by LJ Evans
“How’s Cam?” Seth asked through hooded eyes, making small talk. Something he’d never been good at back when he was a teen in Tennessee.
“She’s good.”
“And the baby?”
“She’s on bedrest. Baby wants to come out early.”
Seth smirked. “Serves her right. Hope the little shitter gives her a run for her money.”
I smiled back, because it was so something Seth would say, and so something appropriate for Cam.
“Speaking of on the run, have you heard from PJ?” Keith asked.
Seth’s smile was wiped away, and in its place, a glower that seemed appropriately Seth again. “No.”
“She’ll be back. She loves you man.”
“If I don’t lose it and drag her back first,” Seth responded. Keith looked unfazed, and I realized that Seth was still Seth.
Keith had said love, and that had my brain reeling again so much that when Seth collected the bowls and cups and moved them back into the house, I didn’t even offer to help.
Instead, I followed the man who seemed so nothing like the sixteen-year-old, motorcycle-riding schmuck that I used to know that it pulled me back to the moment I was in once more. Seth was still silent and brooding. You could still feel the simmer of intensity and anger broiling under the surface of him, but it didn’t seem like he took it out any longer in alcohol and motorcycles and fists.
Seth led us into his studio to get the piece for Bianca, and then my brain shut off for a completely different reason. I was stunned by the art in the room. Art that was full of color and light and beauty. It made me realize that somehow Seth was trying to find a way of putting his past behind him so that it wouldn’t take up any time or energy or space. Johnny Cash would have been proud of him. Seth and Johnny were more alike than Derek and Johnny. Seth was the addict after all.
One piece in his studio caught my eye more than any other. It was a chair made of wrought iron, the legs grooved and broken and put back together with silver and gold welding in a way that somehow made me think of wounds on a heart, as if the scars were embedded there permanently. Over the top of it was draped a piece of purple satin that shimmered and glistened like diamonds. I ran my hand over the silk, then drew back in astonishment as I realized that the satin wasn’t cloth at all, but unbending steel.
“This is exquisite,” I told Seth.
He stared at it, not smiling. He didn’t agree, he just nodded, like it hurt him to admit it.
“Here’s Bianca’s piece.” Seth turned to the corner where a twisted tree stood. The pot it was in was made out of shards of stained glass soldered together. The leaves were made out of iron and steel, and from the branches, hung tiny snow globes filled with an array of different objects.
Keith and I both stared at it. It was amazing. All of his art was amazing.
“You’re really good at this,” I finally said.
He looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. His arms were crossed against his chest, feet wide.
“It’s a living,” he shrugged off the compliment.
“Says the man making millions at his art,” Keith said.
“Shut up, asshole,” Seth groused. That did seem more like him. Keeping people in their place.
Keith and Seth finagled the tree into the back of the sports car, and I helped buckle it in so that it wouldn’t topple over and break.
“Locke said he already got the check, right?” Keith asked, and Seth nodded. A man of few words.
“You gonna be okay?” Keith asked.
“You really need to go to hell. And tell Locke he doesn’t need to send you to fuckin’ check up on me,” Seth bit back.
Keith laughed, and I smiled at Seth’s surliness.
I said goodbye and thanked him for the stew. Seth nodded one more time. “Tell Cam…” he paused. “Let her know how happy I am for her.”
It was said in a quiet, deep tone that would have given me shivers if I wasn’t used to a certain sexy musician’s voice giving me shivers.
“Will do.” I got in the car and then looked back, “Good luck, Seth.”
He nodded one last time, then we drove away.
“Who’s PJ?” I asked as Keith and I made our way back up the coast.
“The love of his life. She’s breaking him into tiny shards because she took off across the country.”
This stabbed at me because, in just about a week, Derek and I would be almost as far apart. After I’d just realized I loved him.
“I can’t imagine Seth being broken by anything,” I said just to stop my own tortured thoughts.
“You’d be wrong. He’s the most broken man I know. But, like Seth himself says, you can take broken and make it into art, so hopefully he won’t stay broken for long.”
I looked at Keith, expecting a smirk, but there was none there. He was serious. Seth Carmen, hard-ass, had really been broken by a girl and was trying to put himself back together. It was enough to make me think of all the ways people can be broken by the ones they love most. And quietly hoped that somehow Derek and I wouldn’t end in the same broken shards that I expected we would once our realities hit us.
♫ ♫ ♫
Keith took me to Dylan’s office on the studio lot. I stared like the greenhorn country bumpkin I was. The energy, and backdrops, and people reminded me a little of the electricity of Vegas, and yet, it seemed somehow one more layer of false. Like these were even stronger automatons going at it. I wondered if anyone who lived in these bright cities ever felt real life hitting them in the face.
We took Seth’s tree to Dylan’s office where his assistant drooled over it and Keith, as if Keith wasn’t gay and she wasn’t fifty. I wondered if Bianca had arranged for the fifty-year-old just like she arranged for the older nanny. What did that say about her and Dylan?
