The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  “I think I know the spot. I can ask if Avalon and Mac can hang out with Annelise . . .” Her heart was pounding now. “Are you free next Saturday between, say, twelve and three?”

  Arranging a babysitter was tantamount to a formal engraved announcement that they were embarking on a relationship. Not only that, but it was inviting the merciless teasing and probing from siblings and family members and then, of course, everyone else in Hellcat Canyon who caught wind of it.

  One didn’t endure that sort of thing frivolously.

  “That sounds perfect,” he said.

  She smiled at him.

  “You’re sure about this?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said lightly.

  “Great. I’ll text you.”

  She reached for the door handle and popped the door open.

  She leaned forward and kissed him, with just enough tongue to keep his lust on parboil for possibly the rest of the day and maybe into the night, when he could take matters into his own hands, literally. As long as he was dreaming of her.

  Just so the last view of him when she walked away was his expression of dazed appreciation and something more thrilling and resolute.

  She’d better know what she was doing. Because she knew she couldn’t dip a toe in with this guy. It would be all in, or nothing.

  “Okay, guys, I know you’re counting on me this Saturday at the game . . .” he said casually, as he twisted the wrench.

  Everyone froze.

  “Are you about to blow us off again?” Louis demanded.

  “I’m not dating all of you, Louis. Keep dreaming.”

  “But Gabe does have a date,” Bud guessed. Slyly.

  “Awww,” they all said. Various kissy noises ensued.

  “Fuck you,” he said grumpily.

  They all just laughed.

  “Go get her, tiger. If we lose, though, you have to buy us dinner for a month.”

  He scowled at them.

  “Deal,” he finally agreed.

  Pasquale’s was cheap. And frankly, he’d pay just about any price for time alone with Eden.

  There was a long, long silence after Eden told Avalon over the phone about why she needed a babysitter for Saturday.

  “Avalon? You still there?”

  “I’m just so happy,” Avalon said on a dumbstruck hush. Sounding genuinely overjoyed and more than a little wickedly gleeful.

  “Knock it off. Knock off the gloppiness right now. It’s one date.”

  “It was the abs that made you cave, right? Those squares?”

  Eden gritted her teeth. “He’s nice.”

  Avalon was laughing so hard now Eden had to pull the phone a little bit away from her ear. “How did he ask you out?”

  “Very nicely,” Eden retorted tersely.

  Avalon snorted. “Yeah, you guys have been on simmer for a while, I’m thinking.”

  If only she knew.

  “Mac and I will take Annelise all night if you want,” Avalon added. “We love having her here. If you want to . . . you know.”

  Oh, the unimaginable luxury of having Gabe all to herself for one entire night. They could be noisy and dirty and use more than three square feet of any given surface to have sex, in every position she could get into.

  No. She wanted to take this part of their relationship gradually. She needed to take this gradually. Because the next part would include Annelise.

  “We’re just going on a picnic,” she said firmly. “I’ll pick Annelise up around dinnertime.”

  “Are you going to that Black & Blue show at the Misty Cat Friday? Do you know who they are? I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Isn’t that weird? Once upon a time we would have known every band that came through here. I have no idea who they are and Annelise has another report due and I’m going to get my beauty sleep.”

  “Yeah, you’re going to want to rest up for you know.”

  Eden sighed and clicked the call to an end to the sound of Avalon laughing.

  Chapter 13

  Saturday, day of the picnic . . .

  Apart from some slight sleep deprivation—apparently Black & Blue had some pretty ardent fans, and they noisily filled the streets with drunken “Woooos!” as they spilled out of the Misty Cat last night, tempting Eden to slide open a window and dump buckets of water on their heads, but she didn’t. Her mom had picked up Annelise from school yesterday, and Annelise had met one of the guys from Black & Blue at their sound check at the Misty Cat. She said he was really, really nice and had taught her to play another mournful chord. So since the guy from Black & Blue was nice and generous to her daughter, Eden decided she’d be nice to his fans, even if his fans were obnoxious.

