Shane
What did Travis say to piss you off?”
Delaney’s eyes widened. “You saw that?”
A laugh rumbled from my chest. “I don’t miss much when I’m onstage.” Technically, that wasn’t true. The lights restricted my vision. But I’d kept Delaney in the corner of my eye all night, wanting to see the expressions on her beautiful face.
She bit the inside of her cheek, let go. “He reminded me to keep you happy…so he would help out my father.”
Guilt slammed into me. Of course. The whole reason Delaney was here with me. “Oh,” I grunted, turning my head to look out the window. We were in a car heading back to my house. Although the tour had officially kicked off tonight, there was no reason to sleep in a hotel just yet. Streetlights flashed by, their individual bulbs blurring into white streaks of light against a dark sky. “He’s lucky to have you out here, fighting for him.”
Delaney blanched, a bitter laugh gurgling from her throat. “Some fighter. He’s been locked up for three years already.” She clamped her mouth shut, lips pursed as if the caustic response left a harsh aftertaste.
I reached out, gathering a lock of her hair and twirling it around my finger. “How are you so sure he’s innocent?”
Anger flared beyond her blue veil. “He’s my father,” she rasped.
I grimaced, my eyebrows bunching over the bridge of my nose. “One doesn’t make the other true.”
Delaney’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Instead she turned away, resting her forehead against the car window, letting the cool glass soothe her heated skin. “I just know, okay?”
A pain lanced through my gut as Delaney defended her father with absolute certainty. How would it feel to have someone believe in me like that? I relaxed my grasp, watching the dark strands unspool, sliding down my wrist to curl at Delaney’s shoulder. “I’ll have Travis get the ball rolling on his transfer. He’ll be moved by the end of the month.”
She twisted back my way, expelling a grateful sigh and looking at me as if I’d parted the sea. “Thank you, Shane.”
I opened my arms and Delaney fell into them, her hair like satin ribbons fluttering around my neck, both of us staring out the window at the moving ocean, its vastness amplified by the infinite expanse of sky above. Neither of us said anything for a while. “It must be hard to leave this to go on tour.”
Resting my chin on the top of her head, I considered the view and realized that Delaney was right. She even made fucking Malibu feel like a place I could stay. “True. I used to like being on the road though. It’s easy to dodge things you don’t want to face when you’re moving from city to city every other night.”
She rubbed her cheek against my shirt, my heart thudding against my ribs as I patted the riotous plume of hair spilling over her shoulders. “You say that like you still do.” Her voice was barely audible, even in the quiet car.
Hide, me? Never. “Nah. Just talking out of my ass.”
Delaney pulled back, her eyes narrowing as they searched mine. “What are you hiding from, Shane?”
I swallowed the groan abrading my throat. “No one. A ghost.”
She started to move away, but I wrapped my hand around her tiny waist and held her tight, realizing if I wanted to keep her close, I would have to answer her question. “I was in a car accident, too. A long time ago.” The words skated, just barely, through my clenched teeth.
“What happened?” Delaney prodded gently.
“It’s a long story. But I lost someone. My best friend; his name was Caleb.”
“Is that why—”
“Yeah,” I interrupted, knowing she was asking why I’d stopped that guy from getting in his truck.
“I’m sorry.” Her whisper floated within the stagnant air of the limousine.
I tilted my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes, holding on to Delaney as the flashbacks came, blinding and fast. Red on white. Blood on snow. Crumpled, twisted metal. A scream, a thunderous crash. Then the oppressive silence of a snowy night, eventually pierced by sirens coming too late to do any good.
Delaney
“You tired?”
Standing in the foyer of Shane’s beach house, the glare of headlights bouncing from wall to wall as the driver backed out of the driveway, I was anything but. “No. You?” Even without any of the details, Shane’s revelation made me feel closer to him.
Shane shook his head, his face softer, more vulnerable somehow, after our conversation in the car. “Come on, I think a little sand in our toes is just what we need.” He grabbed a bottle of wine and two glasses from the kitchen, and then the thick blanket lying across the back of his couch.
The wind was strong but warm as I followed him through the sliding glass door and down the deck stairs to the beach. “I thought you called the people who drink out of glasses on the beach assholes,” I said, when I caught up with him.
A few feet from the water’s edge, Shane was glancing up and down the stretch of shoreline. Was he checking for photographers? I wanted to ask, but there were too many other things on my mind. I laid out the blanket while he opened the wine.
“I said that?”
“Yeah, right after I stepped on the broken glass.”
We sat, and Shane poured each glass three-quarters full, before making a well in the sand and putting the bottle into it.
“Guess I’m one of them,” he responded, tempering his sarcasm with a wink that had me choking on my first sip.
