by Anna Bloom
I frowned but shook my head. “What is this?” I asked.
“It’s Church, for people who don’t feel they can go to church.”
I met her gaze as an unexpected deep ache drifted inside me like a wind whipping up into a storm.
My hand tingled with the absence of my grams’ palm pressed into the back of my hand, her thumb soothing my skin as she sat on a pew, her head nodding to the sermon, occasionally whispering, ‘Amen, Lord’, under her breath as her desire took her.
Longing for what once had made my knees shake.
Evan strummed the strings on his guitar, beautiful and melodic they had a perfect pitch.
From the first note, I knew the song, and my chest ached with such intensity I glued it tight with my arm, holding myself together.
Hillsong, Cornerstone.
I was seven again and clutching Grams’ hand. My eyes drifted to the pew across the aisle where Luca giggled with his best friend. The air hot, stuffy, my lungs dry with dust.
Why couldn’t I sit on the cool pew? No... Only Luca got to do whatever he wanted. I had to sit and listen.
“I haven’t heard this in a long time,” I muttered to Rhian, although my voice still carried over the hushed crowd.
“Evan always opens with this. It’s Church rules.”
“Hey, gorgeous, how about some drinks?” A tall blond waved a credit card at me. With his collar on his shirt turned up, and his hair carefully styled, he stood out from the rest of the Sunday night clientele. “New girl, huh?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.”
“Just a coke please.”
Okay, well that was easy. Although the soda spurting thing had a life of its own.
I handed him a foaming glass of coke and waited patiently for what he wanted next. “And?”
“And nothing, that’s it.”
“Oh.”
Rhian smirked at me and gave a ‘you’re so pathetic’ shake of her head.
“What?” I mouthed, but I kept my gaze down as I gave blondie his card back. He didn’t head back to the crowd, but instead turned and leaned his elbow against the bar, his head bobbing gently in time with the strum of Evan’s guitar.
I kept serving as Evan finished his song. His tone did something a little funny to my insides. I glanced down at my legs at one point to check one hadn’t shrunk smaller than the other and that’s why I felt off balance.
They seemed normal. Although I wasn’t sure normal existed in Blue’s bar.
A growing little seed fertilized itself inside my chest. I tried to ignore it, tried to snap its stem before it could take hold, but it waved its green leaves at me, swaying in a breeze of change. Home. It whispered.
When the women in electric blue gowns came out, the crowd went mental. They didn’t speak, didn’t work the crowd, didn’t have to.
This was the audience connection Professor Greene asked me about in that cursed lecture the other day when I couldn’t think of anything in my brain except why the hell was Jack looking at me like I’d stolen his sweets and given them to the class bully.
The gospel set held power.
It pulsed with the beat of my heart.
I swayed my hips as I served, although we were quieter now, everyone watching the stage.
For one long, intense moment, I wanted to sing. It clawed inside me. I wanted to lift my arms and praise.
But the girl who used to do that no longer existed, so I cleaned the bar instead, polishing a shine as the women on the stage harmonized. I blocked the words they sang, concentrating instead on the rhythms and cadences. Safer that way.
Clean up seemed quicker than Friday, but maybe that’s because I knew what I was doing. My feet ached though, my Doc Martens pulling my feet so that by the time I’d upturned the last stool and the glasses were put away, I walked by scrapping the rubber soles along the floor.
Rhian skipped around with the bounce of a newborn lamb. “How do you do that?” I pointed to her feet.
“Practice, Green, and...” She lifted her foot and grinned as she pointed to her black sneakers. “Total grannie shoes. Don’t care.”
I laughed. Maybe I’d skim some money off my pay to buy some.
“Pay’s up.” Evan called us as he came out the back office clutching his little brown envelopes.
He doled them out. I seemed to be at the bottom. “Lyra, what shifts can you do this week?”
I scrunched my face. “A couple maybe. I’ve got to start focusing on my lectures.” My blood ran cold when I considered who I’d have to face tomorrow. The music of the evening, the keeping busy had almost made me forget. On an impulse I almost asked if I could stay here, maybe I could never have to return to college.
No, Lyra, that’s stupid. What would Grams say?
“Wanna do Church next week?” Even pretended not to watch me, but I knew he did.
“Sure. How about Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday?” I winced at Friday.
“Perfect, have a good week in class.” He patted me on my head, all Luca again.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. I’d rather saw off my hands than go to that practice room in Emmerson tomorrow. It was like knowing you had to go and knock on the door to hell and wait to be let in.
A slow smile stretched across Evan’s face and he glanced at his watch. “Cabs here. License plate is on there.” He motioned to my envelope where he’d scrawled some numbers. See you Wednesday.”
I grabbed my stuff and managed to get my feet to drag across to the door.
Never in all my life had I wanted to crawl into bed so much. Every bone ached.
Eddie had left his post on the door, and when I stepped outside, I stared at the starlit sky. A car flashed its lights and I mechanically forced my legs over to it, desperate to sink inside and maybe close my eyes all the way home. I checked the plate against Evan’s untidy handwriting. I was tired, I wasn’t stupid.
