by Emma Scott
Jonah’s shrewd dark eyes met mine, and I could feel him studying me. He was observant, this guy, and I felt like my insecurities were written all over me.
Or maybe it’s because you look like the poster girl for the Walk of Shame.
“I said you were welcome to eat anything here,” Jonah said finally.
“And it was kind of you to offer, but you don’t have much in the way of…actual food.”
“I have lots of dietary restrictions,” he said.
“Sure.” I coughed. “But why, exactly?”
Jonah looked to be waging an internal struggle, whether or not to tell me what I already suspected.
“I have a heart condition,” he said slowly.
“Oh?” As if I hadn’t already snooped through his medicine cabinet. My eyes itched to glance at the scar that began in the hollow of his throat. I kept my gaze plastered to his face. I must’ve looked like a crazy person, staring so intently because Jonah took a step backward.
“Anyway. That’s another long story and…Yeah, I guess we could grab some food if you’re really hungry.”
“Starved!”
I rushed back to the couch to put my thigh-high boots back on, which looked strange with my leather skirt and men’s T-shirt, but I was out of the bustier, thank God.
“I’m ready.”
“Okay,” Jonah said hesitantly. “A quick lunch and then I get you back to Summerlin.”
“Sounds great.”
He probably only agreed to food so we would change the subject, but no matter the reason, I was happy for a stay of execution. It wasn’t much, but I took it.
I led Kacey out through the parking lot to my truck: a small pick-up in blue, its flatbed filled with cardboard boxes. I held the passenger door open for her, which seemed to surprise her. This whole lunch outing surprised me: not in the schedule by any stretch. But obviously Kacey was in no hurry to rejoin her band. After whatever catastrophe she’d caused at the Pony Club, staying with me was an act of self-preservation.
I climbed behind the wheel and my eyes strayed to Kacey’s thighs—smooth skin between her boots and the almost non-existent mini-skirt. Part of a colorful tattoo was partially visible on her left thigh and the urge to see the rest of it was ridiculously strong. Kacey was easy on the eyes. Actually she was more than that. She was beautiful. But so what? She was more Theo’s type with her bleached hair, leather, and tattoos.
But I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her bare skin. How long had it been since I’d touched a woman?
One year, four months, thirteen days, and eighteen hours.
I scoffed at my inner mathematician, though the number probably wasn’t far off. I hadn’t been with a woman since my ex-girlfriend, Audrey. Before I got sick.
“What’s with the boxes in the back?” Kacey asked, jolting me from my thoughts. “Are you moving?”
“No, they’re full of glass,” I said, grateful for the distraction. “Old bottles and jars that I melt down to make my pieces. I’m going to take them to the hot shop tomorrow.”
“So the hot shop is where you blow the glass?” Kacey snickered.
I arched a brow at her.
“I know, I know. I’m twenty-two but I have the sense of humor of a fourteen-year-old boy.” She turned in her seat toward me. “And how do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Raise only one eyebrow. I’ve always wanted to.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can.”
“Do it again.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s cool.”
I arched my brow at her. “Is it?”
She laughed and sat back in her seat, satisfied. The broad smile remained on her lips as she watched Las Vegas passing outside her window. Even only half-turned to me, she had a stunning smile.
“So what are you working on?” she asked after a moment. “At the hot shop.”
“Well… I’m working on an exhibit for a local gallery. It opens in October. The exhibit, not the gallery.”
Smooth, Fletcher. But it had been months since I’d spoken to a stranger about the exhibit. I’d whittled my circle down to exactly three friends, my family, and the curator of the gallery. Until Kacey, I hadn’t fully grasped just how small a circle that was.
“Will you sell your glass at this exhibit?” Kacey asked. “Like those beautiful paperweights?”
“Yes, I’ll have small pieces like that for sale, but the main focus will be a large-scale installation.”
