“What the fuck are you two into? How do you know where he is?” My voice was rising to a hysterical level.
The lovely Jadyn Snow appeared at the patio doors, looking camera-ready. She sauntered toward us.
My dad glanced over at his blushing bride and back at me. “Later,” he said, effectively ending our conversation and leaving me with far too many unanswered questions. He stood and walked over to Jadyn, taking her in his arms. I stared at the water swaying gently in the pool in front of me, wondering when I’d ever get the answers I was suddenly desperate for.
twenty-one
I left my dad’s without any real information but with tons of questions. I had to get to work even though I wanted to stay and hear what he had to say about Damien.
My thoughts wandered to what we’d had as I drove.
We had never been good for each other, but neither one of us had the option of opting out of what we had until one of us had to get out.
I still wasn’t exactly sure what happened.
It seemed like my dad knew a hell of a lot more than he was letting on, but I was fairly certain he wasn’t going to tell me.
All I knew was that I had been completely dependent on Damien, and when he left, I had to change the way I lived my life. I had wanted to get away from my mother the second I turned eighteen. Damien’s parents had bought him a house. He had room for me, so I’d moved in with him.
I had loads of my own money courtesy of my rock star father, but he took care of me. He gave me a place to live. He cooked my meals. He cleaned our house. He bought me clothes and make-up and toothpaste and groceries and anything I needed. He was my best friend. We both dated other people and didn’t look at each other in any other way than friendship until one day we did. I’d been dating a boy—a musician, naturally—who had only been using me to get to my dad, and I came home heartbroken. Damien had worked to mend my heart, and that was when we became much more than friends.
And eventually, more than friends morphed into a dangerous addiction to one another.
I was addicted to the way he took care of me.
He’d been addicted to the sex.
He never demanded payment from me for living with him. He had his own money.
I didn’t get involved in his business. He owned a restaurant, or rather his parents had owned a chain of restaurants and gifted one to him on his eighteenth birthday. He wasn’t planning to run it full time until he was out of college. Because of school and the restaurant, he worked odd hours. But he was always there for me when I needed him, and that was all that had mattered to me.
And then one night he had come home from work with a bloody nose. A wound above his left eye was fresh and red. His lip dripped blood down onto his shirt. He limped in, clearly sore and unable to move.
He wouldn’t tell me what happened, even as I held his head in my lap while I cleaned his face and dressed his wounds.
I cried as I held him, and tears leaked from his closed eyes. I wasn’t sure if he was in physical pain or emotional pain, but looking back, I knew it was both.
I never asked him what happened. I stupidly waited for him to tell me things that I needed to know. The problem was that I had faith in what we had. I had expectations that he’d talk to me.
He must’ve had broken ribs, maybe other broken bones, but he refused to seek medical treatment. He stayed home for a week, until he was able to move on his own again.
I’d taken my sleeping pills like I did every night, and when I woke up, there was a note on the pillow next to me. Damien and everything he held dear to him—except for me—was gone.
I read the note that he’d left for me. It gave me enough of the truth to simultaneously answer the questions I had while a thousand more formed in my head.
I’m in trouble, Roxy. You’re better off without me. I won’t be back, but I will think of you every single second of every single day. Stay in this house if you want. If I stay, I put you at risk. If I tell you more, I put you at risk. This is a forever kind of goodbye. Please don’t hate me. I couldn’t take it.
That was all it said.
Damien wasn’t into drama. If whatever he was into was bad enough to leave a note like that for me, then I trusted that the note held the truth.
I had no choice except to learn how to live without him. I had to learn how to be self-sufficient, or as self-sufficient as the daughter of a rock star with a healthy bank account needed to be.
Part of it was just learning to live on my own. That was something I’d never had to do before, and it wasn’t something that I could throw money at. It was something I had to learn by immersing myself in the experience.
So I moved out of Damien’s house and into the condo my dad generously bought me. I got rid of nearly everything that reminded me of him, including simple things like pictures and mementos and more complicated things—like my emotions.
It hurt that he was gone, but the sinister thought that he hadn’t broken my heart by leaving me was what attacked my conscience and left me feeling guilty.
Part of me was broken by the loss, but the other part of me wondered if I’d been given the gift of freedom.
I hated my mind for that traitorous thought, and it was that thought that pushed me into the numbness that had clouded over me from the time Damien had left to the time I’d first heard Flashing Light in the store.
I could easily block everything out. I’d read somewhere about how actions become habits after two weeks of consistently doing them. So I blocked my emotions for two weeks. When I felt sadness, I trained my mind to focus elsewhere.
And it worked.
It worked so well that once I’d blocked it all out, it was just gone. I had no way of getting it back, and most of the time that was fine.
It just took meeting the right person to help me dig out of the fog and recall everything that I’d been missing.
