Chapter Twenty-Nine
Miles
Weston’s been giving us more and more time to work with our partners, which Jenna and I can’t get enough of. Today’s assignment is to write down twenty things about some mundane task like walking to school or eating lunch. I keep sneaking kisses when I know Weston isn’t looking. She’s all cute and shy about it when I do, her face lighting up with color, her green eyes somehow even brighter than usual.
Ever since that night at the cabin when we couldn’t stop kissing, I’ve been so damn hooked. We both agreed that sex was a bad idea for us right now, but every time we’re together, we inch nearer to it. The closer Jenna and I become, the more comfortable I get with the whole idea. No doubt, I’ll suck the first time, but I think she’ll forgive me for it…I know she will.
I’m not completely without experience. I’ve done…stuff. My fair share, or at least I thought it was. Still, I wouldn’t mind a little direction. I don’t want to talk to Dev about this. He and Nicolette don’t take a dump without describing it to each other, and if he tells her, she’ll tell one of the girls, or worse, she’ll tell Jenna herself. I need someone outside of my circle to talk to.
“A stray handkerchief,” Jenna says.
“Hmm?” I ask, waking up.
“On the walk to school, you see a handkerchief,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
She makes an elaborate motion with her hands. “Tears? Handkerchiefs?” She lets out an exhaustive breath. “Okay, that was dumb.” She sits up. “Ooh. What if our school was at the beach? We could come across a piece of sea glass on our walk. That stuff’s got all sorts of mystery in it.”
Mr. Weston makes his way to us from another group he’s been working with. “What are we coming up with here, guys?” he asks.
“This one blows,” Jenna says.
Weston crooks an eyebrow.
“I’m serious,” she says. “I’ve totally respected the other exercises, but I’m drying up here with this mundane crap. Isn’t writing supposed to be extraordinary?”
“I think the point of the exercise is to find the extraordinary in ordinary things,” Weston says.
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. The plastic bag in that movie my dad loves.”
Weston nods. “Ah yes. American Beauty. That’s a great movie, and a great example.”
She fakes like she’s falling asleep and snoring. Weston smiles. I can tell he likes her. “You guys getting geared up for the talent show?” Weston asks.
“Yes sir,” I say.
“Yep,” she says.
“What are you singing, Jenna?” Weston asks.
“I was thinking Ariel Loveall,” she says.
Weston nods, his eyebrows drawn together.
She drops her posture. “Not you, too?”
“No, it may be fine,” he says. “It’s just that the judges this year are some really tough industry folks, but nobody in pop.”
“No fair,” she says.
“She does ‘Blue Sky,’” I say. I should have just kept my mouth shut, but as much as I want to win, I want her to have a great show, too.
He lifts his eyebrows. “Yeah, I remember that from your assignment a while back.”
She shrugs, scribbling on her paper.
“She’s really good at it,” I say, hoping Weston will encourage her. She’s a showman, no doubt about it, but if she could pull off what she did with “Blue Sky” that day in my bedroom, she’ll kill. I need to just shut my mouth and let her do Ariel. I’m still confident I’m going to win, but I can’t afford to be taking these kinds of chances. This is what happens when you let your heart drive the ship. Little slipups.
Weston nods, focusing on the wall. “That could be really nice. A little live guitar accompaniment maybe. That’s a performance I’d like to see.”
She purses her lips. “Are you a judge?”
“No,” Weston says.
She holds her thumb and middle finger together and fakes an Italian accent. “Then what good are you to me?”
Weston chuckles. “Don’t listen to me or anyone else. You do what’s in your heart, Jenna. If the performance isn’t authentic, it will show. There’ll be no fooling these judges.” She nods, her brow furrowed.
The bell sounds, and we head down the hallway toward her locker. Bianca and a couple of her cotillion girls hang out at their lockers close by. Bianca gives me that same look she always does, like I’m a dead skunk she has to step over.
“What’d you do to her?” Jenna says with a playful smile.
“Nothing, I swear. I have no idea why she hates me. Don’t really care.”
Jenna shoves her books in her locker and then narrows her gaze at me. “Did you used to go out with her?”
I blink from the shock of that statement and then chuckle at the idea. “No.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Did you hook up?”
This is even funnier. Like Bianca would let me touch her. Like I’d want to. “Unequivocally not.”
Jenna looks me up and down like she’s deciding if she’s going to believe me and then shrugs. She shuts her locker door and then slides her arm inside mine. I beam with pride as I walk with her on my arm toward the guitar conservatory. We poke our heads in to find Shane already in there, picking at a guitar.
Shane has become a necessary evil in my life. Okay, he’s not evil. He’s actually kind of cool, but we constantly have our eye on one another. He’s over the fact that Jenna and I are together, but he thinks he’s going to win that competition, and if I’m not careful, he will. Before Jenna got here, he was my biggest competition for four years, and he’s only gotten better. So have I, but it remains to be seen by how much. All will be told the night of the show.
He glances up and smiles, continuing his strumming. He motions us inside with his head. “What’s up? Y’all headed to lunch?”
