by Jae
“So what if it is? You don’t know anything about me. Did it ever occur to you that I have my reasons for not wanting to stick around? What makes you think you can judge me?” Leo thumped her fist against the middle console. She was shouting at the top of her voice now, even though her manager would have told her to cut it out. Shouting could harm her voice. But to hell with Saul. And to hell with Holly too. If she wanted to shout, she would, goddammit.
“I wouldn’t need to judge you if you finally got your head out of your ass and got over whatever it is that irks you about this town or your parents!”
“My relationship with my parents is none of your damn business!”
“The hell it isn’t! Your parents are good people. They deserve better than having to find out what’s happening in your life through the tabloids because you never visit. You never call.”
“Why would it even matter to you?”
“Because…” Holly blinked as if she hadn’t seen that question coming. “Because I care, dammit!”
That shut Leo up, but only for a moment. Her manager and her ex-girlfriends had said the same thing, but most often, it turned out that all they cared about was her money and her fame. Why would Holly be any different? She was after something; Leo just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.
“I care enough about your family to have been at your grandfather’s funeral last year—unlike you,” Holly added.
“I was in the middle of a concert tour in Australia. What was I supposed to do? Cancel it?” This time, it was Leo who sprayed Holly with droplets of water when she wildly shook her head. “It wouldn’t have done my grandfather any good. I get that you think I’m an egotistical bitch, but people depend on me. My band, my manager, the crew, the label, my fans… I can’t just drop everything and cancel a tour willy-nilly.”
“Willy-nilly?” Holly blew a drop of water off the tip of her nose. “It can hardly be called willy-nilly if you’d wanted to be there when your grandfather died or when your father had his first stroke.”
Another lightning bolt flashed, and Leo felt as if it had hit her right in the chest. She gripped Holly’s hand, which was resting on the middle console. “W-what did you just say?”
Holly stared down at the hand on hers. “I know it’s not really my place to—”
“No.” Leo cut her off with an impatient wave of her free hand. “Did you just say…this wasn’t the first stroke my father had?”
Thunder crashed. Holly’s forehead creased into a frown. Her lips moved, but Leo couldn’t understand a word.
“What?” she shouted.
“No, it wasn’t,” Holly said so quietly that Leo could hardly hear her, even though the thunder had faded away. “Didn’t you…didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know a goddamn thing!” Because I never visited. I never called. Guilt penetrated the armor of her anger, but she shook it off. The phone worked both ways. Her mother could have called her at any time. “When…when did that happen?”
“Last year in the spring. It was a mild one, compared to the stroke he had in May. He had some physiotherapy, and I came in a few times a week to help him with his exercises, and he seemed to fully recover.”
Leo sank against the back of the passenger seat and stared straight ahead, through the windshield. Outside, the rain became lighter and the thunder stopped. A ray of sunshine broke through the dense bank of clouds. Jesus. She’d had no idea.
“Leontyne,” Holly said quietly. “Leo…”
Leo didn’t turn her head to look at her. “Just drive.” After a second, she added, “Please.” She realized she was still clutching Holly’s hand and quickly let go.
Holly turned the key in the ignition. The engine came to life, along with the radio. She switched it off, and they made their way home in silence.
Chapter 4
When Leo marched into the kitchen, her mother did a double take. “Oh my God, Leontyne! You are soaked to the bone!”
Water dripped from Leo’s hair and clothes onto the kitchen floor, but she didn’t care. “Why didn’t you tell me Dad had a stroke last year?”
A wooden spoon slipped from her mother’s hand and clattered to the floor. “I…I… Please don’t be angry. It wasn’t anything like this one. They only kept him in the hospital for a few days. There was no need to upset you.”
“No need? I’m your daughter!”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“It’s not like I can do much now either. I still would have liked to know.”
The phone started to ring, and her mother picked it up quickly, as if she was glad to escape the discussion. “Oh, hi, Julia.” She flicked her gaze toward Leo. “Um, yes, she’s here. Oh. That’s a wonderful idea, but you’ll have to ask her.” She held the phone out to Leo and whispered, “It’s Julia from the mayor’s office. They heard you’re home and would like you to sing at the county fair. Wouldn’t that be—?”
“Tell her no.” She was here to escape, not to give more concerts. “I’m going upstairs to take a shower.” Without waiting for her mother’s reply, she stalked out of the kitchen.
Everyone and their dog was calling her, yet her mother couldn’t manage to pick up the phone to let her know her father had suffered a stroke.
No wonder Holly had acted so judgmental. She had assumed Leo had known and not cared enough to come home.
It rankled her that Holly would think that, but at the same time, she couldn’t help being impressed with her. Back in New York—in any city anywhere in the world, really—people fawned over her and fell all over themselves to please her. Holly’s down-to-earth bluntness was refreshing. Maybe, just maybe, Holly really was who she appeared to be, someone who wanted to help without any ulterior motives. She certainly wasn’t a starstruck groupie; that much was for sure.
By the time Leo had showered and changed, she had calmed down a little, but she still wasn’t in the mood to go downstairs and face her mother or the callers who all wanted something from her—or rather, from Jenna.
