My Song for You: A Pushing Limits Novel

by Stina Lindenblatt

  I expected Callie to correct his sentence, but she didn’t this time. She laughed again. “You’re right. Balloons are much better.”

  Logan took the balloon from me and grabbed my hand. “I show you my room.” He led me away, but not before I caught Callie worrying her lip again.

  The bedding in his room was bright green, as was the rug covering the light gray carpet. An oversized soccer-ball-shaped cushion lay on the floor. On the wall behind the head of the bed, a soccer goal had been painted with trees in the distance and a blue sky behind it. Scattered on the floor was an assortment of toys.

  “Do you like it?” Logan asked, clearly proud of his room.

  “It’s very nice. Did your mom paint that?”

  He nodded. “Mommy’s an artist.”

  “I know. She’s a very talented artist.”

  “Thanks,” Callie said behind me, voice so soft I almost missed it.

  She was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed on the painted walls but her gaze far away. It was as if she was somewhere else. Another time. Another place.

  “Weren’t you planning to eventually work at Pixar?” I asked.

  Her gaze flicked to Logan and the sad smile said it all. She had planned to work there, but then she’d had Logan and everything changed.

  Unlike Alexis, Callie hadn’t aborted her baby, even if he had put an end to her dreams.

  Logan was so busy with the balloon, he missed the look on his mom’s face. When he glanced up at her, she was all smiles again for him.

  “I decided being a graphic designer was a better career choice. More job opportunities.”

  That was probably true, but I suspected that before Logan came along, it wouldn’t have made a difference. She would’ve found a way to survive until her big chance came. She’d never been into expensive things. None of that mattered to her, as long as she was happy. Which was why her choice of furniture was not what I would’ve expected.

  “So you work for a company?” I knew zero about graphic design.

  “Maybe one day, or I can work freelance. Right now I’m working on my degree and doing freelance work on the side. Mostly covers for a few romance authors, designs for their website banners. Swag. Stuff like that. Nothing major, though.”

  The enthusiasm she used to have whenever she talked about her dreams was missing. It sounded like her career choice was a chore. It was just a job for her, nothing more.

  “Where’re you studying?”

  “The Academy of Art University.”

  “Isn’t that in San Francisco?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise that I remembered. “Yes, but I was able to switch over to graphic design and take the program online.”

  “Switch?”

  Her eyes widened even more. “I should finish getting ready for the party. Mrs. Rogers will be over soon.” She didn’t give me a chance to say anything else. She was already out the bedroom door.

  Logan showed me around his room, signing the names for the various items.

  “What’s the sign for dog?” I pointed to his balloon.

  He attempted to snap his fingers then patted his leg. I repeated the action and was rewarded with one of his contagious grins. He continued showing me his stuff, and I practiced the signs he showed me. I had no idea why I was bothering. It wasn’t like I needed to know them, or like I would even remember them beyond today. But it was fun watching his reaction when I got a sign right and when I purposely screwed it up just to see him giggle.

  As Logan showed me his favorite picture book, a loud knock came from the front door. He didn’t even glance up at the noise.

  A moment later, a woman in her early sixties entered the bedroom. She was dressed in a light blue blouse and navy pants, her gray hair skimming her shoulders. Logan tossed his book aside and hurled his small body across the room to her. She barely had enough time to react before his arms wrapped around her legs.

  She laughed and hugged him back. “Hi, Logan. I see you have a visitor.” Her gaze swept over me, but not in the same way groupies and fans checked me out. I’d seen this look before, back when my parents had interrogated my sister’s old boyfriends before deciding if the guys were worthy enough to date her.

  Apparently I met the woman’s standards. She nodded to some unspoken question in her head and smiled at me.

  “Jared, this is Mrs. Rogers,” Callie said from the doorway.

  “You can call me Sharon,” the woman said.

  “Jared’s an old friend of mine from when we were kids.” Callie bit her lip again and suddenly looked like she longed to be anywhere but here, with me. I’d been getting the same vibe from her since bumping into her at the store.

