Neck-deep in resentment, he still wanted her. Wholeheartedly.
She nodded at her brother. “Gracias, hermano. Come in, Aish.”
She held the door open for him and she smelled intoxicatingly good as he walked past her. She closed it and asked, “Can I get you a water?” looking at the minifridge instead of at him.
Feeling like he was trying to surf choppy waves, Aish shook his head.
Her suite was like his, a mix of rustic with its thick stone walls, cool terra-cotta floors, and heavy carved furniture blending with the luxury of white linens, silk embroidered pillows, and supple black leather. Her bedroom door was closed and Aish was glad; he didn’t need the distraction.
He took a seat on one end of the buttery leather sofa without being invited and she sat on the arm on the opposite side, putting her feet up on the seat. With his elbows on his knees and fingers clasped, he noticed the tip of an inked wave peeking out at his wrist. He adjusted his long-sleeve cuff to cover it.
She’d done him a favor by insisting he cover his tattoos. He’d never imagined that she wasn’t listening to the songs, hadn’t seen his tattoos, hadn’t known what they meant. He realized, only in the last few days, that part of his drive to become more famous than famous was so she would hear him, see him. So she would know.
Playing shirtless during the Super Bowl halftime had been easier than just picking up the damn phone.
Now he needed to keep his tattoos under wraps until... Well, until.
She broke up the silence with a sigh. “I’ve been searching for the words to tell you how sorry I am but I’m angry, too, so I go round and round and none of the words are right.” Her lightly accented voice was soft in the lamp-lit suite. “But I’m ashamed. I’m horrified with myself. I’m sorry I did that to you.”
Aish watched her with equal parts surprise and relief. She’d hunched over, crossed her forearms on her thighs, and she was looking down at her unpainted toes.
He wanted to cover them with his hand. “I think you just found the words,” he said.
“Just like that?” Her head came up, eyes meeting his. “I haven’t even said what I’m apologizing for.”
“For using me as your giant dildo,” he said and watched that divot appear between her brows, the skin so fine and soft there. “That was really fucking lousy, Sofia.”
He didn’t like to think about the time he’d spent in her cellar after she’d left, the lights on but all the warmth and air sucked out of the damning space. When his legs could carry him, he’d dragged himself to his room and argued with his hands and his cock, which wanted to keep the scent and tacky feel of her. Ultimately, he’d showered under blistering hot water and then called his mom. She’d filled the dead air once she realized that’s what he needed and didn’t offer to pass the phone to his dad.
Not like this, he wished he’d been strong enough to say to Sofia. Don’t take what we had and make it into this.
Her silence and distance after had been some kind of relief. She’d sent no scripts, dropped no new punishments, and had totally ignored him at workshops and meals. Devonte and Namrita had worried how the interns would perceive it—the international press was dancing with I-told-you-sos—but the interns seemed to think she was giving him an appropriate cold shoulder after a blowup fight. The group of adults seemed to be evenly split between “He was only trying to help,” and, as Amelia put it, “You’re getting what you deserve because she can speak for her damn self.” The interns believed #Aishia was moving along like any blooming relationship.
While Aish had also stayed silent, struggling with his own feelings of guilt, shame, and righteous pissed-offedness, her speeches hadn’t gotten less academic. But she did seem more present, more real. Which shone a big fucking spotlight on the fact that he needed to listen to her more.
“I’ve got to take some of the blame, too,” he told her. They were both hunched over, looking at each other. “That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t chased you down there.”
“I...” She cocked her head at him like she was trying to figure him out. “Thank you,” she said finally.
Her eyelashes were so pretty and long as she watched him. Her mouth curved down. “What I said, though, about you...about John...”
Aish clenched his fingers together.
“That was unnecessarily cruel. I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said it.”
I wish you were the one who’d died.
She might not have meant it, but he had. He’d considered it a couple of times during the worst days, an option that was good enough for John. And he’d veered away from it, instantly, when he remembered that he had unfinished business with her.
“It’s okay, Sofia,” he said. Both of their voices had gotten quieter. “I’m sorry for pushing you. You’ve got enough going on. I’m not gonna push anymore.”
Her lips fell open—surprise?—and, God, her mouth was soft and pink.
“This...this is going much differently than I imagined,” she said. “I thought I was going to have to grovel. I was angry at you for it and you weren’t even here.”
He huffed a light sound of amusement, not wanting to jar this space between them where their words floated like clouds.
As miserable as their fuck had been, part of his shame was that he wasn’t entirely sorry that it happened. There’d been something honest in the way their bodies had punished each other, working out a senseless decade of frustration. There was equal honesty in the gentleness of their apologies now.
They were separated by two leather cushions and ten years of getting it wrong.
“There’s other stuff I need to apologize for—”
She straightened like he’d slapped her.
“More recent stuff,” he fumbled quickly, sitting straight. “Non...breakup stuff.”
She looked a second from yelling for her brother.
“The song. ‘In You.’ That was a private song and I shouldn’t have let the label release it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. But she didn’t kick him out.