She stepped up to the bookcase and ran her index finger over the top shelf. No dust. Her mother had gone out of her way to make her feel at home here, but Leo was too angry with her to focus on that right now, so she randomly picked books off the shelf to distract herself.
A hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Tattered paperbacks of Tipping the Velvet, Stoner McTavish, and other lesbian novels. She had bought them in a bookstore in St. Joe and displayed them proudly, knowing her parents wouldn’t recognize those titles as lesbian.
Next to her copy of Tina Turner’s biography, she came across her old high school yearbooks. She slid her senior yearbook off the shelf, sat cross-legged on the bed, and leafed through it.
Her senior picture made her cringe. Good thing she had a stylist and a hairdresser now.
The text beneath her headshot said she had been voted most likely to succeed. She traced the line of words with her fingertip. Guess they were right. Back then, she would have given anything to achieve fame as a singer, but now that she had it, she felt as if she had lost herself in the process.
Sighing, she thumbed through the rest of the yearbook, in search of Holly’s picture. She was only a few years younger than Leo, so she had to be in there somewhere.
The headshots of the underclassmen were smaller and arranged in alphabetical order within each grade. There she was, in the freshman section.
Holly’s hair had been longer and more reddish than auburn, pulled back into a ponytail, but the look in her startling blue eyes was the same. She was smiling into the camera, and the dimples framing her lips made her seem friendly, even a bit mischievous, as if she was about to crack a joke. At the same time, she somehow appeared to be above all the high school drama. In an X-Files T-shirt, she clearly hadn’t dressed up for photo day.
Leo leafed through the grou
p photos of various sports teams, the drama club, and the school’s jazz band. Holly hadn’t been in any of those. Had she been an outsider, like Leo?
A knock on the door made her flinch. She quickly closed the yearbook and slid it beneath the blanket before taking a deep breath, preparing to face her mother and have a more civilized talk. “Come in.”
Holly opened the door a few inches and peeked in, wanting to make sure Leo was decent before she entered. No sense in repeating that little encounter in the bathroom, just in reverse.
Leo sat cross-legged on the bed. Her hair, still slightly damp, fell to her shoulders in untamed waves. With her long, elegant limbs and her golden tan, she resembled a lioness.
Shaking her head at the strangely poetic thought, Holly opened the door more fully. “I’m about to go home for the day, but first I wanted to…um… Can I come in for a minute?” This was something that she didn’t want to talk about in passing.
Leo unfolded her legs and put both feet on the floor. “Sure. Come in and have a seat.”
Her wet clothes were draped over the only chair in the room, so Holly had to perch on the foot of the bed. A hard corner dug into her butt. Frowning, she reached beneath the blanket—and pulled out a thin hardcover. It was a high school yearbook.
“Um, I was just…uh, looking at some old pictures.” A flush climbed up Leo’s throat and into her cheeks.
Holly couldn’t help grinning. Leontyne Blake, stammering and blushing like a teenager. It was almost cute. The thought gave her pause. Oh no. You know better than this. Thinking people are cute usually leads to wanting to date them, and that leads to them wanting sex. She wouldn’t go down that road again—and certainly not with Leo. But somehow, it had been easier to ignore Leo’s good looks when she’d been angry with her.
Not that she wasn’t still angry. She was, but now she was beginning to realize that maybe things weren’t quite as black-and-white as she had believed. Maybe she had misjudged her.
Leo sat at the other end of the bed and watched her curiously. Her blush slowly faded away. “So? You wanted to talk or something?”
“Um, yeah. I…” Holly glanced down at the golden numbers embossed on the cover of the yearbook. “I wanted to apologize.” She looked up. “I thought you knew about your father’s first stroke. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.” Leo opened her mouth to say something, but Holly held up her hand. “To be completely honest, I still think you could have called or visited a little more often. But I’m your father’s nurse, so it’s not my place to tell you off the way I did. That was completely unprofessional.”
Now Leo just stared at her without saying anything.
“You know, this is the place where you either say ‘I accept your apology’ or ‘Go to hell.’”
A smile tugged on the corners of Leo’s lips. She shook her head, a pensive expression on her face. “I just don’t get you.”
“Is that the ‘I accept your apology’ or the ‘Go to hell’?” Holly asked.
Leo’s smile blossomed into a full-out laugh. “I accept your apology.”
The tension fled from Holly’s body. She blew out a breath, only now noticing how much it meant to her. “Thank you.” She put down the yearbook and stood.
The rich voice with the smoky edge Leo was famous for stopped her before she reached the door. “I really didn’t know. About my father’s first stroke. And I only found out about the most recent one a couple of days ago.”
Holly believed her. She turned around and studied her. “Would you have come if you’d known?”
Leo glanced down to where her fingers traced figure eights on the covers. “I…I don’t know.”
Well, at least she was honest. Holly could appreciate that.
“I think so,” Leo said after a while. “My father and I… Things between us are…” She waved her hand in an unsteady line.
“Complicated?” Holly supplied.
