“Are you calling me unconventional, Fiore?”
“Nobody in their right mind would call you unconventional. Eccentric, maybe, but certainly not unconventional.”
“That’s a relief. For a minute there, you had me worried.” He stretched out his lanky legs and crossed them at the ankles. Took a sip of Chablis and studied the contents of his glass. “So,” he said, “what’s going on between you and Jesse?”
“Nothing’s going on,” she said in exasperation. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?”
“Well, for starters,” he said, “you’re dating him.”
“Oh, for the love of God. I am not dating him. We’re friends. We spend time together because we’re both alone and we enjoy each other’s company. But I’d hardly call it dating. I’m not in the market for another husband. I’m never getting married again.”
“Never,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t know, babe. Never’s a long time.”
“Danny would always be there between us. Nobody could ever measure up.”
“I suppose it would be hard,” he said, his voice gone suddenly flat, “competing with a ghost.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Are you mad at me?” she said.
He squared his jaw. “I don’t know,” he said. “Should I be?”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Look around you, Casey. Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why nobody’s there?”
She thought of the emptiness of her king-size bed, of the black void she faced nightly. “More times than you’d care to know,” she said. “But you see, I have you.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Damn cozy, those three thousand miles of telephone line.” He folded his arms across his belly and studied his toes. Quietly, he said, “I do, you know.”
“You do what?”
“Wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why nobody’s there.”
Inside her chest, she felt the tug of an emotion she couldn’t identify. “Flash,” she said, “why don’t you find yourself some nice girl and get married?”
“You sound like my mother. It’s not like I haven’t been looking. Is it my fault that Miss Right hasn’t shown up?”
“Ms. And in the immortal words of Johnny Lee, you’re looking for love in all the wrong places.”
“That’s what my mom says. She wants me to come home to Southie and marry Mary Frances O’Reilly.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The infamous Mary Frances. Still single, is she?”
“And getting more desperate by the hour. Her biological clock is ticking like crazy.”
Glenn Frey, in an earlier incarnation, was singing in full, lush stereo about taking it easy. In the flickering light of a single candle, Rob held up his Flintstones jelly glass and stared morosely into its depths. “All I know,” he said, “is that something’s wrong with my life, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
Casey rested her glass on her knee. Toying with a strand of his hair, she said, “You could do something really radical.”
He leaned his head back and studied her. “Yeah? Like what?”
She wrapped one golden curl around a slender forefinger. “Maybe move to the East Coast.”
“And give up all this?”
She looked around the room. “Maybe you could buy the Hotel California and have it dismantled and moved, piece by piece.”
They shared a wry grin. “I think,” he said, suddenly serious, “that you’re the only person in my life who’s ever loved me unconditionally.” He drew a pattern on his glass with a fingernail.
It was a curious thing for him to say. Still toying with his hair, she said, “How’s that?”
“You accept me for what I am. You don’t have any preconceived expectations. No matter what damn-fool thing I do, you love me anyway.” He turned his jelly glass in his hand. “Do you realize how old this thing is? They had these when I was a kid. It’s probably an antique by now.”
***
They spent the next few days in the studio, re-recording and remixing portions of his new album, drinking murky coffee and eating stale doughnuts and cold pizza. She’d been away from all this long enough to have forgotten the exhilaration she felt surrounded by the lively chaos of a recording studio. This was a world she understood, a world a million miles away from the one she’d been living in since Danny died.
A little after nine on Saturday night, exhausted but pleased with the way the session had gone, they wound things to a close. As Casey was boxing up the remains of the pizza, Niall, one of the sound engineers, swung his jacket over his shoulder and said, “A bunch of us are stopping by the Blue Onion for a while. You two want to come with us?”
“What’s the Blue Onion?” she said.
“It’s a blues club,” Rob said around the pencil clenched between his teeth. He tucked a cluster of sheet music into a leather portfolio, dropped in the pencil, and zipped it up. “They opened up about three months ago.”
“Very hot,” Niall added.
“This isn’t one of those see-and-be-seen places, is it?” Pizza box in hand, Casey looked down at her jeans and flannel shirt. “I’m not exactly dressed for going out.”
“It’s very low-key,” Niall said. “Ultra casual.”
“Everybody’s there for the same reason,” Rob said. “To drink, to dance, and to hear some of the best blues on the West Coast.”
“Sounds like my kind of place,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The Blue Onion was a musician’s hangout, liberally sprinkled with familiar faces, people Casey had known and worked with over the years. There were a few well-knowns scattered among the crowd, but the majority were the backbone of the music industry, the studio musicians, the songwriters, the backup singers who made the stars of the industry sound good on vinyl, tape, or CD. As usual, she was the lone woman at the table, and as usual, the guys talked shop. It was inevitable. Get a bunch of musicians together, and you could almost guarantee that they’d be either listening to music, making music, or talking about making music. Frequently, it was a combination of the three. Over the years, the talk had changed; new words like MIDI and download showed up with regularity. Computers had taken over the recording industry—to its detriment, some believed. Certainly the new technology had put a number of sessions musicians out on the street. Electronic technology was cheaper and easier in the long run than live musicians, so competition for available jobs was fierce, and only the strongest and the best survived.