She started to ask another question as I pulled the truck into the parking lot of Mulligan’s, a mom-and-pop diner. It was nearly three in the afternoon, the lunch rush was over, plenty of parking to be had. I pulled into a spot near the door.
“This is right up the street from you,” she said. “We could’ve walked.”
“In this heat?” I said, and shut off the engine.
“Good point. The heat is godawful. I don’t know how you desert dwellers cope.”
I held the diner door open for her, surprising her again. She beamed at me and I almost lost my train of thought.
“I was born and raised in the desert,” I said. “I’m used to it, but some people can’t hack it. Wimps and pansies, every one.”
Kacey snorted and elbowed me lightly in the side as she breezed past me into the restaurant. She sighed with relief as we entered the air-conditioning, then caught me giving her a knowing look.
“Oh, fine. I’m a wimp,” she laughed. “Get us a table, smartass, while I use the restroom.”
I chuckled on my way to the hostess station. It was easy to be around this girl. And it seemed like she found it easy to be around me, like we’d known each other for years instead of hours.
A waitress greeted me. “How many, hon?”
“Two,” I said, and felt an immediate twinge in my chest.
I’d heard you could cut off a limb but still feel the pain of its absence. I didn’t miss Audrey, my last girlfriend. She’d cut me off, right after my transplant surgery. We’d planned a certain life together, but when the virus wrecked my heart and nearly killed me, it wrecked our plans and killed our relationship.
Theo would never forgive her for leaving, but I got over her quickly—even after being together for three years. It hurt she left, and the timing sure as shit could’ve been better, but I forgave her for leaving to find someone else, someone healthy with whom she could fall madly in love, and build a real life with.
I didn’t miss her. Yet in answering a waitress’s innocuous question, I realized I missed the ‘two of us.’ Being part of a couple, holding a door for someone, requesting a table for two, joking, teasing, being someone's smartass... My tiny circle of loved ones didn’t include a girlfriend and wouldn’t ever again. I thought I’d made peace with it, but some part of me, buried down deep, said otherwise.
I sank into the booth and took up a menu to distract myself from thoughts I didn’t want. Mulligan’s had typical country diner fare—breakfast served all day, and a variety of burgers and sandwiches for lunch. Unfortunately, more than half the items were strictly forbidden to me.
Kacey flounced into the seat across from me, looking scrubbed and vibrant. I tried not to think about the fact she was wearing my T-shirt, like girlfriends sometimes did with their boyfriend’s clothes.
The waitress set two waters on the table. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Kacey said. “Desperately.”
“Decaf for me,” I said.
The waitress moved on and Kacey shot me a funny look. “Decaf?”
“I can’t have caffeine.”
“What a tragedy.” She leaned over the table. “You know what they say, there’s a time and a place for decaf: Never and in the trash.”
I laughed with her. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
Kacey studied the menu. “I’m so hungry, I might have one of everything. What about you? What are you going to get? Wait…” She let the menu drop to the table. “What can you g
et?”
“Not sure yet. My options are kind of limited.”
“Because of your dietary restrictions.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, shit, Jonah, why did you bring me here?” She flapped her hand at the menu. “This is all grease and fat.”
I laughed and held up my hands at her sudden outburst. “Whoa, it’s cool. I’ll find something.”
She bit her lip. “Yeah, but...”
“I brought you here for you,” I said. “This is perfect hangover food. I used to come here with friends when I was at UNLV.” I tapped the corner of her menu. “Get whatever you want. It’s fine, I swear.”
She still looked dubious as the waitress came back with our coffees, putting an orange decaf doily under my mug.
“You ready to order, hon?”
Kacey gnawed her lip.
“Order,” I told her. “Unless you’d rather we go back to my place and fire up some Lean Cuisines?”
“When you put it that way…” Kacey turned to the waitress and said in a deep voice, “Yes, very well, I'll have a Bloody Mary, and a steak sandwich, and a steak sandwich.”
The waitress gave her a look and I frowned at the Bloody Mary.
