by T. K. Leigh
“Asher.”
She inhales a sharp breath. “Did he find out about you two sleeping together in Vegas?” she whisper-shouts
“Thankfully, no.”
“Then what did he want?”
I look out the windows at the bright moon shining on our abandoned snowman project from earlier. “My help. Asher has a studio date coming up to record his next album, but he didn’t have any songs written, so Jessie thought surrounding Asher with all the people from the so-called glory days of his writing life would help.”
“And that happens to be you.”
“Whenever I came up to the lake house with Jessie, Asher and I did stay up almost all night together.”
Another pause falls over the line. It doesn’t matter that Chloe’s a few hundred miles away. I can feel the wheels spinning in her mind.
“So let me see if I have this straight. Your ex-fiancé invited you up to his grandmother’s lake house to inspire his brother, who you slept with in Vegas, which he doesn’t know about.”
“That about sums it up, although Jessie can’t take the credit for the idea. It was Grams. She somehow knows there’s something going on between Asher and me.”
“There is?” I can hear the inquisitiveness in Chloe’s tone.
“Was,” I correct, then exhale deeply. “Is… Hell if I know right now. That’s why I called. I’m so confused.”
“So you’re up there. With Asher. After all this time. How did that go?”
“How do you think?”
She laughs sarcastically. “Fucking awkward at first, I’d guess.”
“It didn’t help that Jessie conveniently left out the fact that I’d be here.”
“Are you serious?” Her voice rises in pitch.
“Sure am. Which I had no idea about, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw that Asher was surprised to see me. Let’s just say we were all really freaking surprised.”
There’s a pause, and I picture Chloe pinching her lips together as she processes this information. “And how did Asher react to seeing you with Jessie?”
“It definitely brought out the jealous monster inside him. There were a handful of tense moments. But Grams forced us to talk to each other, something we hadn’t done since Vegas.”
“What did you say? Better yet… What did he say?”
I wrack my brain to explain what we’d discussed that day out on the dock. “He told me the truth. About everything.”
“Like what?” Her voice oozes with curiosity. To Chloe, who was once a gossip columnist for a women’s magazine before being promoted to the current affairs editor, this kind of thing is her secret pleasure.
“Like the fact he had a thing for me from the first time he saw me walk into the club where his band was playing.”
“That’s no big surprise,” she replies dismissively. “Anyone with two eyes could have told you that.”
“He also admitted he was about to ask me out all those years ago when I walked into Grams’ lake house on Jessie’s arm.”
“That must have crushed him,” she exhales.
“So when I walked in on Friday…”
“It brought back those memories,” Chloe finishes.
“That’s why Asher was a bit…off.”
“What else did he tell you?” she presses, sensing there’s probably more.
This secret is a little harder to share. Because I’ll also have to divulge the secret I’ve been keeping. “We talked about the night Jessie and I broke off our engagement.”
“Which he deserved for what he did,” Chloe snips out.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, drawing in a deep breath. I’ve kept the truth from Chloe for so long. I have no idea how she’ll react. But if there’s one thing Asher’s ability to come clean has taught me, it’s that I need to do the same with my friends, even if I haven’t told him the truth. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell him I love him, that I’ve always loved him. It would make this situation even more difficult, make it even harder for him to let me go.
And vice versa.
“What if I told you Jessie didn’t do anything wrong?”
The line is silent as Chloe seemingly assesses what I could be implying. “How is cheating on you with another woman not wrong?”
I swallow hard. “Because, technically, he didn’t cheat on me.”
“But—”
“We had… Well, I guess you could say we took a step back to decide if we really wanted to be together.”
“You did?” She can’t mask her utter shock at this revelation.
“Long story short, we’d gotten into an argument before Christmas break. Since I was headed home to Connecticut and Jessie to Florida to visit his snowbird parents, it gave us the opportunity to figure things out. I didn’t even want to agree to that, just wanted to give him back the ring, but he convinced me to take a minute and consider everything I was throwing away. So I agreed to hold off on making a decision. All during break, I ignored his phone calls, texts, everything. Even when I listened to his voicemails and heard how heartbroken he sounded, how desperate he was. Still, I gave him no indication I hoped to reconcile, that I would go back to him when the semester began.”
“But you went up to Boston to surprise him after he landed in town. That’s what you told us. How you made him his favorite lasagna. How you took a page out of Pretty Woman and waited for him with just a tie on. At some point, you must have decided you wanted to keep wearing that ring. Right?”
I cringe. “I may have embellished. I never did any of those things. I just… I was worried you’d figure out the truth.”
“And what truth is that?”
I expected her words to come out biting. Instead, there’s only curiosity. “That the real reason I left Jessie was because I loved Asher. I didn’t have it in my heart to tell Jessie that, so I made him believe I left him because he’d brought home his ex. And you want to know the kicker? Asher knew. Jessie had stopped at the bar where Asher’s band had a gig that night. He saw Candace fawning all over him, knew I was waiting at the house. And you know what he did?”
“Nothing…,” she exhales.
“Exactly. He didn’t stop Jessie. He’s carried that guilt with him for years.”
