by LJ Evans
He cursed under his breath and pulled me onto his lap like I had been the night before. His fingers swirled under my tank along the edge of my jeans.
“I think I like your dresses better,” he said with a smirk that seemed more like the Derek I knew.
“You’re avoiding my question.”
“You’ve been out of questions for a while. We need a new payment plan if you are going to insist on more,” he teased, lighter, coming back from the depths he’d been in.
“You accused me of trying to be strong for everyone else. Of not showing my emotions. You said I tried to make everyone else feel better. And yet you do the same thing.”
“My brother is alive.”
“But your mom’s not, right?”
His eyes clouded over, and the swirl of his fingers slowed.
“No. She’s not.”
“What happened?”
“Overdose.”
“God. I’m s—” I stopped myself, and he didn’t even smirk. Instead, he just kept going like now that he’d started, he wanted to say it.
“It was a relief actually. When she died.”
He looked at me expecting me to be shocked as if he thought what he’d said was going to cause me to walk away. It wasn’t. It wasn’t that I wasn’t shocked that he was relieved his mom had overdosed, it was that I wouldn’t show it. Not now, not when he needed me not too. When I didn’t respond, he continued.
“She’d been sick for a long time. AIDS.”
“That must have been awful. How old were you?” I finally asked.
“Fifteen.”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited. Waited for him to come to me. Waited for him to continue to tell me what he needed to say.
“Dylan was already at college. He’s eight years older than me, so he’d already escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“The mansion. Dad. The women. The drugs.”
My eyes widened.
He chuckled, but it wasn’t his light-hearted chuckle. “Not that Dylan ever cared about any of that. He loved the attention he got at the mansion. He was a domineering asshole even then, and the younger babes really dug him.”
“I can see that,” I responded drily. But he had changed directions from his mom to Dylan so I refocused him. “What happened with your mom?”
He ran his hand through his hair again and closed his eyes, as if to shield himself, or maybe me, from what he was going to say. “I went to check on her when I got home from school. They’d moved her the week before to this piece of shit room in the servant’s quarters so she’d be closer to the in-home care nurse they’d hired. But when I got there she was already gone. The needle still fucking in her arm.”
He swallowed and opened his eyes to find mine.
“And I should have been sad or mad that she’d killed herself. But all I could do was thank God that she was dead.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty for not wanting her to suffer.”
Because I realized that was the guilt he’d told me about on our first day in the Camaro together.
“I was glad because I didn’t have to deal with it anymore,” he said.
“That’s normal.”
“Is it?” He looked at me and shrugged and I knew he didn’t quite believe it just like I didn’t quite believe that I wasn’t responsible for Jake. “I went to find my dad, and do you know where he was?”
I shook my head not even wanting to guess.
“Screwing some babe in their room. In her bed. While his fucking wife died in a shit room below him.”
He was watching me again. Waiting for my reaction.
“That’s…” I ran out of words.
“Crappy,” he said just as I said, “Awful.”
“And you know what’s worse?” he asked.
“What could be worse?” It was my turn to swallow hard because the scene he’d set was already pretty messed up.
“When I tried to tell him, he got so pissed that I was interrupting his blow job that he threw a whole bottle of scotch at me.”
I tugged at his arm and rubbed my fingers along his tattoos so that I wouldn’t cry for this man who I’d just discovered I loved and who I didn’t want to suffer.
“There had always been lots of sex at the mansion. It was everywhere. You couldn’t escape it. It had always seemed normal to me even when it was my dad with someone not my mom. But then, when I found my dad screwing some nineteen-year-old while his wife died alone. Shit. It just opened my eyes to how fucked up it all was.”
I gulped, trying to imagine a sweet, laughing fifteen-year-old Derek having to see that. Having to watch his mom kill herself so she wouldn’t suffer while his dad moved on to sex with a round of girls young enough to be his sister.
“I wanted to kill him,” Derek told me honestly and openly. No regret laced his voice.
“Who could blame you?”
“No, Little Bird, I seriously thought about it. I’d even picked up one of the shards of glass that were on the floor next to me. I was seriously going to walk over and slice his throat.”
He was still watching me. Still waiting for me to fly. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
“What made you stop?”
“Hugo. I guess the nurse had gone to get him after finding my mom. He’d come to find my dad like I had. He forced me to drop the glass, hauled my ass out of the room, and called Dylan.”
I didn’t believe that Derek would have killed his father. I didn’t believe that with any of the two-hundred and six bones in my body, but I did believe that he thought he would have. I could see where his guilt came from. How he was asking for forgiveness as much as trying to forgive. They were double wrapped cords just like his words on his wrist, hard to tell where it started and ended.
“Dylan got me the hell out of there, moved me in with him, and I never went back.”
The deep hug that they shared when we arrived made sense. They weren’t just brothers. They were survivors. I was a survivor too. A different kind of survivor, but I guessed that was what had called my soul to Derek’s or the other way around. Somehow, we’d found each other.
