Jane had gone to bed with Legs an hour before. I was just trying to get my work finished so I could enjoy Spring Break. I put everything aside and folded my hands in front of me.
“Amalia wants me to come to Spain with her. Roland will be home for the next six weeks before he starts his next film. I want to go.” My heart jumped a little. How was I going to make it without her? We had a nice little rhythm, her, Jane, and I. Sure, Danny was coming home, but…
“Is this for good, or…”
“I don’t know. We want to have a commitment ceremony. We want Roland to officiate it.”
“Oh, Nora.” I jumped up from my seat and wrapped my arms around her.
She laughed and cursed my crazy-ass tears. “I’m not going to be gone forever. Calm down. We might split our time between here and Spain.”
“It’s not that. I’m just so happy that you are happy. Nora, I just want you to be happy.” She smiled at me and I was taken aback at how much younger and carefree she looked. Love had quite an effect on her.
“I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want to leave my home, my family, you guys…This is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. But she can’t be here full-time, not yet. I know our marriage could happen, but then there’s a green card, and—”
“Nora, weren’t you the one who told me to go with my gut and do what felt right? You love her. Do you have any doubts about that?”
She shook her head and her eyes welled up. “Not a one. I know it’s been fast, but she gets me. We’re just. Yeah. Happy.”
“Yeah. We’ll be fine. We’ll miss you like crazy.”
We hugged for a few more moments before she pulled away and collected herself. “I can recommend someone to come in and cook, you know, so you guys don’t starve.”
I swatted at her, used to being the butt of this joke. “We’ll be fine. We’ll figure something out. I suppose you and Danny will need to sort things out.”
Her smile slipped a little. “I hate to disappoint him.”
I knew what she meant. “He’ll get over it. Your happiness comes first.”
She thanked me and kind of scooted out of the room before she really started to cry. I hated that she had to choose like that. Once it sunk in, though, I kind of started to panic and my heart felt heavy.
Danny came home two days later and the two of them had a heated conversation. He was disappointed but did a good job of hiding it. He was more concerned with whether or not this woman was going to be good to her. He told her he wanted her to keep her cottage there for at least the rest of the year, until she’d really made a decision. He wanted her to have her home to come back to if things didn’t work out.
Amalia didn’t talk much to us because of the language barrier. She was painfully shy as well. She was younger than Nora, perhaps by a decade or more, and was breathtakingly beautiful with long dark brown hair and huge brown eyes. She cooked for us a couple of nights and Danny raved about her paella. Alex was there that night and had a very intense conversation with her in Spanish, which I had no idea he could speak so fluently. Later on he reassured us that he felt this woman was the real deal and that she truly loved Nora. That made Danny feel better about the situation. When they left in mid-April, we gave them a good send off. We’d all pretty much come to accept her absence as possibly permanent. Except Janey.
Janey didn’t talk much in those last two weeks Nora was home. She asked to go to the ranch more so she could be with Misty, and she avoided being alone with Nora. She barely talked to me except to fill me in on her school adventures. I worried how she would handle Nora’s absence. They were so close. I hated that another person was leaving her, but she needed to understand that this was a part of life, and that Nora wasn’t going to be gone for good. I got my opportunity to talk to her about it about a week after Nora and Amalia left. Ivana and I had planned to take the girls to a movie, but Janey told me when I picked her up from school that she just wanted to go home.
“Are you sick? Do you not feel well?”
She just huffed at me. “Do I always have to tell you everything? Jeez. I just don’t want to go, okay? Is that alright?”
Her attitude shocked me. She’d never spoken to me like this. “Jane,” I started slowly. “I would just like to know what to tell your friend and her mom, that’s all. You know you don’t have to tell me everything, but I hope you know you can tell me anything.”