The line falls silent, as I expected it would. When Asher shared this with me, it was a lot to process. It’s even more so for Chloe now that she knows my truth, too.
“Did you tell Asher why you really left Jessie?” she asks finally.
I shake my head. “No.”
“And you’re still at the lake house?”
“Yes.”
“Are Jessie and Asher both there?”
“Jessie had a meeting in LA, so he’s out there now. Their parents left on Sunday. Grams left Sunday, too, but under the guise of going to church three hours away, fully aware that a snowstorm was coming and she wouldn’t be able to get back up here. Even though the roads are now cleared, she still hasn’t returned.”
“So you’re alone. With Asher. At the lake house.”
“Yup.”
“And?”
I expel a long breath. “And I’m so fucking confused, Chloe. We have these moments when we’re friends, when we can joke and laugh with each other like we used to all those years ago. He makes me breakfast. We cook dinner together. We watch movies on the couch with a fire crackling in the hearth. It’s been…”
“Magical,” Chloe finishes.
“Yes,” I exhale on a long sigh. “But now I’m worried it’s all about to end. That our bubble’s about to burst again.”
“Have you slept together?” she asks in a low voice.
“No.”
“Kissed?”
“There were a few near misses, but he said I have to make that call.”
“Which you haven’t done because you don’t think it’ll ever work, so why put the effort into something that won’t last, not without hurting someone you both care about,” she rattles off.
“Sounds about right.”
She doesn’t say anything for a few moments, but I can sense her mind reeling, taking all the information I just fed her and filing it away in the appropriate compartment.
“I always was suspicious of the cheating story. Granted, I did think you were too young to get married, but I couldn’t discount the way Jessie looked at you. It seemed…odd he would cheat on you. He shouldn’t have run into another woman’s arms while there was still the open question about your status, but I guess I can’t hate him for doing it.”
“So you’re not mad at me for lying to you?”
“I couldn’t be mad at you for that. I kept what was going on between Lincoln and me a secret for probably the same reason you kept this from me.”
“And what reason is that?”
“That I was scared of the way I felt about him. That it still didn’t change the fact that we couldn’t be together.”
I look around the same room I once shared with Jessie, but am somehow surrounded by only memories of Asher. “I’m just torn.”
“About what?”
“What do you think? Asher… And Jessie.”
“I don’t think you should worry about Jessie. He shouldn’t factor into this equation.”
“But he does,” I insist, my voice growing louder. “How can he not? I’m sitting here, after midnight, contemplating sleeping with Asher while I’m lying in the bed I used to share with his brother.”
“You’re focused on all the negatives, like always.”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. You always do that. It’s just who you are. You look at all the reasons a decision is bad. You rarely consider the possible positive outcomes of a course of action.”
“Because the negatives always outweigh the positives, at least where Asher and I are concerned.”
“How?” Her voice is firm and demanding. “How is being happy outweighed by the fact you’ll have to tell Jessie what’s going on?”
“Because Asher will lose the relationship he has with his brother,” I insist.
“You don’t know that. I understand what you’re going through. I went through the same thing with Lincoln. I didn’t think there was any way for us to be together, either. For a while, I thought I was right. People will surprise you. You just need to decide if you’re ready to take a risk, let someone love you like you’ve always deserved. But you have to be willing to face your fears.”
I consider her words, wishing there were a clear-cut answer. That’s what I like. A clear path with no gray area. The gray area scares me. You can lose everything in it. Hopes. Dreams. Wishes. I’ve always been an all-or-nothing kind of girl. But everything with Asher has always lived in that gray area.
“What made you decide you were ready to face your fears with Lincoln?” I ask.
“Because the idea of life without him scared me more. So you need to ask yourself what scares you more? Jessie learning the truth? Or never having this connection with Asher again? That’s all it comes down to. Living in the past or looking toward a future. Once you decide that, your answer will be clear.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A simple melody pulls me out of the bedroom, like a beacon leading a wayward ship to shore after being tossed around by the tumultuous ocean. After I ended my call with Chloe, there wasn’t a second of hesitation on my part. She said I had a decision to make. I knew what that needed to be.
My feet pad lightly as I make my way down the stairs, through the living room, and into the kitchen. As I round the corner and the great room comes into view, I pause, taking a minute to admire Asher as he sits at the baby grand, bent over the keys, deep in concentration. Shadows dance on the walls, only a few low-light lamps and a crackling fire providing any kind of illumination.
I listen to him as he sings softly about a future with a woman he can’t have yet, but in his heart, he knows it’ll work out. About resting his hand on her shoulder as she sleeps peacefully during a secret rendezvous. About being her anchor in the storm of her life, never faltering or wavering.
“You wrote a new song,” I murmur when the final note rings out against the high ceiling.
He tears his gaze to mine as I slowly descend the stairs into the room. “It’s still a work in progress.” Standing, his eyes briefly float to my bare legs. “Did I wake you?”
I shake my head, coming to a stop mere inches from him. “No.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Better than okay.”
