Whew. “Hi, Nate,” my voice trembled beneath nerves and I prayed no one else noticed.
“We’ve heard a lot about you, Ivy,” Matt called from next to the stove and I turned to meet his outstretched hand.
“Oh, no,” I groaned dramatically.
“All good things of course,” Matt was quick to reassure. I took his hand, and he shook it but his eyes were fixed behind me for a long moment before they flickered down to meet mine. He cleared his throat and something changed in his expression before he quickly added, “It’s always nice to meet one of Ryder’s friends.”
I stopped, but just barely, from rolling my eyes.
“It’s nice to meet you too,” I said politely.
Ryder clapped a hand on my shoulder and pulled me out of the kitchen a little bit. “Alright, let’s let Uncle Matt get back to breakfast before he burns everything.” Matt waved an annoyed spatula in the air, but winked at me before turning back to the stove. Ryder leaned in closer and spoke with a softer tone, “Grab your coffee.”
And then he reached around me so that his arm slid across my side and the weight of his chest pressed into my back. I froze. He plucked his coffee from the carrier all the while I counted the places our bodies connected and then he was gone, along with his warmth. I cleared my throat and focused harder on the three remaining cups trying to decipher which one was mine.
“Could this be it?” his dad reached forward and picked up one that had “macchiato” scrawled across the top.
I looked up at him a bit dumbfounded but managed a small nod. He handed me my cup and I quickly turned around to hide my deep blush from him.
Ryder stood over the keyboard, messing around with the melody to the song he wanted me to play with him, so I assumed breakfast also meant practice. That was fine with me. As long as I had a reason, any reason, not to obsess over my feelings for Ryder or analyze every stupid move, touch or word he was responsible for, I could survive this morning.
“You’re still set on making me join the band?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Absolutely,” he grunted, not even a little bit amused with me. He moved out of the way so I could take my place behind the keys and then took my coffee from me. I let it go with heavy regret and watched him set it down on a bent back music stand. “Besides, I think you’re pretty face on stage will help draw a bigger crowd.”
“You have no idea,” I mumbled. I wondered if Ryder was serious, if he really thought I would. A defeated feeling settled over me and I felt deflated…. lost and alone again. He hadn’t meant to, but his words were a cold dose of reality.
“That’s it,” Ryder snapped his fingers in front of me. His tone suddenly stern frustration and I glanced up just in time to see his eyes flash with anger. “We’re going to have a talk later, Ivy. I’m not doing this anymore.”
“Doing what?” I gasped. His words were spoken quietly and for my ears only, but his tone was unmistakably cold.
“My dad and uncle are staring over here,” he whispered fiercely. “At you,” he finished on a snarl in case I didn’t already assume that was what he meant.
“So?” I forced myself to remain casual.
“I’m not playing games anymore. I want to know what’s going on.”
“Nothing is going on,” I sighed and then pretended to be confused. “You’re scaring me.”
That was my go-to self-preservation phrase. I had a perfect success rate with that. Decent guys never wanted to be the reason for female distress. And Ryder was probably the most decent guy I knew.
My tone was all bored confusion, but only because that was how I had been taught to behave. On the inside my heart beat pulsed in my ears, loud and banging and my breath whooshed in and out like a vacuum. Ryder’s gray eyes were granite and steel with determination and a huge part of me didn’t believe I could get out of explaining it this time.
And the other small part of me didn’t want to get out of it.
I wanted to tell Ryder my secrets.
I wanted him to know me.
“Do not play games with me Ivy,” Ryder growled, low and rough. And then he softened, his eyes almost pleading, “You can trust me.”
I held his gaze and panicked. Honestly I couldn’t trust anybody with my secret, not even him. But that wasn’t the point since it didn’t matter if I could…. I wanted to trust him. I wanted to let him in. And that terrified me. Tearing my eyes away from Ryder, my fingers moved against the keys but they pounded out loudly in the now quiet loft, so I paused to adjust the volume with shaking fingers. The music, now barely above a whisper, seemed easier today and my fingers moved to the haunting melody Ryder composed.
