by Vivian Lux
“Right. In exchange for lowering your rent.” She lifted her chin even higher. “An even trade. Dollar for dollar.”
“Do you even know how much I pay in rent?”
She faltered a little. “No. But I can look it up.”
“What if I told you I didn’t pay rent? And you’re just over here looking for a free handout with nothing to offer me in return?”
“You don’t pay rent?”
“You have no idea, do you?”
“Well do you?”
“I don’t care to tell you.” The truth was, Mr. Dolan and I worked out a caretaker arrangement several months back that allowed me to live rent free in exchange for maintenance on the grounds and the great house, but again, it didn’t really suit me to make Miss Priss’s life easier. No matter how nicely her boots clung to her calves.
“Well I can always find out,” she said airily. “Just a call to my granddad’s lawyer and we’ll get this whole tenant thing straightened out really quickly.”
“Ah, so now you’re threatening me with eviction if I don’t feed you?”
“Not in so many words, no…”
“Why don’t you go down to town and get your own food.” I pretended to peer over her shoulder. “Oh right, because you’re stuck here with no car and are completely at my mercy.”
Her face twisted oddly and I instantly regretted the poor choice of words. I was a recluse and a hermit, but I liked to think I didn’t fall in the scary category. “How about this,” I said, trying to smooth over my gaffe. “How about you just say, ‘hey, Derek. How about we share dinner and catch up on old times?’”
“Were you eating dinner now?”
“No, you silly girl, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Why don’t you come by later?”
“Because.” Her voice dropped. She half-closed her eyes, her eyelashes casting long shadows over her cheeks and I could suddenly see how very tired she was. “I’m hungry now.”
Guilt flared like a match set alight in my chest and for a second, regret settled heavily around my shoulders. I leaned against the doorframe, cursing the fact that it pissed me off something fierce that she was here, and she was really only here because I had found her. I’d gone searching for Mr. Dolan’s lost granddaughter and here she was, and there was no food left in the cupboards of the great house. I’d done the cleanup myself so I knew for a fact she was fucking hungry. Really was I such an asshole?
There were those who would say yes in answer to that question, but I liked to tell myself they were wrong. “Come on in,” I said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Aria Jane
He didn’t step aside to let me in, so I had to squeeze past him, brushing up against his skin and the warmth that radiated from him. I held my breath, but I still caught a whiff of something woodsy and spicy and completely appealing.
I rushed into his kitchen and sat down without asking.
Derek gave me an oddly amused look as I sat in the chair and slid my fingers under my thighs, an old habit I’d picked up when I was trying to keep from biting my nails. Within seconds, though, my hand had slipped out and my finger was sliding up to my teeth.
I swiveled in my chair. “Nice place,” I said casually.
In truth, it was much more than nice. It was jaw-dropping gorgeous and not at all how I remembered the carriage house. Where there was a dusty old space was now transformed. The ceilings swooped in an arc above us, twenty feet high in the center and the light of the lowering sun trapped motes of dust that danced crazily. The living space itself was one great room with different spaces carved out of it. Near the front of the house, where I sat now, a beautiful kitchen lined the wall, with a restored antique oven, range, and a deep farmhouse sink. In the corner sat a table that looked like it had been built from the same gray-stained planks as the exterior of the carriage house. In the far corner, half hidden behind a privacy screen peeked a rumpled bed. And in the other corner, a desk was set up with three monitors under a huge window framing the view of the lake. In the very center loomed a huge old potbellied wood stove, atop a tiled platform. I imagined it must be able to heat this whole huge space and for a second I had myself a nice little vision of Derek splitting logs for it. I shook my head.
“What’s behind there?” I asked, gesturing to the one long wall. Farmhouse doors ran in sliding panels along the whole expanse and I couldn’t help but notice the great big padlock holding it closed.
“You’re a lot more nosy than your grandfather,” he observed drily.
“Just trying to get an idea of what my tenant is up to.”
“Your tenant is making your food,” he growled, turning to his refrigerator and crouching down.
I looked away from the sight of his thighs straining against his jeans and blurted out the first thing I could think of. “Do you still hang out with Gabe Foster?”
He stood back up again with eggs in his hand and shook his head without a word. Then he set down the eggs. “Omelet?”
“Yes, please.” My stomach growled and I hoped he didn’t hear it. I couldn’t tell because he was scrupulously keeping his back to me.
“Is Gabe still in town?”
“Far as I know.”
“Huh, you guys were close too.”
“Yeah.”
“How about,” I wracked my brain for a second. “Jesse Klingman?”
He stiffened a little and shook his head again, this time more fervently.
I narrowed my eyes. “Do you still hang out with any of the old crowd?”
He turned to face me and brushed his hand down his face, pulling his lips down into a frown. “No,” he said shortly. Then he turned back to the range.
I kicked my feet. “You used to be like, King Shit of Poop Mountain,” I teased. Who was this quiet, reserved version of Derek Granger? It was like I’d fallen into some parallel universe. “You and your crew, swaggering around here all tough. What happened to you guys? Did you have a fight or something?”