Her scowl lessened. She gazed at me with her baby blues. “I’m sorry.” She began bawling in earnest. I pulled over and took her hand in mine.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me! I miss Daddy. I miss Nora. I feel like you’re the only one who’s there for me right now, and I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry, Jane. Your father can’t help his schedule, but I know he wishes he could be here more. You know you can call him anytime, right?” She nodded pushing her red locks behind her ears. “What about Sasha? Can’t you talk to her?”
She rolled her eyes. “All she wants to talk about is Gabriel. Ugh! I’m so sick of that name! I hope when I finally get a boyfriend, I’m not as stupid as she is. She makes me sick.”
I snorted. “Wow. Okay. I can only imagine she talks about him a lot? Gets all mushy when she thinks about him?” I held back my laughter thinking Jane should be used to this since her father and I were like this all the time.
“It’s just, really? He’s a boy. He’s a dumb boy, even. He sags his pants and acts like he’s all gangster. Dude, bro, you live in Beverly Hills, not Compton!”
I spit out the water I was drinking all over the dashboard. She’d developed quite the sarcastic wit and regularly had me in stitches. She carried on and on about her poor best friend and her “bae.”
“Oh, Janey. I really hope, for your sake, that Sasha has more patience when you experience your first crush, because, whoa.”
She laughed with me. “You’re right. I guess I’m just jealous. I don’t think boys will ever ask me out.”
I patted her hand. “Jane, you are so beautiful and smart that I’m sure they are all intimidated. Plus, there’s your dad. What about the boy that was here at the Halloween party?”
She blushed and bit down on her lip. “We text a lot. His name is Carson. But I don’t know if he likes me for sure. He has a band. He says he wants to play guitar together sometime.” She told me all about young Carson Riley for the remainder of the drive. We seem to have crossed a bridge, one I knew we’d revisit from time to time. It was up to me to be there for her no matter what.
In all of this insanity, my health had remained better than ever. My pain was completely manageable and I had a lot more flexibility in my joints, especially in my hands and feet. I was dancing more and more with the kids at the studio and I felt great. Jane was still taking classes, but she’d decided to only do it through the summer. She was going to be joining a team at her barn to compete in equestrian events in the fall. She’d need to practice four days a week and there would be shows at least one or two weekends a month, with travel involved. I was beginning to worry that trying to handle Jane’s busier schedule without Nora here would be too much for me and thought perhaps I needed to take a leave from teaching the next year. It was just a thought in its infant stage, but one I planned to discuss with Danny.
God, I missed him at times like this. He wasn’t due home for another two weeks, and then only for a weekend before heading out for the month of May. He’d pop in maybe three days altogether for that month. Blackened was headlining the World’s Loudest Month festivals all over the Midwest and southern states. The album was doing fantastic and the guys were flying high, excited to be at this peak in their career. I heard Blackened tunes everywhere I went. It was crazy. My students asked about it a few times, but I never discussed much more than to say yes, we were engaged and no, I didn’t know when we were getting married.
Cosmo was finally getting around pretty good. He and Jinx were living together in a
house out in Malibu. They’d decided the beach was more their speed and the ocean was “inspiring some deep grooves, baby.” Legs and I visited them occasionally, but the chicks in bikinis hanging around were a bit much for me to tolerate. It seemed the party had followed them, even if they weren’t drinking or using any drugs of any kind anymore. They both agreed to stay clean after their near-death experiences. Sam and Johnny were long gone. No one had heard from them. Danny assured them that he would help them shop around their demo when they were ready.
Patricia had taken a few months to get herself back together, and when she returned to Slade, she told them she wanted to focus solely on Blackened. She needed to ease back into it and didn’t want to be chasing the little boys all over the globe that kept getting thrown at her. She was just so good at what she did. They all wanted to work with her. She started to spend more time at our house, eating dinner with us and just hanging out like “a normal girl.” She was fast becoming the best girlfriend I’d ever had. She had even smoothed things over with Max.
“How can I stay mad at the guy? If he wasn’t getting off getting me off, then he needed to go find someone to get him off, right?” It had taken her a while, but her healthy outlook was impressive. I didn’t think I could be that forgiving.
