Heaven Beside You (31 page)

“She says it’s not the same, which it’s not.” Brian pressed back into the seat. “At least when I come home this time, my kid will recognize me.”

“Bubbie was just a baby.” Jason frowned. When they’d returned from the first tour after Brian’s little boy was born, he’d been old enough to walk and had screamed and run out of the room when Brian walked in. Brian had missed the birth too. Getting the time off for him to be home when Tessa started school last fall had been a herculean effort.

If Jason somehow managed to catch Cassie and marry her, that was the life he’d be dragging her into. Part time, long distance relationship. He’d do almost as well just going out there for a couple weeks every winter.

If she didn’t drag out that shotgun she kept in her office.

But he didn’t plan on ever seeing her again because she’d been using him, right?

Frowning, he turned into Marc’s driveway. The others were already there. In the downstairs music room, Tyler, Marc, and Bear stopped their tinkering to harass Brian when they walked in. Jason drifted to a corner and opened his guitar case. The same guitar he’d taken to West Virginia. The one Cassie had lifted out of his hands so she could crawl into his lap and make him stop thinking about Stella. He could feel the weight of her body across his legs and the taste of her lips on his. Her hair had curtained around them, inspiring him to take her to St. Tropez so he could put flowers in her hair and hold her hand on the white sand beach. Then she’d shoved him into the bedroom because Finn was coming. He’d never gotten her into that silk nightgown, but she might have been saving it for later.

The room was quiet.

The guys were looking at him sheepishly, and he had no idea what they’d said that should have set him off.

Marc coughed. “That’s...ah...a nice tune. Is it something you’ve been working on?”

“It’s a song I learned in West Virginia.” Jason continued to play.

“Cool. What’s it called?”

“
In the Pines
.”

“Hey, wasn’t that—” Bear’s question cut off when Brian shot him a look dark enough to have its own gravity. Bear coughed.

All of them went silent again. They stared at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, anything but him. They were all grouped on the other side of the room. Once upon a time these four guys had been his best friends in the world. They’d done all kinds of crazy stuff and talked about everything.

“Come on, guys, it’s not like you have to walk on eggshells around me,” Jason said.

“Yes, it is,” Bear said. He caught dirty looks from Marc and Brian. Tyler had his hand over his face as if he didn’t want to see a fight erupt. “Well, we do. Say the wrong thing to him lately and you might—”

“Have to punch him?” Tyler asked.

“You dumped a pop over his head,” Bear said in a snarling tone.

Jason stood up. “Look, I’m the problem here. Maybe I should go so you guys can get some work done.”

“You don’t have to go.” Brian stepped into the middle of the room. “Why don’t we all go get something to eat and start fresh after lunch. If we don’t get something down pretty soon, Sandy’s gonna skewer us. Besides, you can’t go. You’re my ride.”

Brian would have made an excellent sheepdog. He herded them to a restaurant they all liked and tried to maintain some kind of social conversation without touching on any of Jason’s hot points. That pretty much left politics, the weather, and TV. They were halfway through their lunches, and embroiled in a spirited conversation about
The X-Files
, which they had been watching together last tour, when Brian looked up and groaned. Tyler cursed and Bear stood up and stomped away from the table, leaving the seat beside Jason open. There were only six people in the entire world Bear couldn’t stand to be around, but Jason couldn’t imagine which one of them might risk approaching the table. He looked around, bewildered, until he met the brilliant blue eyes of his ex-girlfriend.

“Hi, Jason,” Stella said sweetly. “How have you been?”

“Good,” he lied.

She slid into the seat Bear had vacated. “I’ve been thinking about you.” Her seductive purr had all the sincerity of a bad porn actress. What kind of ‘work’ had she been doing?

“Really?” Jason asked. “The new guy dump you?”

Brian made a choking sound. Jason picked up his water glass and took a sip.

“I thought we had something,” Stella said.

Sweat filmed her upper lip. She needed something pretty bad. Probably publicity. That was her drug of choice. “I’m taking my mom to the Grammys, if that’s what you want.”

“What makes you think I need to go to the Grammys with you?”

