The Duet

by R.S. Grey

  “Are those for me or for you?” I asked, pointing to the box.

  She pushed them toward me. “I’m so sorry.”

  My eyes flew up to hers. “What? Why are you sorry? I’m the ‘other woman’.”

  Instead of answering me, she positioned herself against the bathroom wall and then slid down to sit on the floor. “I was out of line back there. I purposely hurt your feelings when I should have told you the truth.”

  “You aren’t Jason’s wife?” I asked, hating how hopeful I sounded.

  She winced. “Technically I am.”

  I held up my hands for a time-out. My body couldn’t handle the back and forth. I needed a straight answer or I was going to lose it.

  “I came to ask him to sign the divorce papers once and for all,” she explained.

  Her words sank in slowly, as if from a dripping faucet.

  Jason was married.

  Jason was still married because the divorce papers weren’t signed.

  Jason hadn’t signed the papers.

  Jason didn’t want to be divorced.

  “While I appreciate you trying to set me straight, I kind of just want you to leave.”

  Her mouth fell open at my direct approach.

  “I’m sorry, that sounds terrible, but I just want to pack up my stuff and get the hell out of here. You have your own shit to work out with Jason, but he and I are over. Or we never started because let’s get real, Jason is a one-man show. I was never really with him to begin with.” I stood up off the ground. “So thank you for the tissues, and thank you for being so pretty. I want to hate you because of how pretty you are, but I can’t because you’re also nice, which sucks.”

  She smiled, but then bit down on her lip to conceal it.

  “Ugh, and you think I’m funny,” I said, raking my fingers through my hair. “Great. What the hell am I supposed to be doing right now?”

  She shrugged, but kept silent, aware that I was going through some kind of existential crisis and needed to find my way out on my own. She stood up and stared at me with pity for a few seconds before moving toward the door.

  “For what it’s worth, I think you guys would make a really good couple.”

  I laughed, “I don’t even know what to do with that statement, so I’m just going to tuck it away with the other weird shit I’ve heard today.”

  …

  I’d never been so happy to have an assistant that could make anything happen than I was that afternoon. As soon as I informed Summer of my need to “get the hell out of Dodge”, she booked me a private plane for 1:00 P.M. It was just the right amount of time to pack up all of my stuff and say goodbye to LuAnne, Derek, and Dotty. I had plans on slinking out when no one was looking in an effort to avoid Jason, but when LuAnne told me he’d gone into town to talk with Kim and Lacy, I took my time giving her a giant hug.

  Yes, I was totally giving Montana the ol’ Irish exit, and sure, maybe I should have stayed and listened to Jason say “I’m sorry for lying. I’m sorry for everything.” But the fact is – I wasn’t totally sure that he was. He’d told me he didn’t want complicated. He told me he didn’t want a relationship, so why would he feel the need to come groveling back to me? I would have really, really enjoyed hearing him apologize, which is why I couldn’t stay on the off chance that he wasn’t sorry at all.

  Just thinking about that outcome made it that much easier to leave Big Timber behind. I’d really miss my time in Montana. If my downtown condo had a horse stable and a couple acres, I would have taken Dotty back with me, but alas, I had to leave her behind with a handful of sugar cubes to remember me by.

  I would have cried as I stuffed my guitar case into the trunk of the car waiting on the gravel drive, but I had no tears left. I looked back to where LuAnne and Derek were standing up on the porch steps. Derek was just as sweaty as the day I’d met him, but he had his cowboy hat resting over his heart and a solemn expression masking his features. A part of me wanted to think that Jason didn’t deserve these people, that they were too good for someone like him. A liar.

  But I knew better.

  As the car pulled away from the house, I thought about the fact that Jason and I still had the last part of our duet left to finish that morning. We’d been procrastinating the last few days, putting off the inevitable because we knew as soon as we’d finished, I’d have to leave for LA.

  But the ending was always there, waiting for me to discover it. Once I had, I’d written it down onto a torn piece of paper and slipped it beneath the door to Jason’s room.

  Loving you would be as easy as taking a breath

  But to give you up, that’s a dance with death

  We were over from the start

  You always kept your distance

  You never said you’d give your heart

  So now it’s time for this to end

  After all, a friend is just a friend

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I touched down in LA to find five missed calls and three text messages from Jason.

  Jason: Answer your phone, Brooklyn.

  Jason: I went to talk to Kim because I didn’t know you’d get on a fucking plane and leave as soon as I left.

  Jason: I just read the last of your lyrics. Don’t bother calling me back.

  “He thinks I want to call him back?!” I shouted before slicing through the apple sitting on my kitchen counter. Cammie had picked me up from the airport and I’d filled her in as much as possible. Most of it was just a string of expletives, but she’d managed to piece together the story: The motherfucking-asshole-whore had a wife.

  We’d gone back to my condo and I’d had every intention of calming down, but then I read his final text message and I was back to square one.

  The knife slid through the apple with ease and then I pulled it back and kept right on cutting until I’d all but minced it into nothingness.

