Hot in Hellcat Canyon

by Julie Anne Long

  He pushed his hair back in both hands, a wholly frustrated, resigned gesture. He knew she wasn’t going to like what he said.

  “We were both approached at the wedding and asked to do a promotional spot for the Placer County Children’s Hospital. How could I say no to that? It’s in Black Oak. We’re going to fly to Los Angeles from the airfield here. It seemed childish to tell her to rent her own car to get there. Especially since, last I heard, you didn’t care what I did or who I did it with.”

  She had said that.

  That shut her up.

  “You got something to tell me, Britt? Want to reverse your position on that?” His voice was a little harder now. “I notice you didn’t decorate any other advertisements around town. Just the Rebecca Corday ones.”

  Just a few short days ago that suggestion that she reverse position would have resulted in the two of them riffing on the types of positions she was best at, reverse as in cowgirl being one of them, and then giving a few of them a shot.

  It seemed an eternity ago. Time ought to be measured in emotion rather than hours or days, Britt thought. Two happies ago. A misery and a half from now. Like that.

  She didn’t speak.

  “Did it ever occur to you, Britt, that I don’t have a roadmap for whatever this is, either?”

  Britt was silent and a cold spot settled into her already roiling stomach.

  None of this was what she needed to hear in order to forgive him.

  The next silence was long and grim.

  When he finally spoke again, he sounded drained.

  “There’s still nothing going on with me and Rebecca. But I can’t keep saying that over and over. And I get why it’s scary for you. I get why the timing of Rebecca showing up is weird. I can’t put a force field around myself. But I feel like I can’t do or say the right thing here, Britt. And I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t matter what I said or did.”

  She didn’t say anything for a time.

  There was one thing he could say. All she needed was three words. She somehow knew she could handle the craziness, the uncertainty, the everything about his life. If it was laid down over an unshakeable foundation of those words. The ones he feared most.

  “Why are you here, J. T.?”

  She managed to say it quietly and evenly. But her heart had begun to hammer.

  It was his turn to go silent.

  “I couldn’t go to Los Angeles without . . . without seeing you. I saw the billboard and the benches and . . . I was worried about you, Britt.”

  She suddenly felt unutterably weary.

  That was that, then. A welfare check, so to speak.

  Or at least that was all he was going to cop to.

  “I don’t need you, J. T. I’ll be just fine without you. You can just go.”

  The silence that followed seemed oddly absolute.

  The kind, she imagined, that would follow when the earth finally topped turning.

  She looked at him.

  He was holding himself utterly still. His features had an almost waxy stillness, as if he’d utterly vacated his body. The light had gone out of him.

  As if he was the one suffering with a brute of a hangover, and trying not to jostle it.

  “Well, then,” he said. His voice was a little frayed, too. “I guess that’s what I needed to know.”

  He pushed away from the railing he’d repaired.

  He looked down at her and she looked up at him.

  And then he bent and he pressed his lips to her forehead, where ten minutes ago it had hurt the worst.

  She closed her eyes.

  Now all the pain was in the middle of her chest. Her heart felt like charred ruins.

  And oddly it felt like she was the one who’d lit the match.

  There was some kind of brick clogging her throat. She didn’t say anything else.

  His lips lingered there. She was half certain he’d leave a brand.

  But he finally stepped back.

  His eyes were closed. But he opened them again right away.

  “Sweetheart, I won’t grovel. And I won’t be back.”

  And then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 23

  She lay still for a long, long time because she didn’t want to move yet.

  She was vaguely aware she was lingering out there in order to savor the last of his presence, like an echo.

  Somewhere through her hungover hurt she had the vague sense that she’d done something horrible to J. T. Possibly something worse than he’d done to her.

  She’d been her best self with him, and somehow the threat of losing him had turned her into her worst self.

  But look at what he’d given her, in the process. A community who cared about her. Actual friends. A revived libido. A clear willingness to display her art in public again. A refreshed lust for competition. A renewed respect for the dangers of alcohol.

  It was all good, and all because of him. But she thought she’d trade all of it plus a kidney if she could only turn back time to two weeks ago, and stop it right there.

  She finally stirred when her phone rang. She could move without throwing up now, she found out, so she went into the house and answered it.

  It was Casey.

  “Oh my God, Britt, Rebecca Corday came into the Truth and Beauty today! I nearly had kittens!”

  One day she would tell Casey that she’d drawn her as a lioness. One day, possibly even soon, she’d show her the drawing she’d made. Casey would like it even more than the bunny face, she was pretty sure.

  “Yeah? What did you tell her about your Bunny Face?”

  “I told her I passed out on the bus bench and the same vandal did to me what they did to her. And we commiserated over it.”

  Britt didn’t think she’d ever laugh again, but she laughed then. Just a little. “I knew you could handle it. You’re the bomb, Casey.”

  “No, you’re the bomb.”

  “I think I’m too old to drink like that now, though, Casey.”

  “That’s okay. We can go the movies and do other things that adult women are supposed to do. We can quilt.”

  Britt smiled faintly and then the smile died.

