Winter Love Songs

by Eliza Andrews

  “Melody texted you?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, she did,” said Julie. “I mean, we text a couple times every week. Not usually about you,” she added hastily.

  “You text every…?” My surprise had morphed into confusion. “Why?”

  “To confirm appointments, usually.” Julie paused. “I started training her and Andrew recently. She didn’t tell you?”

  My cousin, who, because I’d grown up with her, was more like a sister, and her husband, who was like my brother-in-law, were now the personal training clients of my ex-girlfriend. A barrage of questions came into my mind all at once: How long had Julie been training them? Why hadn’t Mel said something? Had they talked about me? Why did Melody text her a link to my EW interview? What had Julie thought about it?

  I stumbled through a response that managed to sound like I wasn’t shocked. “She, uh… I’ve been on tour most of the summer. We haven’t talked all that much.”

  “Oh,” Julie said, but I could tell by her tone that she was as surprised as I was that Mel hadn’t said anything. “Well… yeah, I’ve been working them out two or three times per week for a little while now.”

  “So…” I said, groping to find appropriate small talk when all I really wanted to do was break down and tell her how desperately I missed her. “Are they losing weight?”

  “She said she’s going out to visit you in August,” Julie said. “You can give me your verdict then, tell me if she should keep paying me.”

  God, I’d missed Julie’s voice. That cool, easy confidence that seemed so effortless for her. I used to fall asleep to that voice. To write music to that voice. To let the sound of that voice wrap around me like a safety net.

  I stopped pacing, sat back down at the desk. Small talk. I could manage small talk. I appeared on stage internationally and held small talk conversations with my audiences, didn’t I? Surely I could manage small talk with someone I’d known since middle school.

  “So who else are you training these days?”

  I’m not saying that I’m a saint

  I just don’t want to live that way

  No, I will never be a saint

  But I will always say

  3

  August: “Bad Romance,” Lady Gaga

  I sat down in the pool chair next to Melody, rubbing the sweating plastic bottle of cold water across my forehead before I twisted off the cap. She sunbathed beside me, overlarge sunglasses hiding most of her face. Her three kids — Max, aged eleven; Gigi, aged nine; and Thomas, aged six — chased each other in little dog paddling strokes around my infinity pool.

  I liked watching the kids enjoy themselves. I’d come to think of the pool as a decoration and had nearly forgotten it was something that one could swim in. The kids provided a contrasting, harmonic counterpoint to the deafening emptiness that normally occupied my house, and I reveled in their presence.

  I glanced over at Mel, trying to determine if she was awake or asleep. “So,” I ventured, “you look like you’ve lost weight.”

  She shifted, tipped her sunglasses up so she could look at me. “You really think so? I’ve gone down a dress size, but I don’t feel like it’s noticeable yet.”

  “I think it is. Have you been hitting the gym?”

  She flipped the sunglasses back down. “Kind of. Andrew and I hired a personal trainer.”

  “A personal trainer?” I said, feigning surprise. I chuckled. “In Calvin? I didn’t know there were any trainers so far out in the boondocks.”

  Melody hesitated. She would confess to me any moment now.

  “Technically, our trainer lives in Suwannee,” Mel said. “She makes a special exception for Andrew and me — drives all the way out to our house.”

  I gave a low whistle. “That’s some special exception. An hour round-trip for her.”

  “She’s… like family to us.”

  I hadn’t been angry before, but now I started to burn. Julie was like family to Melody? But I kept my tone cool and controlled. “Oh yeah? Anyone I know?”

  Melody took the sunglasses off and sat halfway up. She studied me for a second before she said, “Promise me you’re not going to flip out.”

  “Flip out about what? The fact that you hired my ex-girlfriend to train you? Or the fact that you’ve been keeping it from me?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “Hope. I wasn’t… keeping it from you, exactly.”

  “No?”

  “No. I just wanted to tell you in person, when I came out here.” Mel cocked her head to the side. “How did you know she was training us?”

  “We’ve been… talking again.”

  Melody sat up straighter. “You have been? Since when?”

  “Since a few weeks ago, when I first got home from my tour.”

  “Really.” Mel lifted both eyebrows. “Huh. Well, she didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Now you know how it feels.” I took a swig of water. “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  Mel glanced at the pool. “Gigi! Stop dunking your brother,” she called. “If he asks you to stop, you stop.”

  “Sorr - rrry,” Gigi answered.

  To me, Melody said, “I think you know why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to upset you. Especially not while you were on tour.”

  She lowered her sunglasses and laid back down on the recliner as if she was satisfied that the matter was resolved.

  But I wasn’t resolved. “Why would it have upset me to know that Julie was training you? I’m sure she’s good at what she does. I mean, you look great, Mel. Honestly.”

  Melody turned her head and studied me from behind her sunglasses for a long moment before speaking. “You said you’ve been talking with her since you got home?”

  “Yeah. Four or five times, I guess.”

  Six or eight times was more like it.