I continued to run my fingers over his tattoos. It was his sanity. I understood now why he didn’t want to give his dad, or his past any time or energy or space. It was painful. And ugly. But I wondered if by simply closing the door to it, if it would ever really go away. Just like I knew that my ignoring the guilt I felt over Jake, or the hurt I felt over Hayden, as I’d been doing over the last couple weeks, wouldn’t make them go away either.
But I also knew that Derek didn’t want to open the door and face the demons yet. And I wasn’t going to be able to force him too. He had to do it when he was ready. Just like I’d have to face all of mine when the time came. But at least we’d told each other our stories, and that had to be at least a step in the right direction. Closer to the doors instead of further away.
“You’re pretty incredible,” I said and even though I meant it with all my heart, I said it in a sassy, teasing tone so that I could draw him away from the darkness.
It worked because he grinned his impish grin at me. “I know.”
“You’re also an egotistical moron.”
He smiled wider, but then his eyes grew dark and stormy again.
“And, now Miss Mia, I want to get back to that question you asked.”
“Which one?”
“The one where you asked how many people I’d had sex with.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to know.”
“I’m going to tell you anyway. Are you ready?” he said as he watched me.
I wasn’t ready. Probably would never be ready.
“Four. Including you.”
I stared at him. My number in my head had been a lot more than that.
“Four?” I swallowed.
He grinned at me.
“After the crap I saw, I wanted to make sure that when I made love, it was just that. Making love. To people I cared about.”
He laughed at me.
“You’re such a Lothario!” I teased trying to help lighten his load because I knew that was what he wanted. To move away from this conversation and his mom and the mansion and what had happened there.
“Did you just use your big words with me again, Miss Mia?”
And then he was tickling me. And I was trying to escape, and in the process, I slammed my elbow into his nose making his eyes instantly water as he exclaimed, “Fuck!” and I exclaimed “I’m sorry!”
He froze with the smirk still on his face. “What did you just say?”
I pulled away from him.
“That obviously doesn’t count. That was a legitimate I’m sorry.”
“No. Never again.”
He grabbed me and had me over his shoulder and out the door before I could blink. I banged on his back and squirmed trying to escape, but he held me tight like a cowboy holds his calf. At the pool, he tossed me in, clothes and all.
I came up sputtering. He was laughing. Hard. Back to the Derek that had attracted me to begin with. Back to the smart aleck, gorgeous BB. And it made my heart flip happily that I’d been able to take him away from that scary place in his past.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you did that,” I gasped.
He took off his shoes and dove in after me.
He swam towards me, and I went to swim away, but he caught my blouse that was billowing out behind me and dragged me towards him.
“I think we should shed these wet clothes, don’t you?”
Good Girl Mia balked. “No way! We’re in your brother’s backyard.”
“It’s dark.”
“It is not. It's barely dusk.”
But he was already tugging my top over my head and I either went along or lost a nose in the process. I tried to comfort myself in the fact that my bra was basically the same as a bikini top.
I reached down and pulled off my wedges that were swelling up because corkboard and water don’t agree. I tossed them poolside and then reached for his t-shirt. He pulled it off, and it hit the cement with wet slap. Then he was tugging at my jeans, and I laughed as I got spun upside down while he tugged the clinging material off of my legs.
I came up spluttering again, and then he was kissing me, tongue tangling with mine, hands casing themselves around my waist and drawing me up tight to him where I wrapped my legs around his middle. Our hands and lips and tongues finding this comforting path that we’d discovered together.
After a long time, he carried me to the steps and out of the pool and back to the guesthouse where we quickly shed the rest of our wet clothes and found our way to the bed that had become my favorite place in this whole house because it was the place where we came together. Where all my senses came to life, and where he was the only one. Where we were just… one.
SAVE MYSELF
The City
“I gave you all my energy and I took away your pain. Cause human beings are destined to radiate or drain.”
-Ed Sheeran
THE NEXT DAY, WE had to leave for San Francisco where Derek’s next show was scheduled and where we would attend Harry Winston’s wedding. My heart cried out in a different way because we agreed to leave Jane the Kitten with Maggie and her nanny. Derek said we’d come back for her, or have her sent to us, but I nearly cried because I didn’t want her to think we were abandoning her.
He tugged at my hair, curling it to my lips, caressing them. “She’s happy here. We’ll be back.”
But somehow, in my bones, I knew I wouldn’t be back because this wasn’t my home. This wasn’t my reality. And in truth, I often wondered if it was really Derek’s reality either. There was nothing in the guesthouse that said Derek beyond his instruments. It seemed more like a place he hung his hat while he visited the brother and the niece he loved.
I kissed my little fur ball and made Maggie promise to be careful with her. Betty took pity on me, getting my phone number and promising to text pictures every day.