  “He’s gone, Casey.”

  Casey was quiet a moment. “Oh, sweetie.”

  Another silence, rich with sympathy.

  “We’ll talk about it later, when we’re both all the way sober.”

  “Okay,” Britt said in a near whisper.

  There was a brief little silence.

  “Did you get to blow-­dry her hair?” Britt said finally.

  “I did. I was surprised. It’s kind of thin. She probably doesn’t eat enough.”

  “Once a week. Like a boa constrictor.”

  Casey snickered.

  They ended the call.

  Bip, I know you think he’s a dog, but you HAVE got to see this!!!!!!!!! It has three million hits already. P.S. The dead azalea? That is so you.

  Brit roused herself from the fetal-­position slumber she’d tipped into a few hours after she’d last talked to Casey, awakened by the chime of her sister’s text and startled by the staggering number of exclamation points.

  Should she even bother?

  But she clicked the YouTube link anyway. Really, how much worse could it get?

  Her heart gave a swift hard jump when she saw the title.

  “John Tennessee McCord’s Toast at Felix Nicasio’s wedding.”

  It was one of those illicit videos filmed by someone who annoyingly held their cell phone vertically.

  But the still was of J. T., holding up a glass. He looked so handsome in a tux her head went light. He seemed both utterly at home up there, with hundreds of eyes on him, and a little diffident.

  And speaking of painful, her heart was slamming away in her ches
t.

  She held her breath. Said a silent prayer.

  Then exhaled and pressed play.

  Whoever had recorded it had clearly hit record when he was already a few words into the toast.

  “Most of us sitting here, we’re in the business of fantasy and illusion,” J. T. was saying. “So many things about our lives are outsized. We show up on billboards. On the big screen. In millions of living rooms weekly. Someone else writes beautiful or moving or funny words for us, and they’re accompanied by huge sweeping scores or hip soundtracks so that we and the audience know how and when and what to feel. So sometimes it’s hard to know whether what we’ve got is love . . . or publicity.”

  This was greeted by scattered nervous laughter.

  “Because real life isn’t like the movies. Real life doesn’t have crisply crafted story or character arcs or big crescendos. The love scenes aren’t choreographed. Sometimes it just flows forward more or less uneventfully, with intermittent explosions or grace notes. And we can’t always wrap everything up and make everything better with a big theatrical gesture.”

  “You tell ’em, Tessnesseese!” Some drunken female shouted.

  This was greeted by a chorus of shushes.

  “In real life, it’s hard to know if love is what you’re in. For a few reasons. First, well, we aren’t handed a script that we can read cover to cover that tell us that yep, that’s love, all right. And secondly . . . well, maybe your life up to that point has been a grittier sort of art-­house movie or horror flick. So maybe you’ve never been in that kind of movie before and don’t recognize the genre.” More laughter and some murmurs here. And Britt’s heart squeezed like a painful little fist, thinking of the kind of movie J. T. had grown up in. “And thirdly . . . well, I think the reason we refer to it as ‘in love’ is because when you’re in it, you occupy it the way you occupy your own skin. Or the way you occupy a little house, maybe with a picket fence and a formerly broken porch, with one other person. When you’re in something, you can’t always see clearly that you are.”

  He had that audience in thrall.

  Britt had stopped breathing.

  He looked up, and then she could have sworn he looked her straight in the eyes.

  “And movie love, like our outsized lives, is big: big moments, big declarations, hopefully, big grosses.” He paused, grinning, when the audience laughed. “But in real life it’s the little things. Maybe it’s peanut butter in the house because she knows you like it. You bring her a half-­dead azalea because you know she’ll love it better than roses and you want to see the look on her face when you hand it to her. And it’s in the silences. In how you enjoy everyday things more, like reading, because she’s reading next to you.”

  Someone was audibly weeping now. Britt could hear it.

  Or maybe that was her. She sniffed and swiped at her eyes.

  “Felix—­and I don’t think he’ll mind if I tell you this now, because he’s done locked his woman down—­” They all laughed. “He was a wreck shortly after he first started dating Michelle. We all know he’s a guy’s guy, a bachelor in that old-­fashioned, groovy sense . . . and we all saw that he was just laid low by her. He wanted to know, ‘J. T., how do I know I’m in love?’ And I wasn’t much help to him then, and I do apologize, Felix. You’ve punished me enough for being useless then by making me make this damn toast.” Lots of laughter here and a few enthusiastic hoots.

  It settled down, and J. T. got somber. “But I feel like I have a duty to Felix and Michelle and everyone here. Because if you’re wondering, gentlemen, if what you’re in is love, I might be able to help.”

  He paused. The silence all but echoed. Not even the clink of a glass or chink of silverware.

  “When whatever you’re feeling is so huge that it’s tempting to want to call it other big words, like fear or awe, and it’s so easy, easy as breathing, that you think you can’t possibly have earned the right to be that happy, and so hard it can drive a proud man to his knees, where he will beg for forgiveness, for another chance, for rights to the remote . . .” Laughter greeted this. “It might be love.”