  Once Jules and I had gotten past the initial awkwardness of five years of silence between us, our old patterns had fallen into place with surprising ease. I called her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons around three, the sleepy, lazy, slow part of the day for me, the end of the work day for her. We chatted thirty or forty minutes each day, about everything and about nothing. She told me about her day, her clients, her efforts to open her own gym; I told her about my day, the songs I was working on, the concerts we were planning for later in the summer.

  It made me smile to think of her, but I hid the smile by drinking again from my bottle of water.

  “So I guess you already know about Karen, then,” Melody said.

  Karen?

  “Thomas!” Mel shouted suddenly. “Do not hit your brother.”

  I barely heard her. And when Max stuck out his tongue at his younger brother, it hardly registered.

  Karen?

  Mel turned back to me. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you I’d been working with Julie,” she said. “The last time you saw Jules with a girl… you kind of lost it for a while.”

  I waved a dismissive hand. “That was five years ago,” I said, as if those days were long gone. Those jealous, grieving days when seeing Julie with someone else reminded me of everything I’d lost. Everything I’d broken.

  But who was this Karen? And why hadn’t Julie said anything about her to me?

  Because she knew how you’d react, said a voice in the back of my head. Because she knows you’ve never been capable of being “just” friends. Not with her.

  Melody gave me a measured, thoughtful gaze. “Julie didn’t even look at anyone for a long time after you two stopped talking. Then she met Karen about… I don’t know, four or five years ago. They got married last year.”

  A high pitched scream came from the pool, and Melody was on her feet in a flash. “Thomas! What did I tell you? Get out of the pool this instant and go to time-out!”

  I drank the rest of my water.

  I didn’t call Julie the rest of that week. I told myself it was because Mel and the kids were in town.

  But on the Tu
esday after Mel left, I didn’t call her, either. Thursday rolled around, and when Julie called around three o’clock, I let it go to voicemail.

  Busy, I texted. I’ll try you next week.

  But next week came, and I didn’t call.

  Karen. Five years ago. Right about the time Julie had stopped talking to me.

  #

  “Here,” I said to the twenty-something girl we’d just hired as my latest personal assistant the week before. “Have more champagne.”

  We sat in a private corner of a hotel restaurant, the warm colors of mahogany and candlelight wrapping around us. I tipped more champagne into her flute without waiting for an answer, and she looked up at me with skittish, embarrassed eyes.

  Hazel eyes. Julie had hazel eyes.

  The girl’s name was Marissa. Twenty-three and only her second job out of college. She’d been a lucky find, highly recommended by a rich friend of mine who knew her rich father. The day after we hired her, I’d left for my next batch of summer concerts, and I brought Marissa with me. It was sink or swim for the kid, throwing her into the mix like that so quickly. But so far she’d been swimming instead of sinking, and I was impressed. That was why we were having dinner tonight — I was treating her as thanks for work well done.

  “You should have the rest,” she said, waving off the champagne bottle. Her cheeks were already flushed an apple-red from the champagne she’d drunk so far. “I’ve already had almost half the bottle.”

  I smiled. “And I had the other half. So we’re even.”

  We sat next to each other in a semicircular booth, and she was close enough that I could feel body heat coming off her in little waves. I patted her knee, then set my hand between us. Close enough that the rough fabric of her skirt brushed against my little finger.

  “You were telling me a story about your dad,” I said, reminding Marissa of the conversation from before the champagne interrupted us. “Why don’t you finish? I want to hear it.”

  “I don’t know why you’d be so interested in me,” Marissa said. “You’re the one who’s had a fascinating life.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “Is that right? What’s been fascinating about my life?”

  She gave me a look that bordered on incredulity. “Are you kidding? You’re Hope. The Hope.”

  “I’m not that special. I worked hard and got lucky. That’s all.”

  She shook her head forcefully. “No,” she said. She shook her head some more. “No, it’s more than that. You’re so talented. You know they call you the greatest talent of your generation, don’t you?”

  “Some people do,” I said, shrugging off the compliment. “Some people say I’m nothing more than the latest fad, someone in the right place at the right time with the right sound and the right look.”

  “Some people don’t know what they’re talking about,” Marissa said derisively. She shifted in her seat so she could face me, and with the hand that still sat between us, I felt the bare skin of her thigh rub touch my hand. “I didn’t tell you this before, because I didn’t want to go all fangirl on you, but… your first album? That was what made me fall in love with music. That was why I decided to work in the music industry.”

  She probably didn’t realize how many albums I’d put out before I ever signed with a major label. She was too young to remember the days of CDs, too young to imagine me burning copy after copy from my dusty old desktop computer, cutting out the jewel case album covers by hand. Too young to imagine me selling — or trying to sell — those albums out of a big plastic crate I carried with me to all of my shows.

  Too young.

  Too much champagne.

  My hand still touched her thigh, barely.

  I wondered with detached curiosity what direction this evening would take. But I had a hunch I already knew the answer to my own question.

  We chatted more; we ordered more champagne. She finished the story about her father, told me another one about her college boyfriend. She cried a little. I listened attentively, moved my hand to her thigh — a gesture of comfort.

