Far Too Tempting

by Lauren Blakely

  He takes a step closer. “You know that’s not true. Please tell me you know that’s not true.”

  I hold up a hand, try to speak. Take a breath. Try again. “It is true,” I say. “It’s clearly true. You didn’t want me. You only wanted access.”

  He takes a step closer. This time he reaches for my sunglasses with both hands and pushes them up on my head. He looks me in the eyes, and I can’t hide anymore. He won’t let me look away. I have no choice but to face him.

  “I’m not doing the book,” he begins.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to do the book. I called Alicia, that’s her name, the agent, and told her I wasn’t interested. You’re more important to me than a book. You’re more important to me than a story. You’re the most important person in the world to me.”

  “I am?” I ask, in utter disbelief. There’s no way this can possibly be true.

  “You are,” he says, and there’s no teasing, no toying, none of the usual banter. “And I fucked up. I should have told you sooner, but I’m so used to keeping these firm lines with my work and protecting what I’m writing. And I’m sorry. I am truly, deeply sorry. I never want to hurt you. The last thing I want is for you to think this isn’t real,” he says gesturing from him to me. “It’s completely real, and completely true. I was going to tell you about the book, Jane. I know it seemed like I was keeping secrets from you and you thought I was using you, and I feel terrible that I didn’t tell you sooner. I feel so absolutely awful that I could kick myself in the face,” he says, and I nearly laugh because I’ve thought about face-kicking myself at times too. “The truth was I didn’t think it was a big deal. The book, that is. Because it’s not a big deal to me. Alicia phoned me one day out of the blue. She’d been reading my columns and she wanted to see if I would be interested in writing a book. And I’d never thought about it before. So that’s why I bought Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Facebook Page that night I saw you at An Open Book. But I could barely make it through. You know me, I prefer fiction.”

  “You’re a fiction fanatic,” I say, softening a bit. Then I realize I’m suddenly speaking on his behalf, explaining his desires, his likes, his dislikes. This does not go unnoticed by Matthew. The sliver of a smile forms on his mouth.

  “In any case, I finally finished the book the day of your show. At the Knitting Factory,” he adds, to jog my memory. But I have a crystal-clear recollection of that show. Every single solitary second of it from start to finish. “And I talked to Alicia that afternoon and said I might be interested in something that explored the indie music business. So we tossed around some ideas. I mentioned I was doing this story with you, she liked the idea, and then I told her I’d have to see how you felt.”

  “You wanted to see how I felt about it?” I narrow my eyes, as if I can somehow dissect the truth better this way.

  “Yes, which you made pretty clear earlier this week,” he says, playfully. I am reminded of one of the many reasons I love Matthew—the way he teases, the way he knocks things down a few notches, even in the middle of a serious moment. “Nevertheless, I was going to ask you at the show, but then as soon as I walked into the dressing room…” Matthew’s voice trails off, the corners of his lips curling up.

  I look at him expectantly, fighting back a smile too. “As soon as you walked into my dressing room,” I say, making a rolling gesture with my right hand, prompting him to pick up where he left off.

  “You looked so gorgeous and I wanted you so much and I had to tell you I was madly fucking in love with you,” he says and holds his hands out wide. “And because of that I honestly forgot about the book and everything else.”

  Goose bumps rise on my skin, and I want to banish them so I can be mad. I want to shoo them away, but I can’t, because he’s melting me again. Like he’s always done. “You wanted me so much you forgot about everything else,” I repeat, letting the sheer enormity of that statement, of the sentiment, register. He wanted me so much he couldn’t think straight. Ever since the first night he kissed me I have felt wanted by him. But to be wanted that much, to be loved that much…

  It’s completely the opposite of my marriage and completely wonderful.

  These are the quiet compromises people make to be together. These are the tentative dances of a new relationship, the tender moves of new hearts coming together, awkwardly at times. These are the secrets a relationship can sustain because they are secrets that are no longer hidden.

