by Mimi Strong
I swoon on the inside, but play it cool. My emotions are mixed up. I’m glad he’s next to me, with his arm around me, but I wish he wasn’t so interested in Marley and Bianca.
They keep saying things about music, and he nods and agrees with them, like every dumb thing they utter is the deepest thing he’s ever heard.
“Old guitars have more life force,” Marley says, strumming Dylan’s guitar. “You can hear the soul in the notes.”
I roll my eyes. She’s standing with the guitar, and she puts her bare foot up onto the coffee table, her crotch pointing right at us. Okay. Now I want to slap her.
Bianca looks like she’s nodding off again.
Marley swivels on one foot and taps her sister on the knee with her bare toes.
“Play Freebird,” Bianca says sleepily. The three of them laugh.
Dylan turns to me. “That’s a little musician humor. I don’t know why, exactly, but people always yell it out at concerts.”
I frown at him. Does he think I’m stupid? “Yeah, I know. It’s a Lynryd Skynryd song. People yell it as a joke. Sometimes to be rude and throw off a performer, but sometimes just to lighten the mood.”
Marley starts playing a melody on the guitar, paying no attention to the conversation. Her eyes are green like the weathered sea glass people find on the beach. I’ve never been to the beach before, but I’ll go soon. I wish my boring brown eyes were half as pretty as hers.
Dylan leans over and kisses me on the forehead. “Look at you, little music intern. You’re the trivia master.”
I squirm, feeling warm now. I don’t know if he’s complimenting me or teasing me.
Over in the other chair, Bianca gets out her phone and takes a picture of us.
I hold my hand up. “No pictures! I look like crap. I’ve probably got waterproof mascara smudged under my eyes like black circles.”
Dylan gives me a quick look. “You look perfect. You look natural. Naturally perfect.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see Marley make a gagging face, but I can’t be sure.
Bianca passes her phone over to Dylan. “That’s you, right?”
It’s the video from a week ago, of when I got robbed and he chased down the mugger. The video hasn’t gone totally viral yet, but the views are way up. Tons more people have commented.
I press play and watch the video. It’s the first time I’ve watched it with Dylan, and I feel like I’m seeing it in a new light.
“Do you know those people?” he asks, pointing at the older couple standing near me in the video. Their faces are cropped out in all the footage, but I recognize them by their matching green hoodie sweatshirts. They were nice enough, and the hoodies made me think they were tourists.
“Nope. Remember, I just moved here a week ago. I barely know anyone. Why?”
He scrolls back to the beginning of the video and plays it again, zooming in. The video is a blend of footage from two angles, one of them apparently from the gentleman in the green hoodie. I can see him holding his phone up in the wide shot, and then I can see the edge of my shoulder in the other shot.
“It’s just odd,” Dylan says, studying the screen. “I think I’ve seen them around at a few places. Hmm.”
I look up at Marley and Bianca. They’re humming a song together, ignoring us.
I don’t want to let it slip to them that Dylan’s video was all a setup, but I’m curious.
Careful about my word choice, I ask, “How many of the people in this video do you know?”
“Just him.” He points to the guy who grabs my wallet. I’ve seen this footage bunch of times, but it still feels like a punch in the gut every time. “And another guy, the one taking some of the footage. He’s standing back from the crowd. Oh, and there’s the girl who was supposed to… you know.”
On the footage, a brunette girl joins in at the side. She looks like a regular girl you wouldn’t look twice at. Like me. She’s holding a bright red purse that’s hard to miss. She’s a much more obvious target than me, but the guy must have gotten confused when he grabbed me. Or maybe he thought it would be better if the robbery was real.
Dylan stops the video.
He says, “Uh-oh, is that the time?”
I look around the room for a clock, finding a digital readout on some electronics under the TV.
“It’s ten,” I say. “Are we interrupting something? Just say the word and we’ll get lost.”
I blink up at him. Say the word and I’ll leave with the girls and sneak back in after ten minutes.
Dylan digs into his jeans pocket and pulls out keys.
“Take my car,” he says. “Drive the girls home. I’ve got some business to take care of.”
“Then I’ll have your car.”
His delicious lips curl up, and his dark eyes sparkle. “How about you return my car around eight o’clock?”
I take the keys from him. “Sure.”
He jumps up from the couch and takes the guitar from Marley. She grumbles and he apologizes, but he doesn’t stop shooing us all out the door.
We get on our shoes and stumble out into the bright sunshine.
Marley and Bianca both start squealing about the sun and needing sunscreen.
I roll my eyes and lead them to Dylan’s black car, parked right in front of the old brick building.
Driving Dylan’s car makes me smile. I’ve got a special privilege. He’s already treating me like a girlfriend, and we haven’t even gone on a date, unless I count last night.
The girls give me their address. They don’t have an official home in LA, but they’re staying with a family in exchange for some nanny work. The family has twin boys, four years old.
They tell me all about it while I use the app on my phone to figure out how to get to our destination.
The family probably wouldn’t have hired musicians, but they got Marley and Bianca as a two-for-one deal, plus the mother loved the idea of having another set of twins around for the boys.
