Your Echo (Sherbrooke Station Book 2)

by Katia Rose

  I grab the corner of my blanket and toss it over her, then take a seat on the edge of the bed.

  “Here.” I hold up the damp towel. “I don’t know if this will help with the wax at all, but we can try.”

  She smiles and sits up, keeping the blanket draped over her legs.

  “You mean you’ve never had to remove melted wax from a woman’s chest before?”

  I shake my head. I thought she’d take the towel herself, but she shifts her body towards me, so I start to rub at one of the splashes stuck to her skin. The towel does shit all to help.

  “This isn’t really working. We may just have to pick it off.”

  I peel a flake off with my fingers. Stéphanie laughs.

  “Sacrement. When I left the house tonight, I did not expect to end up in Ace Turner’s bedroom, picking candle wax off my boobs.”

  “Expect the unexpected,” I joke. “What were you doing at that party, anyway?”

  “My friend wanted to introduce herself to some agent. She’s a dancer and part time model. She needed someone to go with her.”

  We’re both working at peeling the wax off her now. A pile of it collects on the blanket.

  “I thought I was seeing things when you walked by,” I admit. “I have this weird reflex now where I think every blonde I see is you.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  I nod. “I know; it’s creepy as fuck.”

  The wax situation is now as good as it’s going to get, so I brush the pieces away and lay back on the bed, pulling her to me again and throwing the blanket over us both.

  Before I can say anything else, Stéphanie curls a hand around the back of my neck and murmurs, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” I ask. “Doing a shit job at getting you cleaned up?”

  “For tonight. For everything. I feel...relieved, as strange as that sounds. I feel like some huge weight is gone from me. I knew I wanted this, but I didn’t realize how much I needed it.”

  I tap the top of her head. “You’ve got some monsters up here too, huh?”

  She nods and then starts chuckling to herself. I’m about to ask what’s so funny when I feel her push her thigh against my cock.

  “And you’ve got a monster down here,” she says throatily, before she bursts out laughing even harder.

  “Oh, ouch. That line was rough, even by my standards.”

  My dick stirs at the contact anyway, and I will it to settle down. I could go all night with this girl, but right now I just want to lie here.

  “Where did you grow up?” I ask, voicing the question as soon as it enters my mind.

  “Pointe-Aux-Trembles,” she answers. “You?”

  Well, there’s nothing like rehashing family drama and painful childhood recollections for keeping your dick at bay.

  “NDG.”

  The lie is a habit now. I don’t even think about it before I let it slip out. Not even JP and Cole know I actually grew up a few blocks over from NDG, in the cesspool of wealth and prejudice that is Westmount.

  “So you’re one of those inner city kids,” she jokes.

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Do you have siblings?”

  I shake my head.

  “Me neither,” she tells me. “It’s always been just me and my mom. Are your parents still together?”

  “I don’t...We don’t really keep in touch.”

  Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, I barely had any contact with my parents at all. They packed me off to a boarding school outside Toronto the second I was old enough to go. The last time I saw them I was nineteen and setting one of my dad’s hedges on fire while he called the cops on me.

  Stéphanie must see enough of that reflected in my face right now to know not to push the subject. She turns so she’s lying on her back, her hair splayed out on the pillow.

  “You said you don’t have people over very often. Is that counting girls you have over for sex?”

  She’s trying to sound brazen, but I catch the hint of insecurity in her voice.

  “I never bring anyone here for sex. I haven’t even had sex since before we went to Europe.”

  “Never?” she repeats.

  “You’re the first.”

  Now I’m the one trying to sound brazen.

  “Of course,” I tell her, “now that you’ve seen my apartment, I’m going to have to kill you.”

  She twists a lock of hair around her finger. “Just as long as my murder involves kinky sex.”

  I reach over to pinch her nipple and she gasps.

  “Who knew you were such a bad girl?” I tease.

  I instantly regret saying it as I watch her face fall. She shrugs my hand off her and pulls the blanket up so it’s covering her chest.

  “Hey,” I say quickly. “It was a joke. I was just bugging you. I didn’t mean it as an insult. You have no idea how fucking hot tonight was, and I loved every second of it.”

  She sits up. I don’t have a headboard, so she leans her naked back against the wall, still clutching the blanket around herself and bringing her knees up to her chest.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s...I get weird about the whole ‘bad girl’ thing.”

  I sit up too. “Any reason?”

  She glances at me and then stares down at the two bumps her knees make under the blanket. She’s silent for so long I’m about to change the subject, but then she starts to speak.

  “This is kind of hard to talk about, but I went through a...Well, I guess you could call it a rebellious phase. Is something a phase if it lasts for five years? I don’t know. I started going off the deep end when I was fifteen, and I only began crawling out of it when I was twenty.”

  “Going off the deep end?” I repeat.

  She takes a deep breath in. “At first it was just small stuff. In high school, me and some other girls used to dare each other to do all these stupid things. We shoplifted. We stole our parents’ booze. We tried weed. I think I was just trying to shout this huge ‘Fuck you!’ to the universe, but the only person I ended up hurting was myself. And my mom.”

