A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One

by Susan Rodgers

Deirdre leaned against the refrigerator door, unseen by Charlie and Jessie. She took a sip of her water and reflected on all the logistical difficulties this wedding fiasco had caused, and the heartache in Jack and Lydia’s eyes when they left.

  She thought they would have been pleased to see Jessie and Charlie grinning now, Jessie poking Charlie in the ribs and blushing, telling him to knock it off. Deirdre couldn’t recall ever having seen them look so close, so comfortable with each other. She was mystified.

  Life was clearly an enigma. Love was a downright puzzle. The dissolution of love? Perhaps non-existent. Perhaps it was simply the responsibility of the partners to recognize the time when love must transform, when it must morph into the next stage of whatever it is meant to be, and to let that happen with the utmost dignity and grace.

  ***

  Maggie, so sorry I haven’t answered yours and Sue-Lyn’s texts. Crazy evening. Long story. On way now if party is still going

  Yes party still going and will be for a while! Your Baileys awaits! But be warned, much alcohol already consumed (not by me)

  Jessie smiled. Maggie was a moderate drinker, as were most of the Drifters immediate cast, partially out of respect to Josh and his - all things considered - fairly recent issues with substance abuse. At any rate, Jessie was relieved to finally point the little red Mustang towards the Lions Gate Bridge and then up Burrard and on into Kits, then a few miles farther to where Josh’s house was nestled in the UBC neighborhood. She hadn’t consumed more than two glasses of wine herself, and that was ages ago, so she felt she was fine to drive. Plus she wanted her Mustang safely stored at her condo in the morning before her flight. So up Burrard she went, and she saw that Charlie had parked the 911 in the usual reserved spot at the club. She figured he’d be going on a big bender and likely bedding a few women in consolation, guilt-free perhaps, so she only had a minor twinge when she passed the club. She’d agreed to still play there on occasion, and they had parted with a memorable, sweet hug, so all in all she felt okay, even though her early call on set that morning and the sheer mental exhaustion of the evening had worn her pretty thin.

  There were still a large number of cars at Josh’s place. She pulled in behind the DP’s Saab, which was parked on the street, and then she got out of the car and walked on shaky legs towards the house. This was it. This was when she had to break the news to Josh, and maybe the others, since it was so late and the press conference announcing the cancellation of her wedding was technically within nine hours. Besides, she thought, who really cares if another celebrity romance has trickled to an end? Certainly there were many much more important issues befuddling the world than another lavish upscale wedding. She thought again of Terri and the other girls who she was determined to help get their lives back together. Yes, she thought, there are more important things to worry about.

  Jessie gazed up at Josh’s house. It was a modern affair, rather boxy in design, with lots of floor to ceiling windows and different levels, although from the street it only looked like one level. The driveway wasn’t overly long, large enough to fit four cars comfortably, two lengths and two widths. At the end of the driveway was a nice sized garage where she knew he kept his Harley and an assortment of tools, ladders, and such. She stepped through a hedge onto a flagstone walkway and headed towards the music in the back, where she knew the party would be in full swing on the beach and by the pool. She was stopped for hugs by drunk and stoned revelers (as well as some sober folks) a few times on the way down the steps to the lower deck. Her heart swelled – she had grown to sincerely love this cast and crew. It would be sad to see everyone go – a long gig on a series often resulted in tight friendships and the emergence of a family-type unit. She would miss them. She wondered again about season two. She had other offers, for films, plus Charles and Dee were pushing her to book a long winter or early spring tour since most of her new album had already been recorded, and would be completed in the fall after her mini-tour for the new shelters. Her presence in season two could be decided tomorrow. That would depend on tonight.

  Jessie made her way slowly onto the lower deck. It had been exquisitely decorated by the Drifters set dec team along with a local firm Jonathon hired to help Josh out with the party. Fairy lights, a chocolate fountain, swans in the pool underlit by red, blue and green lights (she couldn’t tell if they were real or fake, which was kind of eerie)…they had thought of everything. There were even some references to their series – in a far corner she spied a shooting gallery, western style. When she looked closer Jessie could also see that the shallow end of the pool had been turned into a gold prospector’s paradise – although it seemed the gold had all been found, as there were some pans and sieves there, but nobody using them.

