by Kayley Cole
"Jake has, um, he's…he's asked me to go with him for when he's taping Body Satellite in various Colorado locations. So, I just wanted you to know that I won't be around for a few days. Jake said it will be about five or six days of filming. He wants to do it quickly. I'd be his assistant."
I tack on the last part quickly because I'm a coward. It wasn't something Jake and I had actually discussed, but it's a good cover. I'm not quite ready for Andrew to find out the truth.
"Just…all over Colorado?" he asks. He keeps looking between us. He knows. He has to know. Denial can only survive for so long. "That doesn't sound like a good idea. You have work. You have volunteering to do here. The most we'll be able to do with Natalie is get a restraining order, and if she's determined enough, a little piece of paper isn't going to stop her from following you to a place where the policemen don't know you and don't care about you."
"Our trip isn't going to be that predictable."
"No," he states. "I can't protect you if you're out traveling all over the state."
I remember my brother coming home, nearly 1 a.m., after the armed robbery. I had gotten home two hours beforehand, but my mother was still more furious at my brother. She reminded him that it was his job to protect me. She told him that one day she would be gone— that he'd have to be my protector— and now she’s gone.
I can do the math. I can understand his mentality. I don't have to like it.
"I'm twenty-three years old. I don't need your permission."
"You're staying at my house. You should respect my opinion on the matter."
Ah, guilt. Our mother passed it on to him, and now he passes it to me. We're a tornado by ourselves, whirling around and around and around, slowly losing momentum, but still repeating the same behavior.
And it works. Every damn time.
"Okay."
Jake's head slightly tilts at my acquiescence, but he doesn't give any other indication that he feels anything about my fickle mind.
"Thank you. I'm going to call John and see if Natalie has confessed."
My brother stands up, grabbing his phone. As he leaves out the front door, I wonder what he thinks he's protecting me from when he doesn't want me to hear his discussions with his colleagues. The truth? The way men talk when women around? The way policemen talk and everyone in the conversation knows that ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ can create canyons that are impossible to jump over?
"So…" Jake says, standing up. "I should get packing then."
"You know I wanted to go with you," I say, looking up at him. In this dimly lit room, his features are sharper than ever. "Since our father left and the robbery, Andrew is just super protective. Sometimes. He just…the fact that we talked to Natalie alone made him more concerned than ever. We should have gotten him first. We should have involved him."
"I'm not blaming you," he says. "But I do have to pack. I'll come back as soon as I can."
It's a promise, lighter than a dozen others he's told me, but it feels significant to me. Despite everything, the fact that he'd come back to me twice makes me feel like we might survive more than a psychotic stalker.
Jake
SAFFRON MONTAGE
EXT. ANDREW'S HOUSE - MIDNIGHT
Ellie runs out, only wearing socks to be as quiet as possible. When she gets into my rental, she kisses me to show her gratitude for me coming back in the middle of shooting the music video. It feels just like when we were in high school, the secret both tearing us apart and pushing us together.
INT. THE DESSERT CRAFT - LATER
The intricate desserts enchant Ellie. She tries to insist on paying, but I've already paid the restaurant for the various dessert samples.
EXT. DOWNTOWN DENVER
Ellie walks beside me, her head on my chest and my arm around her waist. The night air ruffles her dress. The city still hums with life, but there's a quietness that settles between us, and I can feel us so close to perfection, yet there's something wedged between us like a thorn, causing us to be unable to come closer to each other.
INT. RHIANNON HOTEL
Ellie is standing on the balcony of the River Suite, eight floors up. There's the faint glow of lights from nearby buildings, creating a soft light around her as I watch from the edge of the bed. There's a faint trace of lip gloss along my jawline, and most of her lip gloss has rubbed off. It's cherry red, but it tastes like sorbet.
She turns to me. "You know when you have that look, your mind is wrapped up in imagining the whole world is your inspiration?”
"Isn't it?" I ask. "Do you not like being a muse?"
She walks put to me, placing her hand on my shoulder, I take it, kissing her wrist.
"That depends," she says. "Was I the muse for Tip of the Flame?"
I smile at her. "I knew it."
"What?"
"You've never seen it."
She takes a step back, her fingers brushing against my knee. "How did you know that?"
"If you'd seen it, you'd know."
She is so beautiful, seducing me just by standing there, so determined to figure out what I'm holding back from her. She's dangerous in the way that I'd destroy the earth underneath my own feet to make her smile.