I kept Damien’s note in the back of a drawer in my bathroom with a picture of the two of us. I kept his Nirvana CD because it had been his favorite. And that was all I had left of him. A note, a photo, and a compact disc.
The note and photo were stored together under a pile of make-up that had been bought with Damien’s money. The CD was mixed in with my others.
I’d finally moved forward after a year. I’d finally found someone who made me feel things, who made me happy and angry and who made me laugh and who made me excited to look toward the future.
I felt things with Parker intensely—maybe too intensely, sometimes. I supposed that’s what came from shutting off emotions for almost a year.
I loved the way Parker made me feel, though. What Damien and I had shared in the past had nothing on the intensity that came with my feelings for Parker. I was powerless to stop the speed at which I was developing feelings for him.
The guy in front of me slamming on his brakes brought me back to the present. “Fuck!” My voice was loud in the silence of my car. I was alone—truly alone in my car and in my life.
I told myself that I had Parker, that I had my dad.
But beyond that, I had nothing else.
I didn’t even really know Parker. We had some connection that I couldn’t explain, but it wasn’t sustainable. Nothing in life was.
My car stopped mere inches from the one in front of me. A second’s hesitation and I’d have been exchanging insurance information with the man in the car ahead of mine.
As we started accelerating again, I looked ahead and saw no one in front of him.
Why had he slammed on his brakes?
I brushed off the question. He was probably looking for an address. People were dumb and dangerous behind the wheel.
I pulled safely around him, and once I was parked in my usual space in back of Vintage, I checked my cell phone.
One new text from my dad. Dinner tonight. Just you and me. You free?
I wrote back immediately. Yes.
I’ll pick you up from work. What time?
Eight.
&nb
sp; He didn’t reply, but that was his style. I knew he’d wait for me in the parking lot, parked as close to my car as he could. He’d take me wherever he wanted to go, and we’d talk then. He’d fill me in.
He had to, because now that the answers to questions I’d had for a year were within my grasp, I had to know the truth.
Time moved so slowly at work that it was nearly moving backward.
It was lunchtime when Parker walked into the store. He ordered a coffee and then sat in the seat he always sat in, waiting for me to take my break. He knew my schedule better than I did.
“Hey.” I pulled out the chair and sat across from him.
“Hey.” He looked tired. He still looked good—always good—but I noticed dark circles under his eyes. His hair was a little more disheveled than usual.
“What’s up with you?” I pointed toward his hair.
He shrugged and didn’t say anything.
“The shrugs must be contagious.”
“Must be.” He sighed and looked away from me.
Something was definitely wrong with him, but it didn’t appear that he was going to let me in on his issues.
“Look, I only have ten minutes to chat right now. Are you going to tell me what’s wrong? Because if you’re not, I’d rather go out back for a smoke break than sit here trying to solve the puzzle.”
“You don’t smoke.” His eyes were drifting off somewhere to my left.
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve never seen you smoke.”
“For one thing, we haven’t been together that long. You don’t know me.” It wasn’t really true. I’d started to let him in. He knew me better than Tim. Better than Virginia. But I’d been over-analyzing things between us for a few days, and it was easy to take my shit out on him when he was being a cranky ass. “And for another thing, I smoke when I’m stressed.” I grabbed his coffee and took a sip. I was disappointed to find it was tea.
“I only smoke before and after performances.” His eyes finally landed back on me. “Why are you stressed?”
It was my turn to look away. “Don’t pretend to care.”
He reached across the table and took my chin between his fingertips. “It’s not pretending.” His eyes locked on mine. All I saw was sincerity. “I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t care, Jimi. What’s got you stressed?”
I didn’t want to tell him what my dad had told me. I wasn’t ready to reveal anything about Damien to him, especially not when things were just starting between us. I needed time to sort my feelings. I needed time to find out what was going on with Damien.
And maybe I needed some time away from Parker while I sorted through all of it.
The thought made my heart and my head hurt, but maybe it would be for the best.
He let go of my chin when I didn’t answer, and he sighed again. This time it was in frustration.
“We need to work on our communication,” he muttered.
“If we need to work on stuff this early on, maybe what we’re doing isn’t right.”
His eyes flashed with anger. “Is that what you think?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be such a drama queen. I said ‘if we need to work on stuff.’ You’re the one who said we’re not communicating.”
“Can I take you out after work? I have some things I need to talk to you about.”
I shook my head. “Sorry. I’ve got plans.”
“Break them.”
“Can’t.”
“What are your plans?” He played with the rim of his cup as my eyes followed his hands. God, his hands and the magic he could make with them.
“None of your business.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re frustrating.”
“Thank you. I need to get back to work.”
“When can I see you?”
“I’ve got dinner plans. Maybe after that.”
“How long will you be?”
I stood up. “I have no idea, Parker. If you want to talk to me so bad, you’ll be available when I’m done.”
I wasn’t sure why I was so goddamn crabby with him. It wasn’t his fault that my dad had come and dropped a bomb on me that left me feeling like my world was about to implode.
