I pushed the Jag to its limit, but when I got to Wendy’s apartment, Charlotte wasn’t there.
I stood in the living room and stared at Wendy. “Where is she?” I pleaded.
“I honestly don’t know,” Wendy said. She smiled sadly. “I think she just needs some time.”
I dropped onto the couch, my head in my hands. The tears were starting again. “I can’t lose her, Wendy. Not now.”
Wendy sat down next to me, folding her legs up on the sofa. “I’m sorry, Kyle. I told her she was welcome to stay, but she wasn’t feeling up to it.”
My chest hurt. My heart ached. My head was pounding. I needed my spider. My woman. My Charlie.
This is what you get for being such a chickenshit.
“If I’d told her, maybe she’d have been in my arms this morning,” I whispered.
Wendy shook her head. “You can’t think that way,” she said firmly, and I looked up at her. “You can’t go back in time, Kyle. You can only go forwards.” She tapped the back of my hand. The new tattoo. “Let’s see it.” I held out my hand and she took it, brushing her fingers over the webbed heart. “It looks good.”
“Too little, too late,” I said, pulling my hand away. She shook her head again, and I noticed the scrapbook on the table. “What the hell’s this?” I pulled the table a little closer and opened the book.
“Just a few memories,” Wendy said. “Arthur got it out of storage for me. Do you want some tea?”
“No, thanks.” I flipped through the pages, seeing my face in every photograph. The girl I’d been sweet on back in the third grade. My high school prom. College days. None of it even came close to being as important as Charlotte. Why the fuck hadn’t I told her how much she meant to me?
Wendy’s drawings were there, too. Her early stuff, mostly. A small piece of paper floated out and landed on the floor, and I picked it up. It was the preliminary sketch she’d done for my tattoo. I looked up.
“Did she see this?”
Wendy nodded.
“Did you tell her...” She shook her head, and I blew out a breath and threw myself back against the couch. “So she doesn’t know.”
“I told her that she should talk to you about it.”
I closed my eyes. “Well,” I said. “That’s not going to happen any time soon, is it?”
Wendy patted my leg. “I think she just needs a little time.”
Time? I didn’t have time. I felt like I was dying inside. Like I’d lost a piece of myself. Like my heart had shattered, and there was no one to help me pick up the pieces.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Time.”
Priscilla was avoiding me, since I’d yelled at her for letting Natasha in, but Arthur was waiting for me in the foyer when I slammed the door.
“Sir.”
“Not in the mood, Arthur.”
“Miss Reid was here, sir.”
“What?” I stared at him. “Where is she?”
“You just missed her, sir.” He held out a sheet of paper. “She left this for you.”
I snatched the paper and scanned it, hoping for a note. A word. Anything.
It was my day’s schedule, impersonal and precise. The tailor would have our outfits ready at noon, but she’d pencilled in her own name for that. The guys were coming over at one to go over the playlist for the concert. And rehearsal had been cancelled; Walt had come down with a cold. I’d never been more happy to hear that Scouse bastard was sick.
“Did she say anything?” I looked up at Arthur, and he shook his head. I crumpled the schedule and threw it across the room. “Let me know when the guys get here,” I said, and climbed the stairs to my room. Priscilla had made the bed and tidied up a little, but the memory of the morning’s disaster made me walk right back out again.
I checked the guest room. Charlotte’s phone was sitting on the bedside table, and I picked it up. If it hadn’t been locked, I’d probably have searched it to see where she might have gone. Where I might have been able to find her. I was that fucking desperate.
I spent the morning in the music room, playing the piano, missing her. Missing the piece of me that I hadn’t realised I’d needed until it was too late.
When the guys rolled in that afternoon, Tyler asked me the question I’d been dreading.
“Where’s Tasha?”
I closed the cover on the piano and looked up at him. “Sucking cocks in Hell, for all I care,” I said.
All three of them looked at me. Dan raised an eyebrow. Joey threw himself down in a chair, and Tyler leaned against the piano and studied me.
“Something happened,” he said drily.
“You think?” Dan said, dropping onto the couch.
I sighed. “How flexible are you guys feeling?”
Dan narrowed his eyes at me. “Why?”
I looked over at Joey. “You might get your wish sooner than you thought, man.” I ran through the events of that morning. In brief. They didn’t need all the gory details. “So I think Tasha’s going to bail on us tomorrow,” I finished.
“What!?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Good.” That was Joey. I rolled my eyes at him.
“It’s not that easy, Joey.” I grabbed a few sheets of paper from off the piano bench and handed them to Tyler. “Here’s a list of stuff we can play without her.” I’d written it out in between bouts of misery and rage. There was one more sheet, and I hesitated before picking it up. “And here’s a list of stuff we can play if Charlotte sings.”
Tyler dropped both lists on the coffee table. Dan and Joey pounced on them.
“You okay?” Tyler asked.
I shook my head. “Not really,” I said.
He nodded. “Talked to her yet?” We both knew who he meant.
“No.” I rested my forearms on the piano and looked up at him. “And I don’t know when I will. She left her phone behind, and I don’t know how to find her.”
Joey looked up from the table. “So, what? We make three playlists?”
I shrugged. “I guess. It’s not like we can’t. We know our shit. We can play whatever the fuck we want.” I glanced at all three of them in turn. “You guys okay with that?”
“Fuck, yeah,” Joey said eagerly. “If we get to play our old tunes, I’m happy as a pig in shit.”
“You are a pig in shit,” Dan said, and Joey stuck up his middle finger. “And I’m easy.” He pointed at Tyler. “Not to be confused with cheap,” he added, and Joey cackled.
“What about you, Tyler?” I gave him a searching look. “You okay with this?”
He took a deep breath and shook his head slowly. “I gotta say, I’m not fucking thrilled.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But Tasha’s been driving us all fucking nuts for the last year, so yeah. I’m in.”
I blew out a relieved breath. “Great. Let’s plan on playing a pre-Tasha set. If she shows, we’ll go with a mix.” I glowered. “I don’t want to be on stage with that fucking bitch any longer than I have to.”
We wrote out three lists, and they all looked pretty good. There wasn’t much crossover between them, but as I’d told the guys, we knew the material. We could play any of our stuff, old or new, without much trouble.
Charlotte didn’t come home that night. I spent most of the evening jumping between the piano and my Gibson. When I finally crashed around one in the morning, I fell into the guest room bed and buried my face in her pillow, breathing in the scent of cranberries and regret. There was a lot on my mind, but what was really running through my head was the last thing Tyler had said to me.
“If Charlotte shows up, see if you can convince her to sing with you.”
Sing with me? She might not even be speaking to me.