  She hides her face behind her hair.

  “My mom has...health problems, and she had to work a lot too. I realize now I was probably just acting out of frustration over that. I wanted parents who could come after me when I snuck out of the house. I wanted parents who weren’t so busy working they noticed when I missed curfew. It’s not that my mom didn’t care; she cared so much, but she was stuck. We both were. She was just another French Canadian girl who got pregnant way too young. That’s all the world saw her as, and she accepted it. I wanted so much more for her. I wanted more for us. We used to have these terrible fights. I said some pretty horrible things to her.”

  I run my fingers down the skin of her forearm, and when she doesn’t pull away, I take hold of her hand.

  “When I got older and bars and clubs and sex came into the picture, things got worse. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a party girl, but I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I just...It’s hard to explain.”

  “You don’t have to,” I tell her. “Trust me; I’m the last person you need to explain that feeling to.”

  She doesn’t look at me, but her hand tightens around mine.

  “It started to rip my life apart,” she continues. “I was failing courses at CÉGEP. The dance studio I used to go to had offered me a place as an assistant teacher, and they were threatening to fire me. When I was a kid, sometimes on weekends I’d dance for eight hours a day. When I was nineteen, I usually spent my weekends so hungover I couldn’t get out of bed. The worst part was that it gave me this fucked up sense of satisfaction.”

  Save for the pressure of her fingers, it’s like she doesn’t even remember that I’m here. She’s somewhere else right now, and I know better than to interrupt her.

  “It was a matter of control. Because of my mom and our financial situation, I never got to go as far as I could have with my dancin
g. I was so tired of being forced to give things up. When I was wrecking my life with partying, then at least I was the one responsible. At least it felt like a choice.”

  She stares down at the blanket for another few minutes before she shakes her hair out of her face and turns to me, forcing a smile that barely lifts the corners of her mouth up.

  “Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, dumping all that on you. I’ve just never admitted everything to one person all at once before, and I guess after what we just did, it—”

  “Don’t apologize,” I urge. “I already told you, whatever is going on here isn’t casual. I...want to know you, Stéphanie. I want to know everything.”

  I drape my arm around her shoulders and she leans into my chest.

  “I want to know you, too.”

  For a second, it all threatens to spill out: my parents, the accident, boarding school, all those nights on Boulevard St. Laurent...

  We could have bumped into each other. We could have grinded up against each other on a dance floor and neither of us would even remember it. The same sounds that echo through my dreams could be the same ones that haunt her in hers.

  I’m not ready to drag her into my nightmares, though. For now, I just want to hold her and make connect-the-dot pictures with the freckles on her back. I want to feel her hands trace the ink on my arms and hope it tells the story I can’t bring myself to share.

  15 The Riot’s Gone || Santigold

  ACE

  “Sorry I’m late, guys. Things are crazy at my dance studio. We have our summer showcase coming up next weekend.”

  Stéphanie unrolls her yoga mat and settles herself on it, still panting from running across the park to get here. When she sees me at the back of the meditation group, she looks surprised for a second. Then she blushes and bites her lip like a sixteen year-old who just got asked to prom.

  It’s fucking adorable.

  It’s been less than forty-eight hours since I had her in my bed, but I couldn’t resist the chance to see her again today. She refused to stay the whole night in my apartment, saying she had to be up early for a dance class. I woke up the next morning and could still smell her on my sheets. It made me hard as fuck and sent a punch to my stomach all at the same time.

  How is it possible to miss someone so much, just hours after you’ve seen them? No one but me had ever lain in that bed before, and half a night with her made it feel empty without her body beside mine.

  I spent most of the last two days working on songs for the new Sherbrooke Station album. The music is pouring out of me now, so fast that sometimes I can barely keep up. I’m using this meditation class as an excuse to get me out of my apartment before I forget how to function in the outside world. Spending time with Stéphanie is about the only thing that could convince me to ignore the urge to have my hands on a guitar right now.

  “We’re going to try something a little different today,” Stéphanie tells the group, in French first and then in English. “Let’s start by closing our eyes and focusing on our breathing.”

  She leads everybody through some deep breaths, and I let myself get caught up in the exercise, sinking into the darkness behind my eyelids.

  “Today, I want you to think about the things that make you angry. Think about all the things that make you upset or sad—all of the negatives. Normally in meditation, we try to distance ourselves from these feelings, but today I want you to really let yourself experience them.”

  Without any warning, I’m thrown into the memory of holding the lighter in one hand and the can of gas in the other. My dad’s fucking hedge is going up in flames in front of me.

  “Sometimes, when we try to push our negative thoughts away, we just end up pushing them deeper inside ourselves.”

  Stéphanie’s voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. I can feel the heat of the fire licking up my arms.

  “Sometimes we have to let ourselves feel them. Sometimes that’s the only way to understand them. We have to let all that rage and hurt burn as bright as it can before we can put it out for good. So that’s what I want you to do today. For the next few minutes, let yourself feel the full impact of your negative thoughts.”

