by Ren Benton
Well, not always, but he wasn’t washed up yet.
To his left, the boathouse hung over the water. Given the grandness of the main house — a millionaire’s idea of a cabin loaned by Bob Sylvanian, legendary TV producer and Gin’s lifelong mentor — he’d expected something big enough to park a yacht in, but the scale better suited a couple of kayaks. Set away from the main house to avoid obstructing the lake view, it would be a good place for a lover’s rendezvous or a handy exile for kids when adults needed peace and quiet.
Since there was no lover at his side, that made him an overgrown child taking a time out while others carried his bags and prepared his food.
Thirty-six wasn’t ancient by most standards, but when the girls in the crowd flashing their tits at him got young enough to be his daughters, it was a sign of the end times. He had a few more years in him because he could write a song people remembered for more than three weeks, but no way was he going to drag out his demise until the only gigs he could book were dive bars and the occasional stage ten of a nostalgia festival.
He’d never wanted to be anything other than a musician. He declared his intent at six, played his first paid performance at twelve. He had a deal, a platinum record, and a Grammy before he could drink legally — not that the law stopped him before then.
He started at the top and held that position longer than anyone expected, but he’d known almost from the beginning there was nowhere to go but down. He’d done his best to anesthetize himself for the inevitable crash. Without alcohol to soften the impact, he wanted to choose how, when, and where he landed. Adding “scored River Bound” to his otherwise monotonous list of accomplishments would give him more options to choose from.
If he had the ability to do the job. If he didn’t say or do anything that made Gin tell him to pack his shit and leave before he finished.
He hated if and all its fucking uncertainty. If never bothered him when he was drunk. He had daredevil confidence when loaded, and his life had been a fairy tale — the pauper who charmed the masses with the one thing he did well and was rewarded with cheers everywhere he went, mountains of gold, and the heart of a beautiful princess.
As long as he kept swallowing the poison that ate him from the inside out.
The picturesque lake demanded admiration, but his defiant eyes strayed toward the house. The windows reflected the scenery, obscuring his view of anyone who might be looking back, but unlike that comeback concert, he knew Gin was there, almost close enough to touch.
He kicked a rock and watched it lurch over the uneven ground toward the water’s edge. No matter how badly he wanted the job for his career, his future, and his almighty pride, he wasn’t a good enough actor to pretend — even to himself, the most permissive audience — that his motives were entirely professional.
Five years ago, his love for Gin was an obsession. She freed herself by walking out of his life. He tried to fill the void with getting clean, getting healthier, getting back into the good graces of his music, and practicing how to live without booze. People who thought they knew him well believed he’d moved on.
But Lex had always known the feelings cut off when she left had only been paused midnote. He intended to leave them that way, eternally suspended without an ending.
Then she sent the email that pressed a button and turned the noise back on at full blast after five years of numb silence.
Alcohol muffled his emotional howling while they were together. Then distance took over.
Sober and living under the same roof, keeping his heart quiet might prove impossible.
Gin clutched Juliet’s case against her aching chest like a shield raised after the blow had landed. There would be no yearning for a man with a pregnant wife. Not even quietly to herself. Unrequited feelings weakened their victims until they made fools of themselves.
She didn’t need Lex. The movie did. Her feelings had no place in a business transaction.
Nor did her acute sense of unfairness that her dietary limitations had been a constant source of conflict with Lex while they were together and now he wanted her to teach them to Piper because he gave a damn about her health and was capable of unlimited patience while the mother of his child perused a menu in search of one item free of gluten, sugar, soy, and mystery chemicals.
Maisie ate crap throughout her pregnancy. Despite a diet rich in Cheetos and Pop-Tarts, she glowed as if dusted with crushed pearls and produced a perfect baby. Getting knocked up didn’t automatically make Piper fragile and in need of special treatment.
Seething resentment toward a pregnant girl was a prime example of the type of stupidity unrequited feelings inspired — all the more reason to banish them.
Asking Lex to invest his time and talent in her movie was no different from begging other investors for money. Her job as a producer was to do what was best for the movie with a smile on her face, even when her insides felt like a postapocalyptic hellscape. If his terms included role-playing as a dietician for his pregnant wife, she’d damn well do it.
She took a deep breath to fortify herself for another encounter with effervescent sunshine in human form and shouldered open the front door.
For once, the wall-sized window framing the lake didn’t make her feel exposed.
Instead, it exposed Matt sliding his arm around Piper’s waist and sticking his tongue down her throat.
2
Piper was still giggling about the misunderstanding an hour later. “I can’t believe you thought I was with Lex.”
Ethan lost his grip on the snicker he’d fought valiantly to contain. “That’s like Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls hooking up with Jafar.”
Okay, so Gin had put one and one together and gotten nuclear codes. Even someone who habitually took pains to gather all the facts before making the tiniest decision made a mistake once in a while. She’d laughed about this one along with the three witnesses to her foolishness — until Lex wandered into the kitchen in search of food, and suddenly her stupid mistake wasn’t funny anymore. Being wrong in front of him put a burn in her cheeks.
She slammed the silverware drawer and held up a bundle of spoons like a microphone. “Care to comment, O Grand Vizier?”
