When my throat draws tighter, I know it’s not because I’m reliving sadness, trying to explain something I still don’t fully understand myself.
It’s because, for the first time I can remember, I feel a little less alone. And while I’m sitting with her, I know it isn’t going to last.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
My father’s sigh rumbles through the phone, and I can just imagine him pinching the bridge of his nose, leaning back in his oversized office chair in annoyance. The distinctive clink of ice against a glass tumbler accompanies his breathing, and a forlorn pang of nostalgia creeps up my chest, making me long for the days I’ll never get back.
Days spent watching him rule over New York City’s music industry as a kid, admiring him the way the ancients must have looked at their sun gods.
As if the horizon rose and set by his fingertips alone.
Days before he cheated on my mother, broke her spirit, and consequently left me to be the scapegoat. The reason he strayed.
Only to find out later that it was just because he was bored, and girls were easy.
At least, my ex was.
Days before I hated myself and tried to drown that hatred at the bottom of a bottle, or with razors, or eventually with music.
Music was the worst escape, I think. Use something as a distraction long enough, and it’ll dissolve into the stream of resentment along with everything else.
“You suddenly don’t want to clear your name?” my father asks, his tone pinched. “After you spent the last three years of your life obsessing over getting to do so?”
His words burn my throat, and I move out of my bedroom doorway where Riley’s sleeping—where she’s been sleeping all week, while we wait on the snowstorm to dissipate, so an HVAC guy can come fix her heat.
Like I’m suddenly the good guy in her story.
Probably not a great time to bring up that I cracked the heat exchange in her unit last week.
“I still want to clear my name. I just don’t want to drag her into it.”
Heading down the stairs, I situate myself on the sofa, dragging my guitar off the floor and into my lap. I pluck at the strings absently, waiting while he contemplates what I’m saying.
“Tell me you’re not fucking her.”
My hand freezes, C sharp echoing around me. “So what if I am?”
“So what if—” Exasperation colors his tone. “Do you understand how bad it looks for you to have been accused of sexual assault, not perform or do anything Aiden James related for years, and then when we reintroduce you to the world, you’re fucking the whore who tanked your career?”
“She’s not a whore.” I rub my hand over my mouth, violence pumping through me. “Call her that again, and I’ll fly back to the city just to knock your fucking teeth out.”
He scoffs. “If she’s convinced you to throw your entire life away, again, then I suppose she must be a fucking nuclear physicist. Christ Almighty, son, do you care about your life at all? Do you care about anything other than getting your dick wet?”
Part of me wants to refute his claims and tear into him for suggesting I don’t care about my own career. But it’s rich coming from him, so instead, I push to my feet and head to the small room off the kitchen, slowly opening the door.
I lean against the frame, letting his words rake over my skin and soak up the scene in front of me.
The items of clothing from my closet back home, all the scrap sheets of music and peppermints—empty and not—everything I’ve been hoarding for years, because of this obsessive fucking thought that they’d one day become important.
That I’d need them for something other than to scratch the weird itch in my brain.
Things I carry with me, like phantoms I can’t possibly get rid of, no matter how hard I try.
At the very back of the room, an emerald-green dress hangs over a painting, and I study those baby-blue eyes for so long, I almost forget I’m on the phone at all.
And I’m reminded of that night—the hope I felt, and how it was crushed the next morning. The time I spent in bed afterward, trying to garner up the courage to try, just one more time, to end my suffering.
The purpose I latched on to, my entire reason for coming to Lunar Cove, and how at odds it seems in the weeks since. How Riley’s managed to weasel her way into my blackened heart, confusing the shit out of me as she tries to mend the pieces she helped shatter.
“No, Dad,” I say finally, my eyes glued to her still ones across the room. “I don’t care about anything.”
38
“Here’s a hypothetical for you: on a scale from one to ten, how, um… deranged might one have to be in order to sleep with their stalker?”
The silence on Fiona’s end of the line is extremely loud—to the point that I have to pull the phone from where it rests on the edge of the bathtub and make sure I didn’t lose connection.
She’s got her camera propped up on my brother’s bed while she paints her toenails bloodred, a pink towel wrapped around her head.
“One million,” she says, dipping her brush back in its little bottle, before applying the second coat. “That’s some serious fucked in the head, back-alley kink shit.”
“Jeez, Fi, I didn’t take you as a kink-shamer.” Heat sears my cheeks, and I lower myself back into my bubble bath, letting the foam cover my chest and thighs.
“I’m not kink-shaming.” She pauses, glancing at the phone, cocking her head. “Am I? Is this hypothetical stalker, like, a role-play kind of thing?”
“Role-play?”
“Yeah, like the criminal and the victim? That kind of thing. I don’t personally know anything about it, but that seems like something my brother would be into.”
Probably because her brother is a criminal, but I don’t say that. I barely know the guy, anyway—odd, given that he’s Boyd’s best friend, but it’s not like he shares that part of his life with me.
Or any part, really.
My toes flatten against the tub tile, and I push thoughts of Boyd away. “If it’s not anything like that?”
“If it’s not…” Switching to her other foot, she sighs, seeming to roll her answer around in her head before speaking. “If it isn’t, then I stand by my previous judgment. Hypothetically, it sounds like you need therapy.”
Popping a pink bubble against her lips, she re-caps her nail polish and sticks her legs out, picking the phone up to recline on the bed.
“What brought that up, anyway? You’re not sleeping with anyone, are you?” Her brows raise, wrinkling her freckled forehead. “God, do you have a stalker? Please say no, or Boyd’s gonna freak—”
“I don’t have a stalker,” I say quickly, cutting her off just in case my brother’s lurking somewhere close by. Technically, it’s not a lie—Aiden’s been less of a stalker lately, and more like a vampire I let in once, who now refuses to leave.
In the days since we fucked in his living room, I’ve spent about every night with him. Partly because the heat in my cabin just got fixed today, but also because I’m learning I really like falling asleep wrapped up in him.
Waking up on his luxury silk sheets and smelling that spicy cologne of his gives me an immediate serotonin boost each morning, and selfishly, I’m ignoring everything that led up to this point in favor of those things.