Kacey flashed her eyes, looking between us. “It’s from Fletch? The movie?” She jabbed a finger across the table. “You, Jonah Fletcher, can’t tell me you haven’t seen the greatest Chevy Chase movie of all time?”
“Sorry, I missed it,” I said.
“It’s a classic,” Kacey said. “I have a thing for eighties movies.”
The waitress cleared her throat. “So do I, honey, but I don’t have steak sandwiches or Bloody Marys.”
Kacey ordered a cheeseburger and fries, and I ordered a Cobb salad, hold the bacon, and a side of wheat toast, no butter.
When the waitress moved on, Kacey shook her head. “No bacon? The only good thing about a Cobb salad is you get to put bacon on it.”
I shrugged. “Not on the list.”
“That sucks. What else can’t you eat?”
“No red meat, no chocolate, no salt on anything…”
Kacey nearly choked on her coffee. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No chocolate?”
“I miss salt more,” I said. “And butter. Nothing fatty, nothing delicious.” I laughed dryly. “In summation, I’m not allowed to eat anything delicious.”
Kacey shook her head. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Not like I have a choice. And there are worse things.”
“I’m trying to imagine something worse than not being able to eat chocolate.” She froze, then set her coffee mug down, her smile vanishing. “Oh my God, that’s a terrible thing to say to someone with a heart condition. I’m sorry. I do that a lot—just blurt out whatever pops into my head.”
“Hey, it’s cool. I can’t do cocaine anymore either, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise for all the money I’m saving.”
Her embarrassment fell away with a smile. “Yeah, you look like the cocaine type to me.”
“Total cokehead. Reformed.”
Kacey relaxed and sat back in her seat. “So, you went to UNLV? That’s where you studied industrial arts?”
“Yes, my brother and I both studied art there.”
“And then Carnegie Mellon?”
I sipped my coffee. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”
“You have a lot of photos and diplomas on your wall. Before I decided to cool off my boobs in your freezer, I had some time to kill.”
I set my cup down before I spilled it. “That’s not something you hear every day.”
“It is in my world,” Kacey said with a rueful smile, as if it was an old joke she’d gotten tired of hearing. But she waved it off.
“Carnegie Mellon is…where?” she asked.
“Pennsylvania. Talk about a weather shock. The first winter I was there I wanted to hibernate.”
“Wimp,” she said over the rim of her coffee. “But from one pansy to another, east coast has too much weather for me, too. I was born and raised in San Diego, where if it drizzles, people lose their shit.”
The waitress arrived with our food. I never let anyone alter their diet around me, but the scent wafting from Kacey’s plate curled around my nose, rich and meaty and grilled. I glanced down at my salad that smelled like nothing and took a bite, mostly for Kacey’s sake.
“So you have a gallery opening in October?” Kacey asked, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “It’s too bad I won’t be around to see it. I’ll be on tour for the next bazillion years.”
“A bazillion years…that’s a long tour. I hope you like to travel.”
She shrugged. “Eh. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“No?”
“It sounds ungrateful. Most musicians would give their right tit to be signed by a label and go on a multi-city tour, right?”
“As I have no tit to give, right or left, I couldn’t say for sure,” I said with a grin. “But from my professional observation—as your chauffeur—it doesn’t look like you’re having the time of your life.”
Her eyes flicked up to the ceiling. “What gave it away? The trashed concert venue or blacking out and puking in your limo?”
“Tie.”
She smiled. “I miss the honest music without all the theatrics, you know? I used to love just sitting with my guitar and picking out a song. Finding a riff or a melody, falling into the zone of writing lyrics.”
“Did you go to school in San Diego for music?”
“No, I didn’t go to college at all,” she said. “But...I’ve been playing since I was a kid. My grandmother gave me a guitar when I was ten. I liked to play, but mostly I liked writing songs. The guitar was a way to put the tune behind my words. It could have been anything—a piano, drums… I just wanted to write and sing.”
