The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  Jasper was white about the mouth now. He didn’t dispute that last part.

  “I swear to you I never got any of your messages. I did have a phalanx of people protecting me from other people back then. I guess I still do.”

  The thought popped into her head: how Annelise would love the word phalanx.

  Because all thoughts led to Annelise. She was her very heart; the world was like the circulatory system.

  And yet Jasper was part of Annelise, too. And Annelise was part of him.

  The push-pull of that thought was a sort of sweet anguish.

  “By the way, that was right about the time you fought with the supermodel and went into rehab and then after that dated another supermodel.”

  “Which one was that? Annika or Marie Hele—”

  “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “Right. Right. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Kind of . . . kind of thrown.”

  “Okay. Well, that makes both of us. Maybe you can get a song out of it.”

  He remained quiet.

  Perversely she liked him for not blathering something insincere, or defensive, or self-righteous.

  Something terrified and tense in her was easing: she’d liked him back then for a reason, not just because, well, he was sexy and a musician. Apparently he wasn’t a bullshitter. He was, in fact, an actual person. Her judgment wasn’t entirely awful.

  The news of children pretty much sobered everyone in a damn hurry. Shock was great for burning off the mists of bullshit.

  “I would have gotten in touch,” he said quietly, finally.

  She wasn’t positive she believed that.

  His tone suggested he wasn’t even certain he believed it.

  The guy he was back then might not have.

  The guy he was today apparently believed he would have. He was here, anyway. And that took some nerve.

  She let it lie.

  They stared at each other in the hush of her little store. So precious to her, like Annelise, like her mostly predictable life in Hellcat Canyon.

  “You never got married, huh?” he said next.

  She sighed. “C’mon, Jasper. I’m barely thirty, and you’re not much older than me. And I’ve been kind of busy raising a child and running a business.”

  “Sorry. I meant . . . It’s just that . . . so it’s not like you were . . . um, waiting for . . .”

  When his meaning dawned on her, she coughed a laugh so incredulous it fluttered the leaves on her floral arrangement. “For you?”

  She said it with such genuine, scorching amazement color actually rose in his cheeks.

  She was also amazed anything could still make him blush.

  “I’m sorry, I’m a little thrown, too, and I default to snarky when I’m thrown. I don’t mean to be unkind, Jasper, but, uh, no. I had no interest in a relationship with you. Now, or then. I wanted what you wanted that night, and that’s all.” She tried to say this a little more gently. “It was fun, though. It was memorable. And I guess I don’t regret it.”

  That was hardly flattering.

  He accepted this with a wry twist of his mouth.

  He looked so stunned and so oddly stranded in her store, like a creature abandoned by his mothership. He had always had that quality of otherness about him, that charisma that rock stars exuded, that drew the world in and kept it at a remove.

  She tried her soothing voice, the same voice Lloyd Sunnergren had used that time a coyote had wandered into the feed store a few years back.

  “Jasper . . . just so you know . . . in case you were worried . . . we never needed or wanted anything from you. And we still don’t. Not money, not time, certainly not publicity. We are really, really great. Annelise has dozens of people in her life who adore her and will always be there for her, and we have a really great, happy, full life. So you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  She stopped just short of saying, So you can walk out guilt free right now if you want. She knew he was smart enough to recognize what she’d just said for what it was: the ladder dangling from the rescue copter for the guy who’d tumbled into a ravine. And if he latched on to that ladder, it would be an out for her, too.

  “I’d like to talk more with you about this. Can we? I’m here for the next two days. Staying in J. T. McCord’s house while he’s in Los Angeles filming some spots with Franco Francone. Then I’m off to Sacramento, and from there San Francisco, then Europe. Here’s my number.”

  A collection of bracelets jingled on his wrist and seemed to collectively act as a fan that sent a little waft of patchouli toward her when he held out his card.

  What adult male had time to dab on patchouli? None of the men in or on the periphery of her life were scented by anything other than deodorant soap and deodorant and sweat and in the case of Giorgio the grill cook, hamburger grease. Gabe always smelled clean in a way that immediately made her picture him nude in the shower.

  When she didn’t immediately take the card, he placed it on the counter and slid it over to her.

  And slid the photo back into his own hands.

  “I don’t have too many photos of her. I carry this one around with me. Prop it up on hotel room nightstands when I’m on tour.”

  He carried a photo of his mom and parked it on his hotel nightstand like an anchor, she supposed. Because he was a rootless guy. She remembered that about him. “I flow like a river, baby,” he’d told her then, and that had struck her as profound right before she slept with him, and a month later when that pink plus sign showed up it seemed like possibly the most dangerous thing a man could say.

  And now she understood him a little more.

  Why now, was the question?

  She asked it. “Why now, Jasper?”

  He hesitated. “Eden . . . I swear I don’t have an agenda. I don’t want to disrupt her life or yours. I just . . . happen to know what it’s like not to know who your dad is. I still wonder about mine. And even if Annelise doesn’t pester you about it, I’d bet my left nut that she wonders about it. And my left nut is my favorite.”

