Let Me Be the One

by Christa Maurice

  “No. It’s not unusual.”

  Not friends. Her publisher. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “If you need anything else, just email.”

  Just email. The phone call must have been a little odd. He’d had a hard enough time getting his hands on the number. Brian set the phone down in the charger and studied his mess of notes. When he’d gotten home from Japan, he’d only been able to spend an hour a day on his search, but since the kids went back to their mom, he’d had more time to pursue her. Not that more time yielded better results. The messy notes didn’t help either, but it gave him something to do in his now-empty house.

  Brian pulled a new legal pad out and started at the top.

  She’d left the party with Cherney, but he was a total dead end. Cherney said he’d taken her to an ultra secret location and they’d stayed there for a couple of days while she ranged between hysterical and sick. Cherney claimed it was flu or bad PMS or something. When he brought her back, he’d helped her get a new copy of her ID, and she’d waved goodbye from the driver’s seat of a white convertible rental that he’d paid for.

  The BroRide management office gave much the same information when Brian asked Helen to call them. Helen was tight with their office manager, who had done the legwork on the new ID while Suzi was with Cherney at his undisclosed location. The new ID listed Cherney’s house as her home address. That thought had Brian waking up in a cold sweat when he did manage to sleep. She might be planning to return to him when she finished her walkabout in her white convertible rental. She might have already returned and convinced Cherney to lie and say she wasn’t there. Of all possibilities, that seemed like the least likely. Everyone swore Cherney was a horrible liar.

  Greg said he hadn’t heard one word from either Suzi or Logan. Logan had retreated to his house in upstate New York and headed straight down the neck of a bottle.

  Which explained why both Logan’s landline and cell went unanswered. According to the neighbors—Brian had gotten desperate enough to hunt down numbers for them three days ago—the house was shut up in the July heat with lights blazing at all hours and irregular visits from the local liquor store. One of the neighbors said she had stopped by with some food, but the way the house smelled, it was going to have to be fumigated before anyone could live there again.

  John and Toby were just as useless, though they were planning to quit the band and start their own. When John had asked him if he thought they should bring Greg into the new band, Brian had pointed out they’d just be kicking Logan out. He didn’t add that getting bounced from his band for being an idiot was the least Logan deserved.

  The phone rang, and he grabbed it before it finished the first ring. “Hello?”

  “What cha doin’?” Jason asked.

  “Nothing.” Brian turned over his notepad in case Jason had developed the ability to see through the phone. “What are you doing?”

  “Dodging projectile vomit.”

  “Cool.” Brian turned his notes back over. He hadn’t checked her website lately, and last time he’d tried to email her, the message had bounced because her inbox was full. Maybe he could try that again.

  “This one has aim. I think she’ll be a jock.”

  “She’s six weeks old. What’s she going to play? Competitive napping?” He’d left himself a note at the bottom of the third page to start going through her dedications to see if he could track down any of those people and then forgot about it. He transferred the note to the legal pad and put a star beside it.

  “When she gets older I meant. I’m not planning on pushing her into a career for at least eleven years.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “Marc said Suzi’s email account is sending back messages because it’s full.”

  “Still?”

  “What do you mean still?”

  Brian opened his mouth, but a good lie was not on his lips. Be a little more transparent, why don’t you? “Wasn’t it doing that before?”

  “No.”

  “I thought it was.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Didn’t she have a ton of space for her email?”

  “She did say her storage was huge because she didn’t want fan mail to get sent back.” Brian tapped his pen on the desk. She also went through it everyday to keep it cleared out because she couldn’t stand to be out of touch.

  “Aren’t you even a little bit worried? She vanished out of that party a month ago and Logan’s self-medicating.”

  “Has it been a month?” Thirty-two days. Brian glanced at the calendar. Yep, thirty-two days. A little more than a month. “She’ll turn up.”

  “When did you get so heartless?”

  “I’m not heartless. I just think she’s a big girl, and she wants some time alone. She’s probably thinking this whole love affair with a musician thing is overrated.” Brian paused in the act of opening up the file on his computer that held all her books. Couldn’t blame her. Logan might have done such a job on her she never wanted to see another musical instrument. He needed to go through those dedications. Not all of them could be musicians.

  “She wouldn’t do that. She loves us.” Jason had just enough doubt in his voice to bump the idea higher on Brian’s short list of major worries. What if she had decided to write off all musicians as a bad idea and moved on? She couldn’t do that. Not without giving him a chance to plead his case.

  Chapter 8

  Five Years Ago

  Brian walked down the stairs to the guest cabin. After a solid month of hanging out with Suzi and his kids, he figured he had exactly one good excuse left to talk to her. One last chance to capture that comfortable, family feeling he’d never had with Bonnie. Logan was a lucky guy to have that all the time. Brian found her standing at the edge of the slope by the stream, peering into the bushes. She was wearing what might have been the same pair of cutoffs she’d been wearing since she arrived, a pink T-shirt with the word sweet across the bust in rhinestones, and no shoes. Her hair was up in a ponytail. All of it made her look about sixteen and made him feel like a creepy old man. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Wondering where this stream goes.” She didn’t look at him.