Instead of seizing the opportunity to join the others in mocking her, he plucked the spoons from her grasp and distributed them to the place settings on the quartz-covered island. “If that was supposed to be an insult, it failed. Jafar was a snazzy dresser. Those shoulder pads. That headgear.”
Matt added, “And you’re not going near any jet engines that would make the cape a safety hazard.”
If Gin could grab the words and stuff them back in Matt’s mouth, she would. Whatever he’d been holding over Lex to keep his job despite his unwise mouth had just passed its expiration date. Two subjects were absolutely off limits — alcohol and that phobia.
“Bingo.” Lex traced a square around his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Get a Sharpie, draw on the facial hair, and suit me up.”
She opened a cupboard door to hide her face so she wouldn’t be caught staring at him with her jaw slack. During the two and a half years of their relationship, he had slowly opened up to reveal more of himself to her, but he hadn’t changed. Getting to know him was a process of stripping away filters to get a clean view of what had always been visible beneath. The tint and texture of the picture might change, but the man at the heart of it remained the same.
In five years away from her, he’d effected a complete reversal in handling one of his touchiest subjects. Instead of growling a warning and storming off until the assault on his peace of mind was long over, he cracked a joke. He’d renovated a dark place in his soul to let in some light.
“Are those bowls too high for you, shorty?”
Her stinging eyes closed under the weight of his low, intimate tone. He stood so close behind her that his warmth seeped into her, softening her bones. She improvised an excuse. “I was wondering if they’re big enough.”
His chest brush
ed against her back as he reached over her head to lift the bowls from the shelf. “Size doesn’t matter as long as we can come back for seconds.”
Ethan whistled. “I didn’t catch all of that, but it sounded dirty.”
Cold air rushed to fill the void around her when Lex took the bowls to the stove. He blinked and said primly, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
Gin closed the cupboard door, which had offered no protection at all. “It’s the voice. He can make reading the credits sound pornographic.”
“Your credits don’t need my help to warrant a parental advisory. Don’t think I haven’t noticed GemGam routinely employs a member of the camera crew named Manley Cox.”
Ethan pinched his lips together to stifle another snicker, resulting in a muffled snort that made Piper giggle. He shushed both of them with a halfhearted flap of his hand. “Ryan somehow slipped that past Gin in our first movie.”
Her brother’s name rolled across her chest like a truck, leaving her flat and paralyzed. It hadn’t hit her so hard in months, but with Maisie trouble, a nonexistent script, baby confusion, and Lex murmuring size innuendo in her ear, this day had perfectly positioned her to be crushed.
Her gaze, desperate for an escape route, collided with eyes the deep, cool blue of a night sky. Air forced its way into her tortured lungs. Breathing was punishment, but if Lex could make light of old aches, she could at least pretend to do the same. “Ethan underestimates the deviousness of my evil twin. Ry told me he hired a new guy for the second unit. Put him on the call sheet and everything. I was the dope who added ‘Grip Manley Cox’ to the scroll.”
Ethan’s full-bodied laughter in response to the delayed plot twist spread to infect Matt and Piper. The three of them slumped together in a tittering heap against the island.
Until right this moment, the full extent of that practical joke had been their secret, hers and Ryan’s. Now it was one more piece of him she’d given away and could never get back.
Lex didn’t join the hilarity his observation had set in motion. He watched her, the space between his brows pinching tighter with each passing second, in time with the closing of her throat.
“It’s tradition,” she rasped.
He stepped toward her, as if he could rescue her from a beating she’d taken a decade ago.
She declined whatever he intended to do with a terse shake of her head. Nothing helped, and he would only bring Ethan’s attention to her distress. Then Ethan would feel bad for his ability to remember the dead with joy, and it wasn’t fair to make him relive the loss the way she did, over and over and over again, vivid as the day she stopped pretending Ryan would walk though the door and tease her for falling for another one of his pranks.
“I’ll feed you as soon as I thicken the stew.” She stepped around Lex to get to the refrigerator. She misjudged the distance and her arm brushed against his, an unwelcome reminder that she was solid and did not pass through objects like a ghost.
Without taking his intense stare off her, he lifted the lid from the pot. “At last, the secret of how to thicken without flour or cornstarch will be revealed to me.”
Her gratitude that he went along with the shift to an emotionally neutral topic was so great, she could have kissed him.
You could. That’s not his wife sitting there.
That didn’t mean no one was waiting for him at home. Even if he was unattached at the moment, he’d come in a professional capacity. And even if sexual harassment of a prospective employee wasn’t a factor, one did not mouth one’s ex without an invitation, followed by a thorough risk-benefit analysis.
She kept her lips to herself and pulled a box from the fridge. “The secret is instant mashed potatoes.”
He sucked in a noisy breath. “That is a processed food.”
“A single-ingredient processed food that I could conceivably manufacture myself if I had the time to shave and dehydrate potatoes every time I want a little bit of gravy.” She held the offending box away from him. “But if you want to be a purist, get yourself a bowl of runny soup before I turn it into thick, delicious stew for the rest of us.”
His trademark ominous glare lowered into position. “Pour those spuds in the pot, woman.”
