“Thanks so much, babe,” Garret says. “Have a great night.” He smiles, but I could swear something is missing from his grin – some weight, some depth. A certain degree of sincerity is absent from his pinpricked dimples.
The girl leans forward and plants a soft kiss on his cheek, then stands upright and strides away. She glances back once as she departs.
I sit still and quiet throughout the encounter, my hands folded in my lap. I don’t know what to do here but recede. It would be rude to walk away. I can’t walk away. But Garret, who seconds before had felt so real, so present, so next to me, now seems distant and unreachable.
My thoughts spiral downward. With girls like that throwing themselves at him, how can I compete? You can’t, a voice in my head declares. You just can’t.
I start to finagle a departure, some excuse to get me away. I can’t sit here and pretend that I have any chance with this rock star. I don’t. I can’t.
“Ugh,” Garret says, turning back towards me. “Can’t stand that girl. She’s a soulless one, that’s for damn sure. Real trash on the inside.” Disgust wrinkles his upper lip.
I want to laugh out loud. Is he serious? He must be messing with me. There is no way he is turning down that specimen. I mean, I’d probably sleep with her if she asked! She was stunning! No, he must be joking.
“You’re kidding, right?” I blurt. The words escape my mouth before I can stop them.
Garret laughs. “What do you mean?” he asks.
I stumble over myself. “I mean… she’s beautiful,” I say.
Garret leans forward and looks me straight in the eyes. A heat pulses from his pupils – a beat, a hum, a musical intensity that rings with something inside me.
“I’ve got a theory on relationships,” he explains. “It’s kind of stupid, but it makes sense to me. When you get around the person you’re meant to be around, in a romantic sense, the two of you make a kind of music, you know?” Boom, boom, his eyes pulse. The green irises dance and wave.
He goes on. “It’s like the two of you are…how do I say this? Playing each other, like instruments. When you’re with just anybody, you can touch and talk and do all that surface stuff, of course, but it isn’t the same as when you’re with that one person. When it’s right – when it’s meant to be, as cheesy as that sounds – there’s another layer to it.”
I follow along, my head nodding subtly. I am stunned by what he is saying.
“It’s like the difference between just sound and actual music, I think,” he continues. “You can hit the guitar strings, but that’s not a song. That’s not art. When it’s right – when it’s meant to be – it’s music between the two of you. You’re each other’s instrument. It’s art.”
Garret blinks and the intensity dissipates. He leans back, laughs, and runs a self-conscious hand through his hair. I inhale deeply.
“Sorry to get all serious on you,” he apologizes, embarrassed. “Didn’t mean to subject you to all my mushy-gushy shit.”
“Of course not!” I object. I gnaw on my lip again. The image of Garret I had in my mind – the hard-partying rock star, the skirt chaser, the booze hound and drug aficionado – is cracking. I don’t know what to believe about him. He looks the part, ensconced in a rugged leather jacket and tight jeans that rise and fall with every twitch of his muscles. But the words coming out of his mouth belong to someone different. They belong to someone … real.
He scrutinizes me. His eyes are searching for something in my face. I stare back, mind churning, wondering who he really is. I can’t tell what he is looking for. What is it? I want to ask, but I can’t work up the courage. I am still wavering between disgust and curiosity. I am trying to hate him, but he is making it all too difficult.
He locks onto something. It seems to satisfy him, as he sighs and smiles wanly. “Anyways, like I said, not trying to make you think I’m some crazy psycho dude,” he says.
He cuts himself off. “I’m rambling. We can talk about something else. Tell me about you.”
I laugh, but his gaze is brimming with sincerity. He is listening – actually listening, not just waiting for his turn to speak. There is a receptiveness to him, an aura that envelops me and opens me up.
“Well, there isn’t very much that’s interesting…” I start to say, but he stops me.
“That’s bullshit,” he says. “Look at you. You’re sitting here, having a conversation with a perfect stranger about the nature of love and music and art. Now look around you.” I glance around the dim hallway. A few people lie slumped on couches, passed out drunk. A clump of girls emerge from the bathroom, silent and ghostly with their faces lit by the eerie glow of cell phone screens. Compared to Garret, everyone is closed off and dazed. They all look so sad to me.
“All of them, they’re ghostwalking. They’re zombies. You’re alive, Jodie, I can tell. I can feel it and see it in you, you know? You’re interesting. So tell me about you. How’d you get here?”
The words rip from his mouth with searing intensity. My blood pounds just from listening to him. I feel it, the aliveness. I am so aware of everything around me – the grain of the couch fabric, the breath whistling between my teeth, the subtle musk rolling off Garret in heady waves.
I gulp. I don’t know what to think, but I start to talk anyways.
I tell Garret about my job. I tell him about struggling through school and the banality of overbearing bills and invoices. I tell him how it feels to ache and worry all the time. While I talk, he nods and sympathizes at all the right moments. His blond hair bobs when he shakes his head emphatically as I talk about debt collectors and uncaring professors. His eyes moan with every minor tragedy.