  We changed the topic. We joked together. She didn’t need my comfort anymore, but I didn’t take my hand from her thigh. At one point, she shifted her weight, and the movement pushed my fingertips just beneath the line of her skirt.

  Marissa glanced down at the hand on her thigh, glanced back up and met my eye. She smiled — a shy, girlish thing.

  I leaned closer to her. My head swam with the pleasant buzz of my half of the champagne. “Can I change the topic and ask you a personal question, Marissa?”

  She took a moment to answer. “Of course.”

  “Are you sure? It’s pretty personal.” I liked doing this, drawing the moment out, building up the anticipation.

  “You can ask me anything,” she said, and it seemed she leaned closer to me, too.

  I lifted my hand off her leg, traced a light circle on her bare skin, just above her knee. “Have you ever been fucked by a woman before?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to be?”

  She gazed at me uncertainly. I might’ve been a little drunk, but I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t know what she was thinking. I knew she wanted me. But she was weighing her decision. Trying to decide if she should or shouldn’t.

  If she said yes, would I regularly demand sexual favors as a condition of her employment? Was there something undignified about sleeping with me, something that would cheapen her?

  Yet it was flattering and thrilling, wasn’t it? To be propositioned by the best-selling female vocalist since Lady Gaga? It would be a scandalous story she could tell her straight-laced, straight girlfriends while they whispered questions and gasped at her confession.

  Maybe I could make the decision easier for her, take away some of her worries.

  “I hired you for your brain, Marissa. Not your cunt,” I said quietly. And I meant it. “That’s not going to change in the morning. So it’s completely up to you. I’m only interested in a bit of fun. For both of us. Okay?”

  Marissa drew in a breath, held it a moment.

  I want your drama, the touch of your hand

  I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand

  I want your love

  Love, love, love I want your love

  “Okay,” she said. She let the breath out. “Okay,” she said again, this time with more conviction.

  I led her out of the restaurant and towards the elevators in the lobby, keeping enough respectable distance between us that any unseen paparazzi would only be able to snap a photo of Hope with her latest personal assistant, not her latest fling.

  Charles had been sitting a couple of tables away, and as we left, he followed at a discrete distance, disappearing without a word into his own suite once we reached the penthouse.

  He understood exactly what was going on. Marissa wasn’t the first assistant I’d hired who had hazel eyes.

  #

  It is a dangerous thing to have one’s every whim satisfied. It transforms a person into something insatiable, something always eating and never full.

  We didn’t even make it as far as the bedroom. We stumbled through the door to my suite and fell, rather than laid, onto the pristine, cream-colored sofa that dominated the anteroom. I knocked the remote control off the sofa with an irritated swipe of my hand, stripped off Marissa’s shirt and then my own and tossed them without caring where they landed. One shirt landed on the nearby coffee table, dangling off one corner, the other landed on a plush white-and-grey area rug. Everything in the suite was white or black or shades of grey, a cold advertisement of luxury that made the walls feel like they were closing in on me.

  Marissa provided just the splash of color I needed.

  She pulled me closer to her by the front of my bra, licked the top of my breast as soon as she got close enough.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that since the moment I met you,” she said. She was panting, breathless, like we’d taken the stairs instead of the elevator. “You
’re the first woman I ever fantasized about, ever since I — ”

  I kissed her hard to silence her, because I didn’t want to hear about her fantasies of Hope the musician, Hope the pop star. I had my own fantasies to focus on, one that involved the hazel eyes of a girl long gone, and I didn’t need Marissa to spoil it for me.

  I didn’t lay Marissa down onto the sofa just inside the entrance to the room; I shoved her. And for her part, she didn’t kiss me when I got close enough; she bit me. She bit my jaw, she bit my neck, she bit any patch of exposed skin she could find. She was moaning before my lips even made it to her body.

  “Jesus God,” she whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this turned on before in my life.”

  I kissed the space between her breasts, pulled down on the loose blouse and the bra beneath it until her nipples appeared.

  “That’s good,” I said, “because it’s about to get a hell of a lot better.”

  I opened my mouth wide, put as much of Marissa’s left breast into it as I could fit, and sucked and licked and sucked and licked. My right hand moved south, finding its way between her legs, up her skirt, moving there back and forth.

  Marissa addressed God, Jesus, and Christ so many times that I thought for a minute we might be at church.

  “Can I touch you?” I pressed my tongue into her ear.

  Marissa shivered beneath me. “Yes,” she breathed. “If you don’t touch me I think I’ll die.”

  She was already damp at the crotch of her underwear. I pushed the fabric aside, ran my fingers through her folds.

  I moved my lips down her jaw while my fingers slipped inside her.

  “I’m going to fuck your brains out,” I told Marissa.

  “Please,” she said between gasps. “Please do. Please fuck me.”

  I’d read somewhere that Lady Gaga said her song “Bad Romance” was about being in love with one’s best friend. That had happened to me once. But it was a long time ago, and I’d been wrong to think I could get her back.

  I didn’t have a best friend anymore. Charles, maybe. But what did it matter? Money paid for most of what I needed, including Charles. Fame fed the rest of my needs.