All Rhodes Lead Here

by Zapata, Mariana

  It was Am who held up his hand in a stopping motion and said, “Jackie, don’t freak out—”

  And that’s when she stopped walking, the smile she’d had on her face dropping like a damn fly as her gaze landed on the person sitting next to me.

  She fell over like a fucking tree.

  So hard it was a miracle her skull didn’t smack against the concrete foundation as she passed out.

  “Told you,” Am muttered as we all rushed over, crouching beside her just as her eyes shot open and she screeched.

  “I’m fine! I’m fine!”

  “Are you all right?” Yuki asked, kneeling beside her.

  Jackie’s eyes went wide again, and her face went just as pale as Amos’s had earlier when I’d told him that we were going to recruit Yuki into helping today. “Oh my God, it’s you!” she shouted with another gasp.

  “Hi.”

  Hi. I almost burst out laughing. “Jackie, are you okay?”

  Jackie’s eyes filled with tears, and I realized Amos and I were invisible now. “Oh my God, it’s you.”

  My friend didn’t even hesitate; she scooted forward on her knees. “Would you like a hug?”

  Jackie’s eyes were full of tears as she nodded frantically.

  “I didn’t look like that, did I?” Amos whispered at my side as the woman and the teenager hugged and even more tears spilled out of Jackie’s eyes.

  She was sobbing. Jackie was flat-out sobbing.

  “Almost.” I met his eyes and grinned.

  He gave me a flat look that reminded me way too much of his dad. I laughed.

  But as I turned back, I happened to catch Jackie’s eyes as she pulled away from Yuki’s hug and saw something an awful lot that looked like guilt in them.

  What was up with that?

  * * *

  Eventually, after Jackie had calmed down and quit crying—which ended up taking close to an hour because the second she would start to get herself under control, she’d burst into tears again—we all managed to take a seat in the garage. Amos and Jackie let us keep the seats while they sat on the floor, one of them looking nauseous and disgruntled at the same time, and the other… if my life were an anime, Jackie would have had hearts in her eyes.

  “So…,” I said, eyeing Amos especially.

  He looked up at the ceiling, but I’d caught him peeking at me a second ago.

  I wasn’t going to put him on the spot if he was really against it. He either wanted to perform, which we hadn’t really talked about much yet, or he liked to write. He could just write for himself.

  Amos had a beautiful voice, but it was his decision what he wanted to do with his gifts. Keep them to himself or share them with the world—it was his choice.

  But I wanted Yuki to hear what he’d written, at least one song. Because maybe he didn’t admire her work, but without a doubt, I had a feeling that any praise she had for him would be good for his soul.

  And if that meant me having to do it, so be it.

  “Am, do you mind if I show Yu a little bit of your other song? The darker one?”

  He peeked at me again, pink taking over his neck. “You’re not gonna make me do it?”

  “I’d like it if you did because you know how I feel about your voice, but it’s 100 percent up to you. I just want her to hear it. Only if it’s okay with you.”

  He lowered his head then, and I could tell he was thinking about it.

  He nodded.

  As he handed over his notebook, I pointed at the acoustic guitar he had propped up on a guitar boat at his side, and he passed that over too, along with a guitar pick. I ignored the raised eyebrow he was shooting at me. This child never believed.

  Beside me, Yuki threaded her fingers together. “Oh, I love it when you sing!”

  I groaned, propping the lightweight guitar across my lap and sighed. “I’m not that great at singing and playing at the same time,” I warned the two teenagers, one of whom was staring at me intently and the other who I was pretty sure hadn’t heard a single word out of my mouth because she was too busy still staring at Yuki. “So it’s just an idea,” I said, even though we’d worked together enough to know that everything was just an idea until it had been tweaked to the second.

  “You’re gonna sing?” Amos asked slowly.

  I wiggled my eyebrows. “Unless you want to?”

  That got him to stop talking, but it didn’t get him to look any less dubious.

  “What about you, Jackie? You want to?” I asked my coworker.

  That got her to snap out of it. She looked at me too and shook her head. “In front of Yuki? No.”

  With the notebook propped on my knee, I closed an eye and whispered the words under my breath to get the timing of them okay. Clearing my throat, I heard the distinct sound of tires on the driveway.

  I remembered the chords he played along with the lyrics the day his dad and I had overheard him and was going to stick to them. They were simple enough for me to follow since I wasn’t specifically talented enough to play difficult things and sing at the same time; it had to be one or the other. Figuring it was as good as it was going to get, I started. There wasn’t a nervous bone in my body. Yuki knew I wasn’t Whitney or Christina. Then again, no one was Whitney or Christina. I wasn’t Lady Yuki either.

  I found a book yesterday

  with stories I cannot speak

  empty and hollow

  the words are nothing but bleak

  Okay, this was going well. I smiled a little at Am, whose mouth was slightly gaped, before I kept going. There wasn’t much left.

  Maybe there is a map

  To find the happiness in me

  Don’t let me be

  Left to sink into the debris

  I dipped straight into the chorus because it was what he had written since I hadn’t convinced him to save it for a little later.