The conversation expands. As he talks, I can hear the passion in his voice, the dedication to his music. I listen attentively, savoring the relaxed vibe between us, watching his mouth and lips shape every coolly rumbling word. He tells me about the messages in his music and the way he tries to bring the crowd into the emotional state he is experiencing.
I hadn’t expected him to be artistic in this way; to be honest, I was imagining a hedonistic punk with an overdeveloped appetite for hard drugs and easy girls. But the more and more he talks about the venues and the music and the lifestyle he is dreaming of, the more I see inside his head. My pre-conceptions start to slip away.
“…It was hard to tell my parents that music is what I really wanted to pursue, you know? My dad is ex-military, so he has always been borderline abusive. I left home to come here as soon as I could, but I still feel that pressure on me all the time…”
I am soaking up every word of the conversation. I can feel the pain he felt growing up; it was the same pain I endured, the same kind of ridicule and hurt and repression. One look in his eyes and I see my reflection in them. It's like we are matched up on the same frequency, painting with the same palette. I don’t know what this emotion is because I have never felt it before, but the barriers between Garret and I are dropping rapidly and there is a naked willingness to bare everything, to share everything.
Hours pass while we talk. I ask him where he thinks his band is heading.
“To be honest, I’m barely eking out a living right now,” he says. “We just haven’t made much money yet. Every day is hand-to-mouth, you know, bouncing between paychecks and praying for no bad luck. But we’re getting really close to a huge signing. It's taken years to make the right connections and it’s finally starting to pay off – meetings are getting set up with people who have money, the right kinds of people. I’m hoping that we’ll get signed and start touring really soon, maybe even within the next year. I mean, that’s all kind of a pipe dream, of course, and every time I think we’re getting close, something happens that pushes us backwards again, but despite the frustrations, I really have faith that we’re gonna make it. Soon. I really do.”
Throughout our whole conversation, his bracing honesty has caught me totally off-guard. He is so willing to expose his fears and his anxieties, while I work s
o hard to keep mine shuttered. Underneath all the nerves, though, he still has that confidence, that smile, that tilt of the head that tells the whole world that everything is going to work out just fine for this one. His basic charisma is so appealing, like a finger beckoning me closer towards him.
But I can’t help but fall back on old patterns of self-preservation. The soul-baring candidness scares me; the aloof smile scares me. He is dangerous for me because I have so much to lose and nothing to stop me from losing it. There is no safety net for Jodie Sutton. Despite the down-to-earth persona, Garret is still a hard-partying rocker. Look at him! He has to be. Sarah and the whispers in my classes had supplied too many stories of cocaine and groupies for me to discount them all based on one conversation. I know that he still has that side to him. That scares me, too.
My heart is a house divided, torn apart between the rising attraction I can feel stirring and the intellectual repulsion he draws out in me. My head hates him; my body wants him. The brief flashes of arrogance that leak out in his sentences – in his assumptions about the girls around him, his distaste for anyone trying to compete with him – only fuel the dichotomy. I feel the internal fight acutely. I have too much to lose for him to enter my life.
Sarah pokes her head around the corner. “Jesus, Jodie, there you are! I’ve been looking for you forever. The bar is closing. It’s time to go home,” she says. She sees Garret. “Whoa, who is this handsome devil you’ve got here, Jodie?”
“Garret, a pleasure to meet you,” he says to Sarah, rising from the couch to shake her hand.
“Hi, Garret, I’m Sarah. I see you’ve met my friend Jodie! She’s the best,” Sarah winks.
Garret smiles. “She is. We’ve been talking for so long that I completely lost track of the time."
He turns to me. “Tell you what, Jodie. I want you to do me a favor,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “What is it?”
He sticks out a closed fist. “I want you to take my lucky pick. But you have to promise to bring it back to me at my next show.” He unfolds his hand and shows me the red pick lying coolly in the middle of his palm. I look him in the eyes. They shimmer, green like ocean water or stained glass when the moon beams through.
I smile and look into his eyes--really look into them. "Yeah, okay,” I say. “I promise."
He grins. “Good,” he says. “I’ll see you then.”
Sarah and I walk down the hall. Garret shouts after us, "Remember, you promised!" I look back as a smile creeps on my face.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world!” I say over my shoulder. The last thing I see is his head-tilted grin before Sarah whisks me around the corner.
There is music between us, I swear there is. I am his instrument, and he is coolly, casually, effortlessly tugging on the strings of my heart.
CHAPTER FIVE
My head is spinning as Sarah and I walk back. Thoughts are screaming at me from every direction, yanking at my emotions. I can’t handle the confusion. Garret and money and school and bills and Mother and the whole world are hurling abuses and taunts from every corner of my skull. The cacophony is deafening.
“Jodie, girl, what’s going on? You’ve got this crazy look on your face,” Sarah asks, leaning over to look me in the eye as we walk down the street. Her voice is thick with concern.
“Nothing,” I mutter. “Not right now. Let’s just get back to the apartment. It’s freezing out here.”
