Eye of the Storms (Eye of the Storms #1) (5 page)

“I, um, already got it. Kind of assumed, then figured assuming was asinine of me.”

When?
I wondered. Before following me into the shower? While I had put myself together afterward? Not that it mattered, and I returned the smile, “No, it’s cool.” Cool was an understatement. He might never contact me, but this mixture of consideration, and rock stardom was intriguing.

Next, he was the one to drop a parting kiss to my lips, before extending a gallant arm to assist me down the steps.

With a last wave, and much determination, I turned away for good, but my heart didn’t slow until I knew I was out of sight. Weaving around the trailers, I texted Olivia, and kept my fingers around the phone waiting for her text back.

Dusk was falling fast, and the crowd around the stage was now shadows, illuminated by strobing colored laser light lines. Within the hour, the voice on stage would be one I knew—intimately. I began to debate whether or not to watch the show. One thing I did not debate was my future.

I had missed and mourned my unfaithful fiancé for the last time. There was a better relationship waiting for me, somewhere, someday, and it had taken a lost Jack Russell terrier and a screamo musician to open my eyes.

My phone jingled, vibrating in my hand, and I turned the lighted screen to view.

My retort apparently didn’t grab his attention enough to answer back, or possibly, he was too busy pre-show, and while waiting in vain, I added this number to my contact list under the alias Russ.

Hesitantly, my fingers brushed at the screen of my phone before typing in a return greeting. After pressing send, I suddenly felt queasy when the smell of melted ice cream assaulted my already hyper senses. Stretching, I pushed at the carton until it was on the other edge of the sofa table. The message had woken me from a dead sleep. I was still wearing my work clothes, on the couch, in front of a flickering television.

How was I? Not well, but he was the last person who needed to know.

This flirtation, coming now of all times, was laughable and I glanced down at the wrinkled black blouse, hanging loose to cover the weight I had gained lately. He was speaking of the red lingerie in his memories, and this was also amusing. With the extra pounds, I was now spilling out of my bras. Unfortunately, I was also spilling out of everything. Unable to bear his lines, I joked to throw him off.

Obviously, he was not deterred from his one-track lines, and my mind slipped pleasantly back to how seductive he could be. While I was mulling over this bizarre situation, my phone buzzed and blinked again with the next text.

Jack was no amateur at seductive texting. Pushing to a sitting position, I fished the remote from the cushions to mute the loud infomercial and then pecked at the keys.

He was right. I would for him, if I weren’t currently a cow.

Scowling at the display, I easily discounted the couple of past short text sessions he had left hanging, and nervously rested my phone on my pudgy abdomen. I knew my text had been slightly out of line. He didn’t owe me even the tag texts we’d exchanged. I thought of him every day, but he had no way of knowing it. Before I could even turn the tv off, and take myself to bed, my phone came to life again, this time with a ringtone.

Five months ago, after the best sex of my life, I had promptly come home to my tiny apartment, listened to the album he had given me, and eventually chopped a ringtone from one of his songs.

Never had I heard that ringtone until now.

Accepting the call, I spoke nervously into the device, voicing what had become our standard greeting in print. “Hey!”

The voice from so many of my dreams, both day and night ones, returned, “Hey!” Just as I remembered, it was warm, husky, and sweet. “Does calling count?”

Smiling into my phone, I rested my head on the back of the couch. Letting my eyelids fall closed, I brought his face to the forefront of my memory banks. “It does. Equals at least ten texts.”

“Only ten? I was thinking twenty, easy.” The humor in his voice fluttered at my insides.

“Fifteen.” The compromise left my amused lips.

“Okay, fifteen.” He was agreeable from his end. A few seconds of silence ticked by, then his next words were startling. “Come see me.”

My eyes shot open, unseeingly staring at the dust beasties on the blades of the ceiling fan. For a few months, I had been constantly tired and let the cleaning go. “Where are you?”

“LA. The next leg of the tour doesn’t begin for a couple of months.”

The assumption that he was making the invitation because he was on tour nearby was wrong, and I let out a sigh of relief as well as disappointment. “When?”

“Now. Tomorrow, whenever.”

My laugh was nervous, disbelieving, regretful. My heart was full of so many nondescript and indescribable emotions. When I didn’t jump at the offer, he continued, “Come on, I’ll show you the sights.”

The only sight I wanted to see was him, but I was a sight he certainly didn’t want to see; he just didn’t know it yet. “It sounds great, really. But I have work…”

Jack was not easily deterred. “You have sick days right? Vacation?”

“Actually no.” The lie was slight. Regarding vacation, the two precious weeks due would be used in a few months.

“Call in sick anyway. Or tell your boss a dude in LA will throw a tv off a balcony, endangering innocent tourists if he doesn’t see you… Do whatever, just do it!”

The historical image of Zeppelin’s drummer, in a rage, tossing a television from a suite window made me smile and even briefly wonder if Jack was currently lodged at the infamous hotel himself. But reality soon stole any amusement.