  All in all, however, Eden felt amazing. As though she were wearing clouds for shoes.

  Avalon had already picked up Annelise, who only knew she was going to be spending a delightful day with her aunt and uncle and the goats and the donkey. It was too soon to tell her about Gabe.

  Today, for the first time, Eden was going to have hours and hours with Gabe, and hopefully a lot of those hours would be spent at least seminude out in the wild.

  She was just getting ready to load the day’s deliveries into the van for Danny to handle, after which she’d hang the “Closed” sign on the door a little earlier than usual, when the door jingled.

  And in walked a god.

  Not the Michelangelo-Statue-of-David-aquiline-nose sort. Maybe less a god than a faun. The rakish kind that lived in the forest, slept on beds of moss under blankets of leaves, and captured and humped nymphs, not necessarily with their express permission.

  He wasn’t classically handsome. His jaw was a little too square, his lips a little too pillowy, his nose too big, his eyes maybe a little too narrow. They were shiny and mischievous as a bird’s. It was all topped by a pile of dark curls, so loose and unruly one would need a compass and a machete to untangle them.

  Things seldom turned out well for the various nymphs these kinds of gods pursued, regardless of whether they were willing. They were turned into trees or spirited off to Hades for months at a time.

  In Eden’s case, she’d been quite willing. And she’d wound up knocked up.

  And yet it had taken her a split second to recognize Jasper Townes, because he was literally the last person she expected to see in her shop, though maybe that shouldn’t have been true. She now thought she understood what it truly meant to have the living daylights shocked out of her.

  She froze in place behind the counter, three-quarters of her turned toward the door, one hand reaching for a shelf, as she’d turned herself into a tree, already out of self-defense. Which would not look out of place in her shop.

  Jasper Townes was Sexy. Capital “S,” land hard on the “X,” sexy. But it was more a result of some aura, something he was born with, rather than the net effect of a series of qualities, such as reliability and foresight and protectiveness or those other Boy Scout (or navy SEAL, if she was getting specific) type things that got her motor running these days.

  Being lead singer of a now very popular band called Blue Room was all part and parcel of Jasper’s sexiness.

  “Eden?” His low, raspy voice was sure familiar.

  “Yes?” she said pleasantly in her shopkeeper voice, although thanks to nerves she’d acquired kind of a dry-mouth click. “And you are?”

  He actually laughed at that, quite genuinely.

  Because, ha ha ha, wasn’t it funny that everybody in the whole freaking world knew who he was.

  He had a pleasant laugh, he really did. It was just that suddenly the world was an echo chamber, and everything, even the poor baby roses in the courtyard, looked sinister in light of the moment she’d been sort of dreading for the last decade.

  His band had a drummer who played a double bass drum.

  It had nothing on the beat of her heart right now, though.

  “Wow, you look pretty much the same as I remember,” he said. Admiringly.

  She didn’t
say anything. She just stared. Was that . . . was that a feather dangling from his hair? Did a bird crash into him or did he deliberately install a feather into his hair? Maybe it was a remnant from a down pillow.

  “From the front, anyway,” he added excruciatingly.

  And very, very wickedly.

  Oh, God.

  He’d been like a freaking Chinese acrobat that night. She’d been wheelbarrowed and scissored and flipped like a pancake inside of an hour. For a laconic poet type, he’d sure had a lot to prove about his prowess.

  She’d been more bemused than anything about the whole thing, though it had been interesting the way trying all the rides in the carnival was interesting. A one and done. That had been her plan, anyway.

  She stared him down until the roguish, pleased-with-himself twinkle vanished from his eyes.

  “I bet you get away with saying anything you want these days, huh, Jasper?”

  “Sorry. Maybe that was a little, um, graceless.”

  “Um, yeah. A little.” Tersely as a nun with a ruler about to smack his hand.

  “I was trying to lighten the mood.”

