By Referral Only

by Lyla Payne

  “Get ready for the real Louisiana accent.” Discomfort itched my palms, maybe born of habit more than anything.

  Cole reached out a hand and tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I’ve been waiting for that to peek out for days. I get little hints when you get really excited. It’s adorable.”

  “If you say so. Okay.” I stood and handed over the script. I thought I could do it without the words. “You start with the line about Annie being your girl.”

  He cleared his throat and stood too, staying within arm’s reach but not touching me. “Now, that’s my girl.”

  I spun toward him, widening my eyes and forcing an innocent look into them I hadn’t had in years. “Frank! That’s the second time you’ve said that!”

  Cole smiled and I turned away, pacing a little to convey Annie’s agitation. “Frank, I ain’t been feelin’ well lately. I ain’t been hungry, and I’m always hungry. I’ve been starin’ at the moon a lot. Is that what it means to be in love?”

  “Oh, Annie, ain’t you ever been in love before?” His horrible accent mixed with Scottish brogue almost made me giggle, but I recovered.

  “Oh, sure, dozens of times.”

  “I mean with someone who loved you back,” he said more softly, moving close enough for me to feel his warmth.

  My heart pounded. I knew now that I hadn’t ever been in love. I’d never felt the way I did in Cole’s arms, or when I saw him waiting for me after class, or just the way being with him made me feel worthy of my own skin. “Oh. Well…I guess not. But I hear tell all about it.”

  I launched into the song about the horrible wonders of falling in love, moving toward Cole and then away, like a girl scared of what drew her in but still sucked toward the source of those feelings like she couldn’t help it.

  All of the sudden, I felt more of a kinship with Annie than I expected.

  Cole’s eyes drank in my face while I sang, smiling when appropriate but mostly fixed with a raw, unexpected hunger that didn’t look sexual for once.

  He took the lead in the song when Frank’s part of the duet began, and his voice was so horrible that I did start laughing. It only encouraged him, until he was belting the song in the most off-key rendition I’d ever heard.

  The door rattled in its frame under someone’s fist. “Cole! You’re waking up all the dogs in the neighborhood. Shut up!” One of the twins stomped off without opening the door, probably because he wasn’t sure we were dressed.

  I calmed down in time to take the lead back from Cole, who looked at me smugly, as though he’d just delivered a killer solo.

  The song broke again and I went on about how Frank had to come and watch me perform that night. “When you see me out there and the music’s playin’ and the lights are on me, you’re gonna…you’re gonna….”

  “What am I gonna?” Cole asked with a laugh, the intensity in his eyes drying my mouth.

  “Oh, bust your buttons! And then, just like at the end of a fairytale, you’re going to be so dag gern proud of me that you’re goin’ to ask me to do somethin’ and be someone and I’m only tellin’ you in advance that I’m gonna to do it and I’m gonna be it.”

  He moved forward, offering to do it in advance, but I pushed him away, telling him he’d ruin the plan. But when Cole—Frank—moved toward the door, I called him back. “Frank. Do you think you could touch me? For luck?”

  He turned back, grabbing my hands and yanking me into his chest, planting a big cheesy kiss on my lips. The scene ended for Annie right there, but Cole pulled back, his eyes sparkling, and delivered the last line of the scene.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Chapter 21

  The rest of November passed in a blur of happiness. I auditioned for the play, which would open the week we returned to school in January, and landed the part of Annie. Cole and I spent most of our time alone, but attended the Greek functions for both our houses and hung out with Emilie and Quinn three or four more times.

  It felt as though I floated through everything—classes, DE responsibilities, acting—and little by little, night by night, dimpled smile by dimpled smile, I began to believe this was for real.

  That I would wake up next to Cole, feel desire shoot through me with a glance or a gentle touch, and know he’d be waiting to spend time with me, for a long time.

