by Lisa Suzanne
“You still thinking about who she reminds you of?” he asks.
“Dani Mayne.” I glance over at him to gauge his reaction.
His brows draw together.
“From North Chicago High School. She was in Zoey’s class. Cute little innocent girl. Sang her heart out at that party we threw right before Christmas our senior year.”
He nods slowly. “I remember her. Long, brown hair? Brown eyes?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That was her.”
“They don’t look anything alike, but I see the resemblance,” he says. “I hear it in her voice.”
I nod. “I kissed her in the hallway at school one day.”
“You did?” he asks. “And you didn’t tell me?”
I told Mark everything about every girl I’d ever touched, but she was somehow sacred. My not so dirty little secret. “She was just so…I don’t know. So opposite of me but I wanted her so bad.”
“What ever happened to her?” he asks.
I look back out over the traffic. “I have no idea,” I say, but I’m starting to wonder if she vanished only to be reborn as the girl opening for our band on this tour.
So much of it adds up, yet I have no idea why she wouldn’t just tell me if it was her, why she wouldn’t confess to us having a shared history. If it is her, then I probably need to let her tell me on her own terms. If she’s keeping this huge secret from Mark and me, maybe she has a reason and I need to respect her wishes.
I just don’t know how much longer I can go without asking her about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MACI
“So are you gonna collaborate with him?” Griffin asks me. We still have another few minutes before we can legally get back on the road. Tony is ready to go, sitting behind the wheel with the engine started, and now we’re just waiting on the other drivers and the clock.
I lift a shoulder. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
“What happened last night?” He asks quietly like it might soften the blow, but it doesn’t. I still flinch.
“Nothing happened last night.” It’s technically the truth. This morning was another story. “I don’t want to talk about this with you.”
“What is this with Fuller?”
“I don’t know if it’s anything.”
Griffin’s eyes move over my shoulder.
“It’s something.” Ethan’s voice breaks into our conversation. “I’m just not sure what yet.” He looks over to Griffin. “Switch me,” he says, his voice a command. “I need more time with Mace.”
“She hates being called Mace,” Griffin says, and frankly I’m surprised he has the balls to speak to Ethan that way.
Ethan’s eyes edge over to me. “She can tell me that, then.”
Griffin glances at me, too. “You okay with this?”
I shrug. “Take your pillow this time,” I say. “I don’t want to hear any bitching when you get back.”
Ethan grins, Griffin huffs, and I keep my expression smooth.
Griffin exits my bus, this time with a bag of his things, and Ethan takes Griff’s seat at my table. “Only about five hours this time,” he says. “What sort of damage you think we can do in five hours?”
I blow out a breath. “I think we need to keep this professional.”
His smile fades.
“If you want to write together, fine. If you want to collaborate, I’ll give it a try. But I don’t think screwing you is good for me.”
“It wasn’t good for you?” he asks, surprised. “You got yours.”
“I did. I’m not saying the sex wasn’t good. It was more the part where you ran off afterward.”
He sighs and averts his gaze to the window. He squints as he looks out over at his bus, and just then we start backing out of our spot, the silver metal of his bus moving out of our line of sight. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t expect to—” He interrupts himself. “Never mind.” His legs seem restless as one of his knees starts bouncing up and down, and then he drums the fingertips of one of his hands on the edge of the table. “You’re right. I was a dick.”
“You did exactly what I expected you to do. Exactly what I’ve heard you do.”
He nods. “I know. I didn’t want to. That’s why I’m here now.”
“For round two? You think I’m so weak I’ll just fall over myself to be with you again?”
“No. I know you’re not. That’s not what this is.” His voice takes on a pleading I never expected to hear from him.
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know.” He blows out a frustrated breath before he averts his eyes again, and I know he’s lying.
“Yes, you do.” I push him as hard as I can with my words. “And you can tell me now, or you can sit here for the next five hours by your goddamn self.”
“You remind me of someone, okay?”
“Who?”
He moves his eyes over to mine. They’re fraught with pain and heartache. “The only girl I ever thought I loved.”
“Who was she?” I ask softly.
He shakes his head. “Nobody. A ghost.”
I let that fill the space between us for a few quiet beats. He breaks the silence first.
“Can we work on our song?”
I nod and reach over to the counter beside me to grab my notebook. I write across the top of the page Loss.
“And sex.” He points to the paper. “Remember? Sex sells.”
“Loss and sex?” I say.
He shrugs. “It’s just a brainstorm. Don’t throw anything out.”
I add and sex to the page reluctantly.
“What about loss?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “Is this always your process?”
My brows furrow in confusion. “Is what always my process?”
“Talking about it. Do you have to talk about everything before you just write it down?” His frustration is aimed at me, and I’m not sure what I did wrong other than try to understand where he’s coming from with his ideas.
I hold up both hands in surrender. “I’ve never cowritten a song before. If there’s some other way to do it, by all means, just tell me.”