  “Yes, I wanted you. I want you. I love you. I am completely crazy about you, Jane, and it’s bloody hell without you. So I came here to tell you that. To tell you I was never using you. To tell you that you mean more to me than a book, than an article. To tell you I can’t stand the thought of never kissing you again, and the only thing worse than not kissing is not being able to be with you,” he says so softly, so sincerely that I find myself inching closer to him.

  I remember the first night Matthew kissed me when I felt the world slip away. His words today mean a thousand times more. This is a man who told me he was falling in love with me without any expectations. This is a man who came all the way to Maine to tell me that again. This is a man who told his boss he was falling for me. This is the man who held back until I insisted that I had to have him.

  Until I broke down his resistance.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Why are you sorry?” he asks curiously.

  “Because I made it impossible for you to hold out. That day in the park after we saw Goos Mom. Remember?”

  He laughs. “Yeah, I remember that day. Every single detail.”

  “I knew you were trying to behave, and I wouldn’t let you.”

  “Oh my God,” he says, and runs his hand down my arm. “Are you kidding me? I am so glad you didn’t behave. I am so glad you took me back to my place and seduced me.” He leans close to me, rests his forehead against mine. “Please let me kiss you again. I can’t take it. I can’t stand this. Do whatever you want. Objectify me again. I can’t stand not being with you.”

  Objectify.

  There it is again, and the word echoes louder this time, coming back to me. Louder, clearer, and I can very nearly hear the lyrics, the words that should follow the chorus. They’re sounding low in the back of my brain, but they’re there.

  I place my hands on his stubbly jawline, loving the feel of him, but needing to resist. “But if you kiss me, I won’t want to stop.”

  “I know. That’s the point. Let’s not stop. Let’s not stop anything. Let’s just keep going,” he says, imploring me, and I am aching to give in.

  There’s something I need to do first, though.

  I take a deep breath, then tell him my whole truth. “I thought I had to end things with you. I was thinking about breaking up with you,” I say, each word coarse and calloused on my tongue.

  He tenses and pulls back. “I had a feeling you were. When Jeremy suggested it.”

  I bite my lip briefly, hating to admit this, but knowing I have to be honest with him. “I thought I had to leave you to write. But I couldn’t go through with it. And once I knew I couldn’t go through with it, I started to write again. Not much, but it was something, and I finally started to connect with music…but then the possibility of the book made me sure I had to go back to breakup songs.”

  “Do you have to return to breakup songs?” he asks, his voice pocked with nerves.

  I close my eyes for a moment, listening hard. I can make out the faintest sounds, and I think I might know where to find the music I’ve been missing.

  I open my eyes. “No.” I hold up my right index finger. “But there’s some place I have to be right now.”

  …

  “You finally came to sign your picture.”

  Haley’s walking toward me, looking like he stepped out of my memory perfectly intact. He’s still wearing the same tan cowboy boots, the same diamond-stud earring, and the same getup—jeans and a jean jacket. He h
as crow’s feet around his eyes and his hair is speckled with gray, but other than that he could be a photograph of Haley from many years ago.

  We exchange the obligatory small talk: how are the kids (his are twenty-five and twenty-seven now), how’s the Grammy holding up (fabulous, of course), is he nervous or thrilled to be performing tonight (a little of both). He expanded his shop in the last few years, he tells me, adding more drums and keyboards when the yogurt shop closed down and he “annexed it.” Used to pump frozen yogurt, now pumps tunes.

  He pulls a guitar from the wall. It’s a Les Paul, fire-engine red, and it looks hot. Some teenage boy in a garage band is going to love it. “Want to hear this baby?”

  He strokes the Les Paul lovingly and plugs it into an amp. Then he plucks out the opening chords for “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix.

  “I can’t pick up a guitar without playing that, even though Hendrix was a Fender Strat man.”

  “The Gods of Music are commanding you,” I say, quickly getting to the reason I’m here.

  He points the neck of the guitar toward me, smiling and nodding.

  “Speaking of. What do you do, Haley, if you feel like you’re at odds with them?”