  I drop the gas can, pull out a cigarette, and cup my hand in front of the lighter. I stand there smoking while my dad watches from the window, holding a phone up to his ear. He’s pretending to call the cops, but I know he’s fucking bluffing. Nigel and Rebecca Thompson couldn’t survive the embarrassment of having a cop car show up at their house, just like they couldn’t survive the embarrassment of having a mental case for a son.

  “Now that you’ve built that fire up, I want you to stop feeding it. Stop giving it fuel. That fire isn’t what’s keeping you alive; you’re what’s keeping it alive. Wherever you just went in your thoughts, bring your attention back to this moment. Tell yourself: I’m here. I’m not there anymore. I’m here.”

  My eyes fly open. I stare at her, sitting at the base of the tree, the sun catching in her hair exactly like it did the first time I saw her. I feel that same chill I did when she quoted ‘Nevermore’ to me, that same need to reach out and touch her to make sure she’s real

  There’s no way she can know I say those same words to myself all the time:

  You’re here. You’re not there anymore. You’re here.

  I can’t go back to meditating after that. I sit and watch as she brings the session to a close, and when she opens her eyes, it only takes a second for them to find mine. The usual line-up forms in front of the coffee can as people make their donations. There’s still a few stragglers hanging around when I make my way up to Stéphanie, but I can’t wait any longer.

  “Hey,” she says, a little nervously. “Didn’t expect you to be here.”

  “I wanted to see you again.”

  She plays with the edge of her mat where it’s tucked under her elbow. “I should probably say thank you. You...inspired today’s exercise. I’ve never tried that before, but it really helped.”

  She nudges my foot with hers, and that’s all it takes. I raise a hand to cup her cheek and kiss her on the mouth. I feel the shock run through her for a second before her lips move against mine. My other hand finds her waist, and the kiss lasts until her back thumps against the trunk of the tree. She breaks away from me and looks around, but the remaining few meditators are gone.

  “I think we scared them off,” she says.

  “Thank god.”

  Her fingers trail along the collar of my shirt. She tugs the fabric down until the edge of one of the feathers inked on my chest is exposed.

  “You still haven’t told me why you have this.” The strokes the lines of the drawing, and I have to close my eyes for a moment as I fight for control of myself. “It’s beautiful.”

  “The artist I usually go to lives here in Montreal. He drew it for me.”

  “So you’re just a big Edgar Allen Poe fan?” she asks me.

  Her fingers inch lower, bringing more of the tattoo into sight.

  “Yeah, he...” I trail off to gather my thoughts. Her touch is more than distracting. “He’s the first poet I really connected with, the first artist who really made me see the effect art could have, if that makes any sense.”

  “I remember the first time I saw Swan Lake. It felt sort of the same.” She lifts her eyes from the raven and grins at me. “Maybe I should get a swan tattooed on my chest. We could match.”

  “Interesting idea.”

  She lets my shirt snap back into place and lays her palms flat on top of it.

  “A raven looks a lot more fierce, though. I like the claws on yours.”

  “It’s supposed to look fierce,” I admit. She cocks her head, and I elaborate. “There’s this line from a Simon and Garfunkel song about using poetry to protect yourself. When I first started reading Poe, I...I needed something to protect me. That’s what poetry became.”

  I’ve never talked like this with anyone else. The only thing I’ve ever poured my feelings into
is music. This is the first time I’ve let them flow out of me and into someone else.

  Stéphanie wraps her arms around my neck and clings to me like she’ll take whatever I give her. I bury my face in her hair and breathe in her scent.

  “Now I like your tattoo even more,” she murmurs. “If it’s protects you, then I’m grateful for it.”

  She’s carving my heart wide open, and she doesn’t even know it. I tilt her head up to kiss her again, but she dodges me.

  “I should go,” she admits. “I have a bunch of extra stuff to do at the studio today because of the showcase.”

  “Speaking of which, where do I get tickets for that?”

  She balks. “You want to come to a dance show?”

  “I want to come to your dance show.”

  I let her go so she can pick up the rest of her stuff.

  “It’s not really my show,” she explains. “I just choreographed a few of the routines. I mean, I am going on stage with my six-year olds because they tend to just wander off into the wings if they don’t have anyone leading them, but that’s it. You’d see me on stage for three minutes and be stuck there for another three hours.”

  Three fucking hours?

  “I want to go,” I insist, before I can start to reconsider.

  She’s giving me a look that tells me I’m doing a shit job at hiding how much the ‘three hours’ thing is freaking me out, but eventually she agrees to get me a ticket.

  “On one condition,” she adds, as we walk to the edge of the park. “You get me tickets for La Rentrée. If you get to see me dance, then I get to see you play.”

  16 I’m On Fire || Bruce Springsteen

  ACE

  “Mais c’est une tradition, Ace! It’s a tradition, man. You can’t bail.”

  JP waves his harmonica at me like it’s a weapon of mass destruction. We’ve just wrapped up a morning rehearsal session in the basement to review our set for La Rentrée. Stéphanie’s dance show is tonight. It completely slipped my mind that today also marks the anniversary of the night Matt and I asked JP to join our band.