by Zoe Lee
“I was always going to apologize,” she sniffed, whipping the wheel with slightly more force than required to take a turn onto a busier road, heading north he thought. “Hank just presented me with the opportunity to do it in person. And Kerri and Barnyard, well, they…”
She was speaking to him as if he were an acquaintance, a work colleague at best, not as if he were a person she’d made love with on several memorable occasions, the last of which had been less than an hour ago. Her diction was as cool and slicing as ever. The words were so polite, so vague, as if she were trying not to say anything real at all.
It made his body begin to boil with tension and anger all over again, but he adjusted in his seat a bit, so that he could stare at the clean line of her jaw while she kept her eyes on the road. “Can we drop this formality?’ he finally settled on. “I think we both want honesty.”
“I apologize. Once again.”
That had his jaw hardening, wanting to tell her to just stop with the apologies. But he couldn’t lose his cool here, or he’d be on his knees begging her to love him back.
“They were surprised by the… antagonism that Hank described, until Barley pieced together that Hank was talking about the—artist I’d thought to focus on in my next piece. And when Hank actually used your full name, well… I had no idea they’d already know you.”
“I’m very flattered that they do.”
“Quit it,” she grumbled. “If I can’t be so formal, don’t you pretend that’s… whatever.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with great satisfaction.
Her grip tightened on the steering wheel, but she went on nonetheless, “Kerri and I came for the whole set, and Barnyard tried to sneak in halfway through undetected, but that hardly ever works for more than a few minutes, if at all. I…” Her breath hitched. “I already told you the new songs are brilliant. The way you were up there, alone, it was… right.”
Now he was the one whose breath hitched, but he swallowed hard against the way that made him feel and he coughed once, sharply. “Last night was the first solo show I’ve ever done, other than high school talent shows or youth orchestra solos or class assignments.”
She hummed softly, but didn’t comment further on it.
“Did you write,” she paused, flicking a look in his direction, “before?”
He faltered a bit at that, still surprised at how little she knew about some parts of who he was, but a gentle smile tipped up his mouth as he answered, “Yeah, I did. I started playing when I was little, seven or so I think. The writing came later, maybe thirteen or fourteen. I can’t quite remember what sparked it, but back then was all songs about finding yourself.”
“Not gut-wrenching ballads or scream-fests about your first broken heart?”
“Not that I remember,” he murmured, one eyebrow winging high before he got serious again, sighing. “After Hedda left me, it was like I forgot how to write without her. Like I hadn’t done it alone before we met. The best lines from other songs would be all I could think of to try to tease out explanations for my feelings. Or things we’d said to each other. I filled a few notebooks with my sloppy, all-uppercase writing anyway. My lyrics usually start out as bad poetry, but this shit was frenzied, the ink smeared. But when she died…”
“It stopped?” she guessed softly.
“Or I stopped hearing it,” he admitted roughly after digging deep and forcing himself to be honest the way he was asking Astrid to be. “It’s blurry now, but I think the only way I was able to write music for others, like Downbeat, was because it was strictly about them.”
She blew out a shaky breath and waited until she stopped at a red light and could twist her neck and pin him with her sharp, but sympathetic, gaze. “It must really have… pissed you off to start writing again, but have it be all about me, and not strictly about you.”
That surprised an abrupt laugh out of him. “Oh, honey, I told you, you’re buried deep in me now. Writing about you and writing about me, it ain’t really two separate things.”
“I’ve been someone’s muse before,” she answered after an expectant pause. She shot him a knowing look and then borrowed his polite words from earlier. “It’s quite flattering.”
“Muses are up on pedestals,” he pointed out. “Trust me, you ain’t on a pedestal.”
With a snort, she changed lanes. “Thanks,” she said dryly. “Would you mind… would you mind telling me about this invitation to rejoin Downbeat, and you saying no?”
“What more do you want to know? I think my disinterest in being a rock star has been obvious from the start. I might have had hangups about writing my own music, which I’ve obviously had some breakthroughs in, but that didn’t change my whole philosophy.”
“Fine, then, what were you really looking for from me that day at Tristan’s?”
Energy was running under his skin, making him restless, and he was going to ask her to hold off on this until they were outside of the car. But just then, she curved left onto a barely-lit, twisting road and he realized that they were probably almost at her house now.
“The first thing that attracted me to you was wondering what was going on inside your mind, Astrid,” he murmured, looking out the window into darkness punctuated by streetlights and double rows of those little lights that flanked the edges of driveways. “Your intelligence, the way you think, what you’re curious about, what makes you laugh. I can’t stay focused on one thing; I go all over the place asking you things, trying to figure you out. So every time we get into something serious, my mind gets… greedy—turned on by yours.”
She braked too hard, as if what he was saying resonated with her, and the second the engine was off they were both careening out of the car to meet at the bumper. He caught her face in his hands, stroking the wisps back so he had an unobstructed view of her eyes.
“Baby, I swear I thought I was crystal clear that I wasn’t rejoining Downbeat, even though they asked,” he promised in his raspy, worn-out voice, trying to be as painfully earnest as he could. “And because I thought I was so clear on that, I moved right on.”
