by Ren Benton
Her smile flashed again in response to the poor-little-rock-star routine. “Before you work with anything, I need papers. The release from your label saying I can use you and under what terms—”
“Jim is sitting on the permission to use me until I tell him I’m going to be used.” He unlocked his phone to deliver the order but immediately hit a snag. “What kind of dungeon has no bars?”
“One on the outmost ring of the nearest mobile tower. The office is the only room with a reliable signal.”
He’d been enjoying his phone’s muteness too much to question it. After hours of inattention, his voicemail would be an overflowing garbage barge.
Gin destroyed his best excuse to avoid facing it. “The Wi-Fi password is Matthew1237.”
He grudgingly typed it into the network settings. “Who’s Matthew?”
“It’s a bible verse, for reasons that will be clear if you look it up.”
The new message alerts could wait. More than enough judgment oozed from the search results to get Lex through the evening: By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. “Way to kill the urge to update Facebook. Was that Bob’s idea?”
She grinned at the mention of the man who had taken her under his wing at the tender age of five. “None other.”
Lex envisioned old Bob as a Dickensian villain, training small children for a lifetime of working themselves beyond exhaustion, but there was no denying he’d fed Gin’s hunger to learn everything about her craft even while starving her for sleep. “Not subtle in making it known this is a place to get work done, is he?”
“He even installed a generator so we can’t use power failure as an excuse to halt production.”
“Are we allowed to sleep?”
“I suppose, if you’re into that kind of thing.”
Which he took to mean she still collapsed at her desk more often than she tucked herself into a bed, thereby cutting time off her morning commute so she could resume work that much earlier.
“To further slay excuses for coming above ground, one of those doors in the hall leads to a bathroom.”
“You’re going to fold up the stairs and throw my food down into the pit, aren’t you?”
“That would be messy.” Ever practical, she elaborated, “I’ll lower it in a bucket.”
“Along with lotion to keep my hide supple?”
Her gaze roamed over him. “I’d have to fatten you up before I could go Silence of the Lambs on you.”
He felt the visual inspection like a physical massage, kneading him into agreement with whatever she wanted, up to and including a suit made of his skin. “Well then, I won’t worry my pretty little head until the lotion starts coming without the food.”
“And if the resident diva is too hot or cold, a zoned thermostat is included in these luxury accommodations.” She tucked her hands in her armpits. “Not that I’m hypothermic and bitter or anything.”
If he was comfortable in long sleeves, Gin would be shivering without a jacket. Her accent had been coached away, except when it suited her, but her blood’s loyalty to the Deep South never wavered. “I’ll keep the studio toasty and you can visit anytime you want, polar bear.”
The use of that ironic nickname — a lapse into intimacy he no longer had a right to — froze them both solid. Her gaze slid across a space turned treacherous, collided with his, bruised, stuck. His heart strained for its next beat.
Pause. It can’t hurt if it never happens.
Gin thawed enough to speak first. “I don’t want to be in your way.” She flinched at the stiff creak of her voice and looked down at her hands.
She must hate how her voice betrayed her emotions, at least when he was involved. He’d learned to push his agenda when her calm, rational words were at odds with the tension in her scarred throat. He could be a charming bully, but there was no denying he’d exploited the hell out of an unfair advantage while shrouding his own feelings in alcohol.
For once, he didn’t push.
She flicked a leery glance at his uncharacteristic restraint. “You had a long trip and it’s well past office hours. Take the rest of the night off.”
“I want to watch it again.” This time with his mind on putting his mark on it, now that he knew the effect she wanted.
Her director mask snapped into place. “You’re not writing one note without a release and a rights-and-royalties contract.”
His brain hummed with energy he didn’t want to waste on recuperating from the trip. “I sent Jim a text. The release will be in Maisie’s capable hands first thing in the morning. We can worry about the contract when I’m done.”
“You can’t work on spec.”
He grabbed the keyboard and tried to remember the directional controls she’d demonstrated. “I’m Lex Fucking Perry. I can do whatever I want.”
Her breath escaped in a hiss, making room in her lungs for all the reasons he could not.
Before she could launch her no doubt sensible argument, he said, “I’m not being oppositional for the sake of it. Neither of us knows what the work entails or if it will be usable. The whole contract would be question marks.”
Such a document would be meaningless, and she knew it as well as he did. The knowledge didn’t soften the grim line of her mouth, though. “Your management will never stand for this.”
“Jim has been informed his input isn’t needed in this arrangement. I trust you to be fair.” He succeeded in getting the movie to jump backward one scene at a time. While he waited for a return to the beginning, he faced Gin. “I will sign anything you put in front of me, after I fulfill my end of the bargain. You’re trusting me with your movie. Trust me not to screw up your paperwork.”
She didn’t leap to embrace the offer.
He couldn’t blame her. His track record for following through was mediocre, at best, but it had been years since alcohol dragged him away from his good intentions. “We’ll both know if it’s not going well. If there’s nothing on paper, we can call it off like it never happened and you can move on to your backup plan with nothing lost but time.”
A professional fling rather than a marriage. If it worked out, great, but no messy divorce if it didn’t.