“Caf today,” Jenna says. “My weekly lunch allowance has dwindled.”
I love how independent she is. She likes to pay for her own lunch, even when I offer to take us somewhere decent.
“You want to come with us?” I ask him.
He finishes his riff and adjusts his guitar on his lap. “Nah, man. I’ve got PB&J. I think an alarm would go off if I brought peanut butter in there.” He narrows his gaze at me. “I think I figured out what you’re doing for the talent show.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask.
He nods, eyeing me. “Ribbon dancing.”
I laugh. “Close.”
He points at Jenna. “Do you know yet?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. I’m his competition. We agreed not to go there.”
“Damn.” He points between us. “I’ll figure it out.” He strums a few chords and then holds the strings down to shut his guitar up. “You got your Ariel Loveall song picked out? You should do ‘Insatiable.’ You killed that one on Sensation.”
“Weston and Miles both think I should do ‘Blue Sky.’”
Shane responds by picking out the opening riff to the song on his acoustic. He nods, lifting his eyebrows. “Right on, dude. That’d be tight.” He looks at Jenna. “Your dad get you into the Allman Brothers?”
Of course Shane picked up on that little piece of obvious right off. I had to have it spelled out for me.
“Yeah,” she says. “A long time ago.” Her expression turns slightly solemn.
He rests his arm on the body of the guitar. “I’ll accompany if you want.”
She narrows her gaze at him and reaches for his guitar. “I’m not splitting the money.”
“I’ll take twenty-five percent.”
Pulling the guitar strap over her head and adjusting it in her arms, she seems like she’s done it a hundred times. “You’ll fuck off is what you’ll do.” She strums a few notes, adjusting the strings and fingering frets.
She starts trying to pick out the notes for “Blue Sky.”
“It’s E,” Shane says.
She drops her head to the side. “Can I
have two seconds to figure it out on my own?”
He holds up his hands and takes a step backward. She picks a few notes, singing the first few lyrics stiltedly as she works out the piece. Shane grabs another acoustic and sits across from her. “River’s on B,” he says.
She concedes, letting him help her, watching his fingers as she places her own.
I take a few steps backward. “I’ll go get our lunch,” I say.
She nods, barely acknowledging me as she concentrates on Shane’s guitar. I’m almost out the door when she shouts, “Thanks, sweetie.”
I don’t know what I was thinking encouraging her to do that song. I’m not nervous, of course, just…tense.
Jenna’s family has started their moving process. They have to be out of the little apartment Jenna and I spent our first night in today, and Jenna’s dad is caught up with session work, so I, needing to make up as much ground with Jenna’s dad as possible, volunteered to help. Dev is working, and Nat is wrapped up in production setup for the talent show next weekend, so I couldn’t ask either of them. I had to resort to asking Shane, who was actually really cool about it.
After we get the second futon into the new apartment, Shane looks around the living room. “Man, this place is awesome. I’d love to live down here.”
“Yeah, definitely,” I say. “Where do you live?” I ask, realizing I don’t know already.
“East Nashville, and not the trendy part, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t thinking anything.” But I was. If he’s in East Nashville, and not the trendy part, he must be in the rough part. I wouldn’t have known that about him based on his appearance and who he hangs out with. He seems like he has money, way more than I do, and my family has a shit ton of it.
He narrows his eyes at me. “You’re in Belle Meade, aren’t you?”
I lift my eyebrows. “Are you going to hold that against me?”
He thinks about it. “Nah, man.” He picks up a banjo that rests against the wall of the living room and strums the famous lick from “Dueling Banjos.”
“Is there any song you don’t know?” I ask.
He chuckles. “Plenty of them.”
“You want to come eat lunch with Jenna and me?” I ask. “She’s probably about finished cleaning the other place.”
“Not today, man. I’ve got a date.”
“Oh yeah? Mind if I ask who with?”
He lifts his chin. “If you tell me your talent show performance.”
I laugh. “I don’t want to know that badly.”
He strums another chord or two. “You don’t know her,” he says. “Girl from my hood. She goes to public school.”
“So do we,” I remind him.
He lifts an eyebrow. “Hers isn’t like ours. She has to walk through a metal detector to get into her school. We’ve got our SRO’s up front, but the kids who go to our school are there because they want to be. Nobody’s going to do anything stupid. We’re all working too hard on our dreams.”
I shrug, remembering Jenna saying he took a break to smoke weed at the dance that night. “What about smoking on school grounds?”
He absentmindedly picks at the banjo. “I don’t do that much. Just when I’m nervous.”
Jenna must have made him nervous that night at the dance. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I know they’re over, but still. “I guess Jenna will do that to you,” I say.
He inspects the banjo. “Jenna doesn’t make me nervous. Not anymore. At first I was all starstruck, like she was some sort of celebrity. But now I just see her as a girl, kind of like my sister.” He huffs a laugh. “Weird now to think I was ever into her. I might have been more into the fact that she’s got balls of steel.”
He focuses on an open box on the floor. “She walked out on that stage night after night like she was the goddamned president. She never once looked nervous or rattled. Never said the wrong thing. Teased the judges, teased the host. Adam Bowling may have won, but until then, that was the Jenna Quigley show.”