  Sharon’s face brightened as she looked between me and Callie. “Oh, is that so?”

  Before I could figure out what she meant, Logan blurted out, “Look at balloon he gave me.”

  Sharon bent down to Logan’s level. “Did Jared give you this balloon?”

  He nodded. “And his friend has dog. I want dog.”

  “His friend has a dog.” She emphasized the “a.” “I didn’t know you wanted a dog.” Again she emphasized the “a.” I could easily see her as a teacher in another lifetime.

  “Yes, I do. And he has flowers.”

  “I see that. They’re pretty flowers. I bet your mom likes them.”

  “They’re for you,” Callie blurted out in a way that came off as comical.

  “How sweet. I haven’t had a gentleman give me flowers in years.” She winked at me. I chuckled and handed her the bouquet. They were my mom’s favorite spring flowers, so I’d figured Sharon might like them too.

  We returned to the living room. Callie and Logan had been busy decorating for the party. Clusters of silver and purple helium balloons were tied to the backs of the chairs set around the elegant dinner table. The pair had also painted a birthday banner, with Logan’s handprints scattered over it.

  The table itself hadn’t been ignored either. Purple and silver streamers curled around every available space. The Callie I remembered loved birthdays, and it looked like nothing had changed since she had grown up.

  And for the first time in who knows how long, I realized how much I’d missed her. How much I missed her curiosity, her determination, her generosity. The last time I’d seen her was when I had been visiting my family for our weekly dinners. She’d been walking along the sidewalk near her house with a group of seventeen-year-old girls. All giggled when they saw me, except for Callie, who had turned bright red.

  “So what do you do, Jared?” Sharon asked as we sat. Logan was next to Sharon. I took the only other available spot, next to Callie.

  “I’m a musician.”

  “He plays drums in a rock band,” Logan said.

  “Actually, it’s guitar.” I’d tried playing Mason’s drums once. After he’d stopped howling with laughter, he told me to not quit my day job and to leave drumming to the professionals. I hadn’t thought I was that bad, but the guys’ expressions had suggested otherwise.

  Sharon nodded, the corners of her lips curling down slightly. “Are you any good?”

  “He’s brilliant.” Callie’s face reddened, and she busied herself with serving the pizza.

  An odd sensation in my chest stirred at her words. She wasn’t the first person who had told me something along those lines when it came to my guitar playing. Groupies and fans said it all the time. But somehow hearing her say it felt different. Like her opinion meant more to me than anyone else’s did, including the critics.

  Shit, what was I even thinking? Callie was just an old childhood friend.

  A friend with a young child, a complication I didn’t need.

  An incredibly sexy friend whom I suddenly wanted to get to know better, and not in the same way it had been between her sister and me. I wanted to get to know more about the woman she had become.

  Chapter 4

  Callie

  “He’s brilliant.” Even back when he was first learning to p
lay the guitar and hit more wrong notes than right ones, I’d loved listening to Jared. His excitement for the instrument, which his parents had given him for his fourteenth birthday, had been contagious. I was his first groupie and the president of his fan club. A very exclusive fan club, with me as the only member.

  Later, after he started dating my sister, I’d remained his biggest fan. Luckily for me, he hadn’t minded me sitting in his room while he strummed on his baby. It was always just him and me, the only time I got Jared to myself.

  A memory revisited of when I’d been seventeen and he’d straddled me from behind to reposition my fingers on the strings in the correct chords. His body had been pressed against mine, his subtle scent doing all kinds of crazy things to me. I had been close to tossing the guitar onto the bed and kissing him. That was the first time I’d realized my attraction toward him, an attraction I’d never told anyone about.

  My body heated at the memory. Needing a distraction, I grabbed pizza from the box and placed the slice on Logan’s Winnie-the-Pooh plate. And because my body hadn’t gotten the hint yet, I gave everyone else a slice of cheese pizza too—anything to hide how unbalanced I felt with Jared’s unexpected return into my life.

