by Kate Stewart
“I loved piano, yes, but that just came to me. I don’t even remember not knowing how to play. Piano I was born with. The career? The road and the concerts and the tours? That they made me do.”
Condemnation colors his eyes.
“The addiction—I let that happen,” he says.
“You were too young,” I counter softly. “Too young to take the pills, and our parents should have stopped you, not enabled you. I see that now.”
He scoots closer, looking at me earnestly.
“Bris, I had to get away from them.” He shakes his head, and his eyes are bleak. “To survive. I needed to get better, and to do that, I had to put as much distance between them and myself as possible.”
“But that meant me, too.” Tears prick my eyes.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” He drops his head into his hands. “But you stayed. You were there. I didn’t know whose side you were on.”
“There wasn’t a side, Rhyson.” My words come vehemently. “You were all my family. They weren’t perfect, far from it, but they were the only parents I had. I wanted them to love me. You were the only brother I had. The only family I had, and it was ripped apart. You didn’t seem to want to repair it.”
“Not with them, no,” he admits. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“And me?” My heart flutters in my chest as I wait.
“When you would call, I thought it was them having you check up on me or trying to get in so they could get me back to make money for them. Even when you called and told me you wanted to come here for spring break, I thought there was an ulterior motive.”
He laughs, eyeing me with no small amount of doubt.
“And when you started talking today about moving here and managing my career—”
“I probably should have handled that better.” It’s the truth. “I know it seems crazy to you, but you’re a star, Rhyson. Like once-in-a-lifetime genius star. I don’t want to capitalize on it. I just want to see it happen, and for some reason, it isn’t.”
“I don’t know if I can do that shit again, Bris. It takes so much, and I only got through it with the drugs. I don’t want to create a situation where I need those again. If there was one thing I learned when I kicked the habit, it was that I have an addictive personality. Music is the only thing I need to be addicted to.”
“I’m not trying to create a situation where you need the drugs,” I say. “I just want to be your sister again.”
“And my manager?” Skepticism lifts one of his brows. “You want to be that, too?”
“I still have two years left at Columbia. We could start with me just being your sister.” A wide smile stretches across my face at the prospect. “And then see what happens.”
Chapter Eleven
Grip
I HATE CARNIVALS.
My cousin Jade used to drag me to these things and make me stay until the smell of funnel cake wasn’t even sweet anymore. We’d ride the Ferris wheel and run through the fun house. We’d play every game we could afford and some we managed to swindle our way into. Ring toss. Big Six Wheel. Ring the Bell. Skeeball. Jade’s so competitive, I’d have to let her win the basket toss most of the time. Not so much she’d get suspicious, but enough that she didn’t pout the whole damn time.
Something shifted between Jade and me along the way. I know it started with a secret shame we share, and over time, that deteriorated our closeness some. When I won the scholarship, leaving her in our local public school, things only worsened. We’re still close, but it isn’t what it was before. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up.
All that to say, I hate carnivals.
And Jimmi’s “brill” idea (her whack word, not mine) to show Bristol some fun before she leaves is this carnival. It could be worse. Rhyson could be stuck in the studio again, and I could be entertaining Bristol by myself. And that could get touchy … since I want to fuck her.
I mean, yes, talk to her ’til the sun comes up, laugh about the stand-up comedians we both like, exchange playlists, debate hot-button politics, explore all the ways we are different and just alike … but also I want to fuck her.
And never more so than last night in the alley. That sensuality I wasn’t sure Bristol understood about herself gyrated on the dance floor. The way her eyes dropped closed when she took her first sip of Grey Goose, licking the drops from her lips and savoring their taste. The way she rolled her hips, even sitting on her stool, her body seeking out the primal beat of the music. She says she can’t dance, but it wasn’t skill that had her out on the floor. It was her body pinned up, searching for release. And she thought she would find it with that Zeta Delta Dick frat boy who had been scoping her all night. I could barely focus from song to song as I watched her. Watched him watching her. I knew I couldn’t give her the release she wanted, but he certainly wasn’t going to.