I huff a laugh. It damn sure was. I didn’t want to admit that back when I watched her, still blaming her for my not being in her place, but Shane is right. She did steal that show.
Shane rests the banjo on his foot, still holding the neck. “Can I tell you something, man?”
I meet his serious gaze. “Yeah.”
“I’m scared shitless to take that stage next weekend.”
I chuckle. “Why? You know you’re the best guitar player in our school. Hell, you’re better than most guitar players in Nashville.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t have what she has. I don’t have balls.”
I laugh. “I think you do.”
He rolls his eyes. “I mean, I’ve got balls, but I’m totally freaked by the thought of taking that stage solo.”
“Why did you choose to go solo? You could have gone the band route…taken the pressure off.”
Shane shakes his head. “Need all fifty grand, man. I don’t have another way to pay for college.”
“You’re going to college?”
He laughs. “Yeah. Why is that so surprising?”
I shrug. “I just assumed you would get a band or start a solo career…do studio work at least. You’re damn sure good enough.”
“I want my college education. Nobody in my family’s ever had one.” He peers at me and then looks down at the instrument in his hands. “I’m not smart like you, dude. There’s no scholarships waiting for me at state school, nothing outside of the standard shit that barely pays for books. I need this money.”
I nod, trying not to let the guilt get to me. I have access to money as long as I go to Emory. But as much as I like Shane or am nuts about Jenna, I can’t let someone else have it because I feel bad. I’ve got to stay focused on winning that money so I can pull out from underneath my dad once and for all.
“Don’t let it get in your head,” I say. “Don’t think about it. Just walk out there and do your thing like you’re in the guitar conservatory.”
He rolls his eyes. “I know. It’s easier said than done.”
I narrow my gaze at him. “You’re Shane Fucking McCollough. Who’s better than you? At least at this.” I nod at the banjo in his hand.
He huffs. “I get on stage and all I can see are the people staring at me, focused on me. Expecting me to kill. It’s paralyzing.”
I nod, not sure how else to assure him. “We’ve all got our fears,” I say.
He smiles. “Not you, man. You’ve never seemed afraid to me.”
I huff a laugh of appreciation.
“I’ve always really respected you for not giving a shit,” Shane says.
I turn my head to the side, not sure how to take what he’s said.
“I mean that as a compliment,” he says. “It’s like you said fuck it to trying to be cool or fit in. I’ve spent the past four years hanging with the biggest douches in school just so I can say I’m popular. What the fuck does that even mean?”
“You’re asking me?”
He shakes his head, scanning me. “We’re switched up. You’re from Belle Meade. You’re the one who’s supposed to fit in with that group. The cluster. I’m the one who’s dirt poor. I’m supposed to not give a shit. I’m supposed to be the one above all of it.”
“Get above it then,” I say.
He looks down at the banjo strings, defeated. “There’s more to it than that.”
Since he’s opening up to me, now might be a good time for me to do the same. I’ve got some embarrassing questions I need answers to, and God knows he’s probably got them.
Shane lifts the banjo back up, picks out a tune.
“You’ve…had sex with girls, right?” I ask.
He stops strumming and looks up at me, eyebrows lifted. “Yeah, of course.”
I roll my eyes at my stupidity. He’s Shane McCollough. Of course he’s had sex.
“What I mean is…when you did it the first time, how did you kn
ow you were doing it the right way?”
He sets the banjo against the wall. “Dude, it’s fucking easy.”
I rub my fist against my forehead as my insides twist at the awkwardness of this conversation. But I could really use his help.
“Look,” he says. “You know everything works okay down there, right? You whack off?”
I let out a mortified breath. “Yeah.”
“The hardest part’s gonna be control. They say to think about baseball. I tried that, but then there’s all these baseball euphemisms—first base, second base, third base…third base is the one that always gets me.”
I close my eyes and then reopen them, checking around to make sure there’s not a camera going anywhere in this apartment. If Jenna’s dad heard this conversation, I think I’d have to move to Australia.
Shane squints at me. “Think about vomit.”
“While I’m having sex?”
“No, forget that. Vomit reeks. You don’t want her to see you cringing. She’ll think it’s about her. Think about, I don’t know, Family Feud or like…your preacher or something. Anything to make it last.”
I figure I better ask everything I need to now while we’re in the thick of this, because I’m never talking about this again…I don’t even know how I’m going to be able to talk to him again about anything.
“How long should I…last?” I ask.
“Eh.” He shrugs. “Your first time…if you make it to home plate she’ll be impressed.”
“That’s a lofty goal,” I say.
“If you do make it inside, she’ll be happy with thirty seconds.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah. It’ll probably be painful for her, being her first time. She’ll want you to be done with that shit after a minute.”
I freeze. “How did you know it’s Jenna’s first time? Did she tell you that?”
“Nah, I just assumed. At the dance, Bianca and them tried to get her to do the theatre initiation.” He eyes me. “You know about that, right?”
Falling for Forever Page 24