He offered his hand to shake on it.
She stared at it for a moment, as she would a menu item of questionable composition that might cause her unspeakable misery.
Then she placed her palm against his and wrapped her slender fingers around his hand.
Warmth flashed up his arm and spread through his chest. It took all his willpower not to bring her fingers to his lips in gratitude for bestowing that little bit of faith.
Five years of therapy hadn’t broken him of the habit of lying to himself, after all. He’d planned for two months and enlisted accomplices to drive him across the country on the premise extending his career depended on this job, but one touch shredded that flimsy delusion like a cobweb. He had a good run that yielded enough money to finance the freedom to spend the rest of his life making music for no ears but his own.
He came for this — Gin’s hand in his, and a chance to earn the trust he’d squandered the first time.
After two hours alone with the movie, Lex had page after page filled with irregular lines like the heart monitor of an ailing patient, rough tracings of rhythms and melodies he didn’t stop to better define, circled and boxed to indicate theme groups that emerged from the source material with so little effort on his part it felt like cheating.
He’d also scrawled two pages of questions for the director to make sure his impressions were accurate and delved as deeply as she intended, but the answers could wait until tomorrow.
The thought had crossed his mind that if he plowed ahead in ignorance and did everything wrong, cleaning up the mess he made would give him a reason to remain here twice as long — but apart from destroying Gin’s confidence he was the right man for the job, playing dumb would be dishonest. She would know, in that all-seeing way of hers, and
that would destroy something even more precious.
So he would extend his stay by consulting the boss only during regular office hours.
Emphasis on regular because when he climbed from the dungeon, the door to her office was closed. Olivia’s voice seeped around the edges, audio undergoing edits to make a great performance flawless.
Gin’s presence pulled his hand toward the doorknob, but how would he excuse the intrusion? Don’t let me interrupt. I just want to stare at you like an obsessed creep.
The last man as desperate to be near her murdered her brother and stabbed her a dozen times before slashing her throat.
Lex curled his fingers into a fist and left her in peace.
In the living room, Matt and Piper shared one of the overstuffed leather chairs, heads together, whispering over the tablet in Matt’s hands.
Lex would not be sticking around to watch them cuddle. He didn’t need encouragement to feel sorry for himself.
He kept walking toward the kitchen. “You kids aren’t looking at adult content, are you?”
Matt tilted the tablet to hide the screen. “The adultest.”
Piper giggled against his shoulder. “Gin gave us some recipe blogs.”
The seven edible things Lex could cook had gotten boring a year ago. “Hell, send me links.”
“Will do,” Matt said. “What’s the movie about?”
“It’s about ninety minutes,” Lex tossed over his shoulder as he crossed the threshold of the dining room. “Take tissues when you pay full price to see it in the theater in honor of that nice lady who bought your album twice.”
He searched the cupboards until he located the glasses. At the sink, he filled one with water and took a long drink.
The bitter voice nesting in his brain rebelled against the non-taste, per usual. Come on, loser. At least give me a Coke. A shot of Jack for character. No, no, you’re right. Sugar, caffeine, and alcohol would be excessive. Cut two out of three. I’ll settle for the whiskey.
He doggedly swallowed the rest of the water. The road trip had thrown off his intake. If he didn’t replenish his fluids, he’d wake up with a dehydration headache and be useless until after noon.
Mimicking a hangover wasn’t how he wanted to spend his first official day on the job.
The lights cast a wan glow onto the deck. Movement there drew his eye. He topped off his beverage, found one of the sliding doors in the wall of glass, and joined Ethan outside.
A candy wrapper crinkled in Ethan’s fingers. “You see nothing.”
Lex lowered himself into the neighboring Adirondack chair. “If you think Gin doesn’t know, you’re fifty feet below the surface of denial.”
He’d been so proud of his stealth, clueless that the thrashing as he drowned made waves crash on the surface.
A dull laugh came from Ethan. “You know how they say if you lose one sense, the others intensify to compensate? She lost her twin sense, and now nothing gets past her. It’s so annoying. I’ve given serious thought to a tinfoil hat to keep her from reading my mind.”
“It would be terrible for your hair.”
“That’s what’s stopping me. Want one?”
The bag of assorted snack-size candy bars crackling in the space between the chairs clarified the offer wasn’t for a foil fedora.
“Not worth the joint pain.” Lex had gone on a few sugar benders in his early days of dietary discretion before he got the message stuffing his face with cake and feeling like an arthritic ninety-year-old were related. The inflammation hit his knuckles especially hard, and he needed his hands to make music.
Gin needed his hands.
He took another swig of healthy, cleansing water.
Ethan tore open another wrapper. “I can feel a volcanic zit forming on my chin as we speak.” He laid his head back and contemplated the stars while he chewed. “It’s totally worth it.”
The air carried a faint slap of water against the boathouse pilings. The trees creaked and brushed their needles together in response to a breeze that never dropped to deck level. Lex’s ears throbbed with sounds he wouldn’t have noticed if Gin’s movie hadn’t trained him to expect silence from nature.
Ethan’s voice eased back into the noise. “She didn’t make me choose sides.”
“I never thought she did.”
