Chapter Thirty-One
“I was thinking,” Zee said.
Jamie looked up. “When are you not?”
“If you wanted a mindless female, you—”
“Came to the wrong place,” he finished the old mantra for her, making sure she saw he was smiling. Then he added, “More than ever now.”
He went back to the cabinet door he was fastening. He’d been checking on Kelsey’s horses in the mornings, and working on this in the afternoons. He’d stripped the kitchen cabinets and repainted them a bright white, and was just now putting the doors back on. It had been a lot of work, but a lot of work was what he wanted right now. What he needed.
Well, that and the passion-filled nights with Zee. Those, he thought, could get him through damn near anything. Just as they had years ago. He had…not forgotten, but time and distance had clouded the memories a bit, of how cracklingly, vividly alive she was, and made him feel when they were together. Especially in those hot, fevered moments in the Texas night.
“I want to make one suggestion,” she said, not looking at him, “and then you can go back to wrestling on your own. Will you listen?”
Damn. He thought she’d been awfully quiet about it since he’d poured his guts out to her the night after the wedding. They’d worked on the house side by side day after day, and she’d never brought it up. He hadn’t talked about it since, although he couldn’t deny the pressure relief telling her had given him. It didn’t make the weight of it any less. It was only that he’d shared it. He’d forgotten how she could do that for him, but he remembered now.
And she’d gone a week and a half. A record for Zee, when she had something in her teeth.
He tightened the last screw, checked that the door swung easily and silently, then straightened. He turned around. She had the last door on the small kitchen table, and was replacing the hardware.
She was, he realized, waiting for an answer. That was a change, he registered. But then, she usually, at least before, wouldn’t have even asked, she would have just said what she wanted to say. So she was being careful. Whether it was because of what he’d told her, or just general tentativeness because they’d rekindled…them, he didn’t know.
“You’re at the top of my list of people I’ll listen to,” he said.
She looked up then. She was smiling, and he knew he’d somehow found the right thing to say. “Short list?”
He grinned. “Very.”
Her smile widened, but when she spoke her voice was quiet, serious. “Later, when they’re back and when you’re ready…talk to Deck.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Who better to understand what you’re going through?”
He stared at her. “Deck?” The guy was a freaking genius, his books so intricate and smooth and engrossing that Jamie couldn’t imagine him ever stumbling. “I can’t imagine he ever—”
She held up a hand. He stopped. “That bad place he was in when Kelsey first met him? Part of it was he was completely blocked on the last book.”
He hadn’t known. He’d thought it was mainly Deck’s past Kelsey had had to fight through. “He was?” he said, rather inanely.
“It was so bad he was going to kill off Sam.”
Jamie’s breath caught. He really hadn’t known that. Kill off his boy hero, the main character beloved by millions?
“So when you feel you can, talk to him, will you?”
He wasn’t sure he could. Then again, who better to understand than someone who’d been there?
“Maybe.”
“He might have some real answers.”
“Maybe,” he said again. He never would have thought of it on his own. Maybe he had some walls of his own to batter down. He hefted the screwdriver in his hand, tapped at the bright red handle as he considered. “Maybe,” he repeated a third time, with more emphasis, thinking he might really do it.
“Do. I can only give support,” she said softly. “And tell you that the only thing I love more than your music is you.”
That blasted all other thoughts out of his head. She’d said it. She’d actually said it, that she loved him. And done it as casually as if it were a given, and had been all along.
“Zee…”
It was all he could get out. Something had exploded in his gut, leaving him hot and cold and shivery all at the same time. And had the strangest feeling that if he let out what was jammed up in his throat it would be some kind of primal howl.
And then he thought how very Zee this was, to pick this moment, when they were in the middle of paint and sawdust and scattered tools, a very matter-of-fact moment to say matter-of-factly the one thing he’d never dared hope to hear again.
Because he couldn’t speak he went to her, pulled her into his arms. He simply held her, until his throat loosened enough to where he could get the words out.
“I love you, Zee. I never stopped. I just got…lost for a while.”
“I know,” she whispered.
And later they found themselves showering off sawdust that had wound up in some interesting places.
*
“Well, you look disgustingly happy,” Jamie teased.
Deck grinned at him. “I didn’t even know this happy existed.”
Clearly the two-week honeymoon on some private island had agreed with the new Mr. and Mrs. Kilcoyne. “I’m glad for you, man.”
“I know.” Deck eyed him knowingly. “You’re looking a bit happier yourself.”
“I am,” Jamie said, then hesitated.
“But?”
He let out a breath. He didn’t really think anybody could help him. But if anyone could, it might just be this man.
Besides, he’d promised Zee.
Once he started, it came out easily, either because he’d already told Zee, or because he was barely two sentences into it before Deck was nodding understandingly.
“Been there, my friend,” Deck said when he’d finished, “and it sucks in a very, very big way.”
“Yeah. But you got through it.”
“Thanks to Kelsey,” Deck said. “But she says I had to be ready to hear it first.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Not consciously, so I don’t know if it would work intentionally done that way,” Deck said. “I can only tell you how it happened.”
“Desperate,” Jamie said dryly. “Shoot.”
Deck shrugged. “I started thinking of it as over. Cut it out of my life, tried to cut it out of my mind.” He grimaced. “I think cutting off a finger would have been easier.”
“I get that,” Jamie muttered. He already felt like something crucial had been amputated.
“I kept telling myself I was done. That I’d had unexpected success and I should be glad I’d had even that. That I should figure out what I’d do with myself now that I wasn’t writing anymore. I had enough money, so that wasn’t a worry. So I worked around here,” he said, gesturing at the house and the garden that was a green oasis even in the brown of an early Texas summer. “Ran a lot. Swam a lot. Until I was so exhausted I could hardly move. Tried to get too tired to think.”