  We rise and fall with the tide

  I cannot be led

  Nowhere left to hide

  The fire must be fed

  Yuki caught on to the rhythm and started tapping her foot, smiling wide. “Do it again!” she cheered.

  I smiled back at her and nodded, doing the chorus once more and then starting from the beginning, doing it a little easier, tapping my foot to keep the time. My friend gestured me to sing it once more, but this time, her sweet voice joined in, clearer, higher, and more piercing than mine.

  Some people in life just had it, this talent embedded into their DNAs that made them extra special, and Yuki Young was one of them.

  And it was the same vibe I’d gotten from Amos. This ability to make me break out in goose bumps.

  So I smiled as she sang along the parts she’d memorized and eyed the two teenagers sitting on the floor, staring at us. And when I got to the end of the chorus, I grinned at my friend and said, “Good, right?”

  Yuki was already nodding and smiling so wide, I couldn’t have loved her more for being so sweet to my new friend. “He wrote that? You wrote that, Amos?”

  He nodded quickly, gaze going from her to me.

  “Great job, teddy bear. Just great, great job. That line about being left to sink into the debris…” She nodded again. “That was really good. Memorable. I loved it.”

  Amos’s eyes swept to me, and just as he opened his mouth, another much deeper voice spoke up from behind me.

  “Wow.”

  I turned to look over my shoulder to find Mr. Rhodes standing just inside the garage. Dressed in that incredible uniform with his arms crossed over his chest, feet wide apart, he was smiling. Faintly, but it was definitely there.

  Probably because of Yuki’s beautiful voice.

  But it was me he was looking at. Me that he was focusing that slim smile on.

  I smiled right back at him.

  “I didn’t know you sang!” Jackie shouted out of nowhere.

  I turned my attention back to her. “I’ve sat through a lot of voice lessons. I’m not bad, but I’m not good.”

  Bes
ide me, Yuki snorted. I didn’t even spare her a glance. “What? I wish my voice was as husky as yours.”

  That got me to blink at her. “Don’t you have a four-octave range?”

  She blinked back. “Just accept the compliment, Ora.”

  Standing up, I handed the guitar back over to Amos, who was watching me still pretty sneaky and then set his notebook down beside the pillow he’d been sitting on. My old friend had gotten up too, and I tapped her shoulder before gesturing to my landlord.

  “Yuki, this is Mr. Rhodes, Amos’s dad and the man who owns the house. Mr. Rhodes, this is my friend, Yuki.”

  She instantly thrust her hand out. “Pleasure to meet you, Officer.”

  Mr. Rhodes’s eyebrows rose up from beneath the sunglasses. “I’m a game warden, but nice to meet you too.” I hadn’t noticed until then that he was carrying bags in each hand. He shifted the one in his right hand over to the left and shook hers quickly, so quickly it wouldn’t hit me until later how quickly he moved on, before he turned his attention back… to me. “Not sure if you want to come over, but I brought the kids lunch. I’ve got plenty.”

  What kind of weird game was he playing? Did he take some kind of happy pill every once in a while? My little heart gave a tight, confused squeeze. “Um, well—”

  Yuki’s phone started ringing obnoxiously loud, and she cursed before walking away, answering with a “Yes, Roger?”

  “I’ll ask her,” I explained, tilting my head in the direction she had gone. I threw out the first thing I thought of. “How was work today?”

  “Fine. I wrote out too many tickets.”

  He’d actually answered. Huh. “Did a lot of people play the dumb card and say they didn’t know something?” I asked, not expecting much more of a response.

  “Half of them.”

  I snorted, and the corners of his soft mouth went up just a little bit.

  “I’ll take the kids,” he said. “You decide you want to eat, you know where we are.”

  He was serious about inviting us over. I wanted to wonder why he was being so friendly but wasn’t positive I should find out. Instead, it was probably best to just accept it. “Okay, thank you.”

  But Mr. Rhodes didn’t walk away. He stayed right where he was, just being all big and muscular. No big deal. “How’d it go today?”

  “Really good. They know my friend.”

  “The kids?” He didn’t ask how or why they recognized her though.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, but there was something very casual about the way he did it that didn’t sit right in my head, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “Is your friend staying the night?”

  “I have no idea, probably not.” She had a show tomorrow in Utah, so I highly doubted it. I just hadn’t wanted to ask.

  His next nod, again, was a little too casual.

  “Dad, can we eat now?” Amos called out from where he was lingering right outside the garage.

  The older man replied just as I turned a little to catch Jackie by him, but this time, she was looking at me. Again. That funny, funny expression on her face. Little Rhodes and Mr. Rhodes headed out of the garage, not saying a word to each other, and it made me snicker.

  Jackie wasn’t following after them though.

  “You okay?” I asked her, hearing just a hint of Yuki’s voice from around the house, still talking on the phone.

  “Umm, no?” she croaked.

  I took a step closer to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to tell you something,” she said very seriously.

  She was starting to scare me, but I didn’t want to put her off. “Okay. Tell me.”

  “Please don’t be mad.”

  I hated when people said that. “I’ll try my best to think about what you’re saying and try to take it with an open heart, Jackie.”

  “Promise you won’t be mad,” she insisted, her slim fingers tap-dancing at her sides.