Other things had changed over the years, too. Looking around the table, Casey realized that their group was aging. Receding hairlines and graying ponytails weren’t uncommon, and most of the guys here tonight would have a drink or two and then go home to their wives and kids. Only Niall and Rob remained single. Casey took a sip of beer, closed her eyes and let the music take her.
Ah, the music. It was rich and earthy, cool and jazzy, hot and steamy, with a disturbing, primitive sexual rhythm that moved her in a way she’d never been able to translate into words. Her response to the blues was overwhelmingly physical, visceral and erotic, bringing to mind something she’d heard Rob say years ago: Good blues is like good sex; you can feel it from your toenails to the roots of your hair. She opened her eyes and caught him watching her, and she flushed red-hot. He casually rested his elbow on the back of her chair while he continued his conversation with Mike Andreason. Crowded together as they were, six of them sitting around a table designed for no more than three, she was crammed tight against him, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. He gave off so much heat, she could feel dampness forming under her arms and beneath the collar of her shirt. She discreetly peeled the damp fabric away from her chest, wondering why on earth she’d worn flannel, in California, in July.
Rob shifted position, rested his hand on the back of her neck. She shot him a quick, speculative glance, but he was still deep in conversation, slumped on his tailbone with those long legs spread wide before him, seemingly oblivious
to her. Casey took another sip of beer, relaxed into his warmth, and made a halfhearted attempt to follow the conversation. But it was impossible; she was too distracted by the thumb that was lazily stroking the tender flesh just behind her left ear. Had he been any other man on the planet, she would have thought he was coming on to her. But Rob was an extremely physical person, eminently comfortable inside his body and free with his affection, and she doubted he even realized what he was doing.
She, on the other hand, was excruciatingly aware of what he was doing. And if he didn’t stop doing it, she was going to experience nuclear meltdown, right here at the table. She reached up and removed his hand, then patted his shoulder. “Bathroom run,” she said. “Be right back.”
She stood in front of the mirror in the powder room beside a leggy twenty-year-old blonde who was applying eyeliner. Feeling like the frumpy country mouse, Casey splashed cool water on her face and the back of her neck. The window was open, a soft breeze drifting in, and she undid the top button of her flannel shirt for ventilation. The blonde eyed her distastefully before pulling out lipstick and pursing pouty lips that would have given Jagger a run for his money. Ignoring her, Casey took out her brush and tried to tame her hair into some semblance of order. But it was useless; the humidity inevitably removed what little body it had and left it limp and straight as a stick. She gave up, crammed the brush back into her purse and left the blonde to her toilette.
A friend of Niall’s had shanghaied Casey’s chair, so she stood behind Rob with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, her body swaying restlessly to the rhythm of the music. He reached up, caught her hands in his and leaned his head back. “Wanna dance, sweet stuff?” he said.
He didn’t have to ask twice. When the music moved her, Casey wanted to move to the music. They found an empty spot on the dance floor and she stepped into his arms with an ease born of years of familiarity. He was warm and damp, slender and solid, and she had forgotten how wonderful it felt to be held in a man’s arms, engulfed in his searing heat, pressed against a hard body from knee to shoulder. It was true what they said about people having their own unique scents; blindfolded, in a room full of people, she could still have picked Rob out by smell alone.
She wound her arms around his neck and did her best to follow his lead. Rob MacKenzie danced the way he did everything in life: full speed ahead, with rhythm and panache. He wasn’t a flashy dancer, but had an innate, organic understanding of music that went light years beyond any scattered pieces of theory he’d picked up in a college classroom. He was a natural, born to make music, born to translate it into a language that other, less fortunate creatures could comprehend.
She lost all sense of time as they swayed together, bluesy ballad segueing into bluesy ballad. The humidity ceased to have meaning as they melted together like a pair of Crayolas left out too long in the sun. Her dampness was now his dampness, and his hers. She could no longer distinguish up from down, Casey from Rob, and she wondered how she could possibly be this drunk when she’d only had one beer. It had to be the music, that damned erotic music. Nothing else could explain the hollow ache inside her. Nothing else could explain why his body crushed against hers was sending sparks shooting off into the stratosphere.
She needed to get away, to get some air. To step out of his arms and walk away. But she had been overcome by an inexplicable lethargy, and a soft, insistent voice inside her was telling her that it was, after all, just dancing. Could it possibly hurt, just this once, to relax and allow herself to enjoy what she was feeling?
“Ah, Flash,” she whispered, adjusting the fit of her head against his shoulder. “You feel so good.”
With the tips of his fingers, he brushed the hair back from her face. “So do you, sweetheart.”
“Forgive me for making a fool of myself,” she said. “It’s just been so long since anybody held me like this.”
His cheek touched hers, the rasp of his whisker stubble sending heat through her body in a fluid rush. Gruffly, he said, “You were born to be held.”
Suddenly the heat, the stuffy closeness of the room, his closeness, became too much for her. “I need air,” she said, and like a coward she fled, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the dance floor.