“You sound better today,” Ryder admitted in a more normal tone. “Do you feel more comfortable with an audience now?”
“I feel more comfortable with the keyboard,” I explained, ignoring his small jab.
“Do you think you can keep the melody strong if I start playing along? Or is that going to mess you up?” Ryder asked with a sweetness that had been absent not just two minutes ago.
I shrugged a shoulder but stayed focused on the sheet music in front of me as my right hand soared upward and heightened emotionally(or would have if the keyboard weren’t so inflexible) while my left hand harmonized in chords.
From my peripheral I watched Ryder walk over and pick up his guitar. He slung it over his shoulder and immediately his fingers found home on the used guitar strings. He plucked out a few tuning issues that I did my best not to pay attention to and then walked over to me with a silly grin on his face.
He looked over my shoulder and studied my music for a long time before strumming out a chord that fit exactly right. And then he was off into the lead guitar piece that clouded all of my concentration and forced me to ignore him completely just so I could remember middle C.
We actually started to make music together. After the other night and my obvious failures this felt kind of…. nice. Ryder, the talented rock star, covered my mistakes easily. But I was starting to make fewer mistakes anyway.
I had natural talent in all things musical, but any accomplishments on the piano were achieved by hard work and tons of practice. So even though this wasn’t more than complicated harmonies, I still had to work at it. And I had never played with anyone else before.
After about fifteen minutes and the fourth time through the song, we actually started to sound really good together. Plus, I could hear the guitar a bit better, and because I was familiar with the song I was taking over on my own. This felt awesome.
“Alright Simon, Garfunkel, time to break for breakfast,” Matt called out from the kitchen.
Ryder smiled at me over his guitar, “That sounds good.”
“Yes, it does,” I admitted.
I stood back from the keyboard and grabbed my now cold coffee while Ryder set his guitar down and slipped his black pick into a pouch filled with others of all different colors. I hesitated long enough so Ryder could lead the way to the big cement table where a huge spread of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, rolls, sausage gravy and bowl of fruit were laid out.
“Wow,” I admired. “This looks incredible.”
“Thanks,” Matt beamed.
I sat down next to Ryder, and then accepted the frying pan filled with eggs from his dad. He had to stand up and reach across the table to give it to me and I had to do the same. I accepted the weight of the heavy pan and immediately added some to my plate before passing it to Ryder.
Ryder looked at me for a moment, hands filled with hot frying pan and serving spoon, before he dug a huge spoonful out and added it to my plate. My mouth gaped open with chagrin and I whipped my head around to say something about women’s rights and knowing my own body but he wasn’t looking at me and I didn’t want to make a scene in front of his dad and uncle.
The food continued to be passed around and soon my plate was heaping with homemade goodies. I had never even had biscuits and gravy before. I’d seen it on other people’s plates,
but you can eat a great breakfast without ever being subjected to that kind of greasy calorie fest. I would have passed on it altogether, but Ryder lifted a ladle full of gravy to dump all over my plate, eggs, bacon and all, so I took back the spoon and added it myself. Now the thick, white gravy was mixing with my fresh cut cantaloupe and pineapple and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do.
“So Ivy, tell us a little about yourself,” Ryder’s dad, Nate, asked from over a fork full of eggs.
I felt the attention of everyone in the room like a blinding spotlight. I hated questions like this, and Ryder stayed so still and quiet next to me I realized he was just as interested in what I was going to say as his dad. If not more interested…. he was no help at all.
“Um, I’m not sure what to say,” I admitted. “I go to school with Ryder at um, Central. And I’m a junior…. I’ve never had a breakfast like this before, it’s really incredible. I can’t believe you eat like this every Saturday.”
Deflecting the attention from myself to the food worked and everyone laughed at the insane amount of food on the table.