“Need? Isn’t that more of a
want
situation?” Marc asked. Jason wanted to laugh. Warmed up, Marc could be brutal, and he’d been warming up for two years. Even when they hated him, they were still his friends.

Stella shot Marc a sour look then tried to marshal her charms on Jason again. “I only want to know how you were doing. Are you seeing anyone?”

Jason smiled. She had to know he wasn’t, she followed gossip columns like religion. “Is there something you wanted, Stella? My lunch is getting cold.”

She glanced at his salad. Crystal tears formed on her perfect lashes. “How can you be so cruel? We were lovers.”

“You dumped me in
People
.”

“In a sidebar, no less,” Marc added.

“I thought you knew it was over. I didn’t realize it would hurt you so much.” She reached out and rested her manicured hand on his cheek.

Nothing. No flicker of desire or flush of heat. No urge to touch her back. How had he let this plastic doll mess him up so thoroughly for so long? He’d sooner find himself a mannequin and take that to the Grammys. His trip to West Virginia had served its original purpose. He was over Stella.

She realized he wasn’t responding, and sat back. “Well, it was good seeing you again.” She sobbed. Then she jumped up and ran away from the table.

“Oh, look. There’s a photographer. Maybe you’ll make
Us
,” Tyler said, pointing through the restaurant window.

“
Just Like Us
.” Marc framed a shot of Jason and the chair Stella had vacated with his fingers. “They fight in restaurants.”

“I missed something good, didn’t I?” Bear demanded, standing behind his chair.

“Did you ever. It was awesome,” Marc raved.

Jason studied his plate. Stella touching his face only reminded him how it felt to be touched by Cassie’s loving hands. The way she’d wrapped him in a warmed blanket when he came in from building his ziggurat, and rubbed a towel though his hair. She’d ordered him out of his clothes and then informed him she didn’t want any of his ‘cold parts’ touching her. Around him, his friends were telling Bear what he’d missed. Bear lamented that nobody had taped it. “What do you think about
Crocodile Tears
for a song title?” he offered.

“Oh yeah,” Brian shouted. “That would be perfect.”

“Damn, I gotta call Maur and tell her. She’s going to love this.” Bear pulled out his phone.

Marc batted his eyelashes at them. “What makes you think I need to go to the Grammys with you?” he asked in a falsetto.

Jason laughed, and it didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. What hurt was knowing he couldn’t tell Cassie about it.

* * * *

Cass put the final strokes on the canvas. Since her mother’s lecture, she’d made an effort to pull herself together. She’d been showering and eating more or less regularly, and not all peanut butter straight from the jar. Although, what sleeping got done was on the couch. She was still watching her entire movie collection alphabetically, but she put them back on the shelf instead of leaving them all over the floor. She’d even managed to paint—she just hadn’t meant to paint this.

She turned away from the canvas. Her whole body ached with an exhaustion almost indistinguishable from her gnawing loneliness. Paul had come by with a casserole three days ago and the next morning, a box of chocolate muffins sat frozen on her doorstep. She suspected the muffins came from Angela, based on the fact that they came in an old tax form box and Finn couldn’t bake. When Donny plowed the road yesterday, he’d dropped off her mail, a basket from the Baptist church ladies containing a meatloaf dinner complete with mashed potatoes and green beans, a hand crocheted blanket and a DVD of
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
. He’d also said he was sorry she was under the weather.

Probably her mother had told the town she was sick.

And she was. All the food in her refrigerator made her queasy just looking at it. Hopefully, the series of storms the news predicted arrived soon, because then everyone would stay away for a while. She picked up the phone and dialed Gretta. All those people so worried about her, and she couldn’t talk to any of them.

“Hi.”

“Oh, honey, he left didn’t he?” Gretta said.

“Shouting and stomping in the middle of the night almost three weeks ago.” Two weeks, three days and sixteen hours ago. Cass checked the clock on the DVD player. Two weeks, three days, sixteen hours and thirty-seven minutes ago. Every minute felt like Chinese water torture. The digital display added another minute to the growing pool.

“Shouting and stomping?”

