by Linda Kage
Shit. Chicago. We’d done a lot of bonding in that hotel room. And the entire time, he’d never once thought it prudent to tell me he wasn’t a man.
I pushed toward the next door and reached inside to flip on a light. The breath caught in my lungs when I realized this was definitely his—her—room. Decorated in brilliant magenta, electric blue, and lime green colors, rock and drummer posters were splashed catawampus all over the walls. Posters of Neil Peart, posters that said “Keep Calm and Drum On,” posters that said “Stick to your dreams” with a pair of drumsticks on them, pictures of bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alice in Chains…Incubus.
This was so Remy’s room. And yet a girl’s room. I swallowed when I saw a lacy white bra on the floor at the foot of her bed.
Jesus, she really was a female.
And that’s when I spotted it. A latex mask hanging from the footboard of her bed. A mask with Sticks’s face on it.
I snatched it up and immediately sneezed. But instead of flinging it aside, I curled my fingers around it, holding on tight.
In the doorway, Jodi had gotten her phone and was pounding out a text.
I sniffed and shook my head. “No,” I told her. “Oh, no you don’t. I didn’t get any fair warning about this, so neither does she.”
Jodi guiltily dropped the phone to her side. “She never meant to—” she started, but I held up a hand, stopping her.
“I don’t want to hear it from you. I want Remy to explain…everything.”
Worry lit her face as she bit her lip. “What’re you going to do?”
With a harsh laugh, I shook my head. “No idea.”
My mind wouldn’t stop spinning. I didn’t think I was pissed exactly. Well, some pissed, but mostly just confused.
I couldn’t figure out why…why would she pretend to be a guy? It didn’t make any sense. And why hadn’t she felt like she could tell me? I thought Sticks and I had gotten close enough that he—she—could confide in me the way I’d confided—
Oh, hell. I suddenly remembered all the shit I’d told her since we’d met. Most of it was probably stuff I wouldn’t have admitted to a woman, like how much I love eating pussy and—oh, Jesus! I’d treated her like I would one of my guy friends, calling her fucker and loser, and asshole. Holy mother, I would never call a woman any of those names.
And then I remembered telling her about Incubus shirt girl. My head really went all over the place with that one. I’d talked to her about her! Why hadn’t she said anything? She knew how I’d reacted to Incubus shirt girl, how I’d looked for her for months. Or, wait. Had she known how I’d looked for her? Maybe I hadn’t mentioned that part. I’d only tried to convey how much I wanted to be over the entire ordeal, so maybe I’d made her feel as if she couldn’t tell me because I’d made her believe I’d wanted nothing to do with her—as a woman.
But none of that explained why she’d gone incognito as a man in the first place.
Down the hall, the apartment door came open and someone called, “Hey, hooker. I’m home, and I come bearing food. Double chocolate fudge ice cream. You are so helping me eat this.”
I blew out a breath. That was definitely Remy’s voice. All my questions were about to be answered. Jodi and I silently watched each other as we listened to footsteps move to the kitchen, probably to drop off the ice cream.
Then Remy called, “Jodi? Hello? You home?”
“Uh…yeah.” Jodi cast me a leery glance as if she thought I’d slit her throat or something if she answered wrong. “In your room, puta.”
“What’re you doing in my room? Doesn’t matter. I’m glad you’re there. You need to help me come up with a way to tell Asher—”
She rounded the corner to enter her room and gasped when she saw me, skidding to a halt and clutching her chest.
I had no idea what I’d been expecting, maybe that she’d be dressed as Sticks with the mask on, even though I held the damn mask in my hand.
But the very last thing I did expect to see was…Elisa.
My mouth fell open, my jaw worked, but no words came.
Her wild-eyed panicked gaze darted to Jodi, then back to me. When her attention fell to the mask I clutched in my hand, she turned back to her roommate.
“He already knows,” Jodi whispered with a sympathetic wince.