His ears were really red now and all of a sudden I regretted pushing so hard. But it was too late. “I stopped drinking,” he snapped. “That’s what happened.”
“Shit,” I exhaled.
Early autumn’s golden rays were angled perfectly to shine right on his shoulders. He looked like some kind of statue dipped in gold.
Oh for fuck’s sake. I was so fucking hungry, I was delirious. That thought made me laugh a little and his dark eyes flicked up over his shoulder to see what was so amusing. I blinked and then laughed again, rubbing my eyes. “Sorry,” I said.
The corner of his mouth slipped upward and I noticed the show of a dimple on his cheek. Had I thought he wasn’t handsome enough? That he couldn’t compete with the guys in New York? It must have been a fucking trick of the light. Derek Granger was still fucking gorgeous, so damn handsome he could be called almost be called beautiful.
“Okay, my turn,” he said irritably, whisking the eggs so hard I was afraid the bowl would break. “How about you tell me something?”
I was instantly on my guard. “Tell you what?”
"The story. About why you’re so tired, for one. Why you drove through the night to get here and then slept so long I thought I’d have to call the paramedics.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, well…” I bit my lip. Fuck it. “I found out my boyfriend cheated on me. A lot. Like a whole lot. A whole lot of times.”
Derek exhaled sharply, but said nothing. No sympathy, no exclamations of alarm. And in a way, that was fucking comforting. I was tired of feeling bad about being wronged. I wasn’t a fucking victim.
I was just an idiot.
“You’d been with him long?” Derek finally said.
I nodded. “Seven years.”
He turned up from his cooking and looked at me. I nodded again. “Yeah. Since I left here.” I closed my eyes. Why was I telling him? Sure I had a crush on this guy back in the day, but those days were long past and I didn’t know him at all. But for some reason, I just kept
talking.
I told him everything, a blow by blow account of Killian’s betrayal and the explosion of my band and then my life. Then I found I needed to add in a backstory, so he’d understand just what the hell I was up against. And in my addled brain, this all made sense. How many interviews had I given? How many times had I told the story of running away? About my flight from Reckless Falls the night of my sixteenth birthday, the gas stations we stopped at, the stranger’s floor we slept on, and the concert I went to that night. In the pit, I'd been reborn, and when I emerged, Killian Varness found me.
But even in my hunger induced haze, I didn't mention how vulnerable I was feeling back then. That leaving Reckless Falls had been almost an accident. I just needed to find my own way, out from under my sister’s shadow. My parents were never truly evil, at least not in any overt way. They just didn't know what to do with a daughter like me.
They'd had their perfect daughter, lost her, and then she was replaced with me. No wonder they were confused. No wonder they were hurt by my very existence.
Those were things I did not mention to interviewers. And so I leaned my head back on the chair, and I told Derek the same sanitized version of my backstory that I'd polished and rehearsed to perfection.
Derek set my omelet in front of me and I set about devouring it, but even as I chewed great mouthfuls, I still talked. And he listened so quietly, that it was almost like I was telling it to myself. The words flowed out seamlessly in a story I've grown used to telling…
Right up until the moment the story got away from me and the hurt I’d been trying to keep stuffed down came bubbling back to the surface.
"It was a few months ago," I said. “We were on tour. I woke up in our hotel room and checked my phone while he was still asleep. Habit, you know? I didn’t expect to see anything. But I did. It was an anonymous email.”
Derek sat down at the table with me, resting his elbow on the surface. He leaned forward, but something in his stance showed how uncomfortable he was all of a sudden. I spread my hands. “I know. It was out of the blue, but the way it was worded…I just knew this wasn’t a scam. It told me to check Derek’s phone and it gave me the passcode. Now, how the fuck they got his passcode I have no idea, since Killian wouldn’t even share that with me.”
Derek made a noise. “They’re not too hard to figure out. Birthdates and the like.”
“It wasn’t any pattern I recognized. But then again, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me since I apparently didn’t know the guy at all. I rolled over and got out of bed and took his phone off his nightstand. I typed in the passcode and it was right there. All his messages with the other woman he'd been seeing. Saying sweet, lovey-dovey shit to her that he'd never once said to me, his supposed girlfriend.” I swallowed hard, the last bit of egg catching in my throat. All at once I realized I was spilling my fucking guts to a complete stranger. No, worse than that, someone I was, for lack of a better word, about to really fucking screw over. I clamped my mouth shut. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Not really polite conversation.”
“No, tell me,” Derek said, leaning forward a little.
“Why?”
“Because…” he trailed off. “I’m all invested now. Don’t leave it on a fucking cliffhanger.”
I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t a fucking soap opera, it’s real life.”
“He was cheating, right?”
I nodded and turned away to look out the huge picture window on the far wall. l was just in time to see a glimpse of the long stretch of lake before the sunlight glimmering off it brought tears to my eyes.
Or maybe that was something else making me cry.
“It wasn't just a fling,” I said softly. “I could tell that from the second I caught him. And the more I dug around, the more I realized that while I had his body, his physical presence in the bed next to me, she had his mind and his heart… The new album, most of the songs I thought he'd written about me? They were actually written about her."
