The Duet

  Except neither of us dared to say a word. I tilted my head back, stared up at the paneled ceiling and let myself come apart around him.

  Maybe he didn’t see it because he didn’t want to.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Are you awake?” Cammie asked, prying my eyelid open with her fingers.

  “No,” I lied, turning my head away from her hand. She laughed and rolled over on top of me so that her weight pushed me into the mattress. Why don’t the social rules that exist for the rest of society apply to sisters? She started jumping up and down, dipping me into the bed. This would not be appropriate behavior for normal people.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” she said, reminding me of what she used to be like on Christmas morning—a complete hellion.

  “Cammie, you skinny twat, get off me.”

  She jutted out her bottom lip and then let her upper body fall forward onto me.

  “Ow!” I yelled as her head collided with my chin.

  “Sorry, but you’re boring when you sleep and I’m curious about last night,” she said, rolling off of me once she realized I wouldn’t be going back to sleep. Due to the freaking broken jaw she just gave me.

  “Nothing happened,” I answered, staring up at my bedroom ceiling. After we left the classroom, we found our dates and headed to the limousine. The ride home was quiet and full of tension. It wasn’t there on the way to the prom, but it was filling up the limousine on the way home. It was everything I could do not to roll down the window just to alleviate the pressure.

  Cammie didn’t question me further; instead she leaned over and rested her head next to my shoulder so that we could lay side by side in silence. After our parents died and I became Cammie’s guardian, Cammie and I slept together most nights. It was easier that way. Cammie was my constant, my rock, and I wanted her with me all the time. Laying there in Jason’s house, she still felt like my constant and I clung on to that feeling for as long as possible.

  “Could you play me what you have for the duet so far?” she asked.

  I nodded and sat up, but when I looked over, my guitar stand beside the bedside table was empty. I must have left my guitar in Jason’s room the day before.

  “Hold on, let me go get my guitar,” I said, slipping out from beneath the sheets.

  Cammie relaxed back onto the pillows. “Fine, but if you aren’t back in five minutes. I’m going to come looking for you. And I don’t like to knock, it ruins the surprise.”

  I rolled my eyes as I walked out of my room. I wouldn’t be gone long. Jason probably wasn’t even in his room anyway.

  I took the third floor steps two at a time and was about to knock on the door when I heard the first strumming of a guitar. I should have walked away or knocked. I should have let him know that I was standing there, but I couldn’t because a second later, I heard his deep voice start to sing, and I was completely lost.

  Loving you is the sweetest sorrow

  Too much today, not enough tomorrow

  If this is what it’s like

  Then I chose wrong

  I stood there for another moment, hoping he’d keep singing, but then I heard the distant sound of his cell phone ringing. I pressed my ear closer to the door. Of course I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I was so close to really learning something real about Jason. I couldn’t just walk away.

  “Hi angel,” he spoke softly. “No, I’m not too busy to talk. Did you sleep okay last night?”

  “What are you doing?” Cammie asked, making me jump at least three feet in the air.

  I spun around to face her, holding a hand to my chest as if that would calm my racing heart. She stared up at me from the second-floor landing, but I had no words. My mind was frozen as I tried to memorize the lyrics I’d just heard him sing and also process whether or not they could potentially be about me. Loving you. Loving you. Loving you.

  But who was he on the phone with?

  “Are you spying on him?” Cammie whispered, stepping closer to the stairs. My eyes widened even more.

  I shook my head and shot down the stairs past her, grabbing her hand as I went.

  “I’ll play you what we have later. Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said, not bothering to turn around to see what she was thinking.

  …

  Cammie left later that afternoon.

  As I stood in the doorway watching the car pull away to take her to the airport, my stomach twisted itself into knots. She’d been my buffer for the last two days. With her in Big Timber, Jason and I were on hold. But with her gone, there was one less obstacle sitting between us.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and my red boots so I could wander around the property. I paid Dotty a visit and even convinced Jasper to take a sugar cube from me. (The damn horse sniffed it for like thirty minutes before he decided it wasn’t poison.) I walked through the woods around the house, breathing in the fresh pine smell and trying to work through the unsolvable equations in my head. I helped LuAnne with lunch and sat with her for an hour after, flipping through home makeover magazines and picking out my dream kitchen.

  Basically, I did anything to avoid seeing Jason.

  The night before, I was still deluding myself into thinking that he and I were on the same page. We were having fun. No commitments, just sex. But then, hearing him sing that song about love made me realize that I wanted that. I wanted him to write a song about me. I wanted his love for me to be greater than the complications in his life. I knew he was complicated. Everything about him spelled that out, but someone had to be able to break through that exterior, right?

  So why couldn’t that someone be me?

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one playing the avoiding game that day. When I finally worked up the courage to go upstairs, Jason wasn’t there. His room was empty, the porch was empty too, and when I glanced over the railing, I saw that his Jeep was gone.

  The massive house was quiet and I was left with nothing to do to get my mind off him, so I went into my room and worked through some emails and did an extra workout. My trainer would be proud to know I’d done an additional power yoga session, but even that didn’t cheer me up. I just wanted to see Jason and ask him what he was thinking.

