Matched, p.9
Matched, page 9
“I have to work tomorrow.”
He kept plucking. Bad idea, staying at her house tonight. Or any night.
But a worse idea was being alone, thinking about Vera. Finding Mikey. Beating the shit out of him to take it out on somebody.
Will twisted his ball cap around so the bill faced forward. He shoved the Yamaha at the kid. “This one.” The kid jumped into action, carrying it past the wall of gleaming guitars and through a mess of drum kits to the checkout counter.
Then Will turned his best I’m Billy Brenton and I’m the boss look on Lindsey. “You’re driving.”
She straightened her shoulders and fired back an I am a divorce lawyer and I eat babies for breakfast glare. She pointed to the kid and the guitar. “It stays in the backseat.”
Why in the—huh.
Will found an unlikely smile.
It was an ugly smile, but it was a smile.
She didn’t want him to play. She remembered how much she’d liked it when he played. Still did, probably. Too much, he’d wager.
“All that twangy, depressing crap will make me crash, and then we’ll both be screwed,” she said, but her cheeks were pink, and there was enough of a wobble in her voice to confirm what he’d suspected since he saw her Sunday night.
He still got to her too.
“Ain’t so opposed to being screwed,” he murmured.
Her brows scrunched together. Not a prudish scrunch. More like a We have too much history scrunch.
Girl wasn’t wrong.
Will ambled to the checkout desk and paid the kid for the guitar, a bag of picks, a tuner and a pack of blank sheet music. Lindsey stayed out of the way, arms crossed over her white coat, lips tight, until the kid showed them out the rear door. In case anybody was looking in, he said.
Out back, Lindsey unlocked one of those hybrid cars. Will could’ve driven his truck—probably should’ve, to give himself a quick getaway from her house—but his gut told him to ride with Lindsey.
And when she turned down an alley he hadn’t noticed, then circled past the guitar shop that had six people staring in the front window while three others checked out his truck, he blew out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
Didn’t want to talk to people tonight.
He eyed Lindsey’s silent profile.
Any people.
“I really do have a psychic,” he heard himself say.
She didn’t answer, and Will settled in for the ride.
Six eternal minutes later, Lindsey’s headlights flashed over a street sign for Joy Street, and four houses down, she pulled into the driveway of a light-colored house. Two stories, newer construction, with empty flower beds lit by fancy lights on either side of her ornate glass-paneled door.
Lindsey led him into the house through a laundry room and into a sunny kitchen with white cabinets, softer white tile floor and shiny stainless appliances like he’d gotten Aunt Jessie last year for her birthday. Lindsey’s breakfast nook had a pine-stained table sitting beneath a window trimmed with lacy white curtains.
This fit the girl he remembered. The girl he’d believed in until the end of that week.
Lindsey’s slender hips swung through a doorway, outlined all the right ways in that stiff business skirt, and he followed her into an enclosed sunroom off the kitchen.
A comfy looking floral couch and chair set sat around a soft ivory rug over the oak floor. Big picture windows looked out over the dimly lit yard and the privacy fence.
If that was sand instead of a dusting of snow outside, he could pretend he was at the beach house he’d rented in Destin when he first started having trouble writing.
“Make yourself at home,” she said. “There’s food in the kitchen and clean towels in the closet outside the bathroom upstairs.”
A shower was a good idea. But he didn’t have clean clothes to change into. They’d all been in the house with—he blinked.
Not yet. Couldn’t mourn her yet.
Instead, he set his new Yamaha on the couch, then trailed Lindsey out of the room.
“Television in there,” she said with a flick of her wrist toward the open space at the front of the house near an oak staircase. White blinds closed over the windows, fuzzy white rug in front of two overstuffed white couches, big-screen TV attached to the wall between a smattering of family photos.
Her life. Who she was. What she’d done the last fifteen years.
All that was missing was a dog.
“Feel free to stay as long as you need to,” she said.
Couple hours at most, he figured. Long enough to get his bearings, then figure out where to go from here. Somewhere anonymous in Chicago. Or Nashville.