“You said you hadn’t changed your mind,” she explained, her smaller hands coming up tentatively to wrap around his wrists, anchoring him and holding him there. “But then you went right into all of this other stuff and somehow we wound up with me telling you that you weren’t remotely ready to be talking to me about what we might be, or become.”
An echo of the sucker punch he’d felt during that conversation landed in his solar plexus again, but this time he breathed through it and worked his hardest to stay present, to stay focused on where they were right now, not where he wanted them to go. “You acted like there was no possible earthly reason why I should care about your opinion. And that hurt, because I thought there was a chance that we were moving towards…. something. But then you cut off that discussion too. And I know—I know—it was the wrong time for that, you were absolutely right that my mind wasn’t in the right place to think about it. But it is now.”
For a moment, her whole expression screwed up and he thought she was going to shove him away and yell at him for the presumption, tell him point-blank this time that she wasn’t in love with him, instead of ignoring the declaration the way she’d done on the roof.
But then her whole expression crumpled and she started crying.
It was so unexpected that he actually looked around, as if there were someone there who could explain this to him or help him understand what was happening. Of course, it was just them, and he knew what to do even if he didn’t understand why she was crying yet. He gathered her against him carefully and rocked them side to side, slow and gentle and steady.
“I—that wasn’t a goodbye fuck,” she cried out after some time, only a little garbled.
Her hands fisted his black tee over his abdomen, the fabric gritty when it pulled tight against his skin since he’d performed in it. He processed the physical sensation in too much detail because the emotional sensation her
words caused was… untrustworthy, after all of their apparent miscommunications. Very carefully, he cupped the back of her head and encouraged it to tip back so that their eyes could lock while he studied her thoroughly.
“What do you mean, Astrid?”
“You said that nothing was different this time, except where you are with your music and that I fucked like it was a goodbye,” she paraphrased, her eyes wet but still sharp with accusation. Her voice wobbled when she added, “But you were the one speaking in the past tense. I tried to apologize and you said don’t and I thought it was going to be the last time.”
The motion sensor lights angling out from the gutter on her garage clicked off, since they hadn’t moved but to breathe after they’d stopped face to face at the car bumper. It left them almost completely shadowed, only their jewelry glinting in the half-moon’s dim glow.
In a hushed voice, Seth braced himself and murmured, “I meant, don’t apologize.”
“I’m not sure that I under—”
“God, baby, there’s nothing to apologize for,” he rushed to clarify as soon as she started to show her confusion. “Can’t you see I’m the one who’s fucked up, the one who’s fucked up at every crossroads we hit? I confused you, or made you think I was doing something when I never was, or made you think I was saying goodbye when I’ve hardly said hello,” he said, his face twisting in agony. “All I’ve wanted was to know you. Wonder if you’d like me if you knew me. But I… but did you want that to be the last time we make love?”
Her hands struck out from his body, releasing his tee suddenly and making the lights snap back on. She winced a little and one hand slid up and around to hold the back of her own neck, crossing her breasts as if she were showing nerves but also covering her heart. Seth tried not to be disheartened, because she hadn’t stepped away from him, had she?
“I had this—decision tree in my head,” she stated abruptly, then looked up as if imploring the heavens for help getting this right. “First split in the trunk was: Will Seth accept my apology, yes or no? And now I know that you accepted it. So the next was: Do you hate me, yes or no? I think…” She took a deep breath and tried to smile, but it wobbled like her voice had done, her other hand smoothing carefully down his salty tee from his sternum to his belly button, light but so grounding. “I think I can safely say the answer to that is no.”
“Definitely no,” he agreed roughly, forcibly holding himself in place to let her finish.
“Then it was: Is Seth going to try to become the next big thing?”
“Just a singer-songwriter and the newest recording studio owner,” he conceded with a small smile, pride and amusement mixing together, then doubling when she smiled back at him.
Her fingertips tapped her thighs for a few seconds and then she said softly, “I like that idea for you, Seth. You can stretch your creative wings, use your considerable experience and expertise to help others, and you can continue to work with all your artist friends.”
At that affirmation, the encouragement and optimism, his jaw clenched as he fought to maintain control over himself. That, really, was all he’d wanted to hear from her three months ago when he’d asked for her opinion over and over, like a jackass. He crammed his hands into his front pockets, shifting his weight so they could burrow deeper.
“Thank you,” he mumbled hoarsely.
“Thank you for accepting the praise,” she returned extra primly, with the first hint of overt humor she’d really let slip since he first saw her standing in front of him at the club.
Seeing it unlocked one of the thick bands of tension around his lungs, letting him breathe easier. “Don’t get used to it,” he warned, flashing her a little twinkle of self-aware amusement out of his own eyes. “What else is on this decision tree of yours?”
She froze like a beautiful goddess hit by a lone spotlight while she was trying to sneak across a stage, her eyes flaring wide with panic. Delaying it, she babbled, “Look at us, just standing here on my driveway when the food is inside—and the wine! Won’t you come in?”