  “You having a disagreement with the Gods of Music there, Jane?”

  I hold up my thumb and index finger so there’s just an inch of space between them. “A wee little one. Been going on for a few months now. But I think it might be ending. I wanted to talk to you first though. I want to understand fully what you taught me when I was younger.”

  He puts the guitar on the shelf, patting it once, and ushers me outside. We sit on a bench outside his store. He’s not in a rush, so he looks up at the sky, then the parking lot, then me. “The Gods of Music give you your gift, right?”

  I nod.

  “And you need to respect that like I told you when you were younger.”

  “Right.”

  “But, Jane, they don’t exist to have disagreements with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He places his hands on his legs, tilting his face to the sun, warm this clear April day as it descends into its sunset. “They’re guides, they’re there to help you, not to tell you what to do.” He scratches his chin, then continues. “They hover in the background, they linger, waiting for you to find inspiration wherever you need to find it. Then they help you along.”

  I look toward the sun; the orange disc skips like a stone lower in the sky. “Wherever I need it?” I ask, arching an eyebrow, eager to hear him confirm what I’ve been thinking. “So I could find it elsewhere?”

  “You can find it in front of you. You can find it behind you. It can be whatever you want it to be. You’re not always going to find it in the same place.”

  I nod, and it makes sense. I’m starting to understand the inkling of a song that’s been forming in my head. I’m starting to see that the music is coming from all around me.

  Not just in a little corner of my heart. But in my whole heart.

  “What I am saying is they don’t control you,” Haley continues. “They don’t tell you what to do. They aren’t in charge. You are. And if something is getting in the way of making music, get it out of the way. And I suspect that you might be getting in your own way. So get out of your own way and listen to what the Gods of Music have for you.”

  “Really?”

  Haley erupts into a torrent of laughter, slapping my thigh with his hand. “Jane, you’re overthinking this.” He stands up, spreading his arms wide, holding his hands up toward the sky. “The music will come to you when you are ready for it. And when it does the Gods will be there to help you. Let them channel you. Let them use you. Let them help you when they wake you up in the middle of the night.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  But it’s not the Gods of Music who rouse me at three in the morning. It’s Hammerstein, the oldest of the border collies. He’s licking my face, asking to be let out to pee. I wonder why he doesn’t wake my mom. He’s practically her familiar, following her wherever she goes. He even came to the show tonight, hanging out backstage, curling up his little black-and-white body in the wings, knowing the routine from years of practice.

  If I don’t get up, he’ll spend the rest of the night pacing back and forth around my bed. I pull on a sweatshirt and follow him downstairs. When we reach the front door, he nudges my sneakers. I stick my feet into them, push open the door, and let my mom’s dog outside. He stands on the front porch, then runs a couple circles around me as if he’s herding me.

  “Fine. I’ll come with you.”

  We walk down the steps and into the yard, padding across the grass, thick and spongy. The last vestiges of winter remain in the form of scattered spots of hard, packed snow from a few days ago. The snowfall that blanketed Manhattan hit the whole Eastern Seaboard, too. Crunching through a small patch, I follow him, enjoying the sound of the snapping beneath me.

  Then Hammerstein starts yapping, high-pitched yapping, right there in the middle of the yard. I shush him, but he doesn’t listen. He turns up the volume, transforming his yap into a full-throttle bark, before he takes off for the lake in a sprint. His tail is a blur, his legs cyclones. As he races to the edge of the water, I picture Matthew’s dog chasing the poodle in Central Park. Only Hammerstein isn’t chasing another dog; he’s interested in a family of geese swimming along the lake’s edge, taking a moonlight dip. When he skids to a stop, continuing his battle cry, they scatter, flying away, their brown bodies soon blending into the dark night sky so I can no longer see them.

  Content with his work for the evening, Hammerstein trots back toward me, stopping along the way to push his nose against something. He prods it some more until I can see it’s a green apple. He knocks the apple one more time, displaying the half-eaten side. My dad must have eaten it for lunch some afternoon. Then tossed it into the yard instead of the garbage can, preferring to leave food for squirrels rather than add to landfills.