“I always wanted a twin,” I tell the girls.
We’re driving down a pretty, tree-lined street.
The trees here are so different from what I’m used to. The palm trees are so tropical and alien. I could be on another planet.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” Marley asks.
“I have… relatives. There’s someone, but I wouldn’t call her a sister. It’s complicated.”
“We have six more brothers and sisters,” Marley says. “We’ll try to get them out some day.”
“Out?”
Bianca reaches her arm between us from the back set. “That house. With the boys running around on the lawn.”
I pull over and let them out.
They run up onto the grassy lawn and immediately start playing tag with the two little boys. A man standing with them turns and frowns at me in the car.
The way he’s looking at me makes me feel guilty, like I’ve done something terrible. Then I remember the windows of Dylan’s car are tinted dark and he can’t see me. He probably thinks I’m Dylan.
Just thinking about Dylan gives me a thrill. I squeeze my arms against my sides and squeal. I can’t really say I feel like I’m sixteen again, because I never got this excited about a guy when I was sixteen.
There were a few cute guys at my high school, but most of them I’d known my whole life. In a small town, there’s no mystery. If someone goes away for the whole summer and then comes back, that’s about as close to mystery as you get.
When I went to the community college, I met guys from out of town. But they all looked down on the girls who were from the town. They called us “townies” and acted like we were second class.
For most of my time at the college, I had a stupid crush on a guy my friends called Mr. Jock. He was all about sports and drinking, but he was nice enough. He’d come up to me sometimes at parties, and we’d just talk about nothing.
Right before I graduated, he came and sat beside me in the library one day. He told
me he wished he’d asked me out. My heart did a triple flip, and I thought he was finally going to make a move. Then he kept talking, telling me he messed up and now his whole life was over.
I sat there with my books spread out in front of me, and said nothing. Was he ill or something? He had dark bags under his eyes. He was still cute, though. He was blonde and had a big, square jaw. He looked like the jock quarterback in every single college movie.
The reason I never gave up my virginity to the other random guys who tried over the previous year or two was because I hoped that maybe, just maybe, I would get it on with Mr. Jock. He was my chosen guy, even though he didn’t know.
“Do you want to go get some pizza?” I asked him. “You can tell me more about why your life is over.”
He shrugged and said, “Can’t. I’m getting married.”
My stomach felt like he’d just punched me in the guts. He explained a little more, saying that he’d been seeing a girl on and off, but now she was pregnant and he was going to “do the right thing.”
I tried to play it cool. “That’s the right thing to do. You’ll be a good dad, and a good husband.” I’d never felt so old and so young at the same time.
He gave me a sexy look and quirked up one eyebrow. “The thing is, I’m allowed one more month to be single. Until graduation.”
The look he gave me was about ten times more intense than any of the looks he’d given me before. My jaw probably dropped right open in shock.
“Maybe I should take you out tonight,” Mr. Jock said. “You could use a break from studying. Let’s go back to my place and play XBox.”
I looked down at my books and tried to think. The words on the pages spun all around. Did I want to hook up with my crush, Mr. Jock, for a month? This wasn’t what I wanted, but it wasn’t the worst idea.
Right about then, while I was thinking about the whole thing, my best friend came into the library.
“Hey, Jess,” he said, sitting down next to me with a sigh. “My paper is not going well. Not well at all. Let’s go get redeyes.”
Redeyes were our new addiction. You get a brewed cup of coffee with a shot of espresso poured in. We’d doctor them up with these ridiculous cans of sweetened, condensed milk. It was amazing we slept at all.
Mr. Jock looked over at my best friend, then back at me.
“Shit,” he said. “I forgot you had a boyfriend.”
That was when I figured out why guys didn’t ask me out. They thought my best friend was my boyfriend.
Mr. Jock pushed back his chair, gave me one last heavy look, and left the library.
We never spoke again. I heard he got married in June, right after graduation. The girl was a townie, like me, and she moved away with him. She escaped, and I stayed behind.
I had my degree, but there were no great jobs locally, so I started working at the coffee shop where we’d been getting our redeyes. And that’s where I was working until this month, when I got this opportunity at Morris Music.
Now I’m driving a sexy black car with tinted windows through LA.
My friends would agree this situation is pretty swish.
For a while, I used to wonder what would have happened that day in the library if my best friend hadn’t come in.
Would I have gone over to Mr. Jock’s house? Would I have played XBox for a few hours and then had sex with him? He was really hot. He would have broken my heart for sure, but then I would have gotten that first love and heartbreak out of the way. Then the next guy could be the keeper.
I park the car in front of my house and look at the side of the house where Dylan snuck into the back yard last night.
The memory makes me smile.
I’m happy about all the things that have happened so far in my life, because everything has brought me here.
Being right here, right now, is fun.
I just wish my heart didn’t feel so vulnerable.
I wish I had some experience.
Something tells me I’m going to get a lot of experience tonight, when I go back over to Dylan’s house.
I step out of the car, feeling lightheaded and still woozy from last night.