  “And it might be the ‘L’ word,” he continued, “if you want to suddenly be a better person than you ever have been in order to be worthy of her, and you don’t even know where to start. This is how, by the way, I think the world becomes a better place. We want to be better for the people we love.”

  “Preach it!” someone shouted. Britt thought it sounded like Franco, and it was awfully close to the mic.

  “And it might be the ‘L’ word if you don’t want to say that word out loud, because calling it only one thing feels almost inadequate, a disservice to the actual condition, because it’s actually a million feelings.”

  “Oh my God,” Britt murmured, her hands on her face. Tears poured down through her fingers. “Oh, J. T.”

  “You will feel needed. Absolutely essential. Not because of your fine face and projected grosses”—­he paused for the laugh he’d anticipated—­“but because you are what turns the movie of her life from black-­and-­white to color. By some miracle, you are lucky enough to be precisely what makes her life better, even if you don’t always make her life easier. And you will finally feel at home, which is less about a place than about where she is.”

  “Oh . . .” Britt breathed.

  And with a few words born of fear and anger and wounded pride, she’d told him she didn’t need him. That he didn’t belong here. What had she done?

  “It will make you feel stronger than you’ve ever been, and weaker than you’ve ever been. And you somehow realize that weakness is in fact a strength you didn’t know you had.

  “The hard part, the irony, is that sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until you experience the world without her in it. When you’re with her, it’s like the first time anyone anywhere saw a movie in color. You never knew the world contained such brilliance, such music. Without her, the world is suddenly two-­dimensional and black-­and-­white and soundless and there are no subtitles.”

  The wedding guests were dead quiet. Moved unto speechlessness, remembering, perhaps, or reviewing their own loves.

  “And I think the surefire way of knowing? Nothing, nothing, not even jumping a stunt car through a hoop of fire, scares you more than the notion that she might not love you back.”

  He paused. He took a steadying breath.

  “And so . . . maybe you don’t say it.”

  He cleared his throat and looked down. You could have heard a pin drop.

  Britt could have sworn everybody in the tent was frozen.

  She was frozen.

  She held her breath, and rooted for him to say the next words.

  She thought maybe he couldn’t finish.

  He finally lifted his head again.

  When he spoke again, his voice was a little gravelly. “I submit to you: You’re not really brave, gentlemen, until you say that word to the person you love, and are prepared for the consequences of her answer. It might be the hardest and best thing you ever do. Even if you crash and burn. But don’t, don’t let that opportunity get away from you. It will end you.”

  Britt was pretty sure all the rustling she heard in the background was caused by tissues plucked from pockets or shirt sleeves being dashed against eyes.

  “I know it was a long road for Felix and Michelle. Some of us know their story a little better than others. And my brothers and sisters, Felix is ultimately a brave man, which is why he’s sitting up there right now, grinning like an idiot and is he . . . yep, he’s crying, too! Check it out, I made Felix Nicasio cry!” Laughter and whoops greeted this. “. . . next to a woman he probably feels he doesn’t deserve, and most of us agree. I jest, I jest. You got lucky, too, Michelle, y’ hear, and I know you’ll take care of each other.”

  “I will, J. T.,” Michelle said, sounding quite sniffly. Fe
lix handed her a handkerchief.

  “So raise your glass to Felix and Michelle, who make each other, and us, and the world, better, because they love each other. May the movie of their life be an unforgettable triumph, like every movie we’ve all been in, according to our publicity.”

  A great roar greeted this, laughter and cheers and thundering applause. And the cell phone recording it tumbled to the ground and stopped recording as whoever illicitly recorded it clearly got carried away and dropped it in the act of applauding.

  Tears poured unchecked down Britt’s face. Obscuring everything, which was kind of ironic, given that everything was suddenly clear.

  Sometimes you were the stunt driver, aiming for that flaming hoop, and soaring triumphantly through the air.

  And sometimes you were the ramp that launched the driver into triumph.

  Britt intended to be J. T.’s ramp.

  It was so much easier to be brave when she could be brave for someone she loved. All she had to do was make it possible for him to say what he wanted and needed to say to her.

  Her only fear now was that she had forever blown it.

  It was almost midnight when she finally decided to call Casey.

  She held her breath as the phone rang and rang.

  Casey answered, and actually sounded alert. “Britt!”

  “I’m so sorry to call so late . . . Casey . . . what are you doing right now besides trying to sleep?”

  “I was awake! Oh my God, Britt, did you see J. T.’s video?” She was sniffling, too. He’d made all the women in the world cry, it seemed. That’s my man, Britt thought proudly.

  “I did see it. And this is about J. T. I need your help. Are you up for Round Two? I screwed up big-­time, and I need to make it right before it’s too late. It might already be too late.”

  Casey was more than game once she heard Britt’s plan. Thank God for friends who were delinquents. “I’ll be right over,” she said, absolutely thrilled.

  Britt ended the call and stared at her phone. She was nervous as hell, and her palms were sweating, and she’d never felt more alive.

  Sometimes love was in the quiet moments. But sometimes, like in the movies, a grand gesture was called for to really get your point across.