“Well, it’s not always like this,” Matt spoke up. “Ryder begged for the works this morning though. I think he was trying to make a good impression.”
Ryder jerked at his uncle’s words and gave me a sheepish, embarrassed smile, “I just wanted to make sure there was something you liked. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Oh, no it wasn’t a big deal,” Matt covered, realizing he had said something that made Ryder and me uncomfortable. “I’m just giving Ryder a hard time.” His easy grin was one I had seen on Ryder’s face probably a hundred times in our short friendship and I didn’t even think about it, I just returned it.
Nate cut back in, probably hoping to take the awkward attention off his son, “So you play the piano well, Ivy. Are your parents musical?”
“It’s just my mom,” I offered casually. “And she does play. It’s kind of a tradition in our family. She made me start when I was really young.”
“That’s great,” Nate nodded along. “I always appreciate when a parent takes solid interest in their children’s musical educations. She probably loves the band then? A practical use for all that talent, it’s got to make her proud.”
Unease filtered over my skin and I dropped my eyes to the plate of food I hardly touched. “Actually, my mom doesn’t really understand anything but the classics. I was classically trained with Bach and Mozart, she hates anything composed beyond the nineteenth century, save maybe for Sibelius.”
“Really?” Nate practically choked on his breakfast. “So she never let you play anything jazz? Blues? Contemporary?”
I hid a smile and shook my head. “Nothing current. And especially nothing jazz.”
“Just for the piano though, right?” Nate pressed and he seemed more like Ryder than ever before. “You’ve heard Gershwin? Duke Ellington?”
I gave him a blank look although I had heard the names before and his entire body sagged with the news. Ryder chuckled next to me and put a reassuring hand on my knee under the table. My heart started pounding double time at the small contact, but he simply squeezed my knee cap and then removed his hand like it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t a big deal- at all.
“You’ll have to forgive my brother,” Matt interrupted. “He’s a bit of a fanatic when it comes to contemporary music.”
“No kidding,” Ryder groaned.
All three men broke out into big smiles then. I shot Ryder a questioning look and he rolled his eyes before explaining, “I’m named after a Van Morrison song.”
“Oh,” I said like that explained everything. “What song?”
“Rough God Goes Riding,” Ryder tried to pretend like the song was annoying, but I caught the reverent tone to his voice as he spoke the title carefully.
“I’ve never heard of it,” I confessed.
“But you’ve heard of Van Morrison before, yeah?” Nate asked while his hands gripped at the table nervously.
“I mean sure,” I laughed at his reaction, “I’ve heard the name before.” Even though I didn’t even know if Van Morrison was one man or a full band.
Nate winced dramatically. And Matt burst into good natured laughter. “It’s alright big brother. Look, Ivy’s managed to escape the regurgitated pop bullshit culture her whole life and she seems to have turned out just fine.”
I turned to Ryder for some clarification. “Where my father obsesses over everything current and cool to the point he can karaoke to Gaga, my uncle shuns society as the harrying work of the devil,” Ryder paused dramatically and then finished with, “Except Tarantino films. We all find common ground with Tarantino.”
“Well, that’s the good Lord’s work, right there,” Matt grunted in approval and then shot me another wink.
“And I don’t obsess,” Nate defended. “I am just fascinated by the constant evolution of society. Music is continuously changing, growing…. moving, even if some think backwards. Human creativity is so interesting. And take your mother and me for a moment, how different our tastes are, our values. There is something in that, something worth studying.”
I sat spellbound, loving every word as it fell out of his mouth. He was so opposite of my world, so different and rebellious from anything I had been taught. In the circle you like the same thing everyone else likes, the same thing everyone else has liked forever. There are no individual opinions or tastes, there’s just what we always did, what was expected of us, what was commanded of us. Nix decided. Or our mothers decreed.