  Christmas break loomed large at the end of our sex-hazy tunnel, though. Finals were next week, then Cole would return to Scotland for almost a month, and I’d go home to New Orleans. Emilie and Quinn planned to visit for New Year’s, and that would be fun, but it hadn’t escaped my attention that Cole hadn’t even entertained the idea of asking me to come home with him.

  The logical part of my brain knew we weren’t there. We were stupid happy and the sex regularly blew my mind, but we didn’t talk much about the future. I’d avoided Audra altogether and had managed to only see the twins in passing, even though I spent more nights at their house than I didn’t. I knew Cole wanted us to hang out with them more, but I wasn’t ready to burst the perfect bubble we lived in—wasn’t ready to face their obvious distaste for our relationship.

  It shouldn’t bother me. Everything was great; we didn’t need to spend the holidays together two months after we’d started dating seriously. The Ruby who went out with Liam last August would laugh at the girl I’d become—a girl who craved assurances of a future.

  One day at a time, I lectured silently.

  My Thursday started earlier than Cole’s, and he looked so handsome burrowed under the covers that I couldn’t bear to wake him, even though he’d probably end up enjoying it. Instead, I eased from under the blankets and grabbed his dress shirt from where he’d flung it over a chair the night before and slipped it over my head. It fell almost to my knees and I trudged to the kitchen in search of coffee.

  The sight of Lawren’s back half sticking out of the fridge surprised me—the twins were late sleepers and, from what I could tell, graduate school mostly meant being buried in the library doing independent study.

  “Oh.”

  “Good morning, Ruby.” He grinned at me, the smile a little hesitant but not mean. “Coffee?”

  I nodded and reached for the cup he offered, then dumped in some hazelnut creamer and stirred. I wanted to retreat to the bedroom, but felt awkward about running away. My instincts were always to stand toe-to-toe with the people and situations that made me uncomfortable, Cole having been the exception. If things were going to continue with the two of us, I couldn’t hide from his family forever.

  Lawren looked mildly astonished when I sat down at the round oak table and sipped the steaming liquid.

  “What? Do I look that terrible at six-thirty in the morning?”

  “You look a hell of a lot better than ninety percent of the world at six-thirty in the morning. I am insanely jealous of my brother and have told him so on many occasions. Especially after I’ve lain awake half the night listening to furniture scraping the floor and noises that sound only vaguely human vibrating the walls.” He grinned when my face heated up.

  I tried to glare at him, but ended up smiling instead. “Perv.”

  “Proud of it.” He paused to sip his own coffee, his Stuart green eyes peering at me over the rim of the mug. “All joking aside, I’m happy for my baby brother. He’s spent too much time acting as though one mistake requires a lifetime of penance. It was time he found a lass he could let into his pain, you know? I told him after the first time I met you that you’d be different.”

  Cold fingers wrapped around the back of my neck. Law obviously thought Cole had told me about his past, about whatever had happened that had turned him into the laughingstock of my website. He hadn’t, and what kind of mistake could be bad enough to cause him pain?

  I should have dropped it, let Cole tell me the truth when he was ready. It hurt that he hadn’t already—after I’d found a way to trust him enough to dream about a future, he hadn’t trusted me enough to share his past.

  So, I let Lawren
think I knew.

  “Cole’s a good guy,” I replied, trying for a response that would keep him talking. “He deserves to be happy.”

  “Yes. We all told him that he’s not responsible for Poppy’s decisions over and over again, even if he did handle their situation badly, she’s the one who made the call that led to her death, not him.”

  The ice on the back of my neck soaked into my blood and slid into my stomach. I shivered in the kitchen, suddenly aware of my state of undress, and wrapped frozen fingers around the mug of coffee. Cole felt responsible for a girl’s death—what had he done?

  He appeared in the doorway to the kitchen then, looking heartbreakingly handsome. He blinked sleep-heavy eyes, rubbing a hand over his head, but his gaze cleared as he glanced between Lawren and me. My face felt like a piece of paper, brittle and drained.