  “Okay, all right, I promise not to get mad, but maybe I’ll get frustrated or have my feelings hurt.”

  She thought about it for a second and nodded.

  I waited for her to tell me… whatever it was she was scared to say.

  And then she did. “I know who you are.” The words were rushed and so fast I almost couldn’t take them apart, so I squinted at her.

  “I know you do, Jackie.”

  “No, Aurora, I know who you are like I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”

  I had no idea what the hell she was trying to say.

  She must have sensed that because she dropped her head back, squeezed her eyes shut, and said, “I know you were Kaden Jones’s girlfriend… or wife… or whatever you were.”

  My eyes went wide.

  She kept going. “I didn’t want to say anything! I… I saw your messages with Clara a long time ago… so, I… I looked you up. Your hair isn’t blonde anymore, but I recognized you the first time I saw you. There was like a whole page dedicated to women he was seen with, and there were pictures of you two together, like old pictures, I saw one or two of them before they got deleted—”

  “Oraaa,” Yuki called out suddenly. “Roger’s being a party pooper, and he’s on his way to pick me up.”

  I was going to need to ask Yuki if there was a crystal for mental clarity I could get.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone, okay? I just… I wanted you to know. Please don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not,” I told her, stunned. Just as I opened my mouth to say something else, Yuki came around the corner, huffing.

  “I wanted to hang out with you for longer,” she said, sounding exasperated.

  Jackie hesitated. She took a single step back, braced herself and spat out in a quick stream, “I love you so much. Today has been like, the highlight of my entire life. I’ll never forget it.” Then, in the time it took me to blink, Jackie came forward, kissed her on the cheek and took off running before suddenly stopping and turning around. “I’m sorry, Aurora!” she shouted before taking off again. Yuki watched her part of the way, a faint smile on her face.

  “Is she okay?” she asked.

  I swallowed. “She just admitted that she knows about me and Kaden and she isn’t going to tell anyone.”

  Yuki’s head basically spun. “What? How?”

  “Some fan page.”

  She grimaced. “Want me to pay her off?”

  Of all the things that could have made me burst out laughing, that was going to be it. “No! I’ll talk to her more about it later. What were you saying? Roger is coming to get you?”

  She explained about her manager pitching a fit and wanting her to get to Utah tonight, so she had chartered her a flight that was scheduled to leave in an hour from the local airport. “He said he’ll be here in fifteen.”

  “That sucks,” I told her. “But I’m glad you at least came and we got to see each other for a little while.”

  She nodded, but her expression slowly turned funny. “Before I forget, why didn’t you tell me about Tall, Silver, and Handsome?”

  I burst out laughing. “He is handsome, huh?”

  She whispered, “How old is he?”

  “I think early forties.”

  Yuki whistled. “What is he? Six-four? Two-forty?”

  “Why are you so creepy? You’re always measuring people.”

  “I have to when we’re hiring bodyguards. Bigger isn’t always better… but most of the time it is.”

  It was my turn to wiggle my eyebrows at her. “I wish. I mess with him all the time, and I don’t think he likes me much unless he’s in a good mood.”

  My friend frowned. “How could he not like you? If I was sexually attracted to women, I would be attracted to you.”

  “You say the nicest things, Yu.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “It’s true. It’s his loss if he doesn’t, but I swear I saw him staring at you the way I look at cupcakes when I see them in catering—like I really want one but my costumes say otherwise.”

  “You�
��re perfect, and you can have a cupcake if you want one,” I assured her.

  She giggled, and the next few minutes went by in a blur. The next thing I knew, a small SUV was pulling into the driveway and parking, and a man just a little bigger than Mr. Rhodes came out. Roger, Yuki’s bodyguard, gave me a hug, said he missed seeing me, and pretty much shoved Yuki toward the front seat of the SUV. It wasn’t until then that I realized she had gone upstairs to get her purse… and how the hell had she gotten service, now that I thought about it? I needed to switch providers.

  She rolled down the window as the big, ex-Marine went around the front. “Ora-Bora.”

  “Yeah?” I called out.

  She set her forearm across the frame of the window and propped her chin on it. “You know you can always come on tour with me, don’t you?”

  I had to press my lips together before I nodded and smiled at her. “I didn’t, but thanks, Yu.”

  “Will you think about it?” she asked as her bodyguard set the car into drive.

  “I will, but I’m pretty happy here for now,” I told her honestly.

  I didn’t want to live out of hotels anymore. That was the truth. The idea of living on a tour bus with my best friend didn’t bring me much joy or excitement anymore, even if she was the only thing that would make it bearable and fun.

  I wanted roots. But that was something cruel to bring up to her when I knew that with each time she left home, she was more and more miserable. It was hard being away for months and months at a time, far from loved ones and peace and privacy.

  And the little smile she gave me as Roger hollered, “Bye, Ora!” told me that she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  If I could leave again for anybody, it would be her.

  But I wouldn’t.

  “Love you,” she called out, sounding way too wistful. “Buy a new car before winter! You’re going to need it!”

  I was going to text her mom and sister ASAP, I decided as I yelled back, “Love you too! And I will!”