Ethan’s lengthy, complicated history with Gin made the two of them inextricable. Lex hadn’t questioned losing his friend along with the woman he loved. They came as a package deal. He couldn’t have one without the other.
Besides, he’d wanted to be alone in hell, the better to wallow in his damnation. “If you’d called, I would have had to tell you not to make it awkward for her by playing nice with me.”
“You wouldn’t have had to worry about me playing nice.” The sentence sharpened Ethan’s tone like a whetstone. By the end, it was ready to cut deep. “I could have killed you for what you did to her, but it didn’t seem a fitting punishment after you did such a fine job nearly killing yourself.”
The hugs on arrival had softened Lex up so the blade slipped between his ribs without resistance. “And here I thought you were happy to see me.”
“I was. I am. I simultaneously want to smash your face into that railing while screaming at you about what a dumb shit you are.”
“If that’s what it takes to clear the air, go for it.” Lex set his glass on the decking, safely out of the path of violence. “Just watch the nose and teeth. In the professional capacity for which I was summoned, I can’t be nasal and lispy.”
Ethan sniffed at the calling of his bluff. “I’m not a seasoned enough brawler to batter you with that kind of precision.”
“I guess you’ll have to settle for yelling and calling me names.”
“She kept giving me books about addiction and codependency. She even highlighted the relevant parts so I wouldn’t have to slog through the technical mumbo jumbo and sob stories.” Ethan didn’t raise his voice, but he made no other effort to soften the blow. “I never had the heart to tell her I don’t care how sick you are.”
He was far from the first person hurt by Lex’s alcoholism to say as much. The damage he’d done weighed heavier on their scales than his excuses. He didn’t dispute the fairness of that verdict.
He’d never expected Gin — the person he’d done the most harm — to defend his behavior on his behalf. “I know I didn’t treat her the way she—”
“Oh, shut up. You don’t know anything. But it’s your lucky night because I’m going to tell you exactly how cruel you were.”
He’d wished for a reckoning, hadn’t he? A third-party assessment couldn’t be as harsh as what Gin would have to say. Ethan’s take would provide a frame of reference for how far she was from being able to forgive him. “Shoot.”
“She was always the quiet one, but she wasn’t quiet by any means. She’s a listener and a thinker, but when she’s done listening and thinking, make sure your bladder’s empty and you have snacks because there’s going to be a talking extravaganza with no breaks for intermission.”
Memories of Gin on a roll — face animated, hands flying in time with her words — settled one by one on his chest, making it ache. “She puts on a great show.”
“You know nothing, remember?” Ethan glared until certain no further interruption was forthcoming. “Then we lost Ryan.”
The weight on his chest became crushing. Ethan had been talking about a different Gin, the one who lived years before Lex staggered into her life.
Gin as she’d been before a deranged fan invaded her home, killed her brother, and left her lying in a pool of her own blood.
“She changed. I don’t mean like you’d expect from grief and almost being murdered herself.” Ethan’s humorless laugh scoured the air. “If you have an expectation for that sort of thing. She really, truly became quiet — not being able to remember the last time we heard her voice kind of quiet. We thought at first it physically hurt her to speak, but she denied it. She’d talk to d
irect cast and crew or do promo. It was like she just forgot how to talk for fun.”
Lex remained mute in solidarity.
“Then you came along.”
Dread settled onto the pile, turning every breath into a weightlifting challenge.
Ethan unwrapped another chocolate with exaggerated care. “Maisie and I agreed you were a prick, but for whatever reason, Gin took a shine to you. We knew because she told us. ‘Lex said, Lex this, Lex that.’ Hot damn, who cares if you’re irritable and arrogant? Welcome to the fold, brother. Just please keep giving our girl something to say so we know she’s alive in there.” His throat clogged with emotions too tangled to have one name. “You gave her voice back to her. You gave Gin back to us. Not the old Gin. Jeremy Fogle killed her along with Ryan. But the best Gin she could be after going through hell.”
After recovering from her physical injuries, she’d given interviews as she always had, a newly husky voice the only noticeable difference in her public activity. From a distance, Lex had no way of knowing she’d become less talkative. When he got close, he attributed her initial reserve toward him to skepticism about yet another horny jerk hitting on her. He thought the loosening of her tongue occurred as she got comfortable with him.
Not even his massive ego would have given him credit for helping her heal.
If only their story ended on that happy note.
Ethan ruthlessly reminded him otherwise. “And then you bought her another ticket to hell. You had the decency not to die, so thanks for that, and she had the benefit of experience with the terrain, so it wasn’t as brutal as her first visit. But there are no ‘little’ relapses, according to her damn books, and unlike what ails you, we can’t fix her by taking away the problem because all she has in excess is loss. She went back to hoarding her words like there’s a shortage. She’s gotten better, but I can still see her thinking sometimes about whether she can afford to share.” He crumpled the candy bag closed with unnecessary force. “End yelling.”
“You forgot the name-calling.”
“Oh, thanks. Asshole.”
The phantom breeze had stopped to listen to the tirade, shushing the trees and the water. The resultant silence was the oppressive variety Gin wanted to capture in her movie.