  …

  It’s interesting to consider that I was a full believer in love. I’d built my career on writing songs about love because I truly believed in what they stood for. But now that life was presenting me with my very own version of a love song, I was trying my hardest to rewrite the lyrics. There were so many things standing in our way. We’d only known each other for three weeks; he wasn’t ready for a relationship; there were more things we didn’t know about each other than we did know; relationships between celebrities hardly ever worked out. It was easy to construct the brick wall between us, so easy that when he burst through my bedroom door at midnight, I should have held strong behind that wall—but it took one look at him standing in my doorway to completely bulldoze it down. Just like that, I was lying there defenseless once again.

  “I don’t want to talk about anything,” he said, walking toward the bed and tearing his shirt off.

  I pushed myself up off my pillow. “Neither do I.”

  And that was the truth. I didn’t want to talk to this man about the logistics of our love. I wanted to feel our love, to soak in it while I still could.

  His pants fell as he unbuttoned them at the waist, and I pulled my nightshirt over my head.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” I said as he crawled up onto the bed, pulling the blanket off me.

  “Neither do I,” he answered. We were mimicking each other’s answers, and it was clear that any decisions that needed to be made wouldn’t be decided that night.

  I’d missed him so much in the last few days. We’d had our moment the night before in the classroom, but it was clumsy and rushed, nothing compared to the magic we’d created in the days leading up to Cammie’s arrival. Now we were all alone again, just he and I, with the rest of the night
ahead of us.

  “Please don’t tell me to leave,” he said dipping down to kiss my neck, dragging his soft lips down my chest.

  “No. No. Don’t leave,” I said, hearing the thin cracks forming in my voice.

  I’d rip my heart out before I’d asked him to leave. None of this was healthy, but it had been a disease from the very start. I was completely helpless to the side effects of that disease now. I’d do what I did every time: let his body take over mine like a cancer.

  His fingers laced with mine as he pushed my arms up over my head to lock them in place.

  The first time we had sex that night, it was rushed and loud and desperate. I was frantic for him. But the second and the third time, they were slow and lazy, as if the world began and ended on that bed in Jason’s guest room.

  I don’t remember asking him to stay in my bed after we were done, but I don’t remember him wanting to go either. So for the first time, he and I didn’t flee after sex. We stayed. At the time it hadn’t felt monumental, the act of sleeping in the same bed, but when I’d awoken the next morning to find my world shifted upside down once again, I’d cling onto that idea for dear life.

  Was I the one pushing us to be something more?

  Had Jason led me on?

  Had I turned every moment into something more than it actually was?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next morning I woke up to find my bed empty, the noise from the kitchen jarring me awake. Usually there was coffee brewing, bacon sizzling, newspapers crinkling, but that morning, the sounds were off. There was a woman’s voice, muffled by the space in between the kitchen and my room, but I knew it wasn’t LuAnne’s. It was too young, too soft. I also thought I could hear a child’s laugh, but that didn’t seem possible. But then there it was again– loud and happy, traveling through every nook and cranny of the house.

  With a smile on my face at the idea of meeting new houseguests, I dressed in a loose cotton dress and wrapped a cardigan around myself, not bothering with any make-up. My blonde hair was curly from going to sleep with it damp, but I didn’t mind the wild look.

  Before I headed downstairs, I noticed a note on my nightstand scribbled in Jason’s terrible handwriting. I laughed and shook my head as I padded over to pick it up. I recognized the lyrics he’d sung when I’d first arrived at the ranch, but they were scratched out, replaced with new ones.

  “Don’t want you to stay

  Can’t tell you to go”

  “Want you to stay

  Wish you’d never go.”

  Now, hurry and wake up. - J

  I bit down on my lip, debating whether to keep the note with me all day or to leave it on the side table for safekeeping. Since I couldn’t trust my sweaty hands, I left it behind.

  When I opened the door of my bedroom, the lively sounds from the kitchen amplified tenfold. I trotted down the stairs, craning to see who our houseguests were. When Jason spotted me on the stairs, all conversation stopped. He’d been walking out of the kitchen, maybe on his way to wake me up, but he paused when he saw me. Like a scared animal, his eyes went wide and his lips twisted into a frown.

  If I had to pick, I’d say it was that look that told me something was very off.

  He swallowed slowly and then started walking toward me again.

  “Can we go upstairs and talk for a second?” he asked, reaching out to grab my arm from around my waist.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  I didn’t want to go upstairs; I wanted to know who was in the kitchen. Maybe before I saw his shocked expression, I would have followed him blindly, but now my curiosity was winning out. I pushed past him, and for one brief moment, he resisted, his hand on my arm, his deep brown eyes warning me to turn back.

  I wasn’t going to turn back.

  It was far too late for that.

  My breath caught when I saw the little girl whose laugh had filled the house from the moment I’d awoken. She was sitting at the kitchen table with markers spread out around her, coloring away on a piece of paper. Her red hair was long and curled into tight ringlets that bounced every time she moved. Pink plastic glasses sat on the bridge of her nose. She couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, but I could see how well she colored from across the room. So close to the lines, I wanted to commend her on her work.

