Chapter Eight
“Have you seen Jamie?” Deck asked.
“Not since Wednesday,” Zee said. “He made it pretty clear he didn’t want…company.” Me.
She’d tried to keep her tone level, but apparently she hadn’t succeeded, because he said, rather carefully, “You’re like Kels. If she’s hurting, she turns to family, friends.”
She frowned. “Of course. Who else would you turn to?”
Deck gave her a wry half-smile. “Me, I want to go hole up somewhere alone until I chew my way through it.”
“But you need people—”
“Some do,” he cut her off, but quietly. “Some of us…it’s better if we’re alone until we can at least see the other side.”
She studied him for a moment. Remembered the old stories about Crazy Joe, the recluse. Realized she was witnessing a small miracle, Deck reaching out like this, being so open. Maybe it was simply because he’d come to trust True completely, and it had stretched to include his sister. Whatever it was, she appreciated it.
“I didn’t think of it like that,” she admitted.
“It doesn’t mean we care any less, that we hurt any less. We just handle it differently.” His mouth quirked. “And run into a lot of people who think our way is wrong and theirs right.”
“Like me?”
“Like most people,” he said tactfully, then dropped it. “True tells me you know Jamie better than anyone.”
Zee managed to fight down the heat that wanted to flood her cheeks. For she had spent most of the night thinking about just how well she knew Jamie Templeton, from the quirky workings of his brilliant mind to every gorgeous inch of his body. What little sleep she’d gotten had been no respite, for then the dreams had come, dreams of heated moments in a tree house and then, even worse, dreams of here and now, of finding out if he still liked that little nibble on his ear, if a sliding touch inward from his hipbone still made him shiver.
And in those dreams, of course he’d forgotten none of what drove her mad, the things she’d learned about herself from their exuberant explorations. He’d been the same careful, generous, impossibly sexy lover he’d been until the day he’d walked out of Whiskey River and her life.
Like he’d remember. All those women, groupies at his beck and call—why would he remember what that silly girl back home liked?
She schooled her expression to calm, although she didn’t know if it would be enough to fool the very perceptive Declan Kilcoyne. And whatever he was after, it had to be important, for him to steal time away from his work and his beloved Kelsey this close to their wedding and come practically into town to her door.
“We spent a lot of time together,” she said. “Only natural, after our parents were killed in the same accident.”
Deck didn’t waste breath on condolences for the long-ago tragedy, and she was grateful for that. She knew he had no idea what it would have felt like, to even have loving parents let alone lose them, and she appreciated that he didn’t pretend he did.
“Is he different, now? I don’t mean just grief over his friend, I mean…something deeper?”
Her eyes widened. She’d started to wonder if she’d been imagining something beyond grief at the death of a friend, but if Deck had seen it, too…
It still took her aback, that she was standing here talking to one of the most famous authors in the world, as if he were any other friend. And he was a friend, no longer just the reclusive client who had helped begin Mahan Services. And because of that, she could not, would not do what she might with someone else, dodge his question. And if Deck cared enough to ask, he deserved a straight answer.
“I don’t know what it is, but I sense it, too.”
After a moment Deck nodded. “I guess we’ll just have to keep a close eye on him, then.”
Zee smiled, diverted for the moment. “And you’re the guy who once said you didn’t know a thing about being a friend.”
“I didn’t,” Deck said. Then he smiled, that flashing, brilliant smile that Kelsey had given him. “But I’ve had a great teacher.”
“And now you’ve got friends who’d go to the mat for you.”
He actually flushed. “Yeah. How about that?”
And there, she thought after he’d gone, was another one who wouldn’t understand her anger. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself anymore.
Being Zee, she resorted to her go-to…she made a list. She sat at her desk, pulled over a note pad. Wrote “MAD” in caps across the top, then drew a line down the center of a blank page. Down the left side she listed all the reasons she could think of that made her angry with Jamie, even if down deep she knew they were unfair. Down the right, she wrote what she guessed was his side of it. And then she sat back and studied the columns.
He never came back/They hit it big, momentum
Not even to see to Aunt Millie’s things/But he was there for her when she got ill
Across both columns, As Deck said, different ways of processing?
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll?/Less than most, maybe. ← As if that’s an excuse!
Hypocrite, sings about home but never even visits/But he remembers, it shows
Thinks he’s too big for us now?/Went over and above when True needed him
Said he loved me but left anyway/Never lied about it, he was always going to
Her gaze snagged on that last one. She knew it was the hardest for her, even though of all of them, it was the most unfair.
Be sure, Zee. Because I’m still leaving. We’re heading west as soon as we can and I don’t know when we’ll be back.
When. Not if. Like the foolish girl she’d been, she’d clung to that word.
She’d just never expected it to be once in seven years, and driven by death, not love.
And now? Driven by death again.
She threw her pen down on the pad. It rolled, until it covered that last line. She reached to move it, then stopped. What if she left it? What if she took that last line out of the equation? The unfair one, the one she knew deep down she didn’t really have any right to?
He had never lied to her. He’d warned her, time and again. It was not his fault if her heart had been silly enough to think that things would change, after what they’d found together. That was hers to own, not his to carry.
She read the rest of the list again. And finally admitted that, were it not for that last line, everything on that list was…forgivable. And would have been forgiven in a friend long ago.
It was only that he’d been her lover that tilted the balance. And she’d just admitted that was the one complaint that was most unfair. And she had the uncomfortable feeling she’d been clinging to that hurt like the teenager she’d been, long after she should have let it go. They’d had almost three years together, although the last two were as much apart as together as the band began to tour locally, taking any gig offered in the effort to get themselves out there.
But he’d always come home, then. And she foolishly had thought it would continue that way as their reach expanded. And then the chance at L.A. had appeared, the chance to open for a big-name band at a string of West Coast dates. She’d expected him to go—you didn’t turn down a chance like that.
She just hadn’t expected that he’d never come back.
Time to grow up, Zinnia Rose.
She only used that name even in her thoughts when she was being the most stern with herself. And she’d apparently decided she deserved that just now. The question was, what now?
That was going to take some more thought.