  Sue-Lyn spotted her first. With a wave, Jessie gratefully made her way over to the people she now considered good friends. Josh was nowhere in sight, and she looked nervously around as she hugged and received hugs from Maggie and her partner, as well as Sue-Lyn and her good-looking new man whom she was proudly showing off. Jessie stayed and chatted with them for a while, giving nothing away.

  Curiously, Maggie watched Jessie, as she seemed distracted. Then, with Sue-Lyn happily nuzzling her man and with Maggie’s fella off to the bathroom, Maggie hooked Jessie’s arm and walked her down to the boathouse to dig out the Baileys she had stashed. Although there was no shortage of liquor at the party, it had seemed fun at the time of their earlier texts to indeed hide some, and so the girls grabbed cups on the way down and sat on the boathouse ramp for a while sipping Baileys while Maggie tried to get a fix on what Jessie had been up to that evening that prevented her from attending the wrap party earlier.

  “Are you okay?” she asked peremptorily, as she grabbed the milk carton she had stashed in a little cooler with the Baileys and poured some into Jessie’s cup. She felt she knew her well enough to ask, and Jessie certainly seemed edgy.

  Jessie glanced up at her and wondered how much she dared say. Maggie, who always seemed wiser than her years, had become like a big sister.

  Maggie could see the wheels of Jessie’s mind turning, wondering. “Jessie,” she said. “Stop worrying. Talk.”

  Jessie sighed, then looked down at her cup and indulged in a big swig. It sure was pretty out here by the water, with the lights of cargo ships twinkling in answer to the stars above. Pretty, but not relaxing. After the night she’d spent at the Keating home, she couldn’t settle. She needed to find Josh. The fact she hadn’t been able to find him was worrying although, she admonished herself, he was likely playing pool in his games room with Carter and Stephen and some of the crew. She tried to calm herself. Maggie watched her face change expression multiple times – she could almost read her thoughts.

  “Jessie?” she asked quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

  Jessie looked up. She nodded. “Sure. Ask away.”

  “You haven’t been wearing your engagement ring.”

  “Hmmm. I never wear it to set, Maggie. Kate’s not married.”

  “So why aren’t you wearing it now?”

  Jessie was stumped. What to tell? Sure, she trusted Maggie but at the same time now that they were here together she was terrified to say anything. What if someone overheard? But they were alone at the boathouse, sipping their Baileys in the shadow of the moon, a light breeze whipping up frothy little whitecaps on the water and the earthy, ashy scent of a campfire from down the beach tickling their noses.

  “Okay,” she relinquished all self-control. “But it’s just between you and me, Maggie. No Sue-Lyn yet. She seems a little sloshed.”

  “She’s a lot sloshed.” Maggie raised her eyebrows. “The wedding’s not happening, is it, honey?”

  Jessie shook her head, trembling. “Nope. No wedding.” She searched Maggie’s face for a reaction, but Maggie was nonplussed.

  “I think most of the set has figured it out, Jessie. It’s not really a surprise.”

  Shrugging, Jessie responded with, “Well, I know, but it’s no
t really official yet. It will be tomorrow. Today. Deirdre’s holding a press conference at ten. I don’t really want it to get out tonight. This is about Drifters, not about me and Charlie.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows. She had a habit of doing that, the wise old thing. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And there’s more to this story than you’re letting on. You’re way too happy…although tonight I admit you seem way too nervous. What else is up?”

  “Maggie…” Jessie started, and then a ruckus drew their attention to the wooden steps leading back up to the pool deck. Stephen and Carter were noisily making their way down.

  They threw themselves on Jessie with drunken abandon and she couldn’t help but be swept up in their affection and laughter. “You heathens! Get off me!” She stood up and wiped spilled Baileys and milk off her top, which she had changed into at Dee’s before jumping in the Mustang. It was a silk grey-with-rose-trim low crescent necked slinky number that she hoped Josh would respond to in a very positive way. Even if it did have Baileys and milk splashed down the front of it.

