Peyton was laughing harder as he wheeled the car onto the entrance ramp headed for the Newark Airport. The sun, near the flat horizon and freeway overpasses, glared like a bomb blast over the front windshield.
He said, “Again, close. We grew up together, and she was my first real girlfriend.”
That’s right. Georgie had known about Peyton’s shingles outbreaks and his crunchy, anti-vaxx mom. “So you’re her stalker from childhood?”
“No. We competed against each other in piano competitions from the time we were kids. At Tanglewood, which is a highly competitive music program we both attended when we were sixteen, we fell in love, and we were each other’s first lovers.”
“How precious. I think I might barf. So did you guys live happily, all lovey-dovey for these years, until the big, bad, broody, glowery Xan Valentine took her away from you?”
“No, I fucked it up. I am the villain in this love story.”
“Oh. That’s sad.” She stuffed more pastry into her mouth.
“I would feel sorry for myself, but it’s entirely my fault,” Peyton said. “I did it all. I made every wrong decision at every opportunity. I was an evil asshole, and I hurt her a lot.”
“Did you cheat on her?” Raji sounded more aghast than she had meant to. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t ever going to see Peyton Cabot again. If he was a cheating asshole, it wasn’t her problem unless she was the woman he had just cheated with.
Ew.
Maybe Raji did need a shower.
Peyton said, “Everything but cheating, I think. But no, I don’t think I’m the cheating type.”
“Did you hit her?” Raji asked, trying to figure out what was so bad.
“Of course not. All right, everything except cheating and physical abuse.”
“Addiction?”
“Not that, either. Wow, you have some terrible ideas about men in relationships.”
Yeah, she did.
So that left— “Emotional abuse?”
Peyton sighed as he drove. “Yeah, you could put it like that. I am the biggest asshole in the world, and I fucked her over. I ruined her life.”
Raji squinted at the car’s gray ceiling to think about that one. “Georgie Johnson is the keyboard player for a major rock band, probably earning millions of dollars, and married to the lead singer in what appears to be an exceedingly happy marriage, if you can judge by the way those two were wrapped around each other like blood vessels around a tumor all night. If you were trying to ruin her life, you suck at it.”
“If there is any good that came out of it, it’s that she got rid of me and found Xan. Those two are soulmates. They have sacrificed impossible things to be together.”
“So it all worked out for the best,” Raji said brightly, looking at the other cars on the parkway as they raced through the traffic.
“I cannot think of it that way, ever. What I did was reprehensible. There is no silver lining or meant-to-be or any of that shit. I own it. I am the evil asshole who fucked up the life of the woman I loved until there was no going back. If she turned it around, it was no thanks to me.”
Raji had flinched the whole way through his speech. “That’s pretty harsh, Peys. If a friend of mine said that about themselves, I’d try to talk them down.”
“It’s better that I remember. I try to make up for it every day, to do anything I can to make her happy, to try to make the world a better place, and to never, ever treat anyone like that again. If that’s my natural personality, I need to not be that person.”
“Well, I don’t know what you did, but it sounds like you’re making up for it. I mean, we are our choices, right? Maybe you screwed up, but now you’ve chosen a different path.”
“You don’t know what I did.”
“And I’m not sure I want to,” Raji mumbled.
Peyton said, “You need to know.”
“I don’t think I do.” But she looked over at him and waited.
Peyton sucked in a deep, fortifying breath. “When we were sixteen, it was revealed that her father swindled a lot of people, including my parents and a lot of our friends’ parents, out of a great deal of money. We had plenty. We weren’t poor afterward, by any means. Indeed, we were still one of the wealthiest families in the country. But it was a lot of money. At school and in our community, a dark energy swept through everyone—an anger, a livid rage at our own willing ignorance that had led to our parents being swindled. Her father was arrested and whisked away to prison, where he killed himself within a week. Her mother hid in their compound and then ran to a house they had in a remote area of France. Her older brother was under investigation but hadn’t been charged yet, but he was staying in the city under their lawyers’ lock and key. Georgie was the only one available to attack. Georgie was at school the next day and every day. A housekeeper was staying with her because she hadn’t wanted to go to France, or maybe she couldn’t, legally. I don’t know. All that self-hating rage turned on her, and everyone attacked her.”
“Oh, no.” Raji could figure this out.
“Including me,” Peyton said. “It was vicious because everyone, absolutely everyone, should have known better, years before. They should have known that her father was swindling them, but they hadn’t wanted to know.”
“It sounds like a bad situation,” Raji said, trying not to agree with him too much.
“I listened to what everyone else was saying, what my parents were saying, what all of my friends and their parents’ were sniping about behind her back. Everyone thought she was in on it. They thought she had known that he was a con artist, but she hadn’t. She was as ignorant and shocked and innocent as the rest of us. He left her with nothing, too. No college fund. No inheritance. No graduation money to buy a plane ticket to get to a university.”