  It’s only temporary, I reminded myself. He’ll go on tour soon and forget all about us.

  Logan was watching Jared in the way kids do when they worship someone, as if he somehow sensed the stranger sitting across from him was his father. But that was ridiculous. There was no way he could know. Right?

  Jared made a funny comment and laughed. His dimples came to life, and his mirror image’s dimples came to life too. Sharon looked between the two males, and for a second I could’ve sworn something passed in her eyes that wasn’t good news for me.

  I brushed it off. I was being paranoid. There were millions of guys with dimples. And I was sure a large percentage were dark-haired. Okay, the odds that I just happened to be friends with several dark-haired guys with dimples were low, but Sharon didn’t know that.

  The quick glance she gave me was far from reassuring, but that was all right. She wasn’t the one I had to worry about. Fortunately, Jared would never piece things together. As far as he was concerned, I was Logan’s biological mother and he knew he’d never had sex with me.

  My secret was safe.

  I shoved the slice of pizza in my mouth and watched Logan laugh so hard at what Jared had said that he almost fell off his chair. For the first time since the accident that stole my sister and parents from me, a fissure formed in my bruised heart. Ever since their deaths more than three years ago, I’d been strong, doing my best not to fall apart under the newfound responsibilities piled on me, and doing my best for Logan. When my boyfriend—the guy I had loved and believed was the one—dumped me because the last thing he wanted was a kid, especially someone else’s, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart. When Logan developed meningitis and lost his hearing, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart. And when I had to make the decision by myself as to whether or not Logan should have the cochlear surgery, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart.

  No matter how difficult it had been to remain strong through all of this, I had done so for Logan.

  But now, with the adoring way he looked at Jared, you could’ve sliced me across the stomach with a dull knife and tossed me to a great white shark, and it would’ve hurt a lot less.

  I would do anything for Logan, but I couldn’t give him the one thing he needed. I couldn’t tell him and Jared the truth and risk destroying Logan.

  I blinked back the tears threatening to form. Logan would never have a father. If I had learned one single fact during the past three years, it was that other guys weren’t much different from my ex. They weren’t interested in dating a woman with a child. Add the challenge of the child being deaf—cochlear implant or not—and any interest they might have had in me plummeted to zero.

  I pushed the painful memories away, did my best to temporarily patch up the crack in my heart, and joined the party. I laughed at Jared’s jokes and listened to Sharon tell Jared about some of Logan’s escapades. I avoided redirecting the conversation when she did that, even though I didn’t want her to involve Jared in his son’s life more than necessary. To do so would’ve added to her suspicions.

  “Open my present first,” Logan said, his excitement barely contained as he handed Sharon the gift he had wrapped himself. A ton of clear tape held the happy-face, potato-print wrapping paper together. The package would’ve looked a lot better if we had at least put the gift in a box, but I couldn’t find one in the apartment and Logan had been too impatient to wait.

  Sharon turned the package around in her hands, her expression thoughtful. “I can’t imagine what it is. Is it a soccer ball?”

  Logan giggled. “No. Soccer ball round.”

  “That’s right, Logan,” she said. “A soccer ball is round.” The gift was flat. “Is it a lion?”

  Logan giggled again. “Lion is big.” He also signed it.

  “What sound does a lion make?” Sharon asked, ever the teacher.

  “Rawr.”

  “Do you want a pet lion?” Jared asked, signing the word “lion.”

  Logan shook his head. “No lions. Lions eat dogs.” He pointed at the gift in Sharon’s hand and practically climbed onto the table in anticipation. “Open it.”

  She began unwrapping the gift, taking care not to rip the homemade paper. If she didn’t open it soon, Logan would do it for her.

  Finally the paper was removed intact.

  “I buy it,” Logan said as Sharon examined the picture frame and the picture of the three of us at the playground. If you didn’t know better, you would’ve believed we were a family, with Sharon as Logan’s grandmother.