  The boys were joyous and their enthusiasm contagious, although Jessie listened to them distractedly, looking around occasionally, with Maggie’s watchful eye and demeanor growing more wary. When they finished their drinks, they headed back upstairs, Maggie and Jessie behind Carter and Stephen.

  “Geez, I’m kind of surprised they’re that drunk, Maggie,” Jessie said. She was not accustomed to seeing them with drinks at all, much less drunk.

  “Steve’s not that wasted,” Maggie replied. “He’s just caught up in everything. Sophie is here hanging out with a girlfriend from her acting class, so he’s free to chill with Carter and pretend to drink. Carter, on the other hand…”

  Now was Jessie’s chance. “But I guess I figured with Josh, you know, that they’d all be a little more respectful. But then again, we’re drinking too, right?”

  She was walking ahead of Maggie so she could hide her emotions as well as the strained look on her face upon Maggie’s abbreviated silence. After a while, when they reached the top of the stairs, Maggie touched her friend’s shoulder, and Jessie turned to face her.

  “Look, Jessie,” she said. Big heavy sigh. “He didn’t think you were coming. He waited until about twelve and then I think he gave up.”

  Jessie knew she meant Josh. Maggie wasn’t stupid. Charlie was likely right. Likely everyone already knew how she felt about him. What was the point in hiding that? Oh well. She felt relieved. So he had gotten tired and gone to bed. He, too, had had an early five a.m. call, although this was his party and why would he leave it…?

  She looked quizzically at Maggie, and then she shrugged as if to say Oh well. Confused, she turned back towards the party and took a few steps towards the buffet area, which was set up on the south side of the pool. Stephen and Carter were already there, snacking on spicy hot chicken wings, and she could see what Maggie meant when she said that Stephen was not all that drunk, because now he looked stone cold sober. Jessie noticed that he had paused from eating his chicken wing and was tossing it in the garbage instead, which wasn’t at all like him. He usually devoured chicken wings – as he was often known to say, he was a growing boy. He was looking at the fence by the pool - staring, in fact – and, as Maggie came up behind Jessie, said her name and put her hand on her shoulder, Stephen turned to look at Jessie, gloomily; and then Jessie looked to see where he’d been staring and at first all she could see was a slinky red dress and a couple sharing some deep, intimate kisses the way couples do at parties when they pair off after a certain degree of alcohol consumption.

  The thing that got her, though, was the slinky red dress and the black Manolo Blahniks, and she caught herself wondering how party girl Leeza had gotten into Josh’s place, and then she thought Geez I should have worn a dress like that instead of jeans and my grey top. Then Leeza stepped back, laughing, and not only did Jessie note that she’d been making out with Josh, but she also noted that he was shit drunk.

  “Oh, hell,” Jessie breathed over to Maggie, who settled silently beside her.

  “Yeah,” Maggie responded quietly. “We tried to keep an eye on him, Jessie, but he can be a stubborn old ass sometimes.”

  “Damn it, Maggie, y’all should have tried harder! He shouldn’t be drinking! Why didn’t the boys stop him?”

  She only paused for a second to let her blood boil to the point of explosion, and then Jessie walked the twenty or thirty paces to where the unlikely couple was leaning against the fence. Brusquely, she stepped in front of Leeza and grabbed Josh by his blue plaid button-down shirtfront, roughly and with purpose. Even in an inebriated state he was sexy as hell, his shirt, worn over a white T-shirt, hanging down over faded jeans, and new beige embroidered cowboy boots peeking out from beneath ragged hems, taunting her.

  “Jesus, Josh,” she cried as all her hopes and dreams for the night crashed straight to the bottom of the ocean upon which their strange party was sordidly reflected. “No more, you hear me? Tonight - okay, but no more!”

  Josh wouldn’t – or maybe couldn’t – look at her. He was really rather pissed drunk – wasted. Leeza stood by, laughing like an idiot. In her peripheral vision Jessie noticed Maggie nodding and gesturing to Stephen, who threw an arm around Leeza and hauled her, stumbling, a few feet away to the buffet table.