But here in Lindsey’s house, he had that slinky feeling making the hairs on his neck and arms stand up. He could hear Sacha’s voice. You need to go back, she’d said.
He was supposed to be here.
Will watched Lindsey until she looked at him again.
“Mighty nice of you,” he said.
“I have my moments.” A frown briefly darkened her expression. “Who you do and don’t talk to is none of my business, but if your family files a missing persons report because you refuse to answer your phone, I’ll make your life hell.”
It was enough of a threat to make him pull his phone out of his pocket and hit the power button. He’d shut it off when he left Bliss.
Lindsey showed him the guest room upstairs, a kid’s bedroom by the looks of it, complete with a green dinosaur comforter and dinosaurs painted all over the walls. His heart clenched.
Did she—had she—
Not his business, he reminded himself. She’d nailed it at Suckers—they didn’t know each other all that well.
But the room was comfortable.
Clean.
Decorated with love for someone.
Like his bedroom at Aunt Jessie’s. A safe haven for a little boy. Framed pictures of Lindsey and her nephew were scattered around the room, her smiling, the boy laughing.
Happy. With total adoration for the kid. In love, in a manner.
As if she were someone else.
His breathing evened out, but his pulse didn’t. This fit what he remembered of the girl he thought he’d known too. Big heart hidden under big dreams. “Your nephew stay here often?” he asked.
“Couple times a month.”
She turned to the door across the hall—her bedroom, he guessed—but cast one more glance at him. “And I’m sorry about your guitar. For what it’s worth.”
That thick knot clogged his throat again.
Lindsey ducked her head. An errant strand of honey-blonde hair that had escaped her tight bun caught his eye.
Woman was a mystery. A mystery who’d locked her bedroom door behind her, by the sounds of it.
Wasn’t any call for that. Will didn’t have any intentions of getting close to her.
He knew better.
Still, Mari Belle was like to have another conniption fit, might even disown him when she found out he’d stayed here unsupervised. Sacha would be pleased, Aunt Jessie scared. But it was only for tonight. For tonight, nobody knew where he was. For tonight, he was simply a guy mourning his guitar in private.
Tomorrow, he’d be Billy Brenton again.
An image popped into his head of Bandit curled around Vera on his tour bus’s couch. Will scrubbed a hand over his whiskers.
Maybe he’d be Billy tomorrow. Maybe later.
He dropped Mikey a quick text. You got a place to stay?
I’m set. You okay? You safe? came back almost instantly.
Will eyed the pictures of Lindsey and her nephew.
Nope. Not okay. Not safe. Yep, he typed. And then he tossed his phone on the nightstand and took himself downstairs to get acquainted with the guitar who would never be Vera.
WILL’S EYES POPPED open half a second before his phone rang shortly after noon the next day. He would’ve preferred sleeping the whole day away—meant not facing any of what had happened last night, from the bar to the fire to coming to Lindsey’s house to staying up till almost dawn writing out the pain—but Sacha’s face lit his phone screen. Will winced against the bright green paint and dinosaurs all over the wall and answered the call. “Hey.”
“William.”
Even the hairs on the back of his hairs stood up.
The fire.
She’d told him seven years ago his house would burn down. And then—the look she’d given Vera last week—“No,” he croaked out. “No more visions.”
“Oh, Will. Tell me it didn’t happen. I don’t want to be right.”
He rolled off the bed and looked around for his pants. The house was cold and silent around him. No music. No voices. No soul.
No Vera.
And Sacha knew it. Not because she’d had a vision, not because she was psychic, but because he couldn’t sneeze without all of Pickleberry Springs knowing it within minutes. Not if someone snapped a picture of him sneezing and posted it to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
“Oh, Will,” Sacha said again.
“Shouldn’t have come,” he said. He needed to call Mikey. Go to Nashville. To—hell.
Didn’t matter where. His career was over. He didn’t want to go on tour next month. He didn’t want to record another album. He didn’t want to be Billy Brenton anymore.