In addition to leaving Jane the Kitten, we were also leaving the Camaro. We were flying to San Francisco so that we could attend the wedding later that day because Indian weddings are long events. Hours long. The guys in the band were driving up in the “tour bus” to join us for the gig the next day. After that, we were going to rent a car to drive out to the California Caverns while Rob and Trista drove the motorhome north to Oregon.
We had another show and one more caving trip planned near the Oregon coast, and then that was it. I tried not to think about that as I left Dylan’s mansion.
But all of those things, the kitten, the Camaro, my trip ending, were combining in my heart such that I was an emotional basket case as Keith picked us up and dropped us at the airport. It was hard for me to wear my mask with Derek, maybe because he saw it for what it was, a front, just like I could see that sometimes his happy face was a front. And by the time Keith left us, I was crying.
I’d cried more with Derek in two weeks than I had with any person in my whole life. He entwined his long fingers in mine as we headed through security. I pulled myself together, and when we got to the other side, the tears weren’t flowing but my emotions still felt raw.
The flight to San Francisco was short and my mind was still a twirl of feelings and thoughts as we landed.
We got our rental and headed towards the city. Derek was more comfortable here than he had been in the other places we’d been, probably because he’d played here many times. He didn’t even need the Google Map lady.
“Tell me about this Harry guy,” Derek said after we’d checked into the hotel. He was trying to distract me from my thoughts as I hung clothes.
“Harry was my first best friend.”
“So why wasn’t he your first kiss?”
“Because, moron, he was my best friend, not my boyfriend.”
“I don’t see how any guy could be around you and not want to kiss you,” Derek said, pulling me onto his lap.
He had me captured, hair twirled up to my lips again before I could protest.
“We were, like, seven years old, we both liked books and not football. We were friends until eighth grade when he moved to California,” I said with an eye-roll that earned me a quick kiss.
“Okay. But I may still have to kill him.”
“May I remind you, he’s getting married!”
“Maybe he secretly wants you to be the person to stand up in the crowd and protest the wedding.”
I laughed. Derek tickled me, adding to my laughter, and I ended up on my back on the bed, with him laying up beside me, hand swirling under my t-shirt across my belly button.
“I don’t find it funny that I’m going to become a serial killer trying to keep the guys away from you,” he smirked.
“He’s a traditional Indian! Getting married to the woman he’s been engaged to his whole life!”
“You aren’t making this any better. An arranged marriage? You know he really is hoping you’ll protest, right?”
His hand crept up from my belly button to the wire of my bra, caressing through the satin. My whole body turned to a quivering mass as it did every single time he touched me. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to it. Or not love it.
“You don’t know Harry.”
“Obviously.”
“He is all about tradition and family. He would as soon call off the wedding as he would commit hari-kari.”
“I’d be happy to help him with that.”
My concentration on his words began to fade as his fingers caressed my breasts and my body took over for my mind.
“So, what are you wearing to this very traditional Indian wedding?” he asked me while I fought to maintain a brain cell.
“What do you mean?”
“Wearing. You do plan on wearing clothes, Little Bird, correct?”
“Yes… yes.” His words faded as his fingers continued doing things to me that made me want to forget the whole world.
&
nbsp; “The green dress,” I said. Meaning the very same green dress he had seen me in at the fundraiser.
And then, he disappeared. Standing by the bedside, magical hands far, far away from my body. “Oh no,” he said.
“What?”
“I am not taking you to an Indian wedding in that plain jane dress.”
My body was coursing with desire, and he was talking dresses. And standing away from me. I wasn’t following.
I knelt on the bed and moved towards him till I could rest my hands on his shoulders. “I thought you said I looked beautiful in that dress. Was that a line?”
“No. You did. You do look beautiful in that dress. That wasn’t a line. Although needing you to drive the Camaro, that was a line,” he smirked.
I stared because even though I’d suspected it, I hadn’t expected him to ever admit it. “What?”
“I had to have a better reason for you to come with me than the fact that I wanted to seduce you in my hotel room.”
“You lied!” I couldn’t be mad. I’d known. But I could pretend to pout hoping it would get his fingers back on my skin.
“Of course!” he said.
“You’re terrible,” I pulled at his fingers, kissing them.
“But irresistible,” he smirked.
“That’s it! I’m not taking you to the wedding tonight.”
“You will, but not in that green dress. It’s not at all acceptable for a traditional Indian wedding.”
“How would you know?” I said just as he grabbed my hand and pulled me from the bed. I stumbled, and he caught me. A familiar move that I should expect by now, but continued to catch me off guard.
“I have been to many traditional Indian weddings.”
“You have not!”
He grinned at me. “Okay. One, but I can tell you this, everyone was in bright colors. Had you told me this was a traditional Indian wedding, I would have brought my best paisley. But now we must go shopping.”
“You’re insane!”
I tried to bring him back to the bed, I tried to kiss him and touch him, but he just wagged his finger at me and dragged me with him from the room.
There was a shopping mall nearby. Plus, a Macy’s that took up a whole block. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to local, suburban malls. We ended up at the Macy’s, and it was hot and overwhelming.