Flurries drift past our ears. The city is so quiet now. I can see tendrils of sunlight creeping up over the blocky edges of skyscrapers and high rises, their light seeping into the smog draped over the city and illuminating the whole sky with soft dawn light. Everything feels scrunched together – sky and city, building and street, my happiness and my misery. The tiniest of fluctuations could send one crashing into the other.
Sarah and I walk into the lobby of my building, blinking away the cold-induced tears from the corners of our eyes. Our breath comes in short bursts as we clomp up the stairs and into my apartment. As soon as we enter, I collapse into a rickety chair.
The adrenaline and excitement that had fueled my night are long gone. There is nothing left but exhaustion and a cryptic knot of feelings wrapped around Garret.
My heels are aching from the absurd stilettos into which my poor, suffering feet had been crammed all night. I rip them off with a savage satisfaction. Looking down at my clothes, I stiffen slightly. I can practically hear my mother barking in my ear. Ridiculous. Clown costume. You can’t hide behind slutty skirts and swooping necklines. You’re disgusting. I had heard every version of this tirade during my teenage years, always accompanied by the harsh jangle of jewelry clacking on her skinny wrists. Now, I carry her words with me. The thrill of the evening had, for the first time in a long time, submerged my mother’s hate below the surface of my attention, but as tired and confused as I am, they are roaring back with a vengeance.
I close my eyes and slump back into the chair, trying to quiet the mental firestorm raging within me. I can hear Sarah breathing quietly across from me. I know she is worried, but she lets me calm myself before she speaks. The tick of the clock hand dominates the silence.
“He likes you, you know,” she murmurs. I know exactly who she is talking about.
“I saw the way he was looking at you when we left, and lemme tell you, I’ve seen that look a million times before. He likes you.”
“Shush,” I reply halfheartedly. “He does not. Garret Lyons has no interest in me.” Mother’s imagined voice keeps seething in my ear. Slut. Ugly. Fat. Disgusting.
“Look,” Sarah says. “There’s no way I’m wrong. Just trust me. He likes you.”
With my eyes squeezed shut, I picture Mother standing across from me, dressed like she was the night I threw up at her feet. Her wrists and voice are shaking with equal measures of repulsion and vitriol. The same word is spilling from between her pursed lips on repeat, every syllable perfectly enunciated.
Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting.
I picture myself in front of her. I am no longer a child, but a woman, full-grown. She keeps repeating herself.
Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting.
Suddenly, something wells in my chest, a rising cloud of anger and pride and countless other emotions that have been boiling in my gut for as long as I can recall. The cloud expands to fill my stomach, my torso, my throat, and when it reaches my mouth, it takes shape and explodes outward.
Fuck you, Mother! the imaginary Me screams. Fuck you for everything you’ve ever done! Fuck you! Fuck you! Our voices chorus together upwards, battling.
Disgusting.
Fuck you!
Disgusting.
Fuck you!
Disgusting!
Fuck you!
With a pop, the apparition vanishes. My eyes fly open and I'm panting heavily, like I had just woken up from a nightmare. Sarah is across from me, looking quizzically at my panicked expression.
There are so many things I want to say, so many elements contributing to the particular frenzied symphony of my life.
She is right; I think Garret does like me. There was a glint in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before, not outside of a television show, a certain gleam that communicated so little and yet so much. At least, I think I saw it. I wanted to see it. The fact that Sarah says she saw something too emboldens me.
At the same time, though, a brief vista of my life confirms the obvious: I am struggling. The difficulty of my classes is peaking to an almost unbearable height, and if I want to graduate, I have to focus my attention there. But in order to do so, I have to be able to keep working and paying for everything I need to sustain my life. After splurging on drinks at the bar and tickets for the show, my wallet is pathetically empty and the thought of looking at my bank account terrifies me. I have already spent too much of my money and my time on frivolous things. As much as I may want him – and I want him so badly, a tiny voice chirps – Garret definitely falls into the frivolous category.
He is dangerous, both for me and for the precious balancing act I am performing.
I tune back in to Sarah mid-sentence. “… The bottom line is, you have to make a move soon, Jodie,” she is saying. “There are so many girls who want him, and just because he looked at you all doe-eyed doesn’t mean that he won’t forget about you in an instant while he goes and hooks up with some random groupie.”
“I know, I know,” I reply. I think back to the obsessive gazes of the girls from my class and imagine Garret looking at them the same way he looked at me. It is so easy to see them pouncing on him at a moment’s notice. I nearly gag at the thought.
Part of me has yet to fully relinquish my initial opinion of Garret. The drugs, the promiscuity – there is no escaping that persona. I can dream of this romantic artist swooping me off my feet all day and night, but the fact remains that he has a well-deserved reputation that does not exactly jibe with the fantasy hero that I want him to be. Part of me hates him for it, for the girls he beds, for the sheer sexuality that rolls off of him in waves. It is intoxicating when I am with him, but the farther away I get, the more it sickens me, like a hangover.
Devil's Angels Boxed Set: Bikers and Alpha Bad Boy Erotic Romance Page 38