"There's just scenes in there that come from our time together, Ellie. In high school," I say. "I altered some of them a little to make them more interesting, but they're clearly about you. Do you remember when we skinny dipped in the pond next to the church?"
She smirks. "You didn't."
"It's there. It's just that in the movie we didn't fall asleep there and have to get chased away by a half-blind pastor. My characters slip away on their own because the male protagonist knows that he can't get attached to a woman that he'd just end up corrupting."
"Do you think you corrupted me?" she asks, her fingers brushing against my cheek like a ray of sunlight, warm and comforting.
"I think you're an ocean of good and I'm just the oil spill."
"Oh, what a line. Maybe I should turn that into a lyric." She rests her head on my knee. If I were a weaker man— or maybe if I didn't have so much wine with our desserts—I ’d grab her, pull her partway onto the bed and push into her until any thoughts of screenplays disappeared, and the only thing left were sensations an audience would never be able to feel.
She abruptly stands back up, lifting the skirt of her dress to show me her white lace underwear. She's my sinner, and I'm going to make her my place of worship.
And I need to give her an offering.
"I bought you something." I stand up, walking over to the closet where I told the doorman to hide it.
"You didn't need to do that."
"Sit on the bed. Close your eyes."
She does what I say. It's tempting to just kiss her, to cover her body with my own, but I take out her gift and walk over to her.
"Open your eyes, Ellie.”
"Are you just going to be naked?" she asks, smiling. "Because I'm okay with that, but that was an impressive time getting all your clothes off."
"No. That comes later."
She opens her eyes. They widen as she takes in the twelve-string guitar, engraved with her initials carved into the fretboard and a lily on the body.
"Merde," she mutters.
"There's that French profanity."
"Was this handcrafted?"
"Yeah. I know a guy in California. He already had most of it done. I asked him to add your initials and the flower."
"It must have cost a fortune, Jake.”
"Not to me."
She sets the guitar down beside her, standing up to throw her arms around me. Her peach vanilla lotion wafts over me. God, she's impossible to resist. I press my lips to her throat, feeling her pulse quicken as I kiss her.
She puts her hand on my chest, pushing me away. She gestures for me to sit down. I do what she wants, but only because I know it's the best way to get what I want.
"Tell me your deepest secret," she says. There's something in her voice that remin
ds me that she's never been as innocent as I thought she was. She's not white lace. She's fishnet tights on fire.
"Why?" I ask. "You know me better than anyone."
"That doesn't mean I know all your secrets."
"Secretly, I know there's a chance this music video will be a huge failure."
"Not with you bringing attention to it," she says.
"Not with your song."
"That's not what I mean though. Your deepest secret."
"That is my deepest secret," I say. "My fear of failure. You know I don't like talking about those things."
She nervously sways, swishing her dress' skirt back and forth. "What about the robbery?"
"What robbery?"
"The armed robberies that happened around Saffron nine years ago. The guys who robbed my mom."
I stare at her. "What about it?"
"You were one of the robbers."
I snort. "No, I wasn't."
"Don't like to me, Jake."
"I'm not lying!" I stand up. "Why would you think I'd rob your family? I practically lived at your house. I'd be stealing from myself."
"Because I found my stolen necklace at your house," she says. "I know it was you. I was willing to leave that all behind— you were just a stupid kid— but the fact that you'd still lie to me about it…”
"Wait. Wait. How long have you thought that I was one of the robbers?"
"I found out a week after it happened."
I nod, starting to pace in front of her. "That's when your brother said you started acting weird."
"Because I knew, morally, I should turn you in."
"Well, it's a shame you were consumed in morality at that time because you cheated on me shortly after that."
She let go of her dress' skirt, her arms encircling her waist. "I couldn't be with you anymore. I had to end our relationship…but I didn't want any questions about it. So… I left hints behind about Greg. You jumped to the conclusion that we slept together."
"Which is what you wanted."
"It's what I needed. And you left and became famous. You should be happy."
"I'm feeling a lot of emotions right now, and none of them are happy." I stop in front of her. "I wasn't one of the robbers. I don't know how you found your jewelry in my house, but I didn't leave it there. How stupid did you think I was? Why would I leave it in plain sight?"
"It wasn't in plain sight. I found it behind your pile of textbooks."
"The textbooks I never read because I never did the homework? There was a layer of dust on those by the time I had to give them back to the teachers."
Her eyes are glossy. She turns away from me, walking back out to the balcony.
"You should have watched the movie," I say.
"Why?" she chokes out. I cross my arms over my chest. She cried when we broke up too, and it felt like I was committing self-immolation.