By the time we got back to the mansion, it was almost seven. Keith dropped me at the front door, waved, and tooted the horn before driving off. I was grateful when I made my way through the big house without seeing anyone.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I saw Derek. I’d been trying to figure out how to tell him I couldn’t be his girlfriend, and now it was even more complicated by the fact that I loved him.
But I also knew I couldn’t stay in his world, girlfriend or not. Not only because it didn’t fit me, but because I belonged with my family in Tennessee, helping to heal a family that had lost its gravitational force.
That’s where my brain was when I walked into the guesthouse, but it went out the door when I saw Derek.
He paused midstride as I entered, as if he had been pacing, his hair stuck up at odd angles like he’d been passing his hand through it repeatedly. He looked like he’d lost everything, and my heart crumbled into itself.
“Jesus Christ! Thank God!” he said, walking toward me and wrapping me into that chest-welding hug that I loved. When he did, I realized that his whole body was trembling. He was shaking like a dog caught in a thunderstorm.
“Derek, what’s wrong?” I asked, pulling back to look up at his face. His eyes were closed. Dark lashes hiding his stormy eyes.
“Where have you been?” he asked huskily.
“With Keith. I left you a note.”
“Here?”
“Yes, on the counter.”
I turned him to look at the counter in the kitchen where a pink sticky note sat by the cordless phone.
“Why the hell didn’t you text me?” he asked. I could sense him calming down some, but there was still no sign of happy Derek. That Derek seemed to have been swallowed whole.
“I didn’t want to bug you while you were recording.”
“Shit, that’s not bugging me, Mia, that’s letting me know you’re okay. I’ve been texting you for hours.”
I grabbed my phone out of my bag and realized it was dead. I had forgotten to plug it in last night after we’d gotten back from the fiasco with Derek’s dad and we’d los
t ourselves in each other.
He saw the dark phone face and glowered, pulling it out of my hands to plug it in at the counter.
“What could have happened to me?” I asked, frowning as I watched him sulk and stalk in a way that fitted Seth way more than my happy musician.
“In L.A.? All kinds of fucking stuff.”
“Why are you cussing at me?” I was confused.
He approached me cautiously and reached for my fingers.
“I thought you left,” he breathed out, and then he pulled me into his arms again. One hand at the back of my head, the other around my waist, holding me to him.
“Left?”
“You know. Left me. Went back to Tennessee.”
It was the perfect opportunity to remind him that we had only a week left together, and that I would eventually be going back to Tennessee. But I couldn’t. Not then. Not when the sorrow in his voice was enough to drown a whole city. Not when he looked like his whole world had already collapsed.
I didn’t because I could see now the broken part of Derek, just like Keith had shown me the broken part of Seth. These beautiful men that looked like they were strong and whole and confident. Yet inside, they were a series of crumbling walls, just like me. Derek was just like me. It made my love for him swell even as it made me hurt, because I was afraid that we were both going to end up even more broken when this was all done.
I quietly said, “Moron,” and then led him to the couch. We sat with me tucked up against him and him holding me like he wasn’t going to let me escape. The truth was I didn’t want to escape. Not yet. Maybe not ever, even though I couldn’t see another path for us.
After sitting like that for a few minutes, being reassured by each other’s presence, I finally pushed past the chicken Mia I had been and found the courage to ask him. “What happened to you?”
He knew what had happened to me with Jake and Hayden, but I didn’t know what had broken this man who had repaired and then stolen my heart with the ease of a cleft-stretching smile. And I thought maybe he needed me to know his story as much as I had needed him to know mine.
At first he didn’t respond, so I tried to prompt him with the little that I knew. “Dylan said the mansion was hell. What did he mean?”
Derek frowned. “When did Dylan say that?”
“This morning.” I wanted to add that he’d also accused me of being a PlayBabe looking for an easy target in an up-and-coming musician, but I wouldn’t drive that wedge between Derek and his big brother.
“Why would he say that?”
I shrugged. “He was trying to apologize for your dad, I think.” Which was the truth. Just not all of it.
He cursed under his breath and pulled me onto his lap like I had been the night before. His fingers swirled under my tank along the edge of my jeans.
“I think I like your dresses better,” he said with a smirk that seemed more like the Derek I knew.
“You’re avoiding my question.”
“You’ve been out of questions for a while. We need a new payment plan if you are going to insist on more,” he teased, lighter, coming back from the depths he’d been in.
“You accused me of trying to be strong for everyone else. Of not showing my emotions. You said I tried to make everyone else feel better. Yet, you do the same thing.”
“My brother is alive.”
“But your mom’s not, right?”
His eyes clouded over, and the swirl of his fingers slowed.
“No. She’s not.”
“What happened?”
“Overdose.”
“God. I’m s—” I stopped myself, and he didn’t even smirk. Instead, he just kept going like now that he’d started, he wanted to say it.
“It was a relief actually. When she died.”
He looked at me, expecting me to be shocked, as if he thought what he’d said was going to cause me to walk away. It wasn’t. It wasn’t that I wasn’t shocked that he was relieved his mom had overdosed; it was that I wouldn’t show it. Not now, not when he needed me not to. When I didn’t respond, he continued.