I opened the back door. “Cab for Lyra Lennox?” I double checked automatically. Luca’s nagging bitching like an old woman echoing in the back of my head. Never get in a car you don’t know.
“You can sit in the front, Lyra.” Green eyes swept over me, along my legs, my shorts, my purse that sat across my body.
Jack.
“What are you doing here?”
He laughed a derisive sound. “Just get in the car.”
My legs froze and I glared through narrow stink eyes.
“Please.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jack
She’s not going to get in the car.
Her cheeks flushed a livid pink, a curl of her hair corkscrewed tight—I guessed from the humidity of the bar—across the side of her cheek.
Which reminded me: Price up air con refits. I added it to my mental to-do list.
“I don’t know why you’re here.” Lyra folded her arms across her chest, heaving her perky tits against the Blue’s bar T-shirt. I swallowed and kept my eyes above collar level.
“Kid, just get in the car.”
Her pale-blue eyes widened. “Fuck. Off.”
I laughed and leaned over, pushing open the door to the passenger side. “Don’t let Professor Greene hear you speak like that.”
“Is he here?”
Lyra had grown some lady balls. I kinda liked it. “Can you see him?” I shot back.
She eyed me, dark shadows in the depth of her stony gaze. “No, I just see his bitch. Remind me, Jack? How many coffees do you have to fetch for him a day?”
I snorted. “You have no idea.”
She pulled her plump lower lip between her teeth. Flummoxed.
“Anyway, I’ve spent most of the first week of term trying to work out why his new protégée can’t play her violin.”
Without a word she turned on her heel and swung those hips of hers as she walked away.
An unmistakable dark need to spank that ass crept into my thoughts. I swallowed it back down. “Get in the car,” I called after her. She turned, throwing scorn in an evil stink eye in my direc
tion.
“Can you dial back your douche?”
“Can you stop stropping like a toddler?” My lips curved.
“You’re a mean asshole. Believe me, stropping is all you’ll get.”
I sighed and pushed my hand through my hair. She watched my fingers before snapping her gaze away. “Okay, I’ll dial back the douche.”
She fought her twitching lips damn hard, but that dimple I’d known all my life crept into place on her left cheek.
Damn that dimple.
And damn her.
With an impressing stomping walk she hauled ass to the car and wrenched the door open. Jeez, watch the paintwork.
Sitting in and crossing her Doc Martens over at the ankle, she pulled at the seatbelt, obviously expecting a struggle from the safety equipment and then letting out a little huff of surprise when it didn’t fight her.
That huff ran though my veins like neat vodka.
Folding her arms across her chest she glared out of the window. Okay then. Thrusting the car into drive, we sat in silence as the Audi purred down the quiet streets.
“Are you warm enough?” I asked. She wasn’t, chilled goose bumps ran across her arms, but call me a bastard, she’d have to ask me to put the heating up.
Not that I needed hot air blowing in my face. My internal body temperature settled some place around volcanic.
She huffed and ignored me.
“You know this really is a bad part of town.” I said a few turns later.
“Hmm.” She kept staring at the passing streets, the alleyways, flickering streetlights.
“So are we not going to talk at all?”
With a dramatic sigh that played havoc with my memory box, making me tingle all over, she turned in her seat, a heavy gaze settled on my face.
Well damn. I kind of wished I hadn’t bothered to start a conversation now.
Wished I hadn’t picked her up.
Stupid idea; dangerous really.
I could have just been nice tomorrow morning in practice. I don’t know, bought her a donut for breakfast or something.
Yeah, that would have been much easier.
“What do you want to talk about, Jack?”
What I wanted to talk about was the fact I hated her calling me Jack. I wouldn’t though.
“How was work?”
She snorted a dry laugh that rustled like dried leaves around my senses. “Really, are we going to make small talk now?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“So we aren’t going to discuss where you’ve been, why you never came back, or, oh I don’t know, why you’ve been such a fuckhead this week?”
Fuckhead? Well that was new, and kind of endearing actually. Miriam would never call me something like that.
But then I’d never chased Miriam with worms dangled on the ends of sticks or wanted to kiss her when I saw her in a skimpy red two piece when she was thirteen-and-a-half.
I blew out air.
“I’m not the same person I used to be, Lyra. But that doesn’t mean I want you walking around the back streets of Boston or getting chased down alleyways by the scum of the city.”
She pulled a face. “Once. It happened once. Can we let that go now?”
“Once too many.”
“Like you care.” She turned and glared out of the window again, and I breathed a sigh of relief... too soon. “I can’t believe you never called Luca.”
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe Luca wouldn’t want me to call?”
She turned slightly, reading me through a non too discreet side eye. “That’s not true.”
A spark of irritation rumbled under my skin, a growing storm. “Yeah, well maybe your brother isn’t as perfect as he’s always made out.”
Her mouth flapped open. “I never said he was.”
Too soon we were through the gates. I gave the security guy a half-hearted wave and hoped he was asleep.
“Aren’t you worried we will be seen together?” she asked, tone heavy on the sarcasm and little on the concern.