He cocked a knowing, challenging eyebrow at her, but she just shrugged and walked to her door, fluttering her hand in a witchy come-hither sort of movement.
Without hesitation, he shadowed her into her dove gray limestone house, falling against the door to tug off his boots when she asked him to. The kitchen and the largest wall in the living room were the same stone, while the other walls were soothing earth tones offset by dark purple furniture and a kaleidoscope of photos. Some were poster-sized photos of exotic places and some were framed Polaroids, all with a distinct innocent aesthetic.
“Would you like a drink while you critique my photos?” Astrid asked archly from behind him.
He twisted to look at her over his shoulder and found her barefoot in the entrance to the kitchen, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll just make some toasties too, if that’s good enough,” she said.
“It’s really good, thank you.”
His focus was torn between the photos and watching her, cataloguing how she moved here in her own space versus how she’d moved in his. There was a level of relaxation here that she’d never reached in his home, unless he counted the lazy, cheeky way she got after lovemaking sometimes. Everything fit her, and the little things that seemed not to fit the pattern were just signals to him of the aspects of her he hadn’t been introduced to yet.
“Do you have a favorite?” she called lightly from the kitchen.
“I like the one of you getting slobbered on by either a baby alpaca or a weird dog,” he answered, meandering closer because he was too far, and the food smelled done.
That made her chuckle softly as she slid the toasted sandwiches onto green thick plates one at a time using a big spatula, and poured the wine that had been breathing. “That’s one of Rathbone’s dogs,” she told him while they carried the food and wine to her couch, knees bumping together gently as they sat. “He’s some sort of European hound, I can never remember the name of the breed. Anyway, he really likes dangly earrings. When I set the timer for that shot, he was sitting obediently next to me, but before it went off, he pounced.”
“You took that picture?”
“I took all of them—or my camera on a timer did,” she replied.
Humming, he ate the first of two toasted sandwiches she’d made him in a few neat bites. His hunger was acute, but not nearly as interesting as reexamining the photographs now that he knew she had taken them all. She had curated her own exhibition and displayed it on her walls for her and her guests. Instead of being jealous of how many previous lovers had done the same thing, he was just content and honored to be here now, being given this chance.
They finished eating in silence, not uncomfortable but not really tense with delightful sexual tension or anticipation either. Seth found it refreshing that he knew that he was exactly where he wanted to be, but also had no real idea of what was going to happen next.
By the same token, because he knew what he wanted to happen next, he didn’t let the silence carry on past the last bite of their food. Setting his plate of crumbs onto the coffee table, he propped his elbows on his thighs and angled his body more towards Astrid.
“What else do you want to know, Astrid?” he asked again, staring her down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Astrid
The atmosphere went from tentative friendship and peacefulness to fraught with tension immediately from the adamance in Seth’s tone and body language. Astrid felt his impatience bear down on her, delicious and obvious, as if he were stalking towards her across a football field and when he reached her, he’d lose all semblance of calm.
It was the perfect moment for utterly revealing confessions, for Astrid to tear her own heart out of her chest and push it into Seth’s hands, to make up for all the ways she had hurt him and denied her own feelings. But they hadn’t seen each other in three months and this long exchange, from
the moment she’d sought him out after his show, was lovely. It was truly lovely—nourishing, illuminating, comforting and yet sizzling, so full of potential.
All she could do was suck in a quick breath.
Seth’s beautiful eyes met hers, patient but passionate, deeper than ever. “You scared?”
Mute, she nodded.
Slow and careful, he nodded back. “You’re a powerful woman and I trust you to know your own mind and your own heart. So if those are driving your fear, if the fear is about telling me you don’t want to know anything else, I’ll respect it, I swear,” he drawled, not in the insolent, dragged-out way he did when he called her ma’am, but in a steady, solemn way. “But, baby, if the fear is driven by practicality the way it was before, then… then I’m calling bullshit. I’m not invalidating your fears, I’m calling bullshit on letting those fears stop us.”
If he were being aggressive or mulish, or impatient, Astrid would have read his reaction as immature, proving her practical fears rational, and simply shoved him out of her door. If he were being messy and desperate—the direction he’d been sliding when they went over this before—she would let the possibility of Seth Riveau go and walk away again.
But this time, he was speaking to her the way he’d said everything else that mattered. He was being steady, thoughtful and honest, while his eyes and his energy were all magnetism and yearning at the same time, teasing and challenging her, all passion.
And to be sure, she didn’t want to walk away from Seth, not ever again.
So she tugged on one earlobe gently, similar to how he scratched through the stubble on his jaw when he was thinking and a bit uncertain, and clasped her hands on the table.
“When you imagine us,” she asked simply, “what does it look like?”
A small frown ruptured the serenity of his expression. “It looks… like love, Astrid.”
That sent a puff of laughter out of her, but she pressed delicately, like she might over a bruise that had been laid during ecstasy, “But does it look like Chicago, Maybelle, or the road somewhere? Does it look like the way we each were with past lovers, with others coming and going from our beds? Does it include rings and babies, or puppies and matching tattoos?”