  “Probably down the mountain.”

  “Probably, but how does it get there? Does it join with other streams or split into smaller ones? Are there waterfalls and pools? Or does it disappear underground to percolate to the surface as a spring someplace else?”

  Brian observed the stream again and saw it for the first time. She kept doing that to him. Making him see things in totally new ways. Like his kids. This past month with Suzi and the kids, he’d felt less like a sperm donor and more like a dad for the first time. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either, but I think I’m going to find out. Wanna come along?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll want to leave the shoes behind or you’ll ruin them. Trust me.”

  He did. Without question. Kicking off his shoes and rolling up his jeans, he stepped into the water after her.

  “What did you really want?” She grasped a branch with both hands and used it to lower herself down a rock ledge.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t come looking for me to go stream stomping. Did the kids get out okay?”

  “Yeah, I put them on the plane this morning to go back to their mother. They wanted to stay here.”

  “Ha. They wanted to go fishing with Cassie’s dad again. I think all they ever caught were s’mores. Watch it here. It’s slippery.” She held onto bushes on either side of the stream. “They had a good time, though. They’ve never gotten to be out in the woods like this before, have they?”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you glad you didn’t take them to Disney?”

  “We can do that next time.” Disney might actually be fun. He’d thought of it as a way to keep the kids distracted while they were forced together, but it would be cool to see Bub meetin
g Buzz Lightyear and Tess having tea with princesses. They could spend a day at Disneyland. Suzi might come along.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “I wanted to thank you for helping me out with them while they were here. You probably had writing you were supposed to do.”

  “Nope.” Suzi waded into the middle of the stream. “Little fish.” The tiny fish darted away from her, but when she held still, swam back to peck at her feet and ankles.

  “Tess never got the hang of that.” Brian crouched on the narrow bank. What would Jason think when he never reappeared at the studio? He was only supposed to be gone for a few minutes and this was developing into an all-afternoon adventure.

  “She will when she’s older. It takes patience and the ability to hold still for a long time.” Suzi moved, and the fish scattered. Pushing through low branches, she waded down the stream.

  Brian relaxed. For the last month, no, for the last several months leading up to leaving Bonnie and coming here, he’d felt like he was walking a tightrope between forty-story buildings. One misstep, and he would drop forever. He’d been dreading the visit with the kids because he knew they wouldn’t understand. He’d been ashamed they had understood less than he’d thought. Suzi had insisted he try to explain, but he doubted it made sense to them yet. Right now, none of that mattered. He was in the middle of nowhere following a cute girl in cutoffs through a stream on a hot, sunny day. As long as the sun shone and the stream flowed downhill, everything was fine.

  “Hey, look at—aaaahhhh!” One second, Suzi was leaning over something in the water and the next she was sitting in the middle of the stream. She stared up at him and started to laugh.

  “What did you do?” Brian waded to her and tried to find a solid place to stand on the slippery slate of the streambed. He put out a hand to help her up, but she ignored it, sifting through the rocks with her fingers.

  “I saw something. It was right here.” She shifted onto her knees, still searching.

  Brian peered into the water. He didn’t see anything but rocks. “What are you looking for?”

  “A rock.”

  “Suzi, there’s a lot of rocks here.” He reached down and picked one up as an example. “See?”

  “This one was…” She peered at the rock he was holding. “That’s it!”

  Brian jumped when she shrieked and lost his footing. He landed next to her with a splash.

  “Oh, no! You didn’t drop it, did you?” Suzi howled. “You dork.”

  “Dork?” Brian waited to get pissed off. She’d called him a dork. Nobody outside his close circle of friends had called him a name in over a decade. Nobody but her. And why was that so perfect? Scanning the rocks, he spotted the one she wanted so bad. He grinned, scooping it up. “Am I still a dork?”

  “Is that it? Gimme.”

  “Am I still a dork?”

  She reached across him. “No, you’ve been upgraded to jerk. Gimme.”

  No way was she going to get her hands on that rock without climbing up the front of him. Brian licked his lips. He’d had women crawl on him before, but this was more fun. “Say please.”

  “Gimme, please.”

  This woman was devoted to some other guy. Teasing her might not be such a good idea, for either of them. Even though it felt good. Brian handed over the rock.

  Suzi wiped the excess water off with her finger. “Look at this. Isn’t it amazing?”

  The black rock had the image of a fern stained onto the surface. For this she called him a dork?

  “Look at the details. The lacy pattern of the leaf printed so perfectly.” She put her hand on his forearm. Just a light touch.

  “It looks like a stain on a rock.”

  “It’s a fossil of something that lived millions of years ago.” She turned her gaze up to meet his, and he started to understand the appeal of the rock. Anything that could get her this excited had to be magnificent. Even though he’d seen her get equally worked up about dragonflies and salamanders with the kids.