It feels like this has been building between us for months, but it’s only been days. I had decided to squelch it, but when I heard her master plan about moving to LA and managing Rhyson, something turned over inside my head. A possibility? A maybe? Doing what she’s doing, staking her college career, planning her future based on helping her brother’s dreams come true, it’s crazy.
And so completely right.
I’ve known since the beginning that Rhyson will have to play again. We use the word genius like it’s nothing. I mean, seriously. Apple genius? But he is legit genius. Like playing Beethoven at three years old genius. And for him to neglect his gift, in whatever form it takes—classical, modern, pop, rock—is a travesty. Everyone around him knows it. Jimmi, our friend Luke, Grady. I know it, but none of us have called him on it. We have this silent pact to let him come to it on his own. He has to after what he endured for years under his parents’ tyrannical management. But Bristol, who hasn’t even seen him in five years, does it. She’s so sure it’s right that she’s betting her Ivy League education on it. She’s planning her future around it. She’s challenging him in a way none of us were willing to do.
And that’s my kind of girl. That abandoned passion. That bottomless commitment. You don’t meet people like her often, and when you do, you never forget them. I couldn’t get her out of my mind before, but now …
I glance over at Bristol and Jimmi, who are playing water guns with Rhyson. It’s good to see the siblings laughing. Maybe they worked things out after I dropped Bristol off last night. They seem to be trying to enjoy the little time they have left. She leaves in two days. Why that feels so shitty this fast baffles me.
“Come on, Grip!” Jimmi eyes me over her shoulder as she sprays blindly at the target in front of her. “Grab a gun.”
“Nah.” I munch on the popcorn I grabbed a few booths back. “I’m good.”
Carnivals do have good popcorn. But funnel cake? I ate so much of it with Jade, the smell nauseates me. When they finish the game, the girls want to do rides.
“Ferris wheel.” Jimmi presses her hands together in a plea to Rhyson. “Please ride with me.”
Rhyson carefully considers the girl who has been one of our closest friends since high school. She’s also had a crush on Rhyson about as long as she’s known him. He’s very careful with her heart, though, encouraging her as little as possible. Rhyson gets as much ass as I do, but he’s just on the low with his shit. He knows there should be a huge KEEP OUT sign all over him for Jimmi.
“Okay, we can ride.” Rhyson holds up an index finger. “Once, Jim. I know how you get. All ‘again, again’.”
“Cool.” Jimmi’s expression may be calm, but her eyes dance all over the place. “We can talk about that song I’m working on.”
She knows him well. As soon as she says that, Rhyson is in. Talking music theory and asking about chord changes will occupy them for the whole ride.
“We’re down to ride, too.” Luke, the other guy we’ve been tight with for years and a fellow arts alum, hooks his elbow around his girlfriend Mandi’s neck.
“I ate that polish sausage.” Mandi lo
oks a little green. “Think I’ll be okay on the Ferris wheel?”
I wouldn’t trust it. You can’t ever un-see projectile vomit, and there’s nothing sexy about that.
“So, you’ll ride with Grip then, Bristol?” Jimmi looks between the two of us with a gleam in her eye. Don’t let the blonde hair fool ya. Jimmi’s sharp as a new pair of scissors. She probably picked up on the vibe between Bristol and me last night. We don’t need her matchmaking. I’m trying to figure out how not to complicate this situation more. The last thing we need is be alone on the—
“I’ll ride.” Bristol stuffs her hands in her pockets and looks at her feet. “I mean, if you want to, Grip. Since everyone else is. Up to you.”
She looks up at me, wearing not much makeup at all. Just as beautiful. A threat to my peace of mind.
“Weren’t you scared of heights?” Rhyson asks his sister, a reminiscent smile playing around his lips.
Surprise flits across Bristol’s face.