After I got control of myself, he lifted his glass in a mock toast. “You survived your first Nothing but Trouble concert. Bravo.”
I laughed. “Well, it was pretty tough to take. I wasn’t sure I would make it.”
“Not to worry. You came through with flying colors.”
We both sipped, staring out at the water as our toes wriggled in the sand. “Aren’t I supposed to be keeping you away from alcohol, not sharing a bottle with you?”
Shane’s eyebrows lifted. “If I’d wanted to get drunk I would have grabbed a different kind of bottle, and I wouldn’t be sharing it either.”
A thought occurred to me, flying off my tongue. “Did you drink to feel closer to Caleb, or to forget him?” Immediately I wanted to chase after it with an eraser, rub away the intrusive collection of words as if I’d never said them.
There had been nights when missing my mom had felt like a bitter blade, cutting into me a little deeper with each breath. I tried to dull the pain with vodka once, but after two drinks I’d just fallen asleep on the couch and awoken with a massive headache in the middle of the night. Missing her more.
Facing the water, Shane said nothing, scanning the horizon as if he were searching for the fine line, far in the distance, where sea met sky.
“Crap, I’m sorry. That’s really none of my business,” I backpedaled, the blunt intimacy of my question staining my cheeks pink.
Shane didn’t seem to mind. “No, it’s fine. Don’t apologize. It’s been a long time and talking about him doesn’t hurt the way it used to.” As he spoke, Shane ran his fingers along the ridges of my spine, sending a tremor of awareness racing along my nerves. “Sometimes. But usually it was so I could forget. Forget about everything, actually. Alcohol, drugs—they create a void you don’t have to fill. You can just float. It’s almost peaceful, you know.” His broad shoulders shrugged. “Until you wake up in your own vomit, not remembering where you are or how you got there. That part’s not so fun.”
Waves rolled in, filling the silence. “What made you stop?” I asked, my voice wavering.
“Life. Fate. I was fucking things up. Forgetting lyrics, sometimes showing up too far gone to get onstage at all. Most days I wasn’t even thinking clearly enough to write. Our label was on the verge of dropping us.” Shane shook his head at the memory, which obviously still haunted him. “I wanted out. So I bought enough drugs to OD, but I got caught in a bust. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, too, until I learned the guy next to me was there because he’d left his kid alone so he could work a double shift to pay rent. The kid climbed out the window and had to be rescued by the fire department. Now he’s in jail and his son’s in foster care. Another was arrested for shoplifting to pay for his brother’s chemo.”
“I’d wasted years wondering: Why me? And that night I finally realized something. Why not me? Shit storms don’t discriminate.” Shane took his last sip and let the glass fall on its side in the sand. “I don’t know what strings Travis pulled or even why he bothered. But somehow he got the charges dropped and I walked out of that cell. Nothing I do will ever bring Caleb back, but I realized that if I got my head out of my ass, I could have a career that allowed me to help people like the ones I met in jail. I didn’t finish high school, but my voice gave me options. There are a lot of people out there who don’t have any options at all.”
I was quiet for a long time, absorbing Shane’s words as I sipped slowly from my glass, the tart bite of the wine enhanced by the misty breeze. Was I supposed to meet his confession with my own, like calling a bet in a poker game?
I opened my mouth, but only to take a sharp inhale. No. I wasn’t ready, and the risks were too high. Instead, I pushed aside my own memories, my own guilt, and focused completely on the man in front of me. I wanted to acknowledge his admission while adding a bit of levity to our heavy conversation. “When we first met, I pegged you as some kind of singing Ken doll.”
Shane’s bark of laughter was carried away by the wind. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but Barbie’s boyfriend is a first.”
I leaned into Shane’s side, nudging him gently with my elbow. “I’m just saying there’s more to you than I expected.”
He looked down at me, a smile slanting across his face. “Same here.”
Goose bumps pricked at my arms. “So, what do you do now? When you need to forget, to escape?”
Shane didn’t bat an eye. “I fuck.”
I gulped down a damp breath. “Oh.” His blunt honesty sent my heartbeat lurching into overdrive, unexpected jealousy rushing through my veins at the thought of Shane with other women.
“Or write.”
“Oh.” Much better. “What do you write about?”
The slow twist of his lips sent me spinning. “Lately…you.”
Me. “Do you write about all your fake girlfriends?”
Tension swelled as Shane waited a beat, then another. “No.”
Why the hesitation? I chased my confusion with another sip of wine, another question. “Is that why you asked about my family? Because you think it would make a good song?” A thin ribbon of suspicion threaded through my words.