But Parker didn’t have to be a jerk, either. I was allowed to be emotional. I was allowed a crabby day.
And even as I thought it, I realized that he was just as entitled to those things. Just because he was a boy didn’t mean that he couldn’t have a bad day, too.
Nine out of ten of the boys I knew tended to be moodier than the girls I knew, anyway.
As he stalked angrily out of my store without so much as a goodbye or a hug or a kiss, I realized that we were both just having bad days. We were both tense, and it wasn’t fair to take that out on each other.
And apparently neither of us wanted to talk about the sources of the tension that was coming between us.
It couldn’t be good that we were both hiding things from one another, but in his defense, he had told me that he needed to talk to me about some things.
Maybe later that night I’d find out more than I had bargained for.
My fight with Parker threw me off for the rest of the day. I was short with Tim, who certainly deserved better, but worse, I had to give him some warning about my upcoming plans.
During the afternoon lull, just before two o’clock, I met Tim up by the registers. He was looking through the binder where he kept information he needed. I wasn’t sure exactly what was in there. Schedules, maybe. Pricing. Probably semi-important shit I’d never bothered to look at.
He was looking at a page with a pencil poised in the air. Occasionally he would mark something. Occasionally he would underline.
I knew he still nursed a crush on me, but it was something that would never be returned. We were the only two in the store. Virginia was scheduled to come in at four.
I grabbed a pile of t-shirts because I needed something to focus on while we talked. I hated awkward conversations.
“I’ve got something to talk to you about.”
“Hmm?”
“I think it might help with the staffing issue.” I kept folding the shirts. Anything to keep my hands busy, anything not to have to look him in the eyes.
He stopped underlining things in pencil in his book and looked over at me. “What’s going on, Rox?”
“My dad asked me to go on the last leg of his tour.”
“How long?”
“Four weeks.”
“Starting when?”
“About a week.”
He nodded. “Whatever you want to do. That’s fine. We’ll work it out.”
“Thanks, Tim. You treat me better than I deserve.”
I felt a warm hand on my arm. I looked down and saw Tim’s pasty whiteness. “You deserve the world. You’re so much better than you ever give yourself credit for. I think it’s one of the things I like most about you.”
I glanced up and saw his eyes on mine. Tim was a wonderful person. He just wasn’t the right person for me.
twenty-two
My interminable day finally ended, and as predicted, my dad was waiting for me outside of the store next to my car.
Or, rather, my dad’s driver and head of security, George, was waiting there. I opened the door to the back of the black Tahoe with black windows, SHADOW loudly declaring the owner of the car via the license plate. My dad was sitting in the backseat, cell phone glued to his ear.
“I have to go.” He ended the call and stuck his phone in his pocket. I was pleased he got off the phone for me, but I felt bad for whoever was on the other end of that conversation.
I got in and sat beside him. “Where to?” he asked.
I shrugged and looked out the window. I didn’t care where he took me to dinner. I cared about our conversation.
I cared about the things he had to tell me.
“How was work?”
I shrugged again.
“You gonna talk tonight?”
&n
bsp; “Seems to me like you’re the one who has something to say.”
He sighed and shook his head, a smirk forming on his lips. “You know that you’re the only person in the world who gets away with talking to me like that, don’t you?”
“Not even Jadyn Snow?”
“Not even Jadyn Price.”
I pressed my lips together. “Good thing you love me.”
“That I do. I know we have things to talk about, but it has to wait just a little longer.”
“Why?” I asked.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pointed to it, like I was supposed to discern some meaning from that.
I shot him a look that clearly said I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about.
He mouthed some words at me. “Someone might be listening.”
After a year of wondering, I supposed I could wait a little longer.
Parker flashed through my mind. I still felt unsettled about our fight. I tried to look at the positives. It was good for us to fight, to allow each other to see our emotions. It was bad to take our shit out on each other. And that was exactly what we’d done.
George pulled the Tahoe in front of South Steakhouse.
I thought about telling my dad that I had literally just been there for dinner the night before, that I wasn’t dressed for a steakhouse, but I didn’t want to wait longer for answers to questions I’d pushed to the back of my mind for longer than I should have.
I made a bargain with myself. A dangerous one.
I told myself that no matter what my dad was about to tell me, I had to filter it through my Parker lens. I liked him. I was developing these intense feelings for him that certainly transcended lust. In my quest to protect him by first staying away and later by holding him close, he’d become important to me.
“This okay?” my dad asked. We were waiting for George to get our table situated. My dad never just walked into a restaurant and asked for a table. Too many people would recognize him. Part of George’s duties were to get my dad’s tables. He was an invaluable asset to the Price estate.
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, really. I didn’t want to eat at the same place again. But I did cherish time with my dad. He was the one person on earth who understood me better than anybody else.
Vintage Volume One Page 12