“Uh, yeah. For a little while. Sometimes.” She laughs, covering her mouth with one hand. “Mother sent me to therapy for it. Remember that?”
“God, yes.” Rhyson’s face lights up. “Didn’t she send you to therapy for biting your nails, too?”
“And for wetting the bed. I was three! Since she was never there, therapy was Mother’s parenting alternative,” Bristol says dryly.
Wow. Their mom does sound like a piece of work, but Rhyson and Bristol are laughing about it as if it’s nothing that their mother sent a three-year-old to therapy for bed wetting. Just two prisoners, reminiscing about doing their time. Only Rhyson escaped, and Bristol stayed behind bars.
The ride is crowded, and there aren’t any available cars near each other, so we’re all spread out, leaving Bristol and me strapped into this small space and relatively alone. At first, the only sound is the whir of the motor and distant squeals from the ground below. After a few moments of quiet between us, Bristol snickers. I glance at her to see what’s so funny, but she isn’t even looking at me. She’s looking down at the ground, which is growing smaller and smaller as we ascend.
“What?” I ask. “You laughed. What’s up?”
She turns her head, and her laughter slowly leaks away until the only thing left of it is a shadow in her eyes.
“I was thinking about my mom sending me to therapy for biting my nails.” She shakes her head. “I spent so much time in therapy, I knew the therapists about as well as I knew my nannies.”
“You had nannies?”
“Sure.” She laughs again, but this time bitterness tinges the sound. “Who else was going to raise me with my parents trailing Rhyson on the road most of the year?”
“That sucks.”
I want to say more, but feel it might the wrong thing. Like how her mom should have stayed her ass at home with Bristol instead of forcing Rhyson to perform most of his childhood or leaving him addicted to prescription drugs. But that might be too much.
We reach the top of the wheel, and both of us look over our respective sides at the ground. When I turn back into the car, Bristol’s face has gone pale, and her breath comes in little anxious puffs.
“Hey, you okay?” I lean into her space, grasping her chin to turn her face to me.
“Yeah. I just—” She closes her eyes and clamps her teeth down on her bottom lip. “I shouldn’t have looked down.”
“Are you still scared of heights?”
“Sometimes.” Her eyes are still closed, and she pulls in deep breaths through her nose and blows them out through her mouth. “This used to help.”
“If you’re still scared of heights, why’d you want to ride this thing?”
When she opens her eyes, I almost wish she hadn’t. There’s a vulnerability at odds with Bristol’s bold persona. There’s a question there that she’s afraid to voice, and I know just as surely as if she’d said it aloud that she got on this ride to spend time with me. She drops her lashes and fidgets, bending her body over the bar holding us in and folding her arms on top of it.
“Just don’t look down.” I clear my throat, looking away from her, too. “We’ll be finished soon.”
Only we don’t move at all for the next few seconds. And then more seconds.
“What’s going on?” Low-level panic infiltrates her voice. “Why aren’t we moving?”
“They just kind of pause sometimes,” I lie. “Probably just so we can get a good look at everything.”
Her laugh catches me off guard.
“They just kind of pause?” She rolls her eyes, looking more like the confident Bristol I’ve gotten to know the last few days. “You’re a better liar than that.”
“I don’t lie.” I shrug. “Ask anybody. I’m honest as Abe. You know how you’re in a group and someone farts? And no one claims it?”
“Don’t tell me.” She giggles, resting her cheek on her folded arms and looking at me. “You claim it.”
“If I do it, then I claim it.” I grin at her, glad to see some of the color returning to her face. “I have no shame, but at least I’m honest about my shit.”
Just as I’m thinking crisis averted, an announcement reaches our ears from the ground that there is a technical problem they’re working on, and we should be moving in a few minutes.
“Minutes?” Bristol peers back over her side.
“Don’t look down, Bris.” I’ve never shortened her name before like that, the way Rhyson does, and I shouldn’t like how intimate it feels.