Raji’s father had paid what the divorce court had mandated he had to: private school until Raji was eighteen years old. Her mother hadn’t had a spare penny, though during Raji’s undergrad, she had managed to send Raji twenty bucks every month despite that. The rest of it—college tuition, dorm fees, food, books, and absolutely every cent for living expenses for her bachelor’s degree and through medical school—Raji had taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to cover. She was almost half a million dollars in debt, but at least she’d had a plane ticket to get to college. “That poor girl.”
“I blamed her. We all blamed her. They were all rude to her, shut her out, wouldn’t talk to her, basically destroyed her life by bullying. Everyone did it, but that’s no excuse.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
He shrugged. “Her father took about thirty million from my father and around twenty million from my trust funds.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Peyton! I’d be pissed, too!”
He shook his head. “It was a small percentage of the holdings. We made it up within a few years. Most importantly, it wasn’t Georgie’s fault.”
Raji wanted to stop him from saying any more, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the lines of pain around his eyes or block out the choke in his voice.
“I shouldn’t have listened to them. I should have stood up for her. When she told me that she didn’t know what her father was doing, I should have believed her. I should have believed her above all the others. I should have defended her. I should have been her knight in shining armor, but instead, I was the guy at the head of the mob, wielding the biggest pitchfork. Metaphorical pitchforks, you understand.”
“Yeah. I got that.” Raji’s heart clenched. She couldn’t imagine everyone turning against her like that.
“Georgie ran away. Understandably, she ran away. She ran away from Connecticut and ended up in the Southwest, going to college to be a lawyer so she could pay all of us back, so she could pay me back. Me, like I need the money.”
Raji held onto the smooth, titanium door handle of the Mercedes S-Class, a car that even her father, who had been a highly successful psychiatrist for many years, would have thought
extravagant. With that big of an engine, she bet that it didn’t even get very good gas mileage, and the insurance must be exorbitant.
He said, “Because I am also an idiot, after she was gone, I figured out that I should have stood up for her. So I tried to find her. I looked for years. I went to college, to Juilliard for classical piano, like she and I had always dreamed of doing together, hoping she would be there.”
“But she wasn’t there,” Raji said. “You said she was going to go to law school.”
“I didn’t know that because I never asked her. One day after I had finished my Master’s, I was walking down the hallway in Juilliard, and there she was, lying on the floor with a guy standing over her. I didn’t recognize her at first. I thought a guy had hit a woman, and I was ready to intervene. When I finally recognized her, I was ready to do the right thing and be there for her. Instead, she was with Xan Valentine, and she was already in love with him.”
“Yeah, well, she had to go on with her life,” Raji pointed out.
“I deserve every moment of heartache. I have never denied that.”
“Okay. Good,” she said, still wondering where she should come down on this.
“I figured out that they were at Juilliard to find a new keyboard player for Killer Valentine. I had already signed a contract as a soloist with the LA Philharmonic—”
“The LA Phil? I love them!”
“—and so I broke the contract—”
“Oh, my God.” Even Raji knew what that must mean. One does not casually break contracts with major orchestras or surgical residency programs. Peyton was probably blackballed from the classical music world.
“—to go on tour with Killer Valentine.”
“Because you still love her.”
“Loved. I think I should say ‘I loved her,’ not that I still love her. She and Xan are soulmates, if such a thing exists. I gave up a soloist spot for her, but Xan has given up more. Far, far more.” Peyton swallowed hard, like he had almost been sick. “But the thing is, if she’s his soulmate, then she’s not my soulmate, and so I must not be hers. I shouldn’t love her. I don’t have that right.”
“You don’t just stop loving someone,” Raji said. Not that she had ever loved someone. Cold-blooded, lizard-like, cardiothoracic surgeons didn’t fall in love.
“After Georgie disappeared, I didn’t see her for—five years, I think? That’s a lot of time. When I found her again, she wasn’t the same person. She’d changed. She’d grown. She was stronger and deeper and warmer and more beautiful, but she wasn’t my Georgie anymore. I was in love with the girl I’d known when we were sixteen, and she didn’t want to be that person. It was right to let her go. We’re friends, now. I’ll do just about anything for her, including let her go so she can be with a man who’s better for her than I ever was.”
“That’s actually kind of beautiful,” Raji said.
“It’s not. Remember that it all started with me not believing her and not standing up for her when I should have. It all started because I’m an asshole.”
“How long were you an asshole, though? How many years?”
“About a year and half, from when we got back from Tanglewood until she finished her credits and walked away.”
“So, eighteen months? You gave up your whole life plan because you gave someone the silent treatment for eighteen months?”
“Eighteen months is a long time to make a mistake and double down on it every day, over five hundred days.” Peyton pulled the car under the wide, cement awning of the kiss and fly. “Here we are. You should run to catch your flight.”
This guy had just poured his heart out to her in a high-speed car ride that had turned into a therapy session. “Yeah,” Raji said. “I should run.”
“You should,” he said.
He stared at her, leaning over the console between their seats. The morning sunlight shone in his eyes, turning them sea green, and glanced off the hard planes of his cheekbones and jaw. Blond stubble on his cheeks glinted in the sunlight.
She asked him, “How long have you been with Killer Valentine?”
“Four months.”
Four long months. “You’ve been trying to make it up to her all that time,” Raji said.