“Never?”
I shake my head.
“Well I’m glad to be the one to pop your cowriting cherry.” He shoots me a sly smile.
I roll my eyes. “So how do we do it if we don’t talk about it?”
“Let it ruminate for a minute.” He looks out the window as if he’s drawing inspiration from the landscape passing us by, and then he taps his fingers on the table. “We could fuck and see if it inspires us,” he says.
“I’m not having sex with you.”
“Again.”
“Right. Again.”
He chuckles as his eyes catch mine. A little shiver races up my back when he says, “You will.”
“I thought you were more of a hump and dump kinda guy.” My voice comes out more accusatory than I mean it to.
“I was.” His voice softens as he corrects himself. “Am. But I want you again.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t. Believe me. Something’s different here. I can’t stop thinking about kissing you again.”
My brows raise in surprise. “Why’s that different?”
He stares down at the table when he answers. “Because usually I just want to fuck. Kissing just gets in the way. Kissing means feelings.”
“Did you just admit you have feelings for me?” Another shiver runs up my back, this one a little more powerful than the last. I intentionally choose to decipher the shiver as excitement that I’m finally getting him where I need him to be after all this time—and nothing more.
He lifts a shoulder. “Maybe.”
We stare at each other for a quiet minute.
“What fucked you up so bad, Ethan?” I finally ask, ready to dig deep into who Ethan Fuller really is.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he looks down at my notebook
with the words loss and sex written across the top of the page.
“When I lost her, I lost myself.”
“Who?” I ask.
He nods at the paper. “First line of my lyric. Write it down.”
“Say it again.”
“When I lost her, I lost myself.”
I write it down. It’s not half bad, and something tugs at me. Is he talking about the girl he lost? Or is he just coming up with something magical for a song?
“What happened?” I ask.
“Bottled up my feelings, stuck ‘em on a shelf.”
I scribble his words down, though I’m not sure if he’s confessing his past to me and what made him the way he is today or if he’s just saying words he thinks will work for a song. As a lyricist myself, I know that much of what we put into our songs are our own experiences.
“They sat there in a jar of glass until you walked by with that fine ass.”
I look up at him and raise a questioning brow.
“What?”
I lift a shoulder. “Just seems like the easy way out.”
He laughs.
I close the notebook. “Tell me about this girl.”
He shakes his head and squints out the window—the same motion I’m learning is his default when he wants to avoid talking about something. He finally glances down at my notebook and lifts his chin toward it. “That’s more than I’ve ever told anyone about her.”
“That you lost yourself when you lost the girl you loved? That you bottled it up inside and haven’t allowed anyone to see beyond the glass jar where you’ve stored your feelings since she walked out of your life?”
He nods slowly. “Yeah,” he says softly.
“Where’d she go?” I press. I want this song to slay, and if he gives me petty surface shit like fine ass, we’ll lose the emotions we’re starting to tap into.
When his ice blue eyes find mine, they’re full of sadness. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He shakes his head. “She vanished.”
My brows furrow. “Vanished? And how did that make you feel?”
“I already told you. I lost myself. She took who I was back then with her, and I haven’t been the same since.”
“Is that why you nail and bail?”
He blows out a breath. “I didn’t realize coming over here to write a song meant a shrink session.”
“I’m no shrink, but sometimes talking about it with someone can open the jar on the shelf,” I say softly. I want him to open up to me—want him to confess everything to me, to open that jar and lay it on me.
I have to remind myself it’s all shit I can use against him—that I don’t want it because I’m starting to fall for him all over again, faults and scars and emotional avoidance included. It’s simply a way to get closer to him so I can put him in a vulnerable place and then lower the hammer over his heart.
An edge of guilt nags at me.
“Everyone’s wired differently, and if I’m being honest, I was raised to believe love doesn’t exist. Sex exists, and for me, it’s always filled the hole. Or,” he says, smiling wickedly, “it’s allowed me to fill the hole.”
I ignore his joke. “When did you lose your virginity?” I don’t know why I ask.
“Thirteen.”
“Jesus.”
“She was our next-door neighbor. She was a lonely housewife in her twenties and her husband was out of town on business. She asked if I could help her with some yardwork, and we fucked right behind her hedges. I could see my house, my own bedroom window, every time she bounced down on my dick.”
“Was it just the once with her?”
He nods. “Yeah. They moved away not too long after that, but it unlocked a whole new world for me.”
“Was she the one who left?” I ask, referring to the lyrics he spoke aloud just a few minutes ago.
He shakes his head. “No. That happened several years later. Enough about me. Tell me about your first time.”
“I was eighteen, a freshman in college. I slept with the first guy who looked my way because I was tired of being a virgin. We were friends with benefits for the majority of my freshman year.” We stopped when my mom died, but I don’t mention that. “What about the one you lost?”
His brows furrow. “I never got the chance.”