  “Can you imagine what it must have been like here millions of years ago? When all of this was steamy jungle, and spiders the size of your head lived in holes in the ground waiting for prey. Dragonflies as big as helicopters flew over forests that stretched for thousands and thousands of miles. All of them hunting and eating and living and dying, never knowing that their time was short.”

  Her bright eyes stared through the leaves. The way she talked, he could almost see the trees and the giant bugs and the jungle steam, too. She turned back to him. Her lips parted, and her breath shortened. Her hand tensed on his arm.

  Brian’s groin tightened. She was so damned alive. He wanted to bottle that and take it home so he could nip at it when he felt down. He wanted to lean down and kiss her. She might wrap her arms around his neck and pull him tight. She might also scramble up the mountain to tell Logan, Jason, and everyone what a letch he was.

  Yanking her hand away, she squeezed her eyes shut and shook herself. “I am getting way too big for my britches.” Suzi stood up. She squeezed her shirt. “But apparently you can take parts of the stream home with you. What do you think? Should we forge ahead down the stream or turn around and go back up?” She tucked the rock into the rear pocket of her cutoffs.

  Brian surveyed both directions. Up meant going back to the studio to listen to fighting and being asked his opinion when he didn’t have one. Down meant a whole lot more time with Suzi. “I vote down. We already know what’s behind us.”

  “Oh good, another adventurer. Onward and downward!”

  Suzi led the way for a long time, occasionally stopping to examine a rock or show him something. Brian followed, running scenarios in his head about what might have happened if he’d kissed her back there. Most of them came out ugly. The best he could hope for was a little embarrassment. At worst, she would leave, and that was too high a price to pay.

  She stopped. “Houston, we have a problem.”

  Brian stepped up beside her. The stream tumbled down a steep, jagged cliff face into a pool at the bottom. The rocks were wet but not submerged on either side. Beyond that, mud and the occasional stubborn tree edged the cliff. “We can get down that,” Brian said.

  “We can?”

  “Sure, there’s lots of handholds.” He nodded to help himself feel more confident. “We’ve done harder ones.”

  “And when they find our lifeless bodies in a month because we fell and broke our legs and nobody knew where we were, can I say ‘I told you so’ then?”

  “You’ll probably say that for a while when we’re dying. I’ll go first. I have longer reach than you.” Brian lowered himself over the edge and then decided he needed to be facing the rock. He climbed back up and turned around.

  “Sure about this, are you?” Suzi asked.

  “Yup.” He lowered himself again, this time facing the rock. Feeling for the next foothold, he decided the double suicide might be a nice way to go out. “There’s plenty of places to hang on. Come on down.”

  She shook her head, turned, and started down, giving him an uninterrupted view of her rear. The daily running regimen worked. Every morning for the past month he’d gotten up at eight so he could stand at his bedroom window and watch her walk to the top of the steps, stretch, and jog away. She used four different routes without any pattern. After about forty-five minutes, she returned. At first he’d told himself he was just curious. After a while, he started to feel like a peeping Tom watching her through the curtains, but by then the habit was ingrained, and he got up every morning without fail to watch her jog away and then jog back before breakfast.

  “This is an easy climb. It looked worse from above,” she said. Then the piece of slate she was standing on snapped.

  Brian tightened his grip on the stone just in time for her to slide into his arms. He held perfectly still, not even breathing for a few seconds. She hadn’t made a peep the whole time she was falling. The only sound around them
was the chatter of the stream and bird song.

  “Or not.” Suzi glanced over her shoulder at him with wide, black eyes. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  Her warm body rested against his a moment longer. He soaked in the sensation. This is what she would feel like in bed. The way her curves fit against his body and the sensation of her heartbeat and breathing. This was going to keep him up nights. “My, what strong hands you have.” She giggled.

  “Side effect of the job. Are you ready to go on?”

  “Wait a minute.” She found handholds and lifted her body off his. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Never. He was never going to be ready. He wanted to spend the rest of his life hanging from the edge of this waterfall, cradling her in his arms. Reaching down with his foot, he found the next hold and shifted away. She followed after he’d gained a little distance. When he stepped back onto the little sandy beach at the bottom, he noticed blood seeping from her ankle. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Shit.”

  When she twisted sideways trying to see, he stepped forward, ready to catch her.

  “Where at?”

  “On your ankle.”

  “At least it’s not the bottom of my foot.” She jumped the last bit, landing on her feet beside him. Limping to a fallen tree, she sat down and inspected her ankle. “That’s ugly.”

  “It’s not so bad.” It was horrible. Blood streaming down her foot and dripping off her toe. Brian checked his pockets, though anything there would have been soaked from falling in the water earlier.

  “Grab me some of that moss over there.” She pointed toward a moss-covered tree. Then she scooped water out of the pool to rinse off her foot.

  Brian brought her the moss. “What’s this for?”

  “Nature’s absorbent. I’ll keep pressure on it for a few minutes, and the bleeding will stop.” She pressed the moss over the wound and smiled at him. “Well, if we were undecided about whether to go forward or turn back, I think this waterfall has made the decision for us. The point of no return.”