  Panic infused the air, reaching me before I even said a word, and I knew it was worse than I imagined. The other shoe, the one I’d been waiting to dodge these past six weeks, toppled downward toward my napper, and I pushed past Cole, out of the kitchen. The last thing I needed was his family watching me come apart for a second time.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought she knew.” The guilt in Lawren’s muted response stung my eyes with tears.

  The bedroom blurred as the tears came faster. I wanted to get dressed and get out of there, but Cole’s footsteps stopped me from changing clothes. If we had to do this now, I didn’t want to be half-dressed and end up running out to the car naked.

  He shut the door behind him, his face lined and exhausted, eyes watching me as though I was a caged animal suddenly let loose on a zoo of frightened people. I didn’t know what to say; the hurt in my heart that he had kept something this big from me made me feel ripped in half, but the idea of why he looked scared right now terrified me.

  “I’m sorry I let him think I knew.”

  “You’re apologizing to me?”

  “Only for that.” I grabbed my overnight bag from the overstuffed chair in the corner of the room and started dumping makeup and clothes into it.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have class.”

  “Why are you taking your things?”

  I stopped moving, letting the pain wash over me. Accepting the truth of what I’d known all along—Cole and our relationship was too good to be true. The sickness in his eyes at the sight of my tears only made me more determined. “I think if there’s something that big in your past and you don’t want me to know about it, maybe we need to re-evaluate how things are going, that’s all. And it will be easier to do with some distance.”

  “We’re going great, Ruby. You know that. This thing…it’s not that I don’t trust you enough to tell you. I’m afraid you’re not going to understand.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much the same thing as not trusting me.”

  He sat down on the bed, looking like some kind of catalogue model in his pajama pants and bare chest, except for the broken, tortured expression pinching his features. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Sit.”

  The words scraped out, as though they were coughed up with pieces of his guts and soul. I sat in the chair, my bag on my lap, and waited, one hundred percent sure I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say—that if the scene in the kitchen had knocked loose that suspended shoe, this was where it conked me on the head.

  It was like opening the paper for a review the morning after opening night and knowing in your heart that the performance had been shitty. The knowledge of the inevitable would do nothing to dull the pain of seeing the words in black and white—unchangeable.

  “I was a pretty awkward wean. My brothers gave me a hard time about being skinny and dorky, while they strutted around town in kilts with hot girls on their arms. Then suddenly, when I finally hit puberty around sixteen, everything changed. Girls liked me. Guys wanted to party with me. Gavin and the twins were gone to college and I kind of lost my tether without them.”

  He took a shaky breath, blew it out, then continued without looking my direction. The ice water in my veins struggled to pump like blood—when it got into my heart, I would die.

  “I spent the better part of a year sleeping around and pished half the time, barely getting through school, killing my parents. Then a girl from town, Poppy, came to me. She was obviously pregnant and claimed it was mine. I—” He broke off and rubbed a hand across his head, still avoiding my gaze. “I told her if the stories about her were true then she couldn’t know it was mine, and that trying to pin it on me wasn’t her golden ticket out of the slums. I was a real minger, Ruby. I felt terrible about it immediately, and spent a month cleaning up my act. I went to apologize, to tell her that if she said it was my baby that we’d work it out, that I wanted to support her.”

  His gaze found mine then, desperate and pleading with me to understand. My entire body had gone numb when he’d confessed that this Poppy was poor, that he considered her beneath him—good enough to fuck, probably in the backseat of a car or the loo at the pub, but nothing more than a girl to toss aside when things got serious.

  “But,” I prompted, needing to hear the rest of the story.

  “But Poppy was dead. Her mother was a real devout Catholic. She’d called Poppy a whore and tossed her out, and she had tried to fix things by getting a back-alley, late-term abortion. She felt like she didn’t have another option, I guess, and I’ll never really forgive myself. Her death, it’s always going to rest at least partially on my shoulders. It took me a long, long time to believe that it’s not all my fault, though.”

