can lean on. Who cares more about your happiness than his own.”
I swallow. I’m not sure what he’s describing exists, and it hardly matters, because I don’t want it anyway. Life is easier when you don’t entirely depend on another person for anything, when you hold a little back.