"Then you'd get a general idea of where I was during the robbery. In the movie, Emma's mother is held at gunpoint at a pawn shop. At the same time, John is selling his bike for two plane tickets."
She turns around. "You didn't buy a plane ticket for me."
"I still have them. I wanted you to come with me to California. Maybe it wasn't smart to not tell you, but I figured just giving you the ticket was my best chance because I knew you felt like you owed your family your presence. Then, I found out about the robbery, and I couldn't take you away from your family. So, I thought I'd wait until you were ready. Until Greg."
Her bottom lip is trembling. She takes one step toward me, and I close the gap, my arms wrapping around her until my hands are pressed against her back. When we kiss, it's not laced with lust, but interwoven with apologies and all the words that had gotten lost over time. There are so many things left to say, but we let them go. We let them fall like our bodies onto this bed, exhausted by having to stand alone for so long.
FADE OUT.
Ellie
My fingers press against the strings on the fretboard as my other fingers tremble, holding onto my guitar pick. I've only lost four guitar picks in the sound hole, but that was all before I was ten. I've played in Tiny Kaleidoscope dozens of times, but this feels different. This is the song that will soon belong to Body Satellite and hundreds of thousands of people could hear soon.
"When…” My voice cracks. I clear my throat and play the chord again. "When we all return home/Saffron is dust and debris/they say home is a state of mind/but mine is broken and circling around defeat/Saffron, in the eye of the storm and falling apart in front of me/Here's my state of grace (Colorado)/After everything is taken, and I reap what I sow/My home is in the tornado."
I switch from chords to a riff that switches between panic and calm. The audience disappears, and all I can see is my brother walking out the front door, ready to deal with the fallout of the storm, then my brother transforms into my father, walking out the front door to pursue his wild dreams, and then my mother, her lungs trying to cling to air with a porous grasp. It's all here in this town, where I've been formed by a thousand hands and I met Jake, who consistently changed the rhythm of my life until I was playing new, better songs.
As I reach the bridge of the song, my hand falters, the pick nearly falling out of my hand. There's silence in the room, but I keep my eyes down on the guitar strings. I play 1-2-3 notes before I start again.
"My home is in the tornado/I made my life in this wind resistance/Rain is going to pour/but these roots need it for its existence/We're going to rebuild/We're going to redefine persistence/The weather advisory tells me to go underground/but I won't leave until we're all safe and sound/until we're all safe and sound/until I know you're safe and sound."
I finish the song, something caught in my throat and my fingers barely holding onto the pick. I don't look at the crowd. I leave the small stage, clinging to my new guitar, and feeling like I've given everything to people that wouldn't even take the time to learn my name.
Jake was going to be coming by in ten minutes. He would make me feel known, and he could call me by any name he wanted— it’d feel sweeter than anything else anyone could call me.
The thought of seeing him re-energizes me. I grab my bag from the kitchen and slip out the back door.
The dumpsters behind the restaurant are kept neat, but the smell is still putrid. I keep walking, pulling the strap of the guitar back over my shoulder and holding it close to my waist. It's nearly 11 o' clock, so the nearby Chinese restaurant is closed, but the liquor store is open. I follow the glow of the neon beer signs until I'm on the sidewalk.
I play a few barre chords, trying to fill up the space in my head that just plays Jake's name over and over. I hate standing around, missing him. It feels like those months after my father left and all I knew how to do was wait for him to return. He never did, and that fear that it will be the same with Jake lingers like the scent of the dumpsters.
Someone knocks into me and, for a split second, I assume they were staring down at their phone or half-blind, but then hands are on both of my shoulders, yanking me back. I stumble, clinging to my new guitar like it's my child, but the man— nearly half a foot taller than me and wearing a surgical mask with a ball cap to hide his face— manages to rip it out of my grasp, dropping it on the sidewalk before shoving me.
As my ass hits the ground, my mind freezes around a single, inopportune thought: what the hell is he doing? My purse is still in my car, so there's nothing to rob. I don't know him. He hasn't said a thing.
He grabs my hair, trying to yank me up. I turn onto my side, grabbing onto his ankle. I try to yank him off his feet, but he weighs too much. I sense him reaching down, ready to tear me away from him. I conjure all my energy— all that pent-up frustration over being stuck in this town, over my father leaving, over my mother dying, over my false assumptions about Jake, about Jake leaving, about everything that ever hurt me— and I jump to my feet, my back hitting his head as I launch my body up.