Her clenched muscles softened as if his words contained a sedative. There was no mystical compulsion to obey a command she’d been planning to carry out anyway — it was simply sexier when he growled the order at her.
Not that sexier was a virtue under the circumstances. She could live without being quite so acutely physically aware of him watching over her shoulder as she pushed the beef and vegetables aside with a spoon and shook some flakes into the pool of liquid. A quick swirl melted the potatoes and distributed the thickened broth throughout the pot.
He held out a bowl, cradled in one of his big hands. “Do you have any idea what culinary horrors I’ve wrought because I didn’t know mummy spuds were allowed?”
She ladled a generous helping of stew. “As long as the horrors didn’t escape to terrorize the village, all’s well.”
“Who said they didn’t?” He placed the first bowl in front of Piper. “Taste that and tell me again how depressing healthy food is.”
She fidgeted with her spoon. “I know I need to eat better for the baby, but it sounds really complicated.”
Gin filled the remaining bowls. “Nothing complicated about stew.”
Lex ferried food from the stove to the island for Matt and Ethan. “Especially if you take that slow cooker I got you for the wedding out of the box.”
Poor Matt. He signed up for the glamorous life of a rock star, and instead of a Lamborghini or a Baccarat chandelier for his bathroom, he got a Crock-Pot to honor his nuptials. “One batch will knock out half a dozen dinners for nights you don’t want to cook. Use some of the money Lex stuffed in the box to buy lots of freezer storage.”
A frantic glance passed between the young couple that contained a silent conversation about whether the lame present full of cash had been regifted or stuck safely in the back of a closet.
A bland look from Lex conveyed his displeasure that she’d spoiled his fun. “When you hit the first month you don’t have to cook, shop, or eat out at all because of your frozen stash, you’ll never buy another breaded nugget of questionable origin again.”
When Gin met him, his freezer had been reserved for ice and one harmless-looking bottle of vodka, and the fancy pans hanging from a rack above the range had been merely decorative. The thought of Lex slaving over a hot stove pushed her imagination into the realm of fantasy, where he looked mouth-watering whipping up an omelette while wearing nothing but low-slung sweatpants and bedhead.
Professional, remember? A stern reminder about depleted budgets and nonexistent screenplays put that dream sequence in its grave. “You really got on board with this food thing.”
“My health was shot. I had to get on or get run over.” Lex placed the two remaining bowls at the vacant seats at opposite ends of the island. “Eat.”
An endless flood of booze had eroded Lex’s appetite. He ate on a schedule because relying on his body to tell him when it was time for nourishment was a good way to end up dizzy, shaking, and too queasy to tolerate the idea of putting anything in his mouth. His sense of taste was likewise blunted, making eating little more than a necessary chore.
But when he walked into the house, the aroma emanating from the kitchen nearly took him out at the knees.
It was only stew, for fuck’s sake. His mom taught him how to make it when he was ten because it was too simple to fail — throw meat and veg in a pot, cover with water, and check on it in a few hours. Nothing fancy, but it kept him fed when she was working and his father was at the bar.
Gin took the same ingredients and amplified them with her attention. He’d remembered her searing the beef first but forgotten the bronzed edges on the vegetables she roasted before adding them to the pot. Every bite was perfectly salted with a bite of pepper and some fragrant herb he was too
much of a culinary swine to identify.
An ungrateful asshole who looked just like him had laughed at her once for putting so much effort into only stew. Now he struggled to take one bite at a time to savor what she’d created while his defective impulse control goaded him to cram it down his throat without pausing to chew, as if consuming something she’d given such care would confer that care to him.
Matt ceased stuffing his face long enough to express his appreciation to the chef. “This is really good. Can I repay you with a free copy of Amnesia?”
“Please. I preordered that album so hard, it left a welt on Amazon.” Green eyes shifted toward Lex as if he’d bitched out loud about corporate monopolization. She dutifully added, “I went to my friendly neighborhood independent record store and bought the disk on release day, but I wanted it in my ears at midnight.”
Matt shook his head. “People I haven’t spoken to since third grade hit me up for freebies, but Gin Greene knows more than one guy in the band and buys two copies.”
“As a fellow creative, I know the best way to support the arts is with cold, hard cash.”
Royalty checks were nice, but on rare occasions, an opinion held greater value. Since Matt broached the subject, Lex continuing the theme was good conversational etiquette, not begging for ego strokes. “What’s your favorite song on it?”
Ethan groaned before Gin could answer. “She’s played ‘Sore’ so much, I hear it in my sleep.”
Exactly the response he’d been looking for when he wrote the song. “How does it compete with ‘Cling’?”
During an interview, she’d declared “Cling” her favorite song of all time and likened his songwriting to three-act structure for the screen. Establish tension in the first verse, followed by a brief reprieve in the chorus. Escalate tension in the second verse with a sneaky piano riff reminiscent of a B plot. Reflect during another chorus, then launch into the bridge — the culmination of action, the chase, the fight, the facing of fear. Everything after that climax, whether in victory or defeat, was about releasing the audience, gently or with a boot to the ass, ideally both satisfied and wanting more.