A white van rolls past me and parks up the street.
The door pops open and out steps a guy wearing black from head to toe.
What’s Nick doing here at my house on a Saturday?
Chapter 13
Nick waves as he walks over to me. He’s got a strange wave, where his whole body is stiff, and his shoulder doesn’t move. He just bends his arm at the elbow, like a robot.
“Were you spying on me?” I ask. He has those cameras set up at Dylan’s place, so he probably knew I just left and was coming home.
His calm face gives nothing away. “What do you think?”
I shake my head and start walking up to the house.
“Your cameras are toast,” I say. “As soon as I get back over there tonight, I’m doing a search and destroy. I’ll smash them all.”
“Don’t you dare.” He follows me up the steps to the door, and then right into my house without waiting for an invitation. “They’re expensive and I’ll get in trouble.”
I kick off my shoes and walk through the house to my bedroom. Nick follows. I don’t want him in my bedroom, so I keep walking and lead him into the living room.
The living room is not a selling feature of this rental. It was probably a nice room originally, but part of it got walled off to create the third bedroom. The construction work is professional quality, but you can tell by the floor. There’s a real hardwood floor in the living room, and it has an inlay border of darker wood. You can see two of the corners, but then the inlay disappears under the wall on one side. The other corners are under my carpet.
I don’t know why I care about moved walls and floors, but I do. It might be from reading old Nancy Drew mysteries when I was younger. Nan has a bunch of first editions, and it made her happy to see me reading. I think she took it as a sign I wasn’t going to grow up and be like my mother.
Nick glances around the room and takes a seat on the saggy old sofa. I haven’t noticed how tall he is until now. When he sits, his knees poke up above the seat level of the sofa. He looks awkward here in my house.
Good.
I’ve been on his turf at Morris Music, and it feels good to turn the tables on him.
“Now what?” I take a seat in the armchair. There’s only the armchair and the two-seater sofa. Well, there’s a bean bag, but I’m not sitting on that. My roommate Amanda made a joke about using the bean bag for sex positions and I’m not touching it.
“Maggie wants a report,” Nick says.
The vice president wants a report? After she sent me back down to archives? This is unbelievable. I’m so pissed, it’s hard to sit still in this chair.
“Nick, you tell her I’m not her little prostitute. Or Eye Candy. Or Talent Coordinator, or whatever they call it.”
“She’s curious about why Dylan Wolf left a club last night with three girls. The story got picked up in a few places. She nearly had a coronary when she saw the photos.”
I roll my eyes. “All part of my plan.”
His pierced eyebrows move up for a second. “Really?”
“Yes. Tell Maggie I’m going to have sex with Dylan tonight, but only if I get… a thousand dollar bonus.”
He nods. “That can be arranged.”
I stand up, shake my head, and sit down again. “That was a joke! I’m being sarcastic.”
“How about two thousand?”
I wiggle my jaw from side to side, thinking about his offer. Part of my reason for coming to LA was to try and get some money. My dream is a career in music, but there’s a reason I went to college for a business degree instead of an arts degree. Even though I love music, there’s a part of me that’s very practical.
My grandmother took me in when I had nowhere else to go, and she’s very practical. She’s also the most loving and kind person I’ve been lucky enough to meet.
/> Unfortunately, other members of my family have taken advantage of her kindness. It wasn’t just my mother, but nephews and cousins and neighbors. I swear that everyone in town has gotten a loan or a gift from her at some point. She was practical and smart enough to save up money her whole life, but then her kindness made her lose everything. She co-signed some loans for people. One deal was for a house, which wasn’t so bad, because at least the land had value. The other deal was financing for a car dealership. That was my uncle’s big dream.
When my uncle went bankrupt, he left town to go start fresh somewhere else.
My grandmother was on the hook for all the money. She’d put the farm up for collateral, and the bank wanted everything.
The day I talked to Mr. Jock in the library was the same day I found out we were losing the farm.
I was sitting in the cafe that afternoon, laughing over how disgusting our sweetened redeye coffees tasted when she called me on my cell phone and gave me the news.
Over the next month, the bank took the farm and auctioned it off. All the people Nan had helped over the years disappeared. She tried to get some money to buy it back, but they wouldn’t approve a mortgage for a lady her age. When it went to auction, I’d barely put in three shifts at the coffee shop, and I sure didn’t qualify for a loan.
It sure didn’t seem like a good thing at the time, but looking back, I can see how losing the farm wasn’t so bad.
The new owners took over, which meant they hired their own workers to come in and do all the work of running things. I didn’t have to feed chickens anymore in the morning, and Nan didn’t have to worry about paying the guys she had working for her, doing the hard labor with the cattle.
She had free time during the day and started going to the seniors’ center to play cards. The new owners even let us stay in the farmhouse, since they weren’t planning to use it right away.
They said Nan could live there as long as she wanted. That’s where she is now. She believes she can stay forever, but I don’t.
My plan is to make enough money in LA that I can support her when they finally boot her out of the farmhouse. Just thinking about her having to move from the only home she’s ever known brings me to the brink of tears.