Ten years ago, she’d walked into a bar to find a girl on Aish’s lap with his tongue down her throat. And instead of apologizing, he’d told Sofia that maybe a breakup was for the best. He’d told her—after he’d promised that he needed her and that she could trust him—that he needed to focus on his music before he settled down.
Every time he’d tried to apologize for that now, it ended in disaster.
If he was really going to stop pushing her, he had to stop trying to force forgiveness out of her when she wasn’t ready to give it.
He couldn’t tell her, for example, that he’d written ‘In You’ during the rush of preparing for their first tour, a surprise invite that instigated the breakup. He couldn’t tell her that he wrote it already suspecting he’d made the worst mistake of his life.
Moonlit as I slide inside you
Back in the earth, you glow like a star
You call me your fuego, I call you my baby
Take me so deep, girl, I’ll never go far
“Why did you release it then?” she asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “When we turned in our first album, they said we didn’t have a hit. ‘In You’ was on my laptop. It...was discovered. By the time I showed up for the meeting the next morning, they were already freaking out about how great the song was and adding to our tour dates and John was so fucking happy...”
He grabbed his nape and squeezed. “Regardless, I should have pulled it. I should have said no.”
She looked at him closely. He stayed still and let her look, let her take him apart with her serious scientist eyes. As a kid, he’d never hid from her, but he’d never believed he had anything to hide. Now, he just wanted her to believe him. Being under the intensity of her gaze again also made him want to lower her to the Turkish ru
g and show her what fucking after ten years was supposed to look like.
“Yes. You should have pulled it,” she said simply. “Did John have anything to do with its discovery?”
The needle skipped on his dirty thoughts.
John had panicked and gone through Aish’s laptop to find a song to give to the label. Aish had planned on looking himself, or even recording overnight, but had been felled by a bout of food poisoning. When he’d walked into the label offices the next morning, still nauseous but prepared to beg for another day, he hadn’t known the laptop was out of his apartment.
He shrugged off her question now. “That doesn’t really—”
“John didn’t like me very much.”
“What?”
“I didn’t like him very much either.”
Equal and opposite emotions spiked in Aish: the fierce desire to defend his now-dead friend and the equally fierce desire to hang on to this moment with Sofia.
“What happened to him was a tragedy,” she said softly, as if she knew the words would hurt. “But I never trusted him. Maybe he wasn’t as good of a friend as you think. Are you sure he did nothing to bring about the plagiarism claims against you?”
Heart hammering, Aish stood. “He’s dead, Sofia.” He was not discussing this with her.
She kept her relentless eyes on him. “Yes. And people have accused you of pushing him toward it. You might be a lying, cheating, self-serving fame whore, but you were loyal to John. You would have never hurt him.”
Aish looked at her for a long moment and then gave a huff of a laugh. What the fuck else was he supposed to do? He slid his hands into his jeans pockets and walked toward her balcony doors, stood at the glass and stared out into the dark night.
The rumor had begun as seeds on Reddit boards and fan pages and the comment section of articles—easy-to-dismiss whispers that Aish had maligned, bullied, and shoved John into killing himself. They’d had no impact in the first sad months after John’s death. But when two bands announced that they had irrefutable proof that Young Son had stolen songs, the seeds took root. The thinking was that Aish had harassed his best friend into taking the fall for the plagiarism. People posted daily, expecting an announcement from Aish placing the blame at John’s feet.
While he would never do such a thing, hiding for a year had allowed the rumors to fester and grow.
It was up to Aish to make sure John Hamilton didn’t go down in history as a song-stealing, suicidal victim of his best friend’s jealousy.
And Sofia was wrong. He had hurt his best friend.
He wondered what proof she had against them. “All this shit we’ve been doing to each other, Sofia. Do we have to keep it up?” His words rang hollowly against the glass.
He could see her in the reflection. She studied his back, dipped briefly down to his ass before she looked away.
“No.” Her brow furrowed as if she was surprised by her response. “As long as you stick to your promise not to push me.”
He turned, hands still in his pockets, and leaned back against the glass. “I’m done with that,” he said. “But we’ve got to start working together. We’ve both got a lot of baggage that we need #Aishia to distract people from.”
She was quiet. Then she gave one decisive nod, her hair, now dry and showing all of its splendor of browns and golds, falling into her face.
What he wouldn’t give to push it back for her.
“Pero...pretend only,” she clarified, tucking her hair behind her ear. “What happened in the cellar isn’t going to happen again.”
“You really think I want that to happen again?”
He felt guilty when her eyes flickered with shame. She’d sincerely apologized. And he’d sincerely accepted it.
He pulled his hands out of his jeans and spread his arms. “Let’s hug on it.”
He’d gladly play the fool for her to watch her spine straighten, to watch her chin go up in that royal way that always flicked his Bic.
“Get out, Aish.”
He left her room with the first smile—small, begrudging, but real—that she’d given him in ten years.