  Jessie employed Charlie’s move. She grabbed Josh by the chin and forced him to try to focus on her.

  “Josh. I’m not kidding. No more of this. What the hell are you doing drinking?”

  But she knew. She knew, because she was late and Maggie told her he had waited until midnight. Waited for…me, she thought. He was waiting for me. One last night we could have together, even just as close friends, until my wedding on Saturday. Our last night before everything supposedly changes.

  Jessie’s heart sank. She softened. “Hey, look at me. Look at me, Josh. I have something to say to you.” But what she had planned to say was not what came out. It wouldn’t do. It would NOT do to tell him what she had gone there to tell him that very night – that her wedding was off and that she loved him. She loved him! There, it was, out; out of her subconscious anyway and hanging there in the light of the fairy lights and the moonlight and the twinkling stars and planets and a myriad of partygoers, but only as a thought, not in reality. Tears tweaked the corners of her eyes like little pinpoints of the heaviest burden, wanting to burst free but restrained by Jessie’s cool-under-pressure well-trained demeanor.

  Josh tried to focus on her, but he lost his balance and she had to hang on to him. When he regained his composure, hoping against hope she hadn’t seen him with Leeza, but knowing instinctively she had, he didn’t feel the way he thought he would – embarrassed, chagrined – instead, Josh felt anger and justification in that he was tired of waiting for her. He was tired of the never-ending hope that they could someday be together.

  “You have no right to say anything to me, Jessie,” he said, shaking her off of him. “Get the hell away from me.”

  This was a big change from their leisurely rapport on set the last few days. Jessie was deeply saddened. So this was how it would all end after all – her going one way, Josh another – maybe even back down that deep, dark hole Charlie warned her about – and she would not do season two, and so with that would go all of the new friendships. She would end up alone. Again.

  But, whatever. She had come too far, given up too much, taken too many risks and hurt too many people to let it all end like this. She reached out both hands and grasped Josh by the sides of his face, her fingers in his layered chestnut hair, and her icy sea-pearl eyes boring into his hurting sweet brown eyes.

  “I said that I have something to say to you. Now listen to me. Tomorrow I am going away for a while. I am going far away for the summer and I won’t be coming back until late August.”

  Her voice was gravelly with feeling as she fought back the emotions she knew would dominate her and steal her voice and never end,
should she grant them release.

  “And while I am gone I expect you to get your shit together and blow them the fuck away on that feature, and write your name in the sand and leave it there. Do you hear me, Josh? Blow them the fuck away, and no more booze, no more drugs, no more – shit – in your body because it will suck out your mind and there you will be, gone, the Josh I know and love, hiding in there again in that dark, horrible, awful place, and just when I come out, there you go hiding again, and we can’t work together that way!”

  Well, she had given it her best shot but the moment was too heavy and then some idiot put the song she had written for Josh over the speakers and, somehow that revived him, settled him, enough to at least get him to realize the gravity of the situation if not the actual essence of what was behind her emotion. And so the tears came, unbidden.

  Jessie started to shake because it was just all too much. Josh grabbed her and pulled her close and he would have squished her if he could have; with his left hand buried in her hair and his right arm around Jessie as far as it could go, he cried out her name as if in prayer.

  “Jessie, oh God, Jessie,” because when you love someone that much and you’ve always had to restrain yourself in their presence, when it’s time to let it be known, you do.

  They stayed that way for as long as Steve could restrain Leeza, and then the young starlet got loose and jealous and tried to pull them apart. It broke up the moment, and so Jessie pulled herself out of Josh’s embrace, leaned in for one amazing, beautiful, heartfelt, agonizing kiss, and then turned and walked away.

  Somber, Maggie watched her go, and then she took her guy’s hand, followed Jessie upstairs, and saw her safely to the Mustang.

  Stephen took a step back and watched Josh as he held Leeza aloft, and he could see the anguish in his friend’s eyes as he watched Jessie walk away, her head held high. Steve knew now there was real love there, the kind that is profound and abiding, drawn from similar life experiences, the kind that hurts like hell when you believe that the one you love is embarking upon a more permanent shared and exclusive life with another partner.