“Okay. I promise not to freak out unless they leave us up here much longer.”
“And if we are up here much longer?”
“Then I can’t make any promises.” She runs an anxious hand through her hair. “I’m not scared of heights in general. I can go up elevators and stuff. This is the only thing left from my old fear. Being in an open ride like this and suspended over the ground. I just can’t stop thinking that I could fall so easily.”
The more she talks about it, the more the color vacates her cheeks and her breath chops up again.
“Okay, let’s distract you until we get moving again.” I roam my brain for something to take her mind off the imagined fall to our death. “What’s the weirdest place you ever had sex?”
Yep. The girl I’m supposed to be not trying to screw, and that’s the question that comes to mind. Live by the dick, die by the dick, I guess. No going back now, so I just wait for her response like it’s not a moronic question.
“Um, how do you know I’ve had sex before?” Her eyes and her grin collaborate to tease me. “Maybe I’m a virgin.”
“Weren’t you the girl who screamed ‘I like dick’ at the top of her lungs last night on the dance floor?” I throw my head back and guffaw, in honor of Jimmi and her word-challenged self.
“Oh my God.” Pink washes over her high cheekbones. “I can’t believe I did that. It was the Grey Goose talking.”
“And warned me that you were horny like you might pounce on me if I got too close.” My laugh dies down to a smile, even though this conversation is making my jeans tight.
“Okay, you can stop humiliating me now.” She’s only half joking but twists her mouth to the side. “Coat check.”
“What?” Is the height going to her head already? “What’s coat check?”
“That’s the weirdest place I ever had sex. It was at my debutante ball, and—”
“You were a debutante?”
“Don’t ask. My mother’s doing.” She sighs and offers a wry smile. “But my date and I snuck into the coat check closet and did it. I had on this huge white dress and he was struggling to find the condom and the heel on my shoe …”
She waves her hand dismissively and grins.
“I guess you had to be there.”
That would have been awkward.
“I think I get the picture,” I say. “Your turn.”
She sobers in a few seconds, and her mouth gradually flattens into a soft line.
“What’s your greatest regret?” s
he asks softly.
“You’re kidding, right?” I turn my knees in, pressing my back against the side of the cart so I can see her squarely. “I ask you a funny sex question, and you go for the jugular with this?”
“You didn’t place any prerequisites on it.”
“I didn’t know I was dealing with a sadist, or I would have.”
“Well, you didn’t.” She smiles a little, her eyes softening. “Greatest regret, and you have to be honest. Not something stupid like never seeing The Goonies.”
“God, of course I’ve seen The Goonies.” I run a hand over my face, scouring all the regrets crowding my past to find the one that’s the worst. And once I have it, I’m not sure I want to be honest with her. If I am, it means I have to be honest with myself, too.
“Okay.” I cross my arms over my chest, tipping my head back to contemplate the stars in the darkening sky. “I was like, twelve years old.”
“Is this gonna count?” She drops a skeptical look on me. “That’s pretty young for regrets.”
“Not where I come from,” I say softly. I unfocus my eyes, looking back through the years until I find that day on the playground. “This cop stopped me and my cousin Jade.”
“For what?”
“For … nothing.” I shrug. “It isn’t like what you’re used to. They didn’t need a reason. And this was in the nineties, so drugs were huge in our neighborhood. And kids our age were slinging on the playgrounds. So, we didn’t think anything of it.”
“What happened?”
“He searched me, and of course, found nothing. I was a good kid.” A staccato laugh comes quick and short. “I watched movies, went to school, and wrote poetry. Not exactly a gangbanger in the making. My mom made sure I kept my head down and kept moving. You didn’t have to find trouble in my neighborhood. It found you.”
I glance over my shoulder at the ground, which is so far away the people below like a colony of ants, and turn back.
“Then the same cop searches my cousin.” I pause and swallow the heat blistering my throat. “He … she had on this dress, and he … touched her.”