The waves rolled in, each one getting closer to our feet. Shane stretched his legs out, salt water foaming between his toes. “It might. But that’s not why I asked.”
I set my glass in the sand and turned to face him again, waiting to speak until he’d angled his head toward me again. “Then why did you?”
His voice softened, as if he were a pediatrician holding a needle behind his back. “We’re going to be on the East Coast in about a month or so. You know, if you want to visit your father.”
I could feel the blood drain from my face. Not even the smooth timbre of Shane’s voice could dull the sting of my father’s prison sentence. “I thought you said the road was a good place to hide.”
“Hey.” Shane placed a hand on my shoulder, his thumb sweeping along the line of my collarbone. “If you don’t want to see him, it’s your business.”
A shiver wrestled through me. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said, the lie quick on my tongue. “I just don’t think it’s a very good idea.”
“How long has it been?”
Too long. I released a ragged sigh, trying to tamp down the panic I felt at Shane’s suggestion. “A while.”
He squinted at me, his voice brimming with concern. “What are you hiding from, Delaney?”
The truth. “It’s just…I don’t know if I can handle seeing him in there.”
“Because you blame him for your mother’s death?”
I choked on my last sip, sputtering as Shane rubbed my back. His incisive questions were chipping away at what remained of my conscience. “No, of course not,” I finally wheezed. I knew exactly who was responsible for that, and it wasn’t my father. “He doesn’t want me to visit. He made me promise, just before they took him away.” After what I’d done, keeping that promise was the very least my father deserved from me.
Shane
I recognized the fear and sadness tightening Delaney’s expression, bleeding into her voice. Two emotions I’d been on intimate terms with for as long as I could remember. “And you can live with that? Not seeing him for years—maybe never?”
“I don’t have a choice.” Her eyes were as turbulent as the churning sea.
The wind picked up, blowing thick handfuls of hair across her face. “You always have a choice, Delaney.”
A breathy sigh. “I’m not so sure about that.”
We weren’t talking about her parents anymore. I reached out, smoothing the wayward strands back, my touch lingering on the silky shell of her ear, the curve of her jaw. But in an instant, that soft vulnerability shuttered closed, her tight body bristling with anger as she stared off at a point in the distance. “Is this another photo op?”
I dropped my hand, pulled back. “What?”
She gestured to the wineglasses, the blanket. “Did you stage this? Just another publicity stunt, like the other night?”
Delaney must have spotted something, a flash or a flicker of movement. Feigning a calm I didn’t feel, I scanned the beach where Delaney had been looking, but didn’t see anything untoward. “It wasn’t a stunt.” Grabbing for the empty wineglasses, and the still half-full bottle, I hoisted myself to my feet and headed back to the house. Leaving Delaney to follow, or not.
I wasn’t angry with her, not really. It was a fair question, one I should have addressed before Delaney felt the need to ask.
But…didn’t she feel what I was feeling? Most of my life had been a revolving door of bullshit and betrayal. Delaney was the first person to make me think that maybe, just maybe, it had only been a phase. A trial to get through so I’d be worthy of what came after. Like a rainbow arching over the misty remnants of a storm, beauty rising from debris.
Except with just one sentence, Delaney had accused me of being the bullshit and betrayal in her life.
Rationally, we’d been together only a few days. The accusation shouldn’t bother me. It shouldn’t, but it did. It fucking did. And I didn’t even try to hide it.
Delaney’s muffled curse was only slightly louder than the surf, and by the time I opened the sliding glass door, she was right behind me. “I want to believe you, but…” Her voice trailed off, ending in a murmured, “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.” I choked out the words, slamming the glasses and bottle onto the granite countertop. “All of it, actually.”
Her brows knitted together as she gave the sandy blanket a quick shake and came inside. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed hard, resignation straightening my spine. “I’m going to tell Travis to pay you in full and rip up the contract. And I’ll make sure your father is transferred. Go pack your suitcase and I’ll take you to a hotel tonight.”
Delaney’s eyes were swimming with confusion, and I took some small comfort in knowing she wasn’t immune to whatever crazy roller coaster we’d jumped on together. “I don’t understand. What about the tour?”
“Fuck the tour,” I gritted out. I would probably regret everything I was about to say, but a dam had burst and the words kept coming. “You were dealt a bad hand. I get that. But I’m not the dealer. I’m not out to hurt you. Every intimate moment between us isn’t some phase in a PR campaign. You’ve thought the worst of me at every turn, and a week ago you would have been right.” My gut twisted as I forced unfiltered honesty through my clenched jaw. “But seeing myself through your eyes, it’s a pretty fucked-up picture.”
I huffed a resigned sigh. “I don’t want to be that guy, Delaney. Not anymore.”