“I wouldn’t be paid.” That much was true. My sick days, rarely used in past years, had now been used up in just a few months.

“Let me worry about that.”

“I can’t.” If he was offering to pay for my missed days, as well as the trip, the offer was generous, and I had pride, but the real reason for my decline was rooted deeper. A reason I could not tell him.

The lack of an explanation and hollow excuses created another bout of silence, and then he asked ever so quietly, “Can’t or won’t?”

With all of my heart, I wanted this, but fate had already intervened long before this phone call. The Marissa in his head was not the Marissa he was currently appealing to. “Can’t. You know I want… to.” With a stab at humor, I changed ‘won’t’ to ‘want.’

“Are you married?” The blunt question was his next attempt to see any reason in the situation.

“What? No!”

“Then come. I don’t see the problem. Even if you are going out with someone, you should take a free pass.” He was back to joking, so I was caught off guard when he quietly confessed, “When we kissed… You’re the first person I kissed in a long, long time…”

“That’s hard to believe.” My answer was honest and somehow calm while my heart raced. A guy like him had sex every night. There was no way I believed him if he was trying to tell me different.

“Not really,” he continued and clarified, “I’m not saying I haven’t been with anyone. I’m saying I don’t kiss random women. At least I didn’t, until you. A kiss and sex aren’t the same…”

He was right about that. Kel and I had all but stopped kissing months before our breakup. Sex had turned into almost passionless quickies, and it rarely involved kissing…

“I don’t know why I wanted to kiss you so bad. But Mariss, that kiss and everything that happened was… was something I think about a lot.”

It was something I thought about every day and dreamed about all night.

I could not believe the conversation was at this level. Why after so many indifferent months would he tell me such things? Did it change what I was hiding? My eyes dropped to the extra weight I had put on since seeing him. He wouldn’t be accepting. I was sure of it.

“I want to come, I really do. But I…” Trailing off, I tried to sort my feelings into words.

“But?” The prompt came softly after a very long pause. His next words were notably cooler. “Since you can’t or won’t, and won’t tell me what the deal is, have a nice life, Mariss.”

“Wait!” But my appeal was to dead air. And hearing him say his shortened version of my name, a nickname that had come from knowing him for less than two hours, months ago, released a torrent of tears.

Ring: Ring: Ring: Ring: Ring
“Heh, voicemail suckers. Try again”…BEEEP
“Hi, Jack, it’s Marissa, can you please call me at your earliest convenience, it’s
important.”

Hacking with a spatula at the ground beef browning in a skillet, I intently watched through the window, contemplating my next inevitable move. It had to happen. There was no getting around it. Dread rose like bile in my throat every time I thought about it. The meat cooked, and I drained it before pouring in the spaghetti sauce then strained the noodles from the other pot.

Was the waiting the hardest part?

My focus remained beyond the patio doors on the tiny backyard as I turned the sauce down to low and then snatched my phone from the counter top. With a few clicks, I found the number and pressed send.

“What?”

The realization that a real voice and not a ‘sucker voicemail’ had answered stunned me into initial silence.

“Jack? It’s Mar—”

“Marissa who?”

“We need to talk.” Ignoring his cool detachment, I prodded on and even contemplated a quick swig of the vodka atop the fridge.

“We fucked once. I can’t think of anything we have to talk about.”

Words colder than January gave me pause, and I wondered why I was being treated in such a hateful way, before I dropped my bomb. “Actually, it was twice. And that’s what we need to talk about.”

His end was silent through a few beats of my heart, and then his words seemed wary. “I’m listening.”

“I got pregnant.”

The laugh roaring through the phone, in all of my scenarios, was not a possibility I had imagined. Because he wasn’t speaking, I took it as an opportunity to press on.

“And I need to talk to you about your—”

“Don’t even say my kid. Because, there’s no way.”

“The second time, in the shower, we didn’t use anything.” It felt wrong to bring such sweet memories into a hostile, hateful conversation, and I squeezed my eyes closed for a second, willing the actual image away before it became tainted.

“We didn’t DO anything.”

“We did enough.” I forced the statement through gritted teeth. Was he really going to pretend ignorance and argue the notion that pulling away at the last second was adequate birth control?

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe this.” The words were still chilly, but the hardness left his tone, and I couldn’t get a grip on the new emotion.

“Believe it, since I’m looking at your child right now.” Continuously, I stared through the glass, drawing strength from the tiny figure playing on the patio.

The seconds ticked by, and only background sounds filtered through: the light pound of music, the whip of wind on the phone mic, the rumble of traffic. I didn’t know whether to imagine him in his car or standing on a porch at his home. Then he spoke, and both images dropped away.

“Not mine, you’re not. You’re not looking at my kid.” The denial was firm, and I wondered if he was willing it to be true, or if he actually believed it so.

Dropping to a chair, I looked outside again, and took in the brown eyes, large and innocent. Thick dark hair waved around his cheeky face, and I twisted a lock of my lighter strands. “You’re wrong.”