Remy, Elisa, or whoever the hell she was, whirled back to me. “Asher…” she started softly, her eyes crinkled in apology as she took a step toward me.
I lurched backward and held up a hand, warding her off, trying to make sense of what was going on.
But, shit, fuck, hell, and damn. This changed everything. When she’d merely been a girl, masquerading as a man, that was one thing. I hadn’t been too awfully mad then. But tricking me as Elisa too, deceiving me until she’d tumbled me right into bed with her…
“What the fucking hell is going on?” I demanded. “I go into work tonight and learn you’re not only a girl, but THE girl I wrote a song about and had been seeking for months. And now I see you walk into this room, and you’re Elisa too? Who the hell are you really?”
Oh, Jesus, I hadn’t realized until that moment, I honestly didn’t know her real name.
“I…I’m Remy,” she answered in a small voice.
I narrowed my eyes, silently commanding her not to fuck with me right now.
She lifted both hands. “I swear. My full name’s Remy Elisa Curran. Elisa is my middle name, but only my uncle at the restaurant calls me that.”
“And you apparently understand English perfectly fine,” I sneered. Then it hit me. Fuck, she knew English. She’d understood everything I’d told her when we’d been together, things I never would’ve admitted to a girl I’d just met.
Jesus, how the lies were piling up.
I ran my fingers through my hair, tugging at my scalp, trying to calm down, but I just…this blew my mind.
She reached out toward me, concern lacing her features. “Do you need to sit down?”
I cast her a killer glare. “No, I don’t need to fucking sit down. I need a fucking explanation. Why?”
“I just…” Her lashes blinked rapidly, and I could see tears glaze over her eyes. Then she hugged herself and admitted, “I just wanted a chance to be in the band.”
I shook my head, confused and not at all expecting that answer. “What?”
“Non-Castrato,” she said. “I went to audition for the drummer spot as myself…but that bastard Galloway wouldn’t even let me play one song with you guys.”
My mouth fell open. “Punk rocker girl?” I whispered in horror. She was punk rocker girl too? “That was you?”
When she nodded, I threw my arms into the air and snorted. But of course. It was just my luck that the biggest liar on the planet would end up being all three ladies I’d been daydreaming and fantasizing about lately. Fucking perfect.
“What was up with the Tina Turner wig?” I demanded.
She shrugged and looked a little ill. “Nothing. I just thought it looked badass for the part.”
The part? Yeah, she’d definitely been playing a part…all fucking month long.
“How many other secret identities do you have?”
She shook her head and bowed her face. “That’s it.” When I sniffed, she looked up, scowling. “It is!”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes and ran my hands through my hair, trying to straighten everything in my muddled head. “So you made up ‘Sticks,’ the gay male drummer, to get into the band—” I broke off abruptly to wince because it suddenly struck me…Sticks didn’t exist. All the rounds of Call of Duty we’d played, the teasing, songwriting together, all the shit he’d helped me with and times he had my back. I recalled the night in Chicago when he—she’d—been ready to defend me with nothing but mace and a whistle, and an arrow of pain passed through me. Sticks, my friend, was gone forever.
And why the hell hadn’t it thumped me right over the head that mace and a whistle were the classic rape preventatives—lady protection. I
was such a fucking dumbass. How many times she must’ve laughed over my idiotic cluelessness.
I narrowed my eyes on her as she said, “I actually didn’t even mean to join the band. I was just so pissed after you wouldn’t listen to me; I planned on ripping off the mask afterward and telling you, ha, a woman could play drums just as well as a man could. But then you went and invited me to play with you guys that Friday. I’d never played in front of an audience before. I wanted to know what it was like. And then that very night, we got the gig for Chicago and you sounded so excited, I couldn’t let you down and tell you I was a girl then. What if Gally kicked me out and you’d never gotten to go to Chicago?”
“Oh, so this was all to help me?” I snarled.
She flushed and let out a small sigh. “Of course not. But it did contribute to the reason I didn’t tell you immediately, until I passed the point that I could tell you without causing a huge ordeal, and then I was just too afraid to…because I knew you’d react this way.”