“You sing too?”
“Only back-up nowadays,” she said, not quite meeting my eyes. “And I don’t write my own stuff anymore. Just songs for the band.”
“Why?”
She traced the line of one dark eyebrow absently with her finger. Her hair was blonde but her eyebrows were darker. And perfect.
“We’re a team now. I write for us,” Kacey was saying. “But in a way it’s better for me. I need the band.” She glanced up at me through lowered lashes. “I don’t do so well on my own.”
I nodded, struggling for something constructive to say. To stay focused on her words and not the little details of her face.
“I feel like everything’s moving so fast,” Kacey continued, “and I don’t have time to sit and sort things out. Like what do I want to do? Is this what I want to do? Be a rock star? Half of me says, ‘Hell yeah!’ The other half of me is scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“The lifestyle. The partying. I feel like I do that so I don’t have to make any real decisions. I just follow the band, play really loud music, and drink a lot because…”
“Because…?” I asked gently
She shrugged casually, even if her words weren’t. “Because I have nowhere else to go.”
An image of the bodyguard carrying her out of the club last night flashed through my mind, juxtaposed with the promo shot of her giving the world the finger. Vulnerable and tough at the same time.
She seems lost…
Kacey sat back and waved a hand, as if her words were cigarette smoke to dispel. “Anyway, that’s my angsty hangover story.”
I knew that wasn’t all of it. I had the impression she had a ton more stories and a ton more songs in her.
Silence fell between us as I sipped my decaf that was growing cold. A half-dozen times I started a sentence, wanting to share something with her. Something deeply personal, as if there were some cosmic scoreboard that needed to be evened up.
But my most personal thing was too much. Too dark. Kacey Dawson was luminous and I couldn’t stand the idea of watching my deepest truth settle over her like a shroud, dimming her light with its awful finality.
/> I toyed with my medic alert bracelet under the table. I could at least tell her why I had to eat a fucking salad instead of a burger. I started to, then the waitress appeared with her coffee carafe. She refilled Kacey’s mug, then started to fill mine.
Kacey’s hand shot out and covered my mug. “Wait! Is that regular? He can only have decaf!”
The waitress jerked the pot back with a small cry. “Damn, honey, I nearly scalded you.”
“I’m sorry,” Kacey said. “I just…it’s important.” She glanced at me.
“It’s not worth you getting burned,” I said. But the gesture touched me.
“I’ll get the other pot,” the waitress said, and retreated in a huff.
Kacey’s hand was back in her lap and her cheeks were pink. “Sorry. I got a little over-excited.”
“You go all the way up to eleven,” I said, figuring an eighties movie quote would smooth things over.
Her head shot up, a smile breaking across her face like the dawn. “This is Spinal Tap,” she said. “A classic.”
I held onto her eyes, felt the moment between us, warm and thick. “Thanks for guarding my coffee,” I said. “It’s important.”
Her eyes softened. “Will you tell me why?”
“I uh…I had a heart transplant,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, sitting back in her booth seat. Her eyes stared far off a moment, then she gave her head a brusque shake. “A heart transplant. But…you’re so young. Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six. The virus that wrecked my heart didn’t give a shit how old I was.” I smiled ruefully. “Viruses are assholes like that.”
Kacey didn’t smile. She pointed toward my wrist and the medic alert bracelet. “Can I see?”
I slid my arm toward her on the table. She flipped the rectangular tag over, from the red enameled cross to the words inscribed on the other side.
“Heart transplant patient. See wallet card.” Kacey looked up at me. “What’s on the wallet card?”
“My emergency contact info, my blood type, yadda yadda.”
Her gaze pressed me. “‘Yadda yadda’?”
“What to do in case I get in trouble.”
She nodded. Next she’d ask what kind of trouble I could get into, and I’d make up something about medication side-effects, which was a hell of a lot easier to hear than total heart failure.