  Her eyes glossed up. “Thank you. I love it.” She wrapped her arms around Logan and hugged him hard.

  I also gave her a light blue cardigan and a Starbucks gift card. She thanked me for them, but her gaze kept jumping to the picture frame.

  “Who wants birthday cake?” I asked.

  “Me,” Logan cried out, bouncing on his chair.

  We laughed, and I headed to the kitchen to retrieve the cake. It wasn’t large enough for sixty-five candles, so I’d stuck into the white frosting six red candles on one half and five white ones on the other side. I lit them, and Jared and I sang “Happy Birthday.”

  Logan threw in a random word here and there, but they were spoken, not sung. Once we were finished, he cheered and clapped while Sharon blew out the candles.

  “Did you make wish?” Logan asked.

  She grinned. “I did.”

  I served the cake. Before I had a chance to hand Jared his plate, Logan had devoured half of his own slice.

  “I take it you like cake?” Jared said, chuckling, and my heart tightened at the memory of eating birthday cake with him when we were kids. I learned the hard way that you did not want to get in the way of Jared and his cake. But in the end I couldn’t complain, even if one time he’d smeared it on my face and clothes in revenge.

  “He’s not the only one.” Mischief flared inside me. Before I had a chance to think twice about what I was doing, I plunged my fork into his chocolate cake and removed a huge chunk of it. A healthy dose of pink and white frosting joined it.

  I lifted the fork to my mouth and closed my lips around it. With a satisfied “mmmm,” I slide the fork slowly out, eyes closed. The cake was good, but from the noise I was making, you would’ve thought I had just tasted an award-winning confection.

  I glanced at Jared, prepared to smirk at him. His sexy brown eyes met mine, but now they were dark…with lust.

  Chapter 5

  Jared

  Callie slowly dragged the fork from between her lips and made a sound that instantly brought back memories of the videos Mason enjoyed watching on tour.

  And immediately my cock responded. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fucked. All I could remember was that it had been with Tiffany months ago, when she and I were
in New York City at the same time.

  Shit. If Mason knew that, he would revoke my man card and call me a pussy for not getting any pussy.

  “So, Logan,” I said to distract myself from the thoughts about Callie that I had no right thinking—even if she was no longer thirteen years old and I was no longer considered too old for her. “Do you have any big plans tomorrow?”

  Logan’s face brightened. “I want to go to Disneyland. Ben’s daddy is taking him to Disneyland.”

  The thud of a knocked-over glass startled us both. Her face pale, Callie frantically mopped up the spilled milk with paper napkins. Sharon scrambled from her seat and returned a moment later with a dishcloth. She began cleaning up the mess.

  “Sorry,” Callie said. “I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.”

  “It’s all right,” Sharon replied. “It’s only a little milk.” And it was. But from Callie’s reaction, you’d have thought she’d spilled an entire cow’s worth.

  “Who’s Ben?” I asked Logan, curious if the mention of him and his father was what had upset Callie.

  “My friend,” he said.

  “They’re in the same preschool program.” Callie picked up the sodden napkins and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “His father sounds great,” I said. “My dad used to take me and my sister to Disneyland too.”

  Logan went on to list all the other cool activities Ben’s father did with his son: fishing, teaching him to play baseball, taking him on trips. As he spoke, his voice was heavy with wistfulness. He wasn’t exactly jealous of his friend, but he was in awe of everything Ben got to do with his dad.

  A dad that Logan didn’t have.

  Or maybe it was more than that. “I bet you’ve done some cool stuff with your mom,” I ventured, attempting to lead the conversation away from his lack of a father.

  He nodded. “She plays soccer with me and takes me to the park. And she and Mrs. Rogers took me to zoo once.” He grinned. “I like the animals and ice cream.”

  “That sounds like a lot of fun.”

  “They were fun. But Mommy too busy. She works all the time.”