  “And the no sex thing?” I felt like a robot, and sounded like one, too. Like the totally calm voice couldn’t possibly belong to me while my insides melted down.

  “The whole thing just changed my perspective on intimacy. It changed a lot of things.”

  I stood up, my body shaking from the center all the way to the tips of my fingers. Cole had knocked up a poor girl then tossed her aside, and she’d gotten herself killed trying to fix it. Maybe he was telling the truth about feeling badly about it afterward, or that it had changed his outlook. I couldn’t deny the ratings on the site, or the truth about him taking sex more seriously than most of us.

  But it didn’t change the fact that when he talked about Poppy, I saw my face. I might not be poor, but I was another girl his parents wouldn’t approve of, who would be seen as trying to legitimize herself by attaching myself to him, and it would end the same way.

  His inclination was to believe his family’s reputation and wealth meant more than a girl’s life, or the life of a baby she’d claimed was his. Everything I’d begun to believe over the past month and a half crumbled into dust, into grains of sand that slipped through my fingers. I was wrong to trust him with more than my body. I was stupid to think his family didn’t matter.

  It all mattered.

  I sidled toward the door, keeping as much space between Cole and me as possible.

  “Ruby, wait. Please.”

  The pleading, raw edge to his voice almost undid me. It almost made me stop, made me reconsider the fact that I could be different. But the shadow of this girl I’d never met, but knew—because she was me—flickered in the edge of my vision. I would be her, one day, if I stayed.

  Broken beyond repair. Laughed offstage without the courage to ever audition again, no matter the circumstances. I had to go now.

  “I can’t stay, Cole. I don’t think you’re a bad guy, and you’re right—you can’t blame yourself for Poppy’s choices. But I’ll be her to you one day—a girl you regret getting involved with but feel responsible for seeing things through. If you could push her aside because of her circumstances, you can do the same to me.”

  “No, Ruby. No. You’re wrong, you don’t—”

  He stood up, reaching for me, but I backed away. “Your family is more important to you than anything, and that’s how it should be. This isn’t going to work. Somewhere deep inside,
you already knew that.”

  Chapter 22

  Not for the first time, theatre saved my life. I threw myself into rehearsals for Annie Get Your Gun until Christmas vacation, and the results were good—if any of Geoff’s contacts came to see me again, they’d get the show of their lives.

  I still struggled to get through “They Say It’s Wonderful” without breaking down into tears, but we had some time. The fact that Evan, one of my regular co-stars, had gotten the role of Frank should have made it easier, but every time his lips touched mine, Cole’s face popped into my mind and I wanted to take a shower.

  Being home for Christmas was nice. Even though my dad was only in town for a couple of days, my mom and I had a nice time shopping and catching up. Emilie arrived the day before New Year’s Eve with a bottle of rum and we were flopped in my old bedroom, still decorated with theatre awards, cheerleading pictures, and a stupid pink bedspread my mother had forced on me in seventh grade and had never changed.

  “How are you doing?” Em asked, applying a thick coat of mascara in front of the mirror.

  We were getting ready to go out for New Year’s—I didn’t feel like it at all, but I couldn’t deprive Emilie and Quinn of the holiday in New Orleans, plus staying home would pretty much make me the most pathetic person alive.

  I shrugged. “Another day, another guy.”

  “Ruby. I’m your best friend. We both know Cole wasn’t just another guy to you.”

  “What do you want me to say? That he broke my heart?”

  “Did he?”

  “I broke my heart. I was the one who put myself in that situation again, so he’s not to blame.” I fluffed my hair and wandered into the bedroom to pull on a slinky gold Dior dress my mother had given me for Christmas.

  She followed me a minute later, choosing a plum Versace with a full skirt and slipping it over her head. Quinn was going to be here any minute and we’d need to leave to make our dinner reservations, then we planned to head to an absinthe bar in the Quarter.