by Ren Benton
To Gin, the glass box formed a terrarium with too few places to hide from unseen eyes peering in. Even miles from the nearest neighbor with acres of dense forest shielding the house from the road, the exposure made her skin creep.
No eyes other than hers scanned the living room from within, and no voices drifted from the kitchen ahead or bedrooms behind to indicate the men had made it inside.
Ethan must have exerted just a little too much force trying to get Lex through the door. Overcome by the premonition he was about to be shackled in the dungeon and forced to make music against his will, Lex wrenched from his captor’s grasp and bolted for the trees. Now, Ethan was chasing their runaway composer through the woods because he didn’t want to be responsible for ruining the movie with inferior music any more than Gin did.
She should probably help drag the music man back to ensure he didn’t escape again.
She equipped herself for a footrace by slipping her feet into canvas sneakers cast off at the security panel the last time she came into the house. As she bent to adjust the back of one shoe over her heel, a flash of movement in the dining room set off the alarm in her brain.
“Omigosh, it’s really you!”
Gin hopped back a step as the intruder rushed her. The door blocked further retreat.
The assailant’s embrace crushed Gin’s arms against her chest. The woman was a couple of inches shorter and of average build, but her grip couldn’t be broken from that position. With hands bound, the panic button on the house alarm might as well have been miles away.
She skipped away just as Gin decided to risk her forehead on a head-butt. Hands fluttered in the air like pink, nervous birds. “Please don’t tell Lex I grabbed you. He warned me not to, but I was so excited, I forgot I promised not to do the fangirl thing.”
Gin’s heart continued to gallop while her mind sluggishly processed the news the intruder was a fan, not an assassin — not that the two were mutually exclusive.
She was on the young side of adulthood, petite, hourglass shaped, and hadn’t stopped talking the whole time. “I grew up watching you on Trouble & Toil. I begged my parents every day to let me dye my hair purple like yours, but the most they’d let me do was wear a wig for Halloween.”
Gin’s purple hair had been as fake as the spells her character cast throughout the ten-year run of the series. In rare solidarity with other parents, Simone Greene never would have allowed her daughter’s hair to be dyed purple, thereby diminishing her marketability as an above-average white American girl. Gin could hardly appear on the cover of Seventeen without long, flowing, natural-colored hair, even if it took a stylist four hours a month to apply those “natural” highlights and lowlights to the drab blonde genetics provided.
The other woman’s wide-eyed stare fell to the mark slashing across the right side of Gin’s throat. “The scar isn’t anywhere near as bad in real life as it looks in pictures.”
The defect bothered Gin only when the tissue damage interfered with her voice. The best plastic surgeon in Hollywood, consulted at Simone’s insistence, said she had a greater chance of dying under anesthesia than achieving a noticeable cosmetic improvement with surgery. She never covered the scar with makeup or pretended a fondness for turtlenecks. Fashion magazines digitally erased the disfigurement. Tabloids enhanced it. What they really hid or reveled in was their own discomfort with unapologetic ugliness in a world obsessed with beauty and the “perks” of celebrity.
With any luck, the ball of excitement bouncing before her would never have to understand how ugly the world could be. Gin could easily picture a miniature version dressed up for Halloween like a character idolized by little girls around the world, even if she looked like she hadn’t been born when the final season aired nineteen years ago.
The girl-woman slapped her left hand over her mouth to cut off the flow of words. A set of bands on her ring finger sparkled in the sunlight pouring through the windows. A fresh torrent of words pushed the hand away. “I am so sorry. I just feel like I know you after doing nothing the whole trip except interrogate Lex about you, and I forgot you have no idea who I am. I’m Piper, by the way, and I swear I’m not a nut. I will totally understand if you throw me out, but please please please point me to a bathroom first.”
For the first time since the deluge began, Gin knew how to respond. “I won’t throw you out.” Her voice emerged low but clear, intelligible despite the increasing perception of constriction.
Lex mentioned he was bringing company, so she’d been prepared for another woman. Just not... this one.
She pointed to the hallway beyond the office. “First door on your left, or you can claim any room other than Ethan’s and use the en suite. Make yourself at home.”
The agitated birds took flight again. “I can’t believe how nice you are.”
Lex must have painted an unflattering picture if not wanting someone’s kidneys to explode was unexpectedly nice of her, but why would he be kind? She was the evil ex, after all.
Piper dipped her knees in the universal dance of urinary distress. “My pregnancy app says this baby’s only the size of a kidney bean, and he’s already squishing my bladder capacity to nothing.”
She sprinted toward relief.
Baby echoed in Gin’s ears, reverberated in her skull, and threatened to explode from her mouth, amplified a thousandfold.
She kept her lips sealed and pressed a hand to her hollow abdomen. Lex was full of surprises. Babies, rings, and bubbles full of sunshine. Either a lot had changed in five years, or she’d known him even less well than she thought.
Well. If she’d had any idea what he needed, their relationship wouldn’t have been such a cataclysmic failure. If his new album was any indication, he was thriving now. Obviously, the best thing for him was everything she wasn’t.