“So you never even screwed this girl you still pine after even all these years later?”
He shakes his head sadly. “For the record, I don’t pine after her. But she never even knew how I felt.”
“And then she vanished.” Vanished.
I vanished.
For the first time, a scary thought edges its way into my thoughts.
Was it Dani? Is he talking about me?
I brush away the ridiculous thought. He couldn’t have been in love with me.
Could he?
He nods. “There was a lot involved. I couldn’t tell her. She was too good for me, anyway. It never would’ve worked.”
“How do you know?”
He doesn’t answer, and I open the notebook back up. I scribble down a line.
“What did you write?” he asks.
I turn the notebook to face him. I scratched out his last line about walking by with my fine ass and replaced it.
They sit silent and vile in a glass jar
Taunting me to expose the scar
He nods and glances up at me, his eyes shining with approval that lifts my cold heart. “That’s good, Mace. Really good.”
“I don’t like it when people call me Mace.” I’m not sure why that is the thing I blurt out of my mouth, but I’m finding myself overly honest with Ethan. Well, as overly honest as I can comfortably be considering I’m basically lying about my entire life to him.
“Why?” he challenges. His eyes twinkle with amusement.
“It reminds me of that self-defense spray.” I wrinkle my nose.
“Well it reminds me of a different meaning.”
“What meaning?”
“That metal weapon with spikes at the end of it.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “How is that better?”
“The weapon, like you, is unbreakable. But you have the power to break anything standing in your way.”
My heart wavers in my chest in a weird and unexpected way—almost like I’m having heartburn and a heart attack at the same time, but it passes after just a single beat.
And just like that, suddenly I don’t hate the abbreviation of my name so much anymore.
I’m half in love and half in hate with the man sitting across the table from me. He may think I have the power to break anything in my way, yet I don’t know who really holds the power here. He’s already broken me once.
It takes everything in me not to give up my secret—not to tell him I’m Dani Mayne, we know each other, we have a shared history.
But the fear stabs at me. What if I’m totally off base with that strange thought that filtered through my mind?
I can’t think of anything worse than finally making my big confession and him not even remembering who I was.
CHAPTER THIRTY
MACI
When the bus pulls into the lot behind the American Airlines Center in Dallas, I’m not ready for him to leave. It’s unexpected, this attachment I feel to him, but I like the long, uninterrupted time together.
We added a few more lines to our song, we talked about everything and nothing, and now we’re forced to leave each other again. We’re not dating, we didn’t kiss or have sex, we’re not anything more than a couple of people traveling together because of work, and yet we’re so much more.
I almost slipped up, almost mentioned something about growing up in Chicago, but I covered it well—I think. I talked about an aunt who lived near the city, how she raised me to be a fan of the Bears. I tried to make it sound like we visited often, but the closer we get and the more we talk, the harder it is to keep up the same ruse I’ve maintained since I left North Chicago High School in
1999. The turn of the century brought with it a lot of personal changes, not the least of which included stripping my old identity to build an entirely new person.
And that’s the person I have to maintain I am, even if I’m allowing Ethan small glimpses into the real me. He’s seen some of my sketches—things I don’t show anyone because I’m too embarrassed. I’m trying not to let him see too much of me, but lines are starting to blur and with Ethan, it’s becoming harder to separate who I am on the inside with who the world sees.
I keep thinking maybe it’s time to abandon this plan. I brush the thought away every time it slips into my mind, though, because I deserve this.
My mom deserves it.
Yet he’s letting me see what’s inside of him. He projects a specific image to the world—a bad boy who fucks around, does drugs, drinks excessively, parties whenever and wherever he wants—and while that is indeed who he is, he also has a softer side he’s showing me. I don’t think it’s just because Mark urged him to be nice to me.
Maybe he feels the connection to me I always felt to him, or it could just be that damn red thread tying the two of us together. I wonder if there actually is something to that legend.
I add a line to the back of my notebook. I don’t want to add to our song when he isn’t there. But I don’t want to forget this line, either. It feels important.
I never thought love would find us, but the invisible thread forever binds us.
It’s not love, not with him. It can’t be. Not after everything that’s happened and certainly not after everything I’ve worked for my entire life.
Yet it’s something strong and passionate and fiery, and I wonder what it could turn into.
I add one more line on the next page. It doesn’t feel right for the song we’re working on together, but something he said has been rolling in my mind ever since.
You called me unbreakable but it’s all in your head
You have the power to break the invisible thread.
*
We have a free night in Dallas, and I’m torn between seeing if Ethan wants to hang out and meeting with Griffin. We haven’t had our daily meetings in two days because I’ve been tied up on a bus with Ethan, and we have business to sort. I want to schedule the collaboration with Ethan, but we need to finish writing the song first. Normally when I start writing, I can bust out lyrics fairly quickly—but dragging out the process with Ethan feels right. Or maybe spending time with Ethan feels right.