This way? So she thought I was overreacting, huh? I rolled my eyes. Nice. “Where does Incubus shirt girl fit into all this?” I had to know.
She blinked, confused. “She doesn’t.”
When I only lifted an eyebrow, telling her to try again, she gritted her teeth and growled out a sound. “I didn’t even know that song existed until after I joined the band, and Ten told me about it.”
I growled. Fucking Ten. “But you knew it was about you?”
She cringed. “After I read the lyrics, I knew it was a distinct possibility I was that girl, yes.”
“Un-fucking-believable.”
I wiped my hands over my face and had to spin away because it was so hard to look at her and not see Elisa, not remember every detail of everything we’d done in my bed.
“I can vouch for that part,” Jodi spoke up. “She really had no clue she was the girl in your song until—”
I whirled to glare at her, promptly shutting her up. “You know…” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder as she backed toward the doorway. “I’m just going to leave you two alone to hash this out.” And she shot out of the room.
I glanced at Remy, who seemed to shrink smaller into herself as if she expected me to physically attack her.
I’d been inside this woman, seen her naked, touched her, tasted her, had the best sex of my life with her. I’d dreamed of some kind of future with her and had actually thought we’d been starting something big.
But it’d all been a lie.
I wasn’t sure if I bought her story about Incubus shirt girl, but I figured she was going to stick to her tale, so I proceeded to the issue that meant the most to me…and hurt the most to ask about. “And Elisa?” I whispered.
Tears filled her eyes as she shook her head. “You were never supposed to meet her. You weren’t supposed to return to the hotel room for your wallet and discover her in your shower. You weren’t supposed to go to Castañeda’s and see her at work. And you were never supposed to take her home with you. I told you—dammit—did I or did I not warn you to stay away from her?”
I snorted and shook my head. “A little hypocritical of you, don’t you think, since you are her? Why didn’t you just fucking pull away when I first kissed you?”
Her mouth fell open as if that was the most ridiculous question anyone had ever asked her. “Have you met you?” she cried. “You’re freaking amazing. No hetero woman in her right mind could even remotely resist all that.”
When she waved her hand to encompass me from head to toe, I hissed out a harsh laugh. “Right.”
“I’m serious.” Her face fell as she watched me, as if she knew then that no matter what she said, everything between us was over. “The last thing I wanted to do was fall for you. Hell, after one dipshit lead singer of a band crushed my faith in men altogether, I fully expected to despise you. But then I got to know you, and I…well, it’s just a testament of how amazing you are to break through the stereotype I’d set up against you, and you actually got me to like you.”
“Well then it must suck to be you, because right now, I’m not very fond of you in return. Jesus, I actually don’t even know a goddamn thing about you. You’re a complete fucking stranger to me.”
“Asher,” she whispered, pressing her fist to her chest as a couple of tears slid down her cheek. I hated to see her cry, but the tightness in my own chest made it impossible for me to go to her and try to soothe her. She was breaking my damn heart here.
“You do know me,” she entreated. “You know everything there is to know about me. Everything I told you when I was Sticks, that was all me.”
“Except that you’re not really a man, you’re not really gay, and oh yeah…you understand English perfectly. Jesus.” I gripped my hair. “How many times did you laugh at me because I was too stupid to figure it out myself?”
“Never,” she swore, shaking her head adamantly. “I never once laughed at you.”
“I’ll bet,” I muttered. “I treated you like a guy. Jostled and joked, called you things I’d never call a woman.”
Remy hugged herself. “I didn’t mind. It let me know we were friends.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, nodding in agreement. “We were. You’d probably become one of the closest friends I’d ever had. And you just…you just took that away from me. Then you walked through this doorway and let me know Elisa, the one woman who rocked my world, doesn’t exist either.”
“No.” She shook her head some more. “They both still exist. Sticks and Elisa are still here.” She tapped her hands against her chest. “They’re just one person now. It’s just Remy.”