Good for him. Good for them.
And if his good cheer made him amenable to working on the movie, good for her, too.
She stepped out of the arc of the door when it swung open to admit Ethan and an enormous suitcase covered in flowers of glaring hues.
He laughed at the sight of her. “You look dazed. Isn’t Piper great? Did she make it to the bathroom, or do I need to find a mop?”
She ignored his first question and the peevish impulse to call him a traitor. “I think she avoided leaving a puddle on the floor. Are there more bags?”
He lugged his load toward the bedroom wing. “Lex brought a dozen guitars. Maybe he’ll trust you to carry one.”
Her lips trembled with the effort of forming a smile. He wouldn’t subject his retinue of wooden ladies to such a long journey unless he meant to seriously consider taking the job.
Happy Lex was good for the movie, but as his old friend, she should be glad for him even if he gave her nothing. He was long overdue for some peace.
Her churning feelings receded to the well from whence they’d crawled. They were irrelevant, like ghosts whispering to the living. She would be professional. Lex would put the final perfect touch of sound on her movie and then ride off into the sunset with his wife and child. Gin would return to her blank page.
And they all lived happily ever after. Roll credits.
She stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her. Stone slabs formed stairs that curved around the front of the house, descending to the driveway that bowed toward a detached garage. The steps grabbed at the soles of her shoes, slowing her feet as she rounded the corner.
A Suburban loomed in the drive, rear hatch open to expose the precious cargo within. The guest of honor stood with his back to her, inspecting the integrity of his baggage.
Alexander Fitzgerald Perry. The blues rendition of his life story would begin His mama couldn’t give him a silver spoon, so she gave him a name fit for a railroad tycoon. He had the regal bearing to match, though Gin never could pinpoint the origin, other than from his height, he had no choice but to look down his nose at just about everyone.
His long body looked even leaner than
she remembered it. Broad shoulders strained at the seams of a soft knit shirt. His torso tapered to a narrow ass encased in aged denim.
Following introduction to the mother of his child, she should confine her admiration to the artistic realm and stop wondering if his back still made a good life raft when the floor was lava, if he still got a pinch under his shoulder blade during long guitar sessions and groaned long and low while probing fingers smoothed it out, if the canvas of his skin bore any new ink.
If he tasted the same when another woman took him in her arms and put her mouth on him.
Professional, remember?
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the rear view of Lex Perry was a thing of geometric beauty, his back an inverted sublime triangle. If the half dozen drummers who’d had the privilege of staring at it in the line of duty shared her appreciation of the view, they’d have tried harder to hang onto the job.
A slammed door rocked the Suburban, and the current holder of that enviable position came around the back of the vehicle and called her name in greeting.
Lex turned, revealing a sharper jaw, more chiseled cheekbones, every goddamn hair predictably in place. He pinned her where she stood with eyes that were deceptively dark at a distance. Those, too, were more intense than memory served.
She crossed her arms across her middle and hugged herself as if that would hold her in place. Eight weeks of scripting every word and gesture she would perform at this moment hadn’t accounted for the tidal wave of helpless yearning that threatened to push her toward him. Her lines vanished from memory as if they’d been written in sand.
This movie had tormented her with equal parts promise and agony from the start. Now there could be no doubt it meant to break her heart before it finished with her.
Lex had passed through Colorado at least a dozen times. The hotel room, dressing room, and parlor where he hosted get-togethers for up to twenty thousand rowdy guests at a time were indistinguishable from any other stop on a tour.
Here, miles from Denver, miles even from the nearest blink-and-miss-it town of Grayson, hid a secret world. From the city, this place existed only as a watercolor mural on a distant wall, vanishing when the spotlight of the sun dropped behind it and civilization aimed light at itself in defiance of the darkness.
Here, those pretty pastel mountains loomed, cloaked in their own shadows. Dense forests of fairy tale proportions pinched the road as if trying to stop a gash from bleeding. Trees shifted and sighed in reproach at the passage of toy cars that added insult to nature’s injury.
Here, when darkness fell, a man would feel its weight and run for cover.
“Whatcha writing?”
The images scattered, embarrassed to be caught fraternizing with each other. Less than pleased with his role in bringing them together, Lex lowered the notebook to his thigh and covered his scribbles with one hand. “What do you see?”
Matt took a cursory look at their surroundings and seized upon the most bountiful resource. “Trees?”
“What do the trees mean to you?”
“Christmas?”
And that was why Lex wrote solo and called the band together only when the music was ready to record. “There you go. I’m writing a Christmas song.”
Then again, the idea was just absurd enough to appeal. He turned to a clean page. Instead of jingle bells and candy canes, this tune called for broken toys — no, dolls — and bearded housebreakers. The challenge would be burying the holiday cues to avoid obvious parody.
He had a humorless image to maintain, after all.
Stockings tinsel fire joined the growing collection of words. Someone who didn’t know him well might think the lyrics taking shape represented a condemnation of sex trafficking juxtaposed with cheery seasonal imagery to batter the listener’s conscience rather than a slightly warped retelling of familiar traditions.
