Brett 3
Maggie is nestled in the crook of my arm, her head of soft curls resting on my chest. We lie like that in silence for a long while before she speaks.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I admit into the darkness. “It was bad enough, losing my dad. Now, knowing that Jeremy was involved... Jesus, the whole thing just makes me sick.”
“What do you think he’ll do now?”
“Who the hell knows? He might come back here to bully Mom. He might go back to New York. But then again, he might lick his wounds and head back to Detroit. It could be absolutely anything, because my brother is capable of absolutely anything,” I marvel, thinking specifically of Cal Burridge, his conveniently dead competitor in the Kreisler International Music Competition.
“Brett, I’d like to stay here with your mom for a couple of weeks,” Maggie declares, looking up at me with her big blue eyes. “Just until things calm down a little. You have to get back on tour, and I don’t like the idea of her being here alone so soon.”
I stroke the side of her face with my hand.
“Maggie, I can’t ask you to do that. You’ve got a lot going on at work right now. You can’t just pick up and leave for two weeks.”
“You didn’t ask, I offered. I’ve already arranged it with my supervisor. I’ll keep in touch with my covering case agent from here. It’s going to be okay. She’s going to be okay.”
Those are exactly the words that I need to hear right now. They may or may not be true, but just to have someone utter the words aloud makes me feel a little better.
“Alright, but you’re the one who’s going to have to convince my mother. That woman doesn’t do a damn thing she doesn’t want to do.”
“I noticed!” She rubs a palm over my chest. “Wanna fool around?” she suggests with a sexy little lift of an eyebrow.
I can’t think of anything I’m less in the mood for right now.
“I’m kind of wiped out, Mags. Do you mind if we just get some sleep?”
“Not at all. I just thought you might want to live out a childhood fantasy or two in your childhood bedroom,” she grins sheepishly.
“Tempting,” I chuckle. “But I’ll take a rain check if you don’t mind. Besides, this isn’t the room. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. My parents took down all my posters and threw out all the dirty magazines I had stuffed under the mattress.”
“Oh, you boys are so predictable!” she groans and rolls her eyes up at me.
“What, don’t girls have … magazines?”
“No! We have romance novels. All ‘heaving bosoms’ and ‘turgid shafts.’ We’re not as visual as you guys are. We go looking for our steamy stuff in books. If only all those horny little boys knew – it’s the girl with her nose in a book they should be chasing!”
“Wait, wait, wait ... I’m sorry, back it up a second … did you say ‘turgid shaft’?” I repeat incredulously.
She smiles.
“I know! Ridiculous, right? ‘Love’s sweet spear’ and ‘molten member’ were also two of my favorites. I mean, nothing makes a girl hotter than the thought of a molten spear near the petal-soft folds of her womanhood.”
I can’t help myself, I burst out laughing. This is easily the most insane conversation I’ve ever had. And it does exactly what I most need it to do – lighten the mood.
“I’m glad you find my teenage roadmap to ‘possessing the lily’ so amusing!” she snorts.
In a moment, we’re both laughing so hard that we’re gasping, tears streaming down our faces.
“You really wouldn’t mind staying here?” I ask her once we’ve caught our breath again.
She rolls over on top of my chest, so that we are pressed, body to body, our faces are only inches apart. Then, she puts her hands on either side of my face, rubbing her thumbs gently over my temples.
“Brett, it would be my honor to be of assistance to your mother. She is an amazing woman. Besides,” she continues, “if Jeremy is stupid enough to show up again, he’s going to need someone to keep her from killing him. I’d hate to see Trudy go to jail for killing that idiot.”
I pull her close to me so that my arms wrap around her tightly. “Mags, Jeremy is a lot of things, but an idiot is not one of them. I need for you to remember that. Always. Because, the second you underestimate his intelligence or his capacity for destruction is the second that he’ll strike.”
She studies my expression for a long moment and nods.
“I won’t make that mistake, Brett.”
I give her a halfhearted smile.
“I know you won’t. You’re much too savvy for that. It’s just easy to forget who he is. What he is.”
“The thing with people like that is they’re so good at making you see what they want you to see. Seriously, if your mother hadn’t confronted him with the video thing, would you have ever thought he was involved with your dad’s death?”
I think about this carefully before answering.
“It wasn’t my first thought, but the more I think about it now, the more I’m surprised that it wasn’t.”
“What do you mean by that, Mr. Cryptic?”
She’s half asking, half teasing … but I’m deadly serious.
“It was my mother’s first thought. She checked the video files, even though it was clear he’d had a heart attack. She made the coroner do an autopsy. She was too smart to take it at face value. It was her first thought. He was her first thought.”
Even as I say it, it makes me shudder. I can’t do this anymore. Not now. Not here. I pull her even tighter into me and give her a long, slow, deep kiss. Suddenly, my body is telling me that maybe there are things in which it’s interested, after all.