Chapter Nine
“You’re working pretty hard for a Sunday morning.”
Jamie dropped the bag of yard debris he’d collected and spun around.
“Zee.”
“And you’re awake, too,” she said lightly, and with a smile. For a moment he just looked at her warily. “I brought a peace offering.”
She opened the top of the white bag she carried, then held it out toward him. He got a whiff of the aroma.
His eyes widened. “Cinnamon rolls?”
“Straight from the bakery. Still warm.” His stomach growled so loudly she heard it. And laughed. “Guess that answers that.”
He nearly shivered despite the warmth of the sun in a clear blue sky. He hadn’t heard that laugh, a genuine laugh, from her in so long he wasn’t sure how to read it. But it hadn’t seemed fake or forced.
“I brought coffee, too,” she said. “I didn’t know what you had here.”
“Um…nothing?”
She blinked. “What have you been eating? And if you say nothing, I may rethink this peace offering,” she added sternly.
He suddenly remembered something True had often said: Never get in the way of a determined Zee Mahan.
“No, I’ve eaten,” he said quickly, his eye still on that bag giving off the tempting smell. “Hope dropped off some stuff, and Deck brought a bag of fast food yesterday. I ate it all.”
“Well, I’d give you the eat healthy lecture, but you know I’m as bad as you are about it, so I won’t.”
He smiled at that as he took the bag. Looked inside. “Wow. Half a dozen? I’ll keel over in a sugar coma.”
“I thought you might share. In the nature of tipping the delivery person.”
His gaze shot back to her face. This was almost the old Zee, the gently teasing Zee rather than the one looking daggers at him all the time. God, he’d missed her.
“I gave you three days,” she said softly. “Now it’s time for some company.”
“I’d…like that.”
He looked around; there was no furniture in the house, or anything else for that matter, he’d cleared it out to the walls and floor this morning. And Millie’s old picnic table was long gone, he didn’t know where.
“We can sit outside,” she said.
“The tree house?” he suggested before he thought.
The barest flicker of tightness flashed across her face, and he wished the words back, for all the good it did.
“Not ready for that,” she said, and although her tone was even, he could tell it was an effort. Which he appreciated she was making.
“Sorry,” he said. “Down to the river, then? Our rock?”
Another flicker as he mentioned the outcrop of limestone that jutted into the river at the edge of the property, but she nodded.
“All right.”
They started walking. The rock had been carved out over the years by occasional floodwaters, until it had an almost bench-like shape to it, where you could sit and dangle your feet in the water. Water moccasin bait, Aunt Millie used to say.
And he and Zee had shared it so many times, since that night that had turned both their lives upside down. She’d cried in his arms, apologizing as she did. He’d asked her once why she kept saying she was sorry, and she’d said she could only do this with him because True had too much to carry already.
“But he’s the one crying for the same people you are, Zee,” he’d told her then.
His words had reached her, and she and True had drawn even closer. And a few years later, he’d turned those moments into a song, and “Crying Alone” had become one of the band’s most enduring hits.
And I feel like crying all over again, for yet another loss.
He shook off the thought as Zee glanced up at the tree house as they passed. Her expression was shuttered, unreadable, even for him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“A lot of things. But mostly because that place—” he nodded toward the big post oak “—isn’t the beautiful memory for you that it is for me.”
“Oh.”
“Was it really that bad, Zee?” He grimaced at his own words, thinking he shouldn’t start this, that her mellow mood wouldn’t last if he did, but he was driven to know. “I always thought it was…incredible. Or am I just being a guy and romanticizing my first time?”
She stopped in her tracks. Stared at him. There was no mask now, she was startled. “Your first time?”
He frowned. “Well, ours, but I meant—”
“That was your first time, too?” she clarified, still staring at him.
His frown deepened. “Of course it was.”
“But you had girls all over you at school.”
He grimaced again. “They never paid any attention to me before the accident. I was just that weird kid to them. After, I guess I suddenly got ‘interesting.’ Or worse, to be pitied. You think I wanted that?”
“I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I hated that.” She was still staring at him. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“Because I thought you knew. That you were…my first, too.”
“How could I?” She gave him a sideways look. “You were so…good at it.”
For a moment he just stared at her. And couldn’t help the silly grin that spread across his face. “I was, huh?”
“Quit smirking, or I’m taking back those cinnamon rolls.”
And that quickly she was the old Zee again, quick with a comeback and always teasing him. He wasn’t certain what had just happened, but it gave him hope.
*
Zee savored the last bite of the second cinnamon roll she’d eaten. She hadn’t intended on two, but nothing about this day was going as she’d thought it would.
…you were my first, too.
She’d been wrong. All this time she’d been wrong. She’d assumed he’d already taken that step with one of those popular girls who’d suddenly noticed he was alive, now that he’d become a tragic sort of figure at school. She’d assumed because he had seemed to know every step, every way to kiss her, touch her, to make her tremble, make her ache for him. He’d been gentle yet fierce, and it had been, as he’d said, incredible.
So if it wasn’t experience, what had it been? Her seventeen-year-old self would have answered it had been because it was destiny. The self that had done without him ever since had a different opinion, but she didn’t want to think about that just now. They’d healed a part of the breach at least today, and she didn’t want to jeopardize that.
“You understood, back then, that I needed to share my grief with True.”
He gave her a half-shrug that was reminiscent of her brother, and wondered if that’s where he picked it up or if it was just a male thing. Like that smirking, self-satisfied grin at his own prowess.
“But you didn’t share yours.”
“I did, with you. And Aunt Millie. Sometimes.”
Her mouth quirked. “And then you went off by yourself and wouldn’t let us help you.”
“I needed to be by myself. To…process it.”
She thought of wise words she’d recently heard. “Deck called it holing up somewhere alone until he could chew through it.”
“That’s what I felt like,” he admitted. “Like I needed to den up like a wounded animal, until I healed.” He looked down at the bakery bag his fingers were worrying at. “Or died.”
She ached at the familiar words that so well described the feeling she never wanted to experience again. “And instead you turned it into a thing of beauty, a song that touched millions of people.”
He smiled, but wryly. “I think you might be overestimating a bit.”
“I’m not. Last time I looked, the video for it was up over two and a half million views.”
He blinked. “Was it?”
She gave a little laugh. “And that you don’t know that is part of your charm, Mr. Head Scorpion.”
“I…haven’t been keeping track of much lately.”
And there it was again, that sensation that there was more going on with him than simply the loss, albeit tragic, of a bandmate who’d been with them only a few months. But she sensed that if she asked, he would avoid answering. Whatever it was, he clearly wasn’t ready to talk about it.
So instead she asked, “Do you ever get tired of playing the same songs? The big hits?”
He shrugged. Male thing, she decided. “Those songs are what bought us the ticket for this crazy flight. They’re what people want to hear. Besides, it’s different live.”
She tilted her head to look at him quizzically. “How?”
“The feedback. Instantaneous, from the audience. It fires us up.”
She nodded slowly, because that made sense to her. “So…you still like it. The touring, I mean.”
“What was it that other Texas boy sang, about the road going on forever, and the party that never ends?”
“A lot of Texas boys have sung that song,” she said wryly. “But sometimes the party has to end, so you can clean up the mess.”
She hadn’t meant it to be a jab, just an observation on the lifestyle, but he went very still. And in that instant she knew, deep in her bones, that she’d been right, that this man who had been the boy she’d adored was battling something more than he’d said.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, and his voice was low, harsh. “Sometimes the party has to end.”
And it hurt just to see his face, because he looked as bleak, as desolate as he had in the days after both their lives had been ripped apart.