Leo barked out a laugh, but the sound held no humor. “You could say that, yeah. We haven’t had even one civilized conversation since I left home. Strike that. Even before, we never talked much, and whenever we tried, we usually got into an argument. And now…now we can’t talk, even if we wanted to—and my father made it clear as day that he doesn’t. So I don’t know why I should stick around.”
“You could still talk to him, you know?” Holly said softly. “He understands what you’re saying, even if he has trouble answering.”
“I don’t know what I would say.”
“And maybe that’s why you should stick around—to find out.” When Leo didn’t answer, she opened the door. Maybe she had said too much. She was Gil’s nurse, not Leo’s friend who was free to comment on her personal life. Forgetting that had gotten her into trouble, and she vowed not to make the same mistake again.
Just before she could pull the door shut behind her, Leo called, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Holly looked back and met her gaze. “See you.”
Chapter 5
Holly balanced the laptop on her thighs, her feet resting on her coffee table. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she updated Gil’s medical records and documented the work she’d done during the week. Her mother would have scolded her if she’d known she was working on a Sunday, but she didn’t like doing her documentation while she was with a patient. The laptop created a barrier between them that she’d rather avoid.
The patient continues to require…
The Skype ringtone coming through her laptop’s speakers interrupted her midsentence.
She rolled her shoulders, grateful for the break, and clicked over to the Skype window. A grin spread across her face, and she hit the green icon to accept the video call.
Her friend’s beaming face filled the laptop screen. “Hey there, Nerdy Nurse.” Meg’s voice boomed through the speakers.
Grinning at the use of her Tumblr nickname, Holly turned the volume down a notch. “Hi, Mordin.”
“I saw you online and thought I’d catch you before you disappear again,” Meg said. “Is this a good time?”
“Yeah, sure.” Holly clicked over to her documentation, saved it, and closed the window. Work could wait. It had been a while since she had caught up with her friends. “How are you doing?”
“Great. Organizing the next ace meet-up keeps me out of trouble.”
Holly chuckled. Sometimes, she envied her friend a little for living in a big city where she could meet other asexual people. As far as Holly knew, she was the only ace in Fair Oaks. “And how’s Jo?”
“She’s right here.”
Jo, Meg’s queerplatonic partner, stuck her face into the webcam’s field of vision and waved. She pressed a quick kiss to Meg’s head before disappearing again.
“Talkative as always,” Meg said with an affectionate smile.
The open affection between them often confused people. Holly remembered assuming the two were a romantic couple when she’d first seen them interact. An easy mistake to make, considering Meg and Jo cuddled, lived together, and shared finances. It had taken Holly a while to understand that this level of commitment between two people was possible without it being a sexual or romantic relationship. Now she hardly thought about it anymore. As far as she was concerned, love was love, no matter what type of love it was.
“What’s new with you?” Meg asked.
Holly shrugged. “Not much.”
“Are you still working overtime? You really should take some time off and come to Chicago so we can finally meet face-to-face. We’ll spoil you rotten, and we could finally kick some butt together in the same room when playing Borderlands. Maybe it’ll help, and I won’t have to save your ass all the time.” Meg hopped up and down on her chair, her face bouncing out of camera range for a second before reappearing. “Hey, you could come to the ace meet-up!”
“I’d love to, but this isn’t a
good time. There’s too much going on here right now, so I can’t get away.”
Meg squinted at her. “Does this have anything to do with Jenna Blake being in town?”
Holly sat slack-jawed for a moment. “How do you know that?”
“So she’s really there? In your itty-bitty zero-Starbucks town?”
No use in denying it now. “Yeah. She’s here. How did you know?”
“One of the guys I play with online has a cousin who’s friends with her guitar tech, who apparently heard her manager talk about it.”
Holly’s head was spinning to keep up, but it didn’t matter how Meg had found out. The aluminum edges of her laptop dug into her hands as she clutched it. “You have to keep quiet about it. She’s dealing with a lot right now, and I’m sure she’d rather do it without the paparazzi swarming around her like a flock of vultures.”
Meg mimed zipping her lips. “Not saying a word to anyone.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you think you could get me an autograph?” Meg asked.
“You want an autograph? You? Since when are you a fan?”
“I’m not. Not really.” Meg’s grin flashed across the screen. “But you have to admit she’s hot.”
Holly’s feet nearly slid off the coffee table. She stared at her friend.
“What?” Meg laughed. “Just because I don’t want to jump her bones doesn’t mean I’m blind. She fits all the commonly accepted criteria for hotness.”
Now Holly laughed along with her. “Did you survey your friends and colleagues to put together a list?”
“Kind of,” Meg said. “Back in high school, when I was still trying to fit in and play the pretend-I’m-straight game, I tried to figure out what my friends were talking about when they called someone hot.”
Holly had done the same. It had taken her a while to understand that hot wasn’t quite the same as beautiful for most people. There was a level of sexual attraction involved in finding someone hot that she had never experienced—and likely never would. It had taken some time to come to terms with being different, but now she accepted that being asexual was a part of her, just like being a nurse or a redhead.