  “I was unaware we had established a mood.”

  A little silence.

  Became a long silence.

  “I never forgot that night with you, you know. Thought about it quite a bit over the years,” he tried carefully.

  “I always think it’s funny when men say things like that. Like they should get a medal for bothering to remember boinking someone.”

  He looked faintly surprised. “I never thought of it that way.”

  There was, in truth, no reason she should be rude to him. Apart from nerves and guilt that she didn’t really deserve, because she had tried to get in touch with him.

  Was that why he was here? Oh God.

  She steeled her nerve. “What brings you to town, Jasper?”

  He looked surprised again. “I thought you’d know. I’m the ‘Blue’ part of Black & Blue, my side project with Renfro Black from Powder Keg. We played a set at the Misty Cat last night. Then I’m off to Europe with Blue Room after a few NorCal gigs.”

  Oh, God. Jasper’s band was Blue Room, after the lyric in that David Bowie song, “Sound and Vision.” Black & Blue!

  Oh, shit shit shit. How had that escaped her?

  Oh right: she’d been riding Principal Gabe.

  The hypervigilant part of her brain had kind of been anesthetized by fantastic sex and giddy infatuation.

  And she’d been busy being a mom.

  And then the last part of what he’d just said registered:

  He’d been at the Misty Cat for sound check.

  Which was when Annelise was there yesterday.

  And he was the guy who’d taught Annelise a new chord.

  And just like that, her heart was in her throat.

  Honestly. Did the universe have to pack two moments of truth into one weekend?

  “You own this place now?” He looked around, wonderingly, frowning faintly, as if he was puzzling out what a flower shop precisely was.

  “Forgive me, Jasper, I’m afraid you caught me at a bad time. It’s nice to see you again, but I have to get these arrangements out to the van for delivery. So . . .”

  Now that was purely chicken-shit, and she disliked herself for it, because it spoke to who she was when backed into a corner. Apparently she was willing to just attempt a dodge on the off chance she got away with it.

  She couldn’t imagine Gabe ever doing that, but then, Gabe was six foot a jillion, and he’d never gotten knocked up by a rock star.

  Or had a daughter all to himself for ten years.

  She desperately wanted Jasper to leave. Leave us the way we are, she urged him, as if he were a tarot deck she was clutching. Willing her question into him.

  And yet she’d never forgive herself if he did leave.

  He just smiled, a bemused little smile. “Literally no one has ever told me to go away in at least a decade.”

  “I’ll give you a second to Google what those words mean, if that helps.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if he was reflexively looking around for an assistant to do the Googling for him before he caught himself.

  And then suddenly, something about his posture signaled . . . intent. He was here for a very specific reason.

  He drew in a deep breath. Like he was steeling his nerve.

  Portent gusted through her soul and her stomach turned like a chicken on a spit.

  “Okay. Listen. I didn’t just come in for old times’ sake.”

  He stepped forward and slowly laid something on the counter. Like he was playing a card.

  It looked like a scrap of paper. A dollar bill? A coupon for a bouquet? Good Lord, wasn’t he making good money by now?

  She peered closer.

  All the little hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  It was a faded Polaroid.

  Of Annelise.

  Her baby. Eden’s lungs seized up. All skinny colty legs and long shining hair to her waist, standing in front of what looked like a suburban house, her eyes squinted closed, smiling that adorable gap-toothed smile.

  “Where the hell did you get this picture of Annel . . .”

  And then she stopped.

  Because she somehow understood before he even confirmed it aloud.

  “It’s a photo of my mom when she was eleven,” Jasper said.

  It was like a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet. Eden pressed her fingers against the counter to steady herself against a swoop of vertigo.

  She didn’t look up.

  She couldn’t yet.

  The longer she looked down the longer she could pretend he wasn’t standing here in her shop.

  Her breathing was rough in her own ears now, though.