I shrugged. Hell yes, but whatever. “I saw a student of mine in town and worried for her well-being. I was morally obligated to ensure she got home safe.”
I idled the car outside Hamilton and looked up through the windscreen. “How are you settling in?”
Her hand curled into a tight fist. “Go away, Jack.”
“Lyra...” I met her gaze, fury and lightning storming within a pale-blue sky.
“No. We can’t be friends; you’ve made that clear over the last week. You know what, when I saw you again in Greene’s office that morning, it was such a relief. It’s torn me up not knowing where you’ve been all these years, knowing what happened to you. You. Just. Left. Without saying goodbye.” She stopped, paused, and then took a breath. “And you know what, Jack? I’m not a dumb little kid anymore. It’s not that we can’t be friends because of some rule that you’re now my teaching aide or whatever other crap you can come up with—those things wouldn’t make you an asshole. It’s because you don’t want to.” She unlocked her safety belt. “So you know what, fine. Let’s pretend we don’t know one another.” Her plump lips pursed into a tight bud.
“Lyra, you know next week is a gala dinner. The Collins family will be expecting you to play.”
She visibly blanched.
“Greene will want to see you before then. He wants me to arrange a two hour session on Wednesday.”
She nodded slowly, with a slight droop to her shoulders. When she looked up, an expression of sheer defeat ate away at the beauty of her face. Slowly it undid me. No matter how hard I tried to stop it.
Lyra Lennox. The curse of my life.
“Can you do that?” I asked, pushing her more.
“What do you care, Jack?”
My hand stung with a need to touch her. I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Friends would care, wouldn’t they?”
She didn’t reply straight away. “And are we friends?”
“Not yet.”
Without another glance in my direction she opened the door. “Thanks for the lift. Next time let me get the cab though.”
Um, no. That wouldn’t be happening.
I pushed down the button for the passenger side window. “Oh, Lyra.” She turned. “Eight am sharp.”
She curled her top lip and stormed away, flipping me the bird, and I chuckled the whole way home.
The penthouse was swathed in darkness and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The lie of the last four years slowly unraveled around me. I could feel the ends of it teasing me from the corners of the living area that wasn’t really mine.
None of it was. All pretend, borrowed.
I trod slowly across the floor, peeking around the doorway to the master bedroom. I say master, there were three more, unused, just decorated to perfection on the off chance someone might stay: one a lemon and gray, the other ocean-hued, the other... well fuck knew, the fact I knew two was enough. The master bedroom itself was bigger than my entire childhood home and sleeping on the middle of the super queen lay Miriam, her hair spread against silk, her sleep mask pulled firmly across her face.
Knowing Miriam, she’d be zoned out via medication. I turned back for the living space and walked to the chrome bar along the back wall.
With shoulders dropped, I picked up the heavy crystal tumbler and the bottle of bourbon.
I shouldn’t have it in the house, not really.
But sometimes I couldn’t see the point in being anything other than what I was destined to be, and no matter how long it had been since I’d stepped foot in Florida, New Orleans, I always knew the exact way I’d end up.
Drunk and foul, with no respect for being anyone, not even myself.
I might have pretended that side of me didn’t exist for the last four years, but Lyra reminded me all too easily who I was.
The boy I’d been, the one who danced drunk under streetlights, and listened to violin with more than his ears; the one who knew he’d end up a
drunk, on an inevitable date with destiny.
Without a second thought, I slugged the amber liquid into the glass, and then splashed some more to take the place of the ice I couldn’t be assed to get. Drink in hand, I turned for my chair overlooking the window, sinking down into the soft, tan, calf leather, smiling wryly at the fact I had a chair—just like him.
Destiny. Date.
My view from the window took in all the highs of Boston. Late night lights flickered, and the glimmer of their iridescent glow against night stretched as far as the eye could see.
It really was the perfect place. That boy who used to dance drunk under streetlights could never have dreamed of this.
As the bourbon slipped down, warming my throat and then my stomach, I considered the week ahead. No point thinking over the last week, that needed to be filed under disaster with a capital D and forgotten about.
Why the fuck couldn’t she play? I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I wanted to laugh, say she deserved it after everything her and Luca did to me, to my family; but I also knew that if she fucked up at the Gala it would be another reason for the Collins family to look down at me. And that would burn.
Nailing back the dregs of the glass, I pieced together a plan.
Get her to a) talk, b) stop swearing, c) play the violin.
There, should be easy.
So why as I stripped down to my jocks and pulled the blanket up over me in my chair did it feel like I had a mountain to climb. A Lyra shaped mountain, and one thing was for sure, she wasn’t the meek little girl I’d left behind.
Which probably was trouble in itself.
Next morning, I made sure to be up early to run. The bourbon made my veins sluggish and I ridiculed myself the entire way around the lake. When would I learn? Never, I guessed. That was the point of destiny.
I waited outside Hamilton at quarter to eight sharp. She was one of the first out of the building, and I felt kind of bad for her early morning starts. I bet her roommate hadn’t even woken yet.
From my vantage point leaning against the car, I got my first proper look at her where she wasn’t scowling, shaking, nearly crying, or a combination of all three.