All of this chaos, or normal everyday life in the Blackenedverse, made time go by so quickly. Before I knew it, it was the end of May and school was almost finished. One morning I woke up and just realized that hey, I’d been a part of Danny’s life for a year. A whole year of my life had gone by in the blink of an eye. And oh what a year it had been! So many surprises. So much love. So many changes. It was a Friday morning and I had nothing on the agenda today, except to maybe do some grading, but that didn’t appeal to me right now.
I walked through the library and decided my desk needed some uncluttering, a task I often did when I was avoiding paperwork. I picked up a stack of books to return to the shelves and as I made my way across the room, the top two slid off. The one left on top was now Romeo and Juliet.
Memories assaulted me of reading the play to Danny and Alex over on the couches near the fire last summer. Danny and I were both struggling with our feelings for each other at the time so we’d needed Alex to chaperone. Ours was a forbidden love…Just like Shakespeare’s characters experienced. Luckily the obstacles standing in our way were fairly easily overcome: Janey’s approval, my job, Danny’s Mr. Bossypants persona. We’d had a rocky road during our second act, during which we almost let our fears and other people’s opinions tear us apart. Once we committed to each other, we gained the strength to fight. Our final act remained to be played out. Would we finally have our fairy tale wedding and live happily ever after? Or would we be doomed like Romeo and Juliet? Morbid thinking had no place on this sunny morning. I picked up the books and slipped them back into their places on the shelves lovingly. I was not about to dwell in the dark when Danny and I had so much light.
Speaking of light, the day was much too nice to be hiding indoors with deep thoughts. I wandered out to the backyard to have some cuddle time with our enormous puppy. She joined me on a lounge chair, meaning I had barely any space for my legs, and we both sighed happily.
My cell phone rang and I picked it up with a smile. “Hey, baby.” I always looked forward to calls from Danny. I hadn’t seen him in a week and he and “the guys” weren’t due back for another few days. I believed. I had a hard time keeping track of his schedule when he was on the road. Hearing his voice yanked on that tether between us, no matter how far away he might be.
“Honey, I need you to do something for me,” he said hurriedly.
I sat up from the lounge chair, kicking Legs in the behind in the process. “Oh, sorry girl.” She was so huge now. At a year old, she was one hundred and twenty pounds of scruffy looking love. I scratched behind her ears and kissed her nose. “What do you need?”
I walked into the house as I listened to his instructions. “Grab the copy of Riders on the Storm off the shelf in the library. I need you to take it to Roland at Universal. He’s seeing Robbie Krieger this evening and he wants to have it autographed.”
It seemed kind of silly that Roland would go to all of that trouble, but Danny had told me what a huge Doors fan Roland was. Since Robbie was the only surviving member of the band, I supposed it was a sentimental gesture.
“Now, you’re going to have to take the studio tour to get there. Just let the driver know you need to get off at the spot where the offices are. Tell them you are going to meet Roland. It’s too late for me to get you a pass to get you onto the lot through the regular means. Just hurry, okay? Roland was very insistent he needed it and I hate to keep him waiting.”
Danny was acting so weird! He didn’t even say “I love you” before hanging up on me. I shook my head. “Well, Legs, looks like I’ve got a mission. You hold down the fort.”
We’d installed fencing around the pool and the back of the property so that Legs could have free range through the backyard. She even had her own entrance into the house. It made me feel so much safer with Danny gone. I’d refused his security guy at the house full time, but I knew his guy, Bob, patrolled out front. I’d seen him. One night I even brought him coffee, which he thanked me for, and we talked for a long time. He made me promise not to tell Danny he wasn’t being inconspicuous. It was our little secret, as were the several other nights I took him food and drinks to keep him from being too bored on his long shifts.