“Every day, I try never to be that guy again.”
“Then you’re not.” Her heart hurt for him. “Then you’re not that guy any more. We are the sum of our choices. You’re choosing to be someone else.”
“I’m still the same guy.”
“Not if you are choosing to do differently and following through on it. If you’re choosing to be different, then you are different. You’ve changed.”
“I don’t feel like I’ve changed,” he said.
“You can’t do penance for the rest of your life because you were an ass to an ex for eighteen months when you were a teenager.”
“This feels like the right thing to do,” he said.
“It’s been four months. You broke a contract with the L.A. Phil for her. You’ve paid your debt. You shouldn’t be your ex-girlfriend’s caddy for the rest of your life. Is that what you plan to do, give up the rest of your life because you fucked up for a year and a half when you were in high school?”
“No.” He frowned, a line drawing between his light brown eyebrows. “Not the rest of my life.”
“So what is your plan?”
“Not to fuck up again, I guess.”
“That’s not a plan.” She grabbed him around the back of his neck and pulled him to her mouth for one last, hot kiss. She pressed her lips to his, opening her mouth. He tasted like mint gum and almonds.
His warm hand touched her waist, and he kissed her back.
She broke it off, breathless. “It was wonderful to meet you, Peyton-Cabot. I like you, and I think you’re a good man. I think it takes a good man to realize that he’s not one and to change. I think that we are the sum of our choices. Thank you for getting me to the airport in time, too. I would have been up shit creek if I’d have missed this flight. Good-bye, Peys.”
Raji jumped out of the car, yanked her rollie bag from the back seat, and sprinted for the ticket counter.
She made her plane with seconds to spare before they closed the door, and then she realized that she hadn’t given Peyton her phone number.
That was for the best, really. A guy who was trying to become a good man shouldn’t hang out with a soulless, heartless, reptilian psychopath such as herself, someone who harvested hearts from one dying person and sewed them into another, wrist-deep in chest meat and blood.
He needed someone better than Raji.
Chapter Eight
Bestie’s Advice
* * *
“But you’re not going to see him again, right?”
Raji paused, her scalpel poised over the man’s sternum. The blue surgical drape covered most of the patient, just leaving a clear window for where they were going to cut him open and sew some new veins on his heart. “Of course not. It was just a wedding hook-up.”
Beth stared at her from the other side of the anesthetized patient’s chest. Her blue eyes widened behind her plastic visor. The bright surgical lights above them printed white circles on the plastic shield over her face. “It doesn’t sound like it was just a wedding hook up, not if he told you all those deep, dark secrets.” Her emphasis on the word sound sounded like Beth thought Raji was lying.
Raji had spilled everything while they were scrubbing in for the procedure. “I’m not even sure how deep and dark the secrets are. I mean, he had a teenage relationship that didn’t work out, and when he tried to get her back five years later, she wasn’t interested anymore. That’s not a scandal. That’s the plot line of a boring teenager movie.”
“But these aren’t teenagers. These are three rock stars in a huge rock band. The tabloids would go crazy. Those magazines and websites are all-Killer Valentine, all-the-time right now.”
The other orderlies and nurses in the operating room shuffled at the words rock star
and Killer Valentine. Antiseptic smell infiltrated behind Raji’s visor, a chemical scent that overpowered even her own jasmine antiperspirant wafting out of her clothes.
Raji leaned forward from the waist. “Shhhh.” She hadn’t told anyone else about hooking up with Peyton at the wedding, just Beth.
One of the nurses glanced up at Raji, her dark eyes scanning Raji’s face for more information.
Great, now the nurse would have lots of questions that Raji shouldn’t answer.
“I’m just trying to look out for you,” Beth said. “You know how conservative the attending surgeons are. They’ll get a bug up their tushies about anything, even swearing in front of an anesthetized patient.” Beth glanced down at Mr. Washington, his face pale under his dark skin.
Raji inclined her head toward the anesthesiologist, asking for an update on the patient’s status.
The anesthesiologist, Dr. Jordan, leaned over, checked her monitors, and shrugged. The patient was doing fine. Some people just got pale when under anesthesia.
Raji said to Beth, “Come on, Mr. Washington needs some new veins. We can talk about this later.”
When Beth was looking at her, Raji moved her eyes and looked at the other nurses and orderlies around them, trying to signal to Beth that they were not alone and this was not the appropriate topic for a public conversation.
Unfortunately, Beth didn’t take the hint. “Well, no matter what, you’re not going to see him again, right? I mean one wedding hook-up won’t end your career, but bad publicity for the hospital because one of their heart surgeons is out partying with some drug-crazed rock star would.”
Raji tried to shut up. She really did. It just didn’t work. “He’s not like that. He’s not a typical rock star, or at least not a stereotypical one. If anything, he’s a preppie, and he will totally undo my hard-won reputation as edgy and exotic. He’s never done drugs. No one in that band does any recreational pharmaceuticals. Evidentally, a couple of their band members had a problem with that last year. One is dead. The other is in rehab. Nobody in KV does anything like that anymore.”
A Billionaire for Christmas Page 5