Perfect.
His reward for musical jokes that sailed over the listener’s head was a stockpile of smug superiority. His greatest achievement in that regard remained “Factor E” — fourteen years after release, only one person had ever caught on that the song was about Willy Wonka’s candy empire being powered by slave labor and ritual sacrifice of children.
That movie was a favorite of Gin’s. He’d written the song with the hope she would hear it, recognize him as a kindred spirit, and fall madly in love with him.
It took a few years, but he eventually got everything he’d ever wanted. Then, as in every cautionary tale ever told about thoughtlessly made wishes, the dark side of his dream-come-true began seeping through the cracks.
A puddle of ink spread under his stalled pen, drowning the last word scrawled.
Being recognized initially brought a surge of mind-altering bliss. Sustained recognition, on the other hand, was a steady stream of panic for a man with secrets, and no one had more secrets than an addict. The truth could never sink deep enough into the murk to hide from Gin. She didn’t have to dive. She simply saw. Every fear. Every weakness. Every sin.
Her insight was the stuff of nightmares, but he’d come running to her to have the darkest parts of his soul exposed again. Only Gin could be trusted to tell him whether the monster in the shadows had moved on or merely gotten better at hiding.
Yet here he sat on the tailgate like a teenager too chickenshit to face the consequences of a fender bender.
At least his juvenile behavior entertained Matt, who was little more than a child himself. “I never knew you were such a coward.”
“My spinelessness is a matter of public record.” Lex snapped the notebook shut and tossed it over his shoulder to get lost among the rest of his baggage. He’d have been here four days sooner if not for his certainty airplanes were coffins suspended by nothing but the unanimous mercy of thousands of potentially disgruntled engineers, welders, fuelers, pilots, and air traffic controllers. He hadn’t set foot on one in the five years since getting blackout drunk was stricken from his limited repertoire of coping skills.
Matt was stoked to be in a band that played anywhere other than his parents’ garage. He looked at Canada as if he’d been transported to an enchanted dimension, so being confined to North America wasn’t a source of strife with him — yet. He deserved a fearless leader who could give him the world.
Even if he was being an obnoxious shit at the moment. “You wish I meant flying. What’s the worst that can happen when you see your ex?”
Bursting into flames, loss of oxygen, plummeting, shattering impact, followed by a race between water and sharks to determine which won bragging rights on his autopsy as the official cause of death. Statistically, those outcomes might be slightly more farfetched in regard to a woman than an airplane, but he hadn’t faced Gin since rehab, either — and he’d never had any skill when it came to coping with her. Deep breathing sure as hell didn’t settle nerves jangling with the awareness she held his future in her small, steady hands.
“It’s just a job.” One he needed to execute flawlessly so he’d have a backup plan when the rest of the band, management, the label, and the fans finally got sick of his shit.
No big deal.
“Right. It has nothing to do with the woman who offered you the job being the same woman who stole the heart from your chest, hooked it to a pump to keep it beating, and kept it by her bed to lull her to sleep at night.”
The kid was pushing his luck paraphrasing the most whiny, self-indulgent song on a whiny, self-indulgent album written in the midst of rehab. Lex never should have been allowed in the studio with that bucket of shit, but everyone had been tired of waiting. Bad product was better for the bottom line than no product. His eternal mortification was a small price to pay for getting Gone & Forgotten back on the charts, back on the road, and back generating revenue.
He’d redeemed himself as a songwriter on two subsequent albums. The most recent, Amnesia, crouched in the third slot on Billboard and was expected to claw higher, a promising omen for the forthcoming tour. As long as the venues so
ld out, Big Jim would keep adding more dates. Months away from home stretched ahead of Lex.
But instead of cramming as many private days and nights in his own bed as possible into his last few weeks of freedom, he threw some clothes in a bag, drove most of the way across the country, and told everyone to start preparing without him because the founder and frontman of Gone & Forgotten would rather make music for someone else than do his damn job.
The day was fast approaching when he would have to choose how much dignity he’d like to take with him into the sunset of his career. Writing music for someone else had to be better than hosting a reality show on some dick-centric cable network where has-been celebrities went to die. He just had to acclimate himself to surrendering creative control by degrees, starting with the person for whom he had the most creative respect. If he couldn’t do it for Gin...
There was no if. He barely had the emotional resources to get to this stage of Plan A. There was nothing in the reserve tank for a Plan B. He would give her the best music he could write, critics and audiences would hail him as a genius, and when it came time for a career change, he’d have something other than “rock star” to put on his résumé. End of story.
Matt bounced on the seat like a kid half his age who’d been cooped up in the car too long. “If it’s just a job, let’s head to the office and get to work.”
Lex pretended not to hear the latest attempt to turn this into a team project. “Why aren’t you hauling bags into the house? I brought you to be a pack mule.”
“You mean there’s a task you’d actually trust me to perform? My heart!” Matt clasped his hands over the overwhelmed organ but made a speedy recovery when threatened with the scalpel of Lex’s glare. “Ethan told me to stay put and sound the alarm if you rabbit.”