“I had no idea these guys were such hippies, I swear,” Ryder laughed and then pushed away from his plate. His arm went around the back of my chair and his fingers tapped out an unheard rhythm against the metal.
“Don’t let him fool you, Ivy,” Nate’s silver eyes twinkled at me from behind his glasses. “He’s proud of his old man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryder rolled his eyes. “Now please enough questions. I brought Ivy here to eat, let her eat.”
Nate and Matt grinned at each other sharing some secret that didn’t need to be said out loud. I chose to ignore them and Ryder’s hand as his fingers accidentally brushed across the top of my shoulder. I looked down at my plate and dug in.
Everything was amazing. I sighed happily as I shoveled the food into my mouth, not caring if I looked like a pig. My mother would have been so proud.
Or probably the opposite of proud.
Nate and Matt included Ryder in their conversation that seemed to jump all over the place without any clear direction. They talked about Matt’s classes this semester and I learned that he was older than most to be going to traditional university. But he had spent four years after high school traveling the world and then another two years after that working in Colorado just so he could afford to have a place to sleep, eat and snowboard as often as he wanted to. He finally moved here when Nate accepted the position at UNO and decided to start taking his life seriously. This was all shared in casual clips and phrases that I pieced together myself. I also learned that Nate’s dad not only taught music but also shared his love for soccer and he and Matt played in an indoor league together. Nate hated Omaha in the winter, but loved it summer through fall. He was disgustingly proud of both his brother and his son and had long ago decided that wherever Ryder wanted to go to college, he would just apply for a job there to both take care of tuition and stay close to Ryder. There was also a healthy mix of politics, upcoming plans for the week and a discussion about Batman versus Iron Man weaved in there.
By the time Matt stood up to start clearing the dishes I had never laughed so hard in my life. I hopped up to help with the dishes, but Ryder reached for my hand and tugged me back down. I landed half of my chair, my legs pressed into Ryder’s, his hand still gripping mine.
“This is always my job,” he explained in a soft voice. “If Matt’s offering, let him do it.”
“Ok,” I agreed. This close to Ryder, with so much of our bodies touching, I felt breathless, disorie
nted.
“Do you have time for a walk?” he asked, his thumb brushed a line across the palm of my hand and his knee pressed harder against my thigh. I felt slightly jostled as his knee bounced furiously up and down connected so tightly to me.
“Yes,” I answered before I actually looked at the time.
A crooked smile broke across his too handsome face and he met my eyes and held them for several moments. Neither of us said anything, or moved, and then everything quieted around us, or at least I felt like it did. The sounds of dishes clinking together in the sink ceased, his father and uncles voices faded away and then there was only my breathing and his as our chests lifted and fell in harmony.
“Ok, let’s go,” he breathed and then tugged me to my feet.
“Ok,” I heard myself say. And then I was following him out the door and ignoring every single rational protest that was screaming inside my head.
Chapter Thirty
We didn’t walk far, just up the last flight of stairs and to the roof of the building. The cement ceiling was flat and littered with gravel. The wind whipped, chilly and crisp across our faces. The sun was bright and warm this morning, in constant battle with the dropping temperatures of autumn.
Ryder let go of my hand when we were alone on the roof and walked to the far side. I followed. I didn’t have a choice but to follow. I was in way deeper than I wanted to be- than I should be.
He turned around once he reached the shoulder high wall barricade of the brick building. The tall wall kept us from having a great view of downtown but over the top of it I could see the trees from the mall all turned brilliant fall shades of orange and red and yellow and I could see the tops of all the biggest buildings, First National, the Holland Center, The Double Tree Hotel.
“I want to know, Ivy,” Ryder said simply in a way that seemed relaxed but sincere.
Tears pricked my eyes immediately. Whatever I said about Ryder, whatever I wanted to believe…. I liked his friendship, I valued it. And I liked him. This conversation was the beginning of the end. The death of everything beautiful between us.
The Rush (The Siren Series) Page 26