I grumbled about having to change out of Danny’s boxers and t-shirt and slipped into one of my new dresses Patricia had pushed me to buy the last time she took me shopping. The hem of the ivory dress was just short of knee length with embroidery on the bodice. I threw my hair up into a bun and added a dab of eye makeup just so I didn’t look tired. My skin was very tan from all the time I spent in the backyard with Janey and Legs. I used sunscreen, but this was the darkest I’d ever been. The Vitamin D was good for me.
I drove quickly but safely to Universal Studios, trying not to get too irritated with the traffic at this late morning hour. I arrived at ten thirty and used my season pass to get into the park. I walked through to the back where the several-story-high escalator took me down to the bottom level where the studio tour was. The park was not very crowded today since most of the kids were still in school. I was able to walk right up to the front of the line.
“Excuse me,” I said to the attendant at the front of the line. “My name is Jesse Martin and I’m supposed to meet with Roland Curtis. My fiancé, Danny Black, told me to take this tram to the offices”
“We don’t stop the tour for visitors to get off. You’ll have to call and make an appointment.”
I frowned. I clutched my bag with Roland’s book a little tighter. “I promised I would get this to Mr. Curtis, is there any way you can—”
“Ma’am? If you want to ride the tour, you’ll ride the whole tour. Do you understand?”
Wow. This woman was good. But my teacher voice was tougher. “I understand. Thank you for your assistance,” I said tersely.
The gates opened and I walked up to the tram, thinking I might be able to speak to the driver. Unfortunately, I was elbowed out of the way by a group of tourists from Germany or the vicinity. There were about ten of them and they were all talking loudly and laughing as they cut in front of me and took up the two rows between the driver and me.
I growled in frustration and tried to figure out what to do. The screens at the front of the tram came to life and there was Jimmy Fallon doing a very goofy introduction. A very friendly-sounding young woman took over the tour guide duties, but I couldn’t see her well from where I was sitting.
“We will be passing through the set of a pilot being filmed today, so be sure you watch for my cue when it’s time to be quiet.” She chatted amiably about the history of the tour and all of the most recent films being shot there on the lot.
Our tram wound its way through warehouses and then we passed the cute bungalows where I was
supposed to get off. I even saw a sign marking Roland’s parking place. I contemplated jumping off, but didn’t want another run in with security or police. Vegas had been enough for me, thank you very much. My life of crime was over.
The guide’s cheerful voice was starting to really grate on my nerves. If she pretended to be surprised by one more thing, I was going to snatch the mic out of her hand and beat her with it. I leaned back against the seat and groaned as we made our way onto the water where Jaws was about to come up and snap at the German tourists’ unsuspecting feet. They all whooped and hollered when the shark came up and cheered wildly.
The next stop was the set from the Grinch film, the brightly colorful buildings now dirty and gritty like a ghost town. It was a little creepy in the daylight. Around the next bend was the Bates Motel set, but the tram stuttered to a halt before we rounded the corner of the building.
“I’m sorry, folks. It seems like we have a special guest on this tram. Is there a Jesse Martin on board?”
Startled, I looked around before raising my hand timidly. The guide smiled brightly and said, “Wonderful. Everyone say hello to Jesse.” I was greeted in German, Spanish, and even Japanese by a group in the back row. I waved to them all and then looked back at the guide with a puzzled expression.
“Miss, would you please come with me?” Another guide was now standing at the side of the tram. His hat covered his face, but his build seemed familiar.
I took the hand and stepped down off the tram. I looked up into Cosmo’s face. “What are you doing here,” I asked in a whisper. The giggling on the tram and the curious voices had me feeling really uncomfortable.
Cosmo took my hand and wrapped it around his arm. “Right this way,” he said with a wink.
His hair had grown into a mop of curls that framed his face, but right now it was tucked under a silly looking Safari hat. He walked me down the dusty trail a bit to the edge of the building where my father stood, dressed in the same silly uniform, smiling brightly with a bouquet of roses in his hand. He pulled me into a hug, not holding back his strength. I felt something pop in my back.
Teacher: The Final Act (A Hollywood Rock n' Romance Trilogy #3) Page 19