  But then my gaze slid to the woman sitting directly beside her. Our eyes locked as I realized she was just as stunning as the little girl beside her— with the same bright red hair. She wasn’t the type of stunning I was used to from my life in Hollywood. There was nothing fake about her. Her hair was pulled up into a loose ponytail and her complexion looked naturally flawless.

  “Oh hello,” the woman said with a tentative smile. Her gaze flitted between Jason and me as if she wasn’t quite sure who could explain the situation better.

  “Um, hi,” I said, unable to muster actual conversation as my brain worked overtime to figure out who she was. Jason’s cousin, Jason’s sister, Jason’s friend, Jason’s long-lost twin, door-to-door sales people. Nothing fit, because deep down I already knew what I was walking in on. The phone call the day before had proved it.

  The woman stood up from the table and walked to join us in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Lacy, stay in here and color for a second,” the woman warned with a sweet edge to her voice.

  LuAnne, who I hadn’t even realized was standing at the stove, spoke up. “I’ll watch her, Kim.”

  The woman— Kim— smiled toward LuAnne and then slid past the kitchen doorway in pursuit of the living room. Jason followed after her, but I stood frozen in place, unsure of where I belonged. I didn’t want to go back into the kitchen and I sure as shit didn’t want to go into the living room. Maybe if I just silently went upstairs, we could pretend that I’d never come down in the first place.

  “Brooklyn?” Jason asked from the doorway to the living room. His hand gripped the wooden frame as he willed me to cooperate.

  With a heavy sigh, I found myself walking past him and taking a seat on the couch across from Kim. I’d rarely gone into the living room before that day. LuAnne always kept it immaculate and I felt awkward moving the pillows around or turning on the TV. It was my least favorite room in his house because it was the least lived in. Maybe now it would be my least favorite room for a different reason.

  “I’m Kim,” the redhead said, bending over the coffee table to offer me her hand.

  I stared at her dainty fingers for a moment before taking it. She had none of the guitar calluses that I was used to feeling on my own hands.

  “Brooklyn,” I said simply when my eyes locked on the massive rock sitting on her ring finger. It had to have been at least two carats, flawless and twinkling in the morning light from the window behind me.

  My gut clenched.

  “Brooklyn, this is my—”

  “Wife,” Kim answered with a terse smile.

  Wife.

  Wife.

  Wife.

  What the fuck? Is wife Spanish for “cousin” and no one had told me? Why the hell hadn’t I paid attention in school? There had to be a translation for wife that meant something other than a married woman.

  In the matter of two seconds I had a dozen emotions seep through my bloodstream. Shock, confusion, disbelief, denial, anger, guilt, jealousy, and then sadness. Such sharp sadness.

  I shot up off the couch and ran to the doorway, trying to keep the tears from spilling down my cheeks. Unfortunately, they were already slipping down my chin and dripping onto my neck. I used the back of my hand to wipe them away as subtle as possible. I stayed facing away from them as I spoke.

  “I just realized that I have a bunch of phone calls to return,” I said with stuttered speech as I ran toward the stairs.

  “Seriously, Kim?” Jason asked.

  “What, Jason? That’s what we are! You’re still my husband.”

  No. No. No. I didn’t ask for this. I shot up the stairs and shut the door to my room behind me
, wishing for once that there was a lock on the door. Lock or not, once I was alone, the tears really came. My chest convulsed and I lunged forward holding my knees and crying with abandonment. There wasn’t even time to process the last ten minutes in my life. I was still feeling it.

  “Brooklyn.” Tap, tap. “Brooklyn, let me in for a second.”

  “If I open that door, you won’t be leaving with your body fully intact.”

  Jason growled. “This isn’t a fucking joke, Brooklyn. Let me explain. You’re being ridiculous.”

  I love being told I was ridiculous after finding out that the man I’d been falling for the last three weeks was married. That’s like piss icing on the shit cake.

  “Go to hell,” I spat.

  I heard his growl on the other side of the door, but after that, it was silent. I don’t know how long he stayed there, because I was too busy going through various stages of grief:

  1. Tearing up the cute note he’d left me that morning.

  2. Trying to drown the note shreds in the bathtub.

  3. Flushing the shreds down the toilet instead, when drowning had proved ineffective.

  4. Sitting on the top of the toilet seat and crying.

  5. Hating myself for caring enough to cry.

  6. Crying more because I hated myself for crying.

  7. Checking to see if the note had actually flushed, and crying harder when I realized that it was gone for good.

  …

  Hours passed or maybe it was just a few minutes. I couldn’t be bothered to check the time while I was busy trying to talk myself out of murdering Jason. Either way, I didn’t realize Kim had joined me in the bathroom until she was standing right in front of me as I sat against the bathtub. I’ll be honest, the first thing I did was look for a weapon in her hands. I wouldn’t put it past her to want to kill me if she knew I was sleeping with her husband, but she wasn’t holding anything except for a box of tissues.