This time it was my turn to shake my head and say, “No. The only person I’m looking at is a fucking liar.”
I turned away to storm out the door when she called, “Wait! What about tomorrow?”
I paused and glanced back, frowning. “What?”
“It’s Friday. The band,” she reminded me. “We’re supposed to play at Forbidden.”
Shit. And to top everything else, she’d just broken up my band, too. “Oh, you’re not in the band anymore,” I announced in a soft voice.
Devastation lit her gaze, but she nodded respectfully. “And Sunday? You still need someone to deejay at Pick’s wedding.”
Damn it. I clutched my temples as a headache began. How the hell had she became so essential in just a few short weeks? I didn’t have time to find Pick a new deejay and I didn’t trust anyone else to work the sound system the way I trusted Sticks…aka, her.
“If you’re still willing, Pick needs you,” I managed to grit out reluctantly, wishing I could tell her to fuck off instead. But I couldn’t do that to my brother, who was counting on someone to play “Baby Love” for him to dance to with Eva.
She nodded. “Of course I’ll still do it.”
I gave my own grateful nod before glaring and growling, “Just stay out of my way and don’t fucking talk to me there. In fact, if I never see you again after Sunday, it’ll be too soon.”
Tears filled her eyes, but she nodded her understanding and acceptance.
Unable to stick around a second longer, I lit out of there, practically running from the building until I reached my apartment. I hissed a curse when I realized I’d forgotten to lock my place before leaving for work earlier…because I’d been too occupied with thoughts of finding Elisa.
Well, I’d found her. And I wished I hadn’t.
My phone alerted me to a text message from Pick, but I couldn’t answer it right now. Cursing aloud, I kicked my wall and then slapped all the things off my kitchen table, one of them being the gift bag that had once held the handcuffs I used with—
“Motherfucker,” I roared. Then I spotted my notebook of lyrics and had to fling that across the room too. The song I’d written with her suddenly felt like one big joke.
Acid coated my tongue. I couldn’t believe she’d deceived me so completely.
I sneered at the Call of Duty box on my coffee table and wanted to shred i
t with my bare hands. Snatching it up, I flung it across the room until it hit Mozart’s cage, clanging against the metal wire.
“Shit. Sorry, Mozart,” I said.
But when I checked on my pet, I frowned. Mozart wasn’t in his cage. And the door to free him hung wide open. I blinked, knowing I hadn’t let him out. With everything I’d been doing with Elisa these past few days, I hadn’t had the time to let him run free since probably Monday.
“Mozart?” I said. Even though I knew he wouldn’t be in there, I checked every inch of all his cages. Then I whirled to the bed, his favorite hidey-hole. “Mozart,” I called, getting down on my hands and knees to look under the mattress. The only thing under there was a few stored nuts.
I damn near tore the place apart, but the only thing I knew for sure after an hour of searching was that my squirrel was gone.
Shattered is a mild word for what I’d felt after Asher walked out of my room. I’d been defeated before, cheated on and betrayed by a man I was going to marry, crushed when my mother lost her mind and abandoned me, left to feel like an outsider at most every family reunion I attended because I wasn’t exactly like them. I was used to not getting what I wanted.
Yet somehow this felt worse, because this time I knew I deserved it. I had one hundred percent caused this, and every decision I’d made in the last month had led to this very moment. It sucked that my one stint in a band had ended this way, but what hurt the most had been watching the pained expression on Asher’s face as he became increasingly aware of just how much I’d lied to him.
I don’t think I’d ever hurt anyone like that before.
It killed me.
Jodi tried to console me.
Didn’t help.
Then she tried her buck-up, stop-whining-and-get-back-on-that-horse approach.
That didn’t work either.
I wasn’t even interested in the ice cream she tried to hand-feed me.
Finally, she gave up completely and left me alone to mope in my bed, under the covers, with a handful of tissues that I went through in, like, two minutes.