  “How about I take over cutting the apple? You’re going to hurt yourself, or even worse, you might hurt me,” Cammie smiled, trying to defuse the situation.

  “Oh, Cammie, don’t be ridiculous!” I said before slamming the blade back down onto the chopping board. It was a millimeter away from chopping my thumb off, a fact that Cammie also noticed. She pinched my arm until I dropped the blade and then I slunk down to the cold kitchen floor.

  “Oh, no. No. You don’t get to just lay down on the tile like all of your bones turned to Jell-O,” she said, gently kicking my side.

  “Maybe I should just keep laying here, Cam,” I said, letting the cold tile sink into my skin. “Maybe I’m just so sad that I’m going to lay on this kitchen floor for the rest of my life. Boneless.”

  “Oh my God, have I ever told you how much of a drama queen you are? You could have been a southern debutante in your past life.”

  I kicked in the back of her knee so that her leg buckled and she fell down onto the tile next to me. Misery loves company. Her elbow stabbed my stomach and my knee went into her back as the two of us groaned and readjusted so that we could both fit in between the kitchen island and the kitchen counter.

  “This is gross. When’s the last time you cleaned these floors?”

  “I don’t know, sometime before the BJ era,” I answered.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m about 50% sure that you’re not talking about giving guys blow jobs all over your kitchen floor, but I’m going to need confirmation on what that acronym stands for.”

  “Before Jason,” I sighed melodramatically.

  With a groan, she pinched my side. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  I shrugged.

  “Now what?” she said, rolling her head to the side so she could get a better look at me.

  I smiled the first smile since waking up that morning.

  “Now, we drink,” I said, shooting up to my feet and running to my refrigerator. Being in the music industry meant that I had copious amounts of high-quality alcohol. It was the gift that kept on giving. When I pulled the refrigerator door open
, the first thing I saw was a nice big bottle of champagne sitting on the bottom shelf.

  “Cammie, grab some glasses so we can have some—” I paused so I could turn the bottle around and read the label, “Bollinger Blanc De Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises.”

  When I looked up, Cammie was staring at me with a blank stare. “Speak English, whore.”

  “Don’t call me a whore even though that’s exactly what I am,” I said, feeling the tears burning my eyelids. “I’m literally the definition of a whore. No, wait. I’m worse—I didn’t even get any money out of the deal.” I kept rambling as I ripped the paper off of the top of the champagne bottle and started working at untwisting the cork. I’d popped two or three corks in my life, so I figured I had it down pat.

  I did not have it down pat. I held the green bottle to my stomach and pointed the cork away from me, but it wouldn’t come out, even as I nudged it gently. I looked down at it and started to pull again, but Cammie reached out and pulled my hand away.

  “Don’t open it in the direction of your eyes!”

  I sighed, “Fine. Give me that knife and I’ll chop off the end of the bottle like a pirate,” I said, holding my hand out in annoyance.

  Oddly enough, Cammie wouldn’t let me do that either, so we went across the hall, to my neighbor’s condo and knocked on the door so we could ask the older man who lived there if he could open the bottle of champagne for us.

  Except we never got the chance to hand it over to him because when he opened the door he was wearing a banana hammock and a ski mask. Only a banana hammock and a ski mask.

  I screamed because he looked like a burglar. The Banana Hammock Burglar. But apparently, it was all a giant misunderstanding. He was hosting “an orgy of sorts” and thought we were his guests that had been running late. Once we assured him we were not, and would never be, attendees at his orgy, he popped the champagne for us and we went on our merry way.

  When we closed the door to my condo, I completely lost it. I started crying so hard that I couldn’t get coherent words out. Cammie kept asking me what I was saying and I kept repeating it, annoyed that she couldn’t interpret my speech.

  Finally, I dropped my hands and looked up at her as I spoke. “I’m a whore, I’ll never have a proper orgasm again, and now I live across the hall from an old people orgy fest. Why can’t this day just end already?”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was about to drink that bottle of champagne with Cammie and promptly pass out on the couch in the living room in a pool of my own drool. It wasn’t the best way to end the worst day of my life, but I was happy to wake up the next day in my own condo with candy wrappers and tissues stuck in my hair.

  Until I heard pounding on my front door, followed by Jason’s deep voice.

  “Open the door, Brooklyn,” he shouted, continuing to pound away.

  Shit.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jason was here. Jason was in LA. Oh, hell no. How dare he follow me back to LA as if he’d planned to make some grand, romantic gesture? I’m a simple girl. The only romantic gesture I need is TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT A MAN IS MARRIED.

  I pushed up off the couch and checked my reflection in the hallway mirror. Oh dear God, a small family of raccoons had infested my hair and was now planning on making it their permanent home. I had a jolly rancher stuck to my cheek, which seemed strange until I remembered a hazy memory of daring Cammie to launch a jolly rancher from across the room to see if I could catch it in my mouth. We’d tried like fifty times, and apparently I hadn’t cleaned them all up by the time I’d passed out on the couch, which is why the melted sugar was imprinted on my cheek.