Derek exhaled softly through his teeth.
I smacked my hand against the table. ”And I'm pissed, yes. Of course I'm pissed. He's a lying, cheating, sneaky asshole. But I'm also pissed that I never freaking noticed, you know? I mean, once I knew, it was so freaking obvious, like, right there under my nose. I just wonder, how did I let it get to that point? Where things are just so rote and routine that I didn’t even notice how fucked they were?"
Derek let out of rueful laugh that sounded more like a bark. I opened my eyes and turned to look at him. "That sounds like the laugh of experience," I observed.
He shook his head. "That's a long story too,” he said. All at once he stood up and took my empty plate from me. “I’ll drive you down to get your car now.”
I blinked at him. “Really?”
“Do you want to come or not?”
“Well, um…” All at once, my tongue, which seconds ago couldn’t stop tripping over itself to spill all of my secrets, suddenly twisted itself into a knot. I stared at him.
He grabbed his keys off of a hook by the front door and then turned back expectantly. “Come on,” he said. “Bus is leaving. Now or never.”
I scrambled to follow him.
CHAPTER NINE
Derek
I didn’t look behind me to see if she was following. I was too afraid of what she’d see on my face.
I had no idea why I’d offered to give her a ride. Why the fuck was I even considering helping her, making any of this a little more easy for her to deal with? I should be putting roadblocks up at her every turn, blocking her from up-ending my life in any way. But below all that resentment and righteous indignation hummed that quiet chorus of guilt, the one that reminded me, over and over again, that I was the one who’d done this to myself.
Just like everything else in my life, there was no one to blame for my predicament except myself.
I yanked open the passenger side door with a savage jerk. The hum of guilt was now rising to a buzz of anxiety. I only drove into town when I had to. And I most certainly did not have to right now.
So why the fuck was I doing this?
Aria gave me a silent, startled glance as she slid into the passenger seat. I carefully shut the door and exhaled. Clearly, there was nothing to this other than my own fucked up sense of morals. Just like the projects I worked on, the ones I hoped could redeem me. This was just like that and had nothing to do with Aria herself.
Right.
I slid into the driver’s seat beside her. The autumn sun had warmed her shoulders and I could feel the heat of her skin and smell the scent of her shampoo.
It was the closest thing to drunk I had felt in years.
“Okay,” I grunted, throwing the Jeep into drive with a lurch.
“Okay,” she repeated. “You know where you’re going?”
“Vineland Realty,” I grunted, throwing my Jeep into drive. We bounced along the driveway, winding our way down to the main road and I took a sharp, involuntary breath.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“You sure?”
“You seem tense.”
“So do you,” I shot back. Anxiety was making me rude.
She exhaled a breathy laugh. “Well, yeah. I kind of don’t want too many people to know I’m here.”
I swallowed. “We’ll take the back way,” I told her, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. The back way. I could handle it. It had been three years now, and I’d driven on that road several times since the accident.
“Won’t that take longer?”
“No idea,” I said shortly.
“Oh.” She sat back. I breathed a sigh of relief at her sudden silence. The more questions she asked me, the more I felt like she was shining a spotlight right on every shitty thing I’d done in my life.
She fell silent then, shifting to lean her head against the window to watch the town slide in and then back out of view. Reckless Falls was nestled in a valley shaped like a scooped out bowl. At the
top of the valley, three cascades of the waterfalls that gave the town its name leaped down from two hundred feet above before settling into a meandering stream that emptied into the lake.
Aria’s grandfather lived on the western ridge of the hill with the blunted slope that the locals called Whaleback Mountain. It was the highest elevation in the county and as the road wound down, it was the prettiest view of the town. She twisted in her seat a bit to look back on the town as it fell away behind us. With the falls in view on the left and the lake on the right with the town nestled between both, it was pretty.
But not as pretty as the girl in the passenger seat next to me.
She started talking, saying something, but I turned my head, deliberately looking away from the shapes her lips were making. She was saying something about her band and the tour she’d been on, how she’d been to a bunch of places but still found these hills to be the prettiest. It was nice chatter, normal chatter, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of it. Not with each breath filling me fuller and fuller of her scent.
Goddamn, I needed to get the fuck away from her. I pressed my foot down on the gas, taking the turns recklessly. A fleeting glimmer of worry reminded me of what happens when you take these roads too fast, but it was a bright sunny day and I was sober as a priest.
Celibate as one too.
I took a deep breath and realized she’d fallen quiet.
I snuck a look over at her and I saw her eyelids drooping. “If you want to go to sleep, I don’t mind,” I heard myself say.
She nodded without looking at me. “Mmkay,” she murmured. Her head lolled and then fell back against the headrest and she let out a shuddery breath.
The sound of her sleeping was doing strange things to my body. She was completely boneless next to me, her whole body limp and flopping and there was something strangely intimate about the way she just let herself be so vulnerable like that. I tried to think back to the last time someone had been relaxed enough around me to fall asleep. Years.