“Did that work? Because it sure as hell hasn’t for me.”
“No. But at the same time I told myself I was doing it because I wasn’t a writer anymore. I was done. Past. And that, I think, got me to where I was…open when Kelsey came up with the answer. To where I could see the answer when it finally came. Before I think I would have just batted it away like everything else.”
Jamie thought about what his friend had said as he drove back to the house. The Mustang tooled along smoothly, and he focused on the wind in his hair and the sun on his shoulders. This wasn’t a bad life, not really. Like Deck he had enough money to live comfortably for a long time, if not luxuriously. But he didn’t need luxury. Not if he had Zee.
But it was a couple of days of turning it over in his mind before he could actually formulate the thought. Zee kept to her word, and neither said nor asked anything about it. It was as if she could sense his inner battle and left him to fight it, while still being almost always within reach. It was exactly the kind of support he needed, and that she’d realized it, that this was the way he had to do it, told him just how much she’d meant that apology. And that promise.
And that she loved him.
He clung to that memory as he fought through the automatic protest of his mind. His own personal identity had been wrapped up in his music for so long, it was like trying to accept that his eyes had changed color. Finally he reduced it down to the essentials.
Just write it off. Count the years with Scorpions as a success. Do something else. He’d been a musician, now he wasn’t. Simple, really.
And yet the hardest thing in the world.
Could he really do it? How long before the need to keep trying, to keep testing that dead, empty place where the music used to live inside him faded? It had been a year now. But he hadn’t given up, hadn’t consciously quit. But did it even count as quitting if he was doing it in the hopes of the same kind of rescue Deck had gotten? And who was supposed to do it? Zee? She’d already done so much for him.
He thought of what Deck had said. Maybe he needed to cut off that finger. That’d do it, if he chose a critical one. No guitar picking then.
He nearly laughed at himself when he realized what he was thinking. Desperate wasn’t even the word.
Then one afternoon he was up on the roof, clearing debris out of a rain gutter, when Zee’s car pulled into the drive. She’d had some work to do now that True was slowly gearing back up again. She parked next to the Mustang, and it made him grin again to see the clash of colors.
Or because she’d admitted finally that she probably had chosen that color because it matched his eyes. Those nights were the only thing helping him hang on.
And in that moment she looked around, as if searching for something. She spotted him as he dropped down from the roof, and her smile lit her face. And his heart.
And in that moment he realized he could do it, if he had to. Because she would be enough. As long as he had Zee he could deal with the rest, whatever it was. Or wasn’t.
*
The first time she heard him say it, casually, Zee nearly stopped breathing.
It had been a simple exchange with Charlie, who had just delivered the new outdoor table and chairs Jamie had bought to replace the ones that had disappeared. She’d been happily planning the barbecue he’d suggested they have here this summer when she’d come around the corner just in time to hear them talking.
“Are you going to put together a new band?”
“No. I’m done.”
“But—”
“I’ve had my run. It was fun while it lasted. You got the other chairs, right?”
She dodged back around the corner of the house, out of his sight. She felt as if she’d been stabbed, the pain was so sharp. She could only imagine how it felt to him, to believe it enough to actually say it so offhandedly.
It took her until late that night, when they were wrapped in each other, to work up to asking him about it.
“Of course it hurts,” he said flatly. “But that doesn’t change it.”
She kissed him. “I’m sorry. It just sounded so…matter-of-fact when you said it.”
“It is a matter of fact. It’s gone, I’m done.” He sucked in a deep breath, and she heard him let it out slowly. “And saying it like that, to other people, it’s all part of convincing my head of what my heart already knows.”
“I love you, Jamie.”
He rolled over, pulled her to him. “I know. That’s the only thing getting me through.”
She made love to him then, intent only on driving every other thought out of his mind. And judging by the way he groaned her name as he erupted into her, she succeeded.
Gradually the newness of him being back in Whiskey River faded. People began to accept, both his presence and the fact that he quietly made clear time and again that he was just plain Jamie Templeton now, the rock star trappings left behind for good. Whatever advice Deck had given him, he’d clearly taken it to heart. But no matter how much she had gained by it, it still hurt Zee’s heart a little every time she heard him say it.
And when he one day reached the point where, sitting in the tree house after an afternoon spent revisiting the time when it had been their refuge, he said he needed to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life, she knew the process was nearly complete.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned back on his elbows, gave her a lazy smile she wasn’t positive was completely genuine. “Maybe let you support me.”
She shrugged. “Fine.”
He blinked. “Kidding. I’ve been careful. There’s enough money for quite a while.”
“I know.” She gave him a sideways look. “But I also know you’re far from the type who’d be able to just do nothing.”
He lay back down, looking up at the boards above them. “Maybe I’ll build tree houses.”
“You’d be good at it.”
“And I’d enjoy it.”
She smothered the pang. Buried the memory of that man who’d once owned any stage he was on. “That’s what matters. And Templeton’s Tree Houses has a certain ring to it.”
He smiled again, and this one she was certain was real. “It does.”
“True could help you get started. He’d know all the suppliers you’d need.”
He sat up. Studied her for a moment before he said softly, “That’s my Zee. Organizing, practical.”
“You forgot one.”
“What?”
“Happy. She’s very happy.”
He reached for her then. “Then I’ve done my real job.”
She couldn’t doubt he meant it. The sincerity of it fairly rang in his voice, and echoed in the way he touched her. And she realized in that moment that in fact he’d come a lot further in this process than she herself had, was a lot closer to total acceptance. Perhaps he was even actually there already.
She wasn’t so certain she would ever get there.