September 16
Early the next morning, Sofia and Carmen Louisa sweated at Sofia’s desk while they studied the leaf water potential readings taken the previous night from the Bodega Sofia irrigated vineyards. Several vineyards were dry farmed; they relied entirely on rainwater. But those with irrigation had turned on the misting systems, hoping a light amount of water would keep the not-quite-ripe grapes from dehydrating or raisining. Too much water, and the grapes could bloat. The readings, which measured the water content in the vines’ leaves, told them they were getting close to the point when even irrigating would no longer be an option.
As Sofia wiped the sweat from her forehead in her winery—her supposedly temperature-controlled winery—she feared this heat wave would last beyond that point.
“And the temperature never went below twenty-four degrees last night,” Carmen Louisa said, crushing her wavy hair at her neck. “If we don’t get a break from the heat soon...” She flopped both hands down in her lap.
Sofia had never seen her so hopeless.
Years ago, when her brother was all but hiding in the United States, Carmen Louisa had been the principal grower who’d helped Sofia keep up the people’s flagging faith that he would one day return. Carmen Louisa had led the charge to pull out underperforming Tempranillo vines for Mateo’s new and improved breed, the Tempranillo Vino Real.
Sofia wondered if the faith the grower had always maintained for her prince was flagging for her princess.
“Weather reports predict cooling temperatures in two or three days...” Sofia said lamely.
Carmen Louisa didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Two or three days might be more time than they had. If the grape vines were stressed beyond a certain point, they would abort the fruit just to stay alive.
Sofia had drawn the eyes of the world to the Monte during a potentially disastrous growing season.
“Excellent!” Both Sofia and Carmen Louisa startled as a voice boomed in her office. “You both are here.”
Juan Carlos strolled into Sofia’s glassed-in office, a white hat set jauntily on his silver hair, a pale pink shirt unbuttoned dangerously low. His fingers and wrists were heavy with gold.
The black iron gate bearing her name might as well be invisible for how well it kept him out.
Juan Carlos saw the water readings on her desk. “Worried, señoritas?”
Pijo. Sofia gathered up the notes and tapped them into a neat pile as she held his eyes. “What do you want?”
“To free you from worry.” He flared his bejeweled fingers. “The Consejo will buy your growers’ fruit.”
Sofia stared stonily. “Our fruit isn’t for sale.”
Juan Carlos offered a price per kilo as if Sofia hadn’t spoken. The amount was twice what her winery would purchase the grapes for, which was discounted because the growers would receive a share of the winery’s profits, and significantly more than what any other buyer would pay.
The price was Juan Carlos’s bribe to lure her growers to finally abandon Sofia.
“That offer is only good until the sun goes down.” He looked straight at Carmen Louisa. “Wait much longer and you will have no fruit to sell.”
“My fruit isn’t even ripe.” Carmen Louisa scowled.
Juan Carlos shrugged. “You mix the raisined fruit with the under-ripe fruit, add in a little bit of this and that... My growers have already picked. We’ll send our workers to you.”
Since the first whispers of her winery, Juan Carlos and the Consejo had thrown every difficulty in her path to make her adhere to their winemaking rules that resulted in mediocre wine. And yet, he had the gall to stand in front of her and talk about adding this and that. He would follow the rules—aging in Frenc
h oak and bottling for the prerequisite years before release. And while the wine aged, he would throw in powdered tannin to add texture and beet sugar to help it ferment and Mega Purple to deepen the color, all artificial enhancements that the Tempranillo of the Monte del Vino Real didn’t need.
It was as much a crime to the integrity of wine as stealing notes and words were a crime to the integrity of music.
“I’m fortunate that none of my growers installed new vines,” he said, shaking his head. “Tragic what’s happening.”
Sofia commanded him to shut his mouth as she stood. “¡Cállate!”
They’d only begun installing the Tempranillo Vino Real a few years ago, so many growers had tender one-to three-year-old vines that were suffering in the heat. Crop insurance that covered devastating losses wasn’t available until vines were five years old. Her brother was getting as little sleep as she was, trying to come up with a solution.
He liked the old ways? Well she was princess and he was her subject. “Don’t mock our people because this heat wave fits your agenda.”
“My agenda?” Juan Carlos sneered. “We’re in this situation because of the crazy ideas of you and your brother. You strive to disrupt what has worked for six hundred years and our people suffer for it. I offer your growers a way out and you spit in my face. Maybe you shouldn’t be the one answering? Carmen Louisa, why don’t you share what I’ve said with your compadres. Let them decide who truly has their best interests at heart—the delusional princess who will let their fruit burn to feed her fantasy or the Consejo that has been caring for them for centuries.”
Sofia glared at him as she waited for Carmen Louisa’s response. And waited.
She swiveled her head to look at her friend. “Carmen Louisa?”
Finally, the grower said, “My answer will not change. The other growers will come to you themselves if their answers are different.”
Sofia didn’t have to look up to see the satisfaction coming off Juan Carlos. “Perfect. Remind them not to dawdle; they only have until sundown.”
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 15