  “I met Annelise at the Misty Cat during sound check. She’s a sweetheart. Told me she could play guitar, too. She actually told me a lot of things.” He smiled faintly. A little nervously.

  He was nervous.

  “Yeah. She takes lessons,” she said faintly. “And she’s . . . she’s a gregarious kid.”

  “She’s a charmer. She told me she was ten years old. She showed me her new favorite chord. It’s—”

  “A minor.”

  She and Jasper said it at the same time.

  There was a little silence.

  He breathed in. Exhaled at a steady length. He was gathering courage for something.

  “She told me she used a lot of A minor to write a song called ‘Invisible Dad,’” he added.

  Fuck fuck fuck triple fuck.

  “She said she doesn’t know who her dad is, but he had to leave town for an appointment. She says she’s pretty sure he has big shoulders.”

  Bless Leesy’s friendly, talkative little heart and her dreams of a certain kind of dad.

  Eden had nothing to say to this. All she could think of was Gabe, and his shoulders, and his warm eyes, receding like a dream. Like he was standing on the opposite shore and she hit a sandbar just as she was about to walk off the boat into his arms.

  “She has one of these, too.” Jasper pointed to the dent in his chin.

  Eden had nothing to say to that.

  “I connected the dots,” he concluded.

  Yep. Jasper was no dummy. She remembered that well.

  She slowly leveled her head up and stared at him. She caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror up in the corner of the store: pale, eyes big and hunted. She herself looked like a shoplifter who’d just gotten caught.

  Annelise not only had the chin dent. Annelise had his eyebrows, the way they sort of winged up at the end. And probably a thousand other subtle little things.

  She said nothing, as the full import of all of this washed over her. As if she’d gone down in a dunking booth.

  “So, I’m just going to come right out and ask. Eden . . . am I that kid’s father?”

  She was pretty sure her expression already answered that question.

  �
��Yes.”

  Absolute and total silence reigned for a few seconds.

  Then he pushed his hands back through his hair and sucked in a long, long breath.

  She was surprised things didn’t fall out. A dime, or a gum wrapper. The kinds of things one found in sofa cushions. Because he still looked like a guy who’d partied hard the night before and fell asleep on the couch.

  “Huh. Wow. Well.”

  A long silence ensued while Jasper looked off into the middle distance pensively. He swallowed. Then he pressed his lips together.

  “Do you need to sit down?” she asked solicitously. With her foot, she nudged a chair over toward him.

  He shook his head.

  “Do you need a . . . drink? I only have water,” she added hurriedly.

  When she’d learned she was pregnant, it was also about the time Jasper was in the news for dating a British supermodel with whom he subsequently loudly, publicly, and drunkenly argued in an airport lounge, about, bystanders said, the fact that she preferred John Mayer’s last record to his.

  “THAT PRAT?” he’d shouted, waving his arms in an outraged inebriated fashion, like those inflatable men outside car dealerships.

  It had become a meme.

  He’d in fact been girlfriend-free for all of about five minutes after he left Hellcat Canyon.

  Shortly after that he’d gone to rehab for some unspecified “dependency.”

  His unspecified dependencies were something else she ought to learn about. For Annelise’s sake.

  He shook his head again.

  “Jasper . . .” she said carefully. “I still have to get these flowers in the van or they’ll wilt. This is my livelihood.”

  “Eden . . . it’s just . . . why didn’t you tell . . .” he began. His volume escalated a little.

  He caught himself.

  “I did tell you,” she said instantly, evenly, with as little emotion as she could muster. “Or at least I did try to tell you. Multiple times. I managed to get through to your agent. Or one of them. You seem to have a slew of agents and managers of various kinds running interference for you. I was told very kindly that approximately twenty-five women a day claimed to be pregnant with your child. I left a message for you. When I didn’t hear back, I figured you just didn’t want to know. Which was actually fine with me. I was only fulfilling what I thought was my moral obligation. I couldn’t imagine the news would thrill you at that point in your career.”