“She saved you,” Sacha said. “I had a vision. Your girl. The fire. She saved you from yourself. She saved all of us.”
“Stop.”
“You haven’t seen this through yet, William.”
“Seen enough.”
“She needs you as much as you need her.”
He froze with one leg in his jeans. He could still smell the smoke in the denim, see the flames and ash glowing in the night. But in front of it all was an obnoxious blonde.
“Who?” he said to Sacha. “Who needs me?”
“Your girl.”
“My girl burned—”
He choked. He couldn’t say it. The sun was shining on the other side of the blinds. The world was turning. He could flip on the radio, hear music, make coffee, take a shower, order clean clothes online.
“Not Vera,” Sacha said softly. “Your snow angel. She’s not who she’s supposed to be, William. She needs you.”
He squeezed the phone so tight his joints ached. “I’m hanging up now.”
“It’s not easy living in a world that doesn’t believe in you.” Sacha’s voice was quiet, tight, vulnerable.
In seventh grade, Will had beat up a kid for calling Sacha a crazy faker. He’d been suspended three days. Mari Belle had hit the roof. Don’t you want to be somebody someday? You have to do good in school if you want to escape this place. And then you go and get suspended over some knucklehead telling the truth? She is a faker. She is crazy.
But she’s ours, Will had said.
Aunt Jessie had plied him with her famous chocolate chip cookies, sweet tea and homemade fried chicken for those three days. And Sacha had taken him for his first guitar lesson with Vera, then told him not to fight on her behalf ever again. He didn’t remember exactly what she’d said, but he couldn’t hear Taylor Swift without thinking of Sacha. Haters gonna hate.
“You need to see this through,” Sacha said. “For all our sakes.”
He had to force his jaw to unclench to talk. “What does that mean?”
Sacha hesitated. Barely a moment, but enough for Paisley’s words from last night, before the fire, to pop into his brain. “What’s going on with you and Aunt Jessie?” Will said.
“Nothing. Why?”
She was lying. Will didn’t have psychic powers, but he knew Sacha. “She need another divorce lawyer?” Will said.
“Don’t be silly. Donnie’s the best thing to ever happen to her.”
And again with the lying. “Sacha—”
“You worry about you, young William. You can’t fix anything else until you fix you.”
Will bit back a bullshit. “Nothing to fix. I’m not broke. Tell Aunt Jessie I’ll call her later. Love you.” He hung up, then moved to the window and pulled the blinds up to see two cars stop out front. His truck pulled into the driveway, and a girly red number parked on the street.
His phone rang again, but Will didn’t have to check the screen to know who was calling. “Mikey.”
“Still alive, buckaroo?”
The hesitation and caution in his voice put a rock in Will’s gut. They’d been here before, everyone worrying about Will’s state of mind over a girl. Will’s heart shed a tear and raised a glass to Vera. “Yeah.”
“Got your truck and some clean clothes downstairs. Could hit Nashville by nine if we left now.”
“Word’s out I’m here, huh?”
“Nope. Just used some smarts.”
Figured Mikey would use those smarts now.
“I’ll pop the garage,” Will said. “Pull it in.”
Wasn’t going to Nashville.
The somebody-walked-over-his-grave feeling from last night had faded, but he was getting his own signs that he needed to stay here.
Like writing all night long. Then sleeping like the dead.
“Not so sure that’s a bright idea, Billy.”
Will wasn’t either. Mikey was probably right. Staying in Lindsey’s house wasn’t smart.
But maybe Sacha was right too.
Maybe he wasn’t done here.
He glanced at the notebook next to the bed, filled with scribbles of lyrics, chords, arrangements. Staying wasn’t smart for his heart, but it was productive for his art.
Why he was here, after all.
“Not your call,” Will said.
He disconnected before Mikey could start cussing like a roadie.
Will stumbled downstairs to open the garage, and Mikey pulled the truck in. Under silent protest, Will was sure. Pepper followed on foot, and Will shut the garage again.