“Then wha—”
I clutch his cheeks, my grip fierce as I bring his lips within a whisper of mine. I pause, neither of us moving. Instead, we breathe in each other. In a way, this is more intimate than the most erotic and soul-fulfilling of kisses. We’re in that place where we still have hope. Where there’s the promise of a kiss. This place is magic. My El Dorado. My wonderland. My somewhere over the rainbow.
Asher’s intense gaze remains locked on mine, waiting for my next move. With painstakingly slow movements, I finally close the last bit of space separating us, my lips touching his for the first time in over a year, testing the connection. His body stiffens as he inhales sharply. I can’t blame him. After all, we’ve almost made it to this exact place several times over the past few days. But each time, I pulled back. I’m done with that. Done depriving myself of this amazing sensation.
A growl rips from his throat as he burrows his fingers into my hair, his hold firm and resolved. He deepens the kiss, his tongue swiping against my lips, begging for entrance. Without hesitating, I open for him, our tongues exploring, searching, savoring.
He yanks my body even harder against his. The way his arms consume me gives the impression he fears I’ll disappear if he permits me even the smallest window of opportunity. But I have no intention of disappearing. Not while we’re still in our bubble.
The ferocity of our kiss stealing his breath, he tears away, peering down at me, his chest heaving. Dark eyes trace over every inch of me, as if he’s still unsure whether this is real or a dream. Then he smirks.
“Took you long enough. I would have lost money if I bet on how long I thought it would take for you to come to your senses.”
“And how long did you think?”
“I’d hoped a minute.”
I playfully punch him in his chest. “Cocky bastard.”
He chuckles before his expression turns serious once more. “In all honesty, I hoped you’d come to your senses after about a day.”
I chew on my lower lip. “Sorry I made you wait.”
“Oh, darlin’, trust me…” His hands frame my face, bringing my mouth back to his. “Even if it took you ten years, you’d be worth the wait.”
He’s about to kiss me when I place my hand on his chest, stopping him. “Did you mean what you said the other night? About taking whatever I’m willing to give?”
“Well… Yes. I suppose.”
I nod, straightening my spine. “Then this is all I can give you. These moments when it’s just us. When we’re in a bubble.”
I pray Asher understands why it needs to be this way. I suppose I’m asking him to stay with me in the gray area I always try to avoid. But this is the only way.
“I can’t give you forever. It’s not fair to me. Or you. Or anyone else,” I add, not wanting to mention Jessie by name. “If you’re not okay with that, I understand. But I need you to know that I’m not ready to go all in. That I’m not ready for you to go all in, either. That I’m still stuck in the middle, but I’d love nothing more than to be stuck in the middle with you. And I’m not saying that so you’ll laugh at my reference to a Stealers Wheel song, but because that’s all I’m comfortable with.”
He doesn’t move for several excruciating seconds. Simply stares. Analyzes. Decides. Then he draws in a deep breath, blowing it out on a long exhale, dropping his hold on me. Turning, he walks toward the mantle covered in family photos, focused on one in particular.
I squint, trying to decipher it. My heart warms when I realize it’
s a photo of Asher and me sitting on the dock, our feet dangling off the side. I can make out the neck of his guitar jutting out to his left, my head leaning on his right shoulder. The color is breathtaking, the sky the brilliant pink I recall from watching the sunrise with him in the summer. And that’s what this photo depicts. One of the many sunrises I’ve watched with him.
“Right then.” He spins around and advances toward me. The sudden movement catches me off-guard, my breath escaping when he encloses me in his arms. “I guess I better find a way to convince you to change your mind. That we can have it all.”
Permitting me no chance to protest, he claims my mouth, his kiss devouring me, taking everything I have to give. But even after he takes every last breath, I doubt he’ll be satisfied. He’s made it clear time and time again. He’ll always want more. He’ll always need more.
I fear I will, too.
With a hand on my hip, he leads me toward the sitting area, his lips never straying from mine, the caress of his tongue powerful and forceful. When my legs hit the couch, he lowers my back onto it, nudging my legs apart and climbing on top of me.
“What?” I manage to say between kisses. “No piano sex? I thought this would be the perfect opportunity.”
“And it would be…” He trails kisses along my jawline, and I crane my head, reveling in the jarring sensation of his beard against my flesh. “If all I wanted from you was sex.” He nibbles my neck, eliciting a moan.
“That’s not what you want?” I pant, wrapping my legs around his midsection, subtly thrusting against him.
“No. Not tonight.” His hands explore my torso, frantic yet measured. “I made a promise to myself.” He returns his mouth to mine, but the kiss is too short, too simple, too weak, making me desperate for more. Asher knows this.
“And what’s that?” I skate my fingers up and down his back, pulling up his t-shirt slightly, exposing his skin. When I dig my nails into his flesh, he arches into my touch, the look of pure ecstasy on his expression more satisfying than even the most potent of drugs. He is my addiction.
“That if I were ever lucky enough to return to this place, to be with you again, we wouldn’t have sex. I promised myself I’d make love to you, Isabella.” His lips curve into a sexy smirk. “At least the first time.” He winks. “But don’t worry. Piano sex is most definitely on the agenda tomorrow.” He buries his head in the crook of my neck.