  He waited for the laugh, which of course wasn’t coming. Not today.

  “I didn’t know my dad. And you know what? After a while I stopped asking about him, because I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings, because I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t enough.”

  She couldn’t say a word, because he’d just voiced precisely everything she’d been thinking for going on two months.

  “Anyway. Good seeing you. Call me or text me if you want to have dinner to talk about it tonight. I’ll let you get back to . . .”

  He waved his hand vaguely, puzzled, to indicate the shop, her life. Her ordinary, extraordinary life that had just shifted to allow in the possibility of an extraordinary man. Gabe Caldera.

  She was no stranger to sacrifice, but what she had to do next seemed so wildly unfair she was arrested in a moment—just a tick of the clock—of grinding self-pity at the injustice and gracelessness of the universe’s timing.

  And then, because she always had, she did what she had to do.

  Chapter 14

  Gabe stared at the text for so long his stillness drew the attention of all his friends.

  I apologize profusely, Gabe, but I can’t make it to Firelight Falls today. Something has suddenly come up.

  He now held in his hand what felt like a grenade, but which could be a perfectly innocuous text.

  What did it actually mean?

  And to think, just an hour before he’d been standing in the shower singing an homage to one of Eden’s guilty pleasure songs: “The first time . . . ever at Firelight Falls . . . ba da da daaa . . . dum de da da da da daaaaaa . . .”

  Eat your heart out Roberta Flack, he’d thought.

  That mood suddenly seemed eons ago.

  Did she need help? Did she have cold feet? Had she changed her mind about the two of them? Did he have the right to press the issue? Should he press for answers?

  Some premonition slowly ice
d his stomach. But surely it was just another blip in their schedule challenges, not a definitive blow off?

  Finally, he texted back:

  If I can help with anything let me know. I’ll be there in a flash.

  He meant it when he’d said he hated games.

  But he’d also just put the burden of asking for help on her. Which he also hated.

  Suddenly he realized what was really bothering him about that text she’d sent: the two of them established a sort of radical, good-humored directness. And that text was oblique as hell. All apology, no humor, no real . . . intimacy.

  Another text dinged in.

  Thanks for understanding, Gabe.

  And that was all.

  Not even an emoji, for crying out loud. Not a heart or a smile or a cat.

  He would have loved an emoji from her. And emojis got on his nerves.

  He looked up when he realized it had gone silent. All of his friends were staring at him.

  He cleared his throat. “Hey, looks like I can make the game after all.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yaaay,” Louis said weakly. Finally.

  “Nice, um, restaurant.”

  Jasper seemed uncertain as to whether this was the appropriate word to use. A little wonderingly, a little amused.

  She’d chosen Pasquale’s Pizza specifically for its unique qualities: it was way, way off the beaten path of downtown Hellcat Canyon, at the south end of town two streets behind the high school, where the buildings grew gradually more and more faded, drab and disreputable, as if the town was running out of toner by the time it got to them. And she was very unlikely to see anyone she knew there.

  Its other unique qualities included a facade of dirty, chipping beige stucco; a no-frills rectangular marquee announcing PAS UALE’S PIZZER A; grubby, fissured beige linoleum that curled at its outer edges like potato chips; and battered and wobbly Formica tables crowned with glass shaker jars of cheese that had probably been powdered around 1977.

  The pizza wasn’t horrible, which was perhaps the kindest thing that could be said about it.

  “We’re not liable to run into anyone we know here, is the main thing. The pitchers are cheap. Free refills on iced tea, too.” She rattled her glass. Someone, somewhere, a few decades ago, might have passed a tea bag over the water, enough to give it its color. If she really gave her imagination a workout, she could almost taste tea.

  One ordered at a glassed-in counter, behind which were the pizza oven and a trio of surly employees. They stared at Eden when she strolled in with Jasper, not so much in recognition of either of them but with vague hostility, as if customers were merely an inconvenient byproduct of running a business.

  She’d taken a table way, way against the back wall, near a silent jukebox. She’d tied three knots in her straw wrapper so far. Three little knots to represent the great big knot in her gut.

  Jasper had ordered a bottle of Michelob and wasn’t drinking it. He was percussing it with his fingers. Annelise did that, too: jauntily tapped things.

  Eden inhaled. “Soooo . . .” she said on the exhale. “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Soooo . . . well, I guess it’s that I’d like to get to know, um, our daughter.”

  “The word our implies a we, and as I established, there is definitely no we,” she said instantly and reflexively.

  This was not off to a great start.

  “Okay,” he said carefully. “I’d like to get to know the fruit of my loins?”

  She closed her eyes. “So. Much. Worse.”

  “‘Fruit of My Loins’ is the name of my next record, as it so happens.”

  Incredulity made her eyes snap open again.

  “Kidding,” he said shortly, probably lest she actually fire the blue daggers she could feel glinting in her eyes into his heart. “Funny, I remember you had a pretty good sense of humor. Which was part of what made you so hot.”