  I’m ready to return to the front door, but the border collie scurries to the back of the house. I follow him to our sprawling back porch, where he quickly spreads out on the wood, his back legs stretched straight behind him and his front legs crossed. I sit next to him in one of my dad’s signature deck chairs, and watch the moon. After a minute in the quiet, the cool of the night, with no sounds but Hammerstein’s breathing and my own breathing, I start to feel the slats on the back of the chair making their mark against my back.

  Just like they do at home in New York. When I sit on my deck in the same chair, this chair’s doppelganger. When I sit on my lucky deck.

  My lucky deck. My lucky deck.

  Suddenly, I sit up straight. I start humming, very softly, practically under my breath. The words are there, the music is there, the melody is there.

  I’ve got a lucky deck of cards tonight…

  It’s rough and it’s just a few words but I kind of like it, and it’s kind of me. I do have a lucky deck. I do have a lucky life. I am a lucky gal, and I now have the start of another song.

  “Want to go inside, girl?”

  Then it hits me. Hammerstein isn’t a girl; he’s a boy. But I’m thinking of The Doctor chasing the poodle in the park when I told Matthew I wanted to break down his resistance, and then the half-eaten apple here and the sun-kissed fruit Matthew extolled at the farmer’s market, and then the patches of crunchy snow here and the fresh, falling stuff from when I told Matthew I was writing again.

  Suddenly words and notes and melodies and bits and pieces of songs are crashing around in my head, clanging their symbols, beating their drums, like a symphony, a chorus. I don’t even try to parse them out, I just let them come rain down on me—the sounds of a voice, a girl and a phantom, neurons and synapses, wisps and fingertips. Glorious, brilliant sounds and chords ringing in my head over and over and over.

  All the sounds of the last few days that were playing faintly in my head are now loud and clear.

  I feel like that girl in a music v
ideo. She stands outside in a bright green field, holding her arms out like she’s flying. She turns in circles, her face to the sky, the summer rain beating down on her, a smile as wide as the sea. She’s getting soaked to the bone and she doesn’t care. She’s happy, deliriously happy.

  I bend down and kiss Hammerstein on his wet black nose. Tonight Hammerstein is a true guide dog. He helped me get out of my own way.

  I bounce back inside through the back door, Hammerstein at my heels, and head into my mother’s study, clicking on her computer to look up flights from New York to Portland tomorrow. Then I buy a ticket and reach for the phone. I call the one person I can call anytime of day, anytime of night.

  He answers, with nary a trace of sleep in his voice. His mantra is “I’ll sleep when I’m dead and until then there’s caffeine.”

  “Hi, Mom. Everything okay?”

  “Owen, it’s me.”

  “The prodigal son returns. Well, daughter.”

  “Guess what you’re doing tomorrow.”

  “An ‘I’m sorry’ would be nice.”

  “I’m sorry. Really sorry. Terribly sorry. I’ll make it up to you somehow, I promise. I’ll get you a lifetime membership to Starbucks or something. But for now, I need you to come to Portland tomorrow. I booked you on the nine o’clock flight. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “Jesus, Jane. I’ll have to get up at six thirty to get to LaGuardia on time.”

  “I booked you first class and there’s a town car coming to your place to give you a ride. Just put on a ball cap and roll.”

  I hang up the phone, but I don’t go to sleep. Instead, I root around in my bedroom closet, hunting quietly for the old acoustic, so the rattling won’t wake Ethan. I find it on a shelf in the back, a little bruised, its body bearing the scratches of time. I pull it down, then head back to the deck. Hammerstein follows me.

  I tune the guitar, a task that takes several minutes due to its long-time lack of use. But once I start plucking at the strings, they sound just the same. They make music just the same. So I stay up all night, writing songs, sometimes scraps of songs, sometimes a refrain, sometimes an open. The sun rises, pink and shimmery over the lake and I keep playing. I’m not even remotely tired. I am beyond energized.