Mikey eyed him cautiously, an apology lurking along with the dumbass accusations. “You look like shit.” He stepped into the house and gave Will a man-hug.
Behind him, Pepper offered a small finger wave. “I think you look fabulous,” she said.
Will smiled at her. “You sure you’re related to Saffron?”
“Unfortunately,” she said brightly.
“You get a hotel?” Will asked Mikey. He’d swing by later, show Mikey what he’d been working on and see if the songs would still talk to him outside Lindsey’s house.
But Mikey flashed a classic Mikey grin. “Got six numbers last night. Figure I can house-hop for a couple days.”
Will swung around to look at his buddy fully.
Because now Mikey was lying. If he were house-hopping, he’d smirk and say he had something better. Shove his hands in his pockets and shut up, not inspect the kitchen.
Mikey didn’t have to mention his numbers. It was understood. Bragging—something was off.
“Talked to the fire chief,” Mikey said.
Will swallowed hard.
Maybe the fire had thrown Mikey off his game. Will could see the truth, the sympathy in his buddy’s eyes. Vera was well and truly gone. Not so much as a string left. No tuning knob, no bridge, no frets.
She was dust. Memories. She’d played her final song.
He should’ve put her in the truck last night. Should’ve taken her along. “You go and say the sorry word, I’m gonna kick your sorry butt from here to Canada,” Will said, his voice too raw. “It’s nobody’s fault. Happened. It’s over. Gotta move on.”
He’d dedicate his next Grammy to her, God willing he got another. Wouldn’t ever forget her or replace her in his heart, but it didn’t matter if it was Mikey’s fault the fire started or Will’s fault for leaving Vera in the house in the first place. It mattered that Will still had to be Billy.
Mikey glanced around the kitchen again and did an admirable impression of a Mari Belle sigh. “Shit, Will. Mari Belle’s gonna kick your ass,” he muttered.
“And your momma’s gonna wash your mouth out.” Will dialed up his charm for Pepper. “Begging pardon, ma’am. He doesn’t get out often.”
Pepper humored him with a smile, but she had some curiosity and confusion drawing her brows together. “Related to Saffron, remember? I’ve heard. Where do you want your clothes?”
“Cassidy called in an order,” Mikey said.
Will’s assistant was well on her way to a raise. He took the bag from Pepper, and when Mikey got that look—that I’m gonna talk you blue in the ear look—Will nodded to the door. “Got a lot of stuff to do. Appreciate the help. Give a holler if you run out of houses to hop to.”
Mikey flinched, but still took on that don’t-stay-here-and-be-a-dumbass look. “Will—”
“I got this one,” Will said.
Whether he truly did or not, he still herded his guests to the front door. He did have a lot to do—he always did. Lot more went into being Billy Brenton than writing and singing songs. There were still tour logistics to hammer out, merchandise to approve, marketing and publicity plans, endorsement commitments, his agent and manager and the label brass to appease. He’d used the B word—burnout—to get everyone off his back when he ditched Nashville, but it meant they wanted to hear from him more.
To know he was okay. That he’d be ready for tour. That he wouldn’t disappoint his fans or any of the dozens of people who counted on the Billy Brenton empire for their paychecks.
So even if he didn’t have his personal life under control, he had to convince himself he did.
He thanked Pepper for the help. Listened to Mikey’s orders to call Mari Belle and Aunt Jessie. He’d ask Cassidy to find him a new hotel as soon as he finished messing around with a song that was tickling his brain. He had to work on it now, before he forgot.
Mikey paused on his way out the door. “You’re a real mess, Billy-boy.”
“Not so much as I could be.”
Chapter Eight
WEDNESDAY WAS A hot mess of a day for Lindsey. Opposing counsel sent ridiculous requests to change already agreed upon terms, a staff meeting went without coffee and her mind kept replaying the soft guitar sounds that had invaded her sleep most of the night. She wasn’t sure when Will had finally fallen asleep, but she’d tiptoed out of her house as silently as possible and hadn’t spoken to him.