  I peeled it off my face, but it left a layer of residue that I couldn’t get off before I reached the door. Since I couldn’t do anything else with the Jolly Rancher, I popped it into my mouth and opened the door. (This was a really low point in my life, so if you could reserve your judgment about that, I’d appreciate it. And it was a blue raspberry one, as if you’d waste it either.)

  When I swung open my front door, Jason was leaning against the doorframe with his head down, staring at the floor. As soon as the door opened, his gaze shot up to me and he pushed through the doorway.

  “Oh sure, welcome to my condo, asshole,” I said, moving out of his way and closing the door behind him. “Would you like an ice cold bottle of fuck-off, or how about a get-the-fuck-out martini?”

  I hadn’t checked, but I assumed that Cammie had fallen asleep somewhere in the condo the night before, and hopefully she was smart enough not to come out and join us during the fight that was about to ensue.

  I watched him stalk toward the kitchen and then spin around with his back to my marble island. He was seething, his chest rising and falling with anger, but I wasn’t going to give in. The bastard could stare at me all he wanted.

  “You left without hearing the real explanation and now you think you’ve got it all figured out.”

  He’d dressed it up with fancy wording, but he truly meant the age-old excuse: “It’s not what it looks like.”

  I rolled my eyes and folded my hands over my chest, only then realizing that I was in fact not wearing a bra. My eyes darted to the couch and I saw it resting on top of a champagne bottle. Clearly, I hadn’t been keen on wearing it to bed.

  Great, so I had to argue bra-less with Jolly Rancher gunk on my face.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I answered because I knew it would hurt him. I wasn’t done building my anger from the day before. I wasn’t ready to think rationally or let him sweet talk his way back into my life. I just wanted to hide behind bitchy comments until he was too angry to stay any longer.

  “Talk to me.”

  Oh, fuck that.

  “We don’t talk, remember? That wasn’t part of our set-up.” I pointed back and forth between our bodies for emphasis. “We were a series of one-night-stands. Over and over again. So let’s not pretend there’s anything more. You wouldn’t explain a wife to a one-night-stand, so don’t explain it to me.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  I laughed. I didn’t know anything. Not a single thing. I thought I’d been chipping away at a guarded man, slowly weaving myself into his life until he couldn’t not be with me. Instead, I was having sex with a married man, like a dime store hooker.

  When I’d heard him singing on the third floor, I thought his song had been for me. But that song was for his wife.

  They were never for me.

  This entire time I’d been a delusional idiot. I’d been staring at an optical illusion. Once I saw the real image, the image I was supposed to see, I could never go back to the picture I saw before. My mind already knew what was real and what was fake. That knowledge made the tears start to form again, which was not happening in front of Jason.

  “I thought you told me you could handle our situation. You were the one to push it, even when I told you I was complicated.”

  “I know!” I yelled, unable to put the lid on my emotions. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  I’d had enough self-loathing circulating through my system; he didn’t need to continue to point that fact out to me.

  “So then why are you backing down now?” he asked, taking a step away from the island.

  “Why am I backing down?” I asked, flailing me arms out to my sides. “Because you’re married! Which puts me in the home-wrecker category. Do you realize that? Do you realize that by not telling me the truth, you’ve forced me to become the other woman without even realizing I was doing it? I’m not a bad person. I don’t sleep with married men.”

  He shoved his hands through his dark hair, gripping onto the ends for a moment as he squeezed his eyes closed.

  “Yes - I’m technically married. But not because I’m in love with Kim. I was never in love with Kim.”

  I laughed, but it came out sounding like nails on a chalkboard. “That means nothing to me. I bet half of married men would say that at any given time.”

>   His hands finally dropped from his hair and he cleared the distance between us in a matter of seconds. “That’s not what I mean, Brooklyn. Kim is with another man. That ring on her finger is from another man.”

  What the hell kind of crazy shit had I walked into?

  “Lacy isn’t my daughter, but I still raised her while we were married. I tried to adopt her but Kim kept putting up road blocks.”

  I backed up against the counter and crossed my arms, prepared to listen to whatever he had to say.

  “When Kim filed for divorce, I had no claim to Lacy. Kim could take her and I’d never get visitation. She’s not my child, I know that, but it felt like in one fell swoop I was losing my entire family and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  “So when you left Montana yesterday without even waiting for an explanation, it reminded me of why I purposely wanted to keep things simple with you in the first place.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me about all of this?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep you separate from them. You were supposed to help me write a song and then leave,” he said.

  His words shouldn’t have had the ability to hurt me anymore. I clearly deserved his anger, but I couldn’t just stand there and take it.

  “That’s exactly what I did,” I argued. “I left when the song was finished.”

  “That’s it?” Jason asked, narrowing his eyes on me.

  I wanted to yell, “No, that’s not it.” Instead, I forced a sharp nod. “That’s it.”

  I didn’t ask for this. At twenty-seven, I didn’t need complicated. I needed simple and easy. I needed someone who was ready to settle down.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m really sorry about everything you’re going through Jason, but I just need some space. A breather,” I said, feeling confident in my decision.