“She’d been sick for a long time. AIDS.”
“That must have been awful. How old were you?” I finally asked.
“Fifteen.”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited. Waited for him to come to me. Waited for him to continue to tell me what he needed to say.
“Dylan was already at college. He’s eight years older than me, so he’d already escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“The mansion. Dad. The women. The drugs.”
My eyes widened.
He chuckled, but it wasn’t his lighthearted chuckle. “Not that Dylan ever cared about any of that. He loved the attention he got at the mansion. He was a domineering asshole even then, and the younger babes really dug him.”
“I can see that,” I responded dryly. But he had changed directions from his mom to Dylan, so I refocused him. “What happened with your mom?”
He ran his hand through his hair again and closed his eyes, as if to shield himself, or maybe me, from what he was going to say. “I went to check on her when I got home from school. They’d moved her, the week before, to this piece-of-shit room in the servant’s quarters so she’d be closer to the in-home care nurse they’d hired. When I got there, she was already gone. The needle still fucking in her arm.”
He swallowed and opened his eyes to find mine.
“I should have been sad or mad that she’d killed herself. But all I could do was thank God that she was dead.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty for not wanting her to suffer,” I said because I realized that was the guilt he’d told me about on our first day in the Camaro together.
“I was glad because I didn’t have to deal with it anymore,” he said.
“That’s normal.”
“Is it?” He looked at me and shrugged, and I knew he didn’t quite believe it, just like I didn’t quite believe that I wasn’t responsible for Jake. “I went to find my dad, and do you know where he was?”
I shook my head, not even wanting to guess.
“Screwing some babe in their room. In her bed. While his fucking wife died in a shit room below him.”
He was watching me again. Waiting for my reaction.
“That’s…” I ran out of words.
“Crappy,” he said just as I said, “Awful.”
“You know what’s worse?” he asked.
“What could be worse?” It was my turn to swallow hard because the scene he’d set was already pretty messed up.
“When I tried to tell him, he got so pissed that I was interrupting his blow job that he threw a whole bottle of scotch at me.”
I tugged at his arm and rubbed my fingers along his tattoos so that I wouldn’t cry for this man who I’d just discovered I loved and who I didn’t want to suffer.
“There had always been a lot of sex at the mansion. It was everywhere. You couldn’t escape it. It had always seemed normal to me, even when it was my dad with someone not my mom. Then, when I found my dad screwing some nineteen-year-old while his wife died alone…shit. It just opened my eyes to how fucked up it all was.”
I gulped, trying to imagine a sweet, laughing fifteen-year-old Derek having to see that. Having to watch his mom kill herself so she wouldn’t suffer while his dad moved on to sex with a round of girls young enough to be his sister.
“I wanted to kill him,” Derek told me honestly and openly. No regret laced his voice.
“Who could blame you?”
“No, Little Bird, I seriously thought about it. I’d even picked up one of the shards of glass that were on the floor next to me. I was seriously going to walk over and slice his throat.”
He was still watching me. Still waiting for me to fly. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
“What made you stop?”
“Hugo. I guess the nurse had gone to get him after finding my mom. H
e’d come to find my dad like I had. He forced me to drop the glass, hauled my ass out of the room, and called Dylan.”
I didn’t believe that Derek would have killed his father. I didn’t believe that with any of the 206 bones in my body, but I did believe that he thought he would have. I could see where his guilt came from. How he was asking for forgiveness as much as trying to forgive. They were double-wrapped cords just like his words on his wrist, hard to tell where it started and ended.
“Dylan got me the hell out of there, moved me in with him, and I never went back.”
The deep hug that they shared when we arrived made sense. They weren’t just brothers. They were survivors. I was a survivor too. A different kind of survivor, but I guessed that was what had called my soul to Derek’s or the other way around. Somehow, we’d found each other.
I continued to run my fingers over his tattoos. It was his sanity. I understood now why he didn’t want to give his dad, or his past, any time or energy or space. It was painful. And ugly. But I wondered if, by simply closing the door to it, it would ever really go away. Just like I knew that my ignoring the guilt I felt over Jake, or the hurt I felt over Hayden, as I’d been doing over the last couple weeks, wouldn’t make them go away either.
I also knew that Derek didn’t want to open the door and face the demons yet. I wasn’t going to be able to force him to. He had to do it when he was ready. Just like I’d have to face all of mine when the time came. But at least we’d told each other our stories, and that had to be at least a step in the right direction. Closer to the doors, instead of farther away.
“You’re pretty incredible,” I said, and even though I meant it with all my heart, I said it in a sassy, teasing tone so that I could draw him away from the darkness.
It worked, because he grinned his impish grin at me. “I know.”
“You’re also an egotistical moron.”
He smiled wider, but then his eyes grew dark and stormy again.
“And now, Miss Mia, I want to get back to that question you asked.”
“Which one?”
“The one where you asked how many people I’d had sex with.”