  “I would have laughed, except, you know, my daughter’s life is no laughing matter to me.” She landed just a little harder on “my” in that sentence than necessary. Given that she’d already made her point. “Why don’t you just call her Annelise.”

  Another little silence.

  “Okay. Sorry. It’s just I don’t know how to talk to you about this. But I want to. What do you need to hear from me so that you’re convinced I’m sincere?”

  He sounded quite reasonable. Not angry, not defensive.

  He sounded perfectly normal, in fact. Although she knew this could not ever be entirely true.

  “I don’t know. I’m having a hard time with this. It’s just . . . I mean, Jasper . . . you have a pet jaguar.”

  “But Annelise likes cats. She told me.”

  “And don’t you have a python?”

  “Used to.” But he sounded somewhat wistful. Which made her wonder whether the python had made a break for it, and whether one of his neighbors was destined to find it emerging from their plumbing or cuddling them in their bed in the dead of night.

  “I could get a koala, instead, if she likes animals. It’s safer.” He paused and tipped his head back as if remembering something. “Well, marginally.”

  “You can’t just go to the store and buy a freaking koala!”

  He looked at her with something like tender pity for the Muggle she was. He could probably get his hands on anything—and anyone—he wanted.

  “Listen to me, Jasper. Annelise is not something new to add to your menagerie, or some item your PR people can use to keep your name in the news, or something that you try on like . . . like . . . Kabbalah, to see if it fixes your life. No.”

  “I was never into Kabbalah. You’re thinking of Madonna. I did have a guru living with me for a while. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.”

  “Oh. Right. Silly mistake.”

  “He slept with my girlfriend. Had to kick him out.”

  She closed her eyes again. “Jesus, Jasper.”

  “Jesus Jasper is the name of my next next record.”

  That almost made her laugh.

  Although the hysteria might be doing that, too.

  His life was both kind of magnificent and sad. He was the Parthenon, a glorious wreck.

  “I’m not a bad person. Sometimes I’m even boring.”

  “Do you mean boring, or bored?” she said tersely.

  He went silent.

  “You’re not boring,” he concluded finally. He didn’t sound altogether pleased about this.

  “True,” she agreed tautly. “When it comes to my daughter, I’m not boring the way a Tasmanian devil isn’t boring.”

  “You really are beautiful, though.”

  The “though” was almost funny. As if one could be “not boring” or beautiful, but not both.

  She supposed this was his go-to compliment when it came to disarming women.

  “Well, I must be, right? I’m sure you never boink ugly women.”

  He smiled. “None that I recall, anyway. They all seem beautiful at the time.”

  Dear God.

  “Jasper, that’s . . . that’s not how you . . . look, maybe this is a mistake. Maybe I should get going.”

  “Eden,” he said firmly and evenly, “I just want her to like me. And I wouldn’t hate it if you liked me. Believe it or not, I’m nervous about this.”

  She eyed him suspiciously.

  “I like kids, I really do—I’m the godfather to John’s kid. Travels with us. He’s still little. His name is Milo. Want to see pics?”

  He whipped out his phone and showed her his screen saver: a photo of him crouching next to a diminutive plump toddler with big dark eyes. It was pretty stinking cute. They were both making peace signs.

  “John is . . . ?” Eden said absently. Studying that picture. Adorable as that kid was, she was really glad Annelise wasn’t the kind of kid subject to the vicissitudes of life on the road with a band.

  “John’s my drummer. And if I’m partly responsible for Annelise being in
the world, I want to be part of her life. At least a little part of her life. It literally kept me awake last night thinking a kid of mine is growing up not knowing who her dad is. I mean that. I mean, I know your dad. Cool guy. You had that growing up.”

  She was going to have to tell her parents about Jasper, and she had a hunch Glenn would not be a cool guy when he heard the news.

  “Yeah. I have a great dad. Annelise has plenty of positive male influences in her life.”

  She landed on “positive” a little too hard.

  She forgave herself.

  She was all for making Jasper work for this.

  “You know, speaking for myself, when you don’t know your dad, there’s this . . . you’re always just kind of aware that something’s missing. No matter what. Even if you don’t really lack anything. For me, it added this level of restlessness, I think . . . maybe that’s why I have a jaguar.”

  She smiled a little at that. But he was serious.

  “And yeah, I’ve tried a few ways of, um, thinking and being. Who doesn’t do that? It’s just that the things I’ve tried are on a slightly, um, epic scale, and make it into the news.”

  This did sound like a reasonable explanation.

  “She’s a little girl. Not a supermodel. You’re a rock star who possesses a certain amount of charm—”

  “As much as that, huh?”

  “—and you’re intelligent, and odds are good you’re not a sociopath.”

  “Now you’re just trying to turn me on.”

  “She’s a delightful, funny, blazingly smart, sunny-natured easy child, and I lucked out with that, I really did. I’m totally aware that it could be so different. So it’s not that hard for anyone to make her like them, Jasper. She’s trusting and openhearted and . . .” She stopped, freshly breathless with trepidation, suddenly, at the idea of exposing Annelise’s tender, trusting, open heart to the relative wild card that was Jasper Townes.