Outside, she leaned up against the building and took great, gasping gulps of fresh air. Eyes squeezed shut, she bent forward from the waist, hands on her spread knees. The door opened, then closed, and beside her, in the darkness, Rob said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, straightening up. “I just felt a little queasy.”
His hand was cool and damp against her cheek. “You don’t feel feverish,” he said.
Beyond his shoulder, a dying star burned out and plummeted in a streak of fire across the velvet blackness of the sky. She reached up and removed his hand. He was standing far too close. “I told you,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Still he didn’t retreat. He ran the tip of his finger along her jaw, and her breath caught in her throat at the curious combination of pain and pleasure that was scrambling around inside her. Then the door swung open wide and a half-dozen boisterous voices broke the silence. Music and loud male laughter spilled out into the night, and Casey drew in a huge gulp of air. “I’m tired,” she said. “Can we go home now?”
Rob was uncharacteristically silent as he maneuvered the sleek, black Porsche through the darkened streets of Los Angeles. He drove with the top down, and she closed her eyes and reveled in the cool air kissing her face and threading fingers through her hair as Percy Sledge crooned into the darkness about a man loving a woman.
The Hotel California was dark, and somewhere in the shrubbery beneath his landlady’s parlor window, a cicada chirped his solitary song. They went up the stairs together and Rob unlocked the apartment door. He dropped his leather portfolio on the kitchen table, and Casey put the pizza box into the refrigerator. He cleared his throat. “Want a nightcap?” he said.
She closed the refrigerator door and leaned against it. “I’m tired,” she said. “I think I’m just going to bed.”
He didn’t say anything, just propped those lanky hips against the kitchen counter and folded his arms. After a minute, she said, “Good night,” and turned to walk away.
Softly, he said, “Babe?”
She paused, turned slowly to look at him. “What?” she said.
He crossed his ankles. Squared his shoulders. His jaw. “Never mind,” he said. “G’night.”
The bedroom was hot and sticky. She hated taking his bed away from him, but he’d insisted, the night she arrived, that she was a guest and that he would be the one sleeping on the couch. It was too hot to wear pajamas, so she peeled off her damp clothes and stood naked at the window, letting the night breeze cool her heated skin.
She cast aside the heavy bedding and lay between cool percale sheets, but sleep was elusive. The bed linens smelled of Rob, and she floundered, sleepless, wondering what on earth had gotten into her. It must have been the dancing that had made her so jangly inside that she couldn’t lie still. Her breasts ached at the memory of being crushed up hard against him, and she finally fell into a restless and troubled sleep filled with erotic dreams in which a shadowy, faceless man subjected her to electrifying and unspeakable pleasures.
She woke grainy-eyed and hung over. Rob was still asleep on the couch, and she showered and put on cut-offs and her Sexy Senior Citizen tee shirt and went outside. In the deep shadows of morning, the grass was cool and damp between her bare toes, and Mrs. Sullivan was on her knees, pruning the peony bush that grew at the corner of the house.
“Good morning,” she said as she approached. “Your peonies are spectacular.”
At eighty, Rob’s landlady had blue eyes as sharp and clear as those of a young girl. “Your Mr. MacKenzie planted them for me,” she said. “Three summers ago.”
Casey didn’t bother to clarify that he wasn’t precisely her Mr. MacKenzie. She knelt and began picking off dead leaves. “He does a lo
t for you, does he?”
“I don’t know what I’d do without him,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “Why, just last week he fixed a leaky faucet in my kitchen. Imagine if I’d had to pay a plumber to do it.” She moved on to intently examine the rosebush that climbed up the trellis beside the bay window. “Damn aphids,” she said.
Casey couldn’t help it; she laughed aloud. It was so unexpected, the profanity coming from that sweet, grandmotherly lady. “They’re eating up my garden,” the old woman explained. She picked up a sprayer and began pumping some noxious chemical onto the leaves of the rosebush. “You know,” she said, “I’ve seen a lot of women in and out of that apartment over the years.”
Casey picked up a waxy peony leaf and smoothed it against her bare thigh. “No doubt,” she said.
Mrs. Sullivan glanced at her, then back at her lethal task. “But it all stopped a while back.” Squirt. “You’re the only woman he’s had up there—” Squirt, squirt. “—in nearly two years.”
She glanced up at the old woman in surprise, but before she could say anything, Rob clomped down the front steps and loped across the lawn toward them. “Hey,” he said.
Casey sat back and smiled. “Hey,” she said, wondering how any man could look so appealing in wrinkled gray sweats.
“Ready to run?”
“Just give me a second to run upstairs and get my sneakers.”
Rob’s neighborhood was flat as the proverbial pancake, so the biggest challenge to running there was finding her way back home. The streets were a maze of trees and houses that all looked alike. Every time they ran there, she was dependent on his homing instinct to keep her from getting hopelessly lost.
They skirted a parked Oldsmobile and gave a wide berth to a barking Rottweiler. “I’m going on tour next month,” he said. “Want to come with me?”
“Not hardly,” she said. “Not in this lifetime.”
A dark-haired, dark-eyed child on a tricycle solemnly watched them pass. “Sing with me,” he coaxed, “and I’ll give you equal billing.”
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 38