Cass rubbed the bridge of her nose. She seemed to have an ever-present headache. “He found my magazine collection and decided I was trying to manipulate him into getting married or something. He just went nuts. It was the middle of the night, and he packed up his stuff and stormed out.”

“Oh God, how awful. What did you do?”

“For the first two weeks, not much. I sat and watched movies.”

“You could have called.”

Cass sighed. “Gretta, I could barely get off the couch. Answering the phone was hard enough. Dialing would have been impossible.”

“I understand. So what got you off the couch?”

“My mother yelled at me. It got me moving, anyway. The whole town thinks I’m sick.” Her stomach responded to the word, roiling ominously. It had to be the stress. Having someone slam out in the middle of the night, shouting wild accusations could make a person sick, couldn’t it?

“Are you?”

Cass hesitated. If she heard it out loud and it wasn’t true, she’d be crushed. She didn’t think she could stand another blow this year. “Some.”

“Sick how?”

“Headache, tired, upset stomach. I think it’s just depression.”

Gretta breathed for a long time on the other end of the line. “Could you be pregnant?”

Now she’d heard it, and her heart grabbed the idea and ran. Pregnant with Jason’s dark-eyed, dark-haired baby. A little piece of him, hers forever. “Maybe,” she admitted. “We were careful, but we slipped once.” And she doubted condoms were sturdy enough for multiple uses, which had happened more than once.

“Once is all it takes.”

“But I wouldn’t be sick already. It hasn’t even been a month.”

“A girl in my office was sick practically the next day.”

Cass struggled to keep hope from blooming out of control. It might be depression, or subsisting on peanut butter and no sleep for two weeks. Or shock. She might have caught a bug at the dance and hadn’t shaken it yet.

But please let it be a baby. Please.

“Listen, I know you can’t get sensitive stuff in the mail, but how about Fed Ex?”

“The nearest hub is in Charleston. Nobody sees him even come over the mountain.”

“I’m going to overnight you a pregnancy test. I want you to be thinking about whether you’re going to keep the baby and whether you’re going to tell him.”

Jason heard Cass, but he couldn’t find her. By the time he crawled to the foot of his king sized bed, he’d hear her sweet laugh from the headboard and when he got there she was somewhere on the left side calling him with a seductive purr. It didn’t help that the bed had grown to the size of a football field and he couldn’t figure out how to get off his knees.

Then he woke up tangled in the sheet in the middle of the bed with one limb stretched toward each of the sides, hard as iron. Pushing himself up, he shook his head to clear it. Why was he always so optimistic that would work? Shaking his head just aggravated his headache. He’d never wanted a king-size bed. You tended to lose the other person in it. The acre of mattress had been Stella’s idea, something about needing enough space to sleep. Cass had a queen-size mattress. Big enough to stretch out in, but small enough he could always reach her.

He’d finished off the brandy last night. On the way home from his encounter with Stella a few days ago, he’d bought a bottle. That night he’d needed one glass to put him to sleep. The next night it had been two. Last night he’d needed the rest of the bottle before his eyes started to droop. As far as building a tolerance level went, this was insane. By the end of next week, he’d be buying brandy by the case and mainlining it. Maybe he should take Sandy up on that therapy option. Self-medicating wasn’t doing the trick.

He rolled out of bed and slicked sweat off his face with his hand. Waking up sweaty, hard and frustrated every day wasn’t exactly a peak experience. The hangover never helped either. Stumbling to the bathroom, he drank two glasses of water then stepped into the shower.

Grammy day. He had to pick up his mom for hair, makeup, and wardrobe at two, then some dinner with the guys and their dates so they could be in their seats by five and sit around until at least seven before they got to the good awards. Good thing they weren’t nominated for children’s recordings or Best Incidental Music in a Commercial. Those poor suckers were already there. He staggered out of the shower and drank another glass of water.

Hopefully his mom had taken Connie with her when she’d picked out her dress. Designers could convince his mother of anything. Connie had an eye for style and wouldn’t let Mom look bad. Thinking of which, what was his sister dressing him in tonight? When she called last week he’d told her he didn’t care. She would make him look good, too.

He yanked on a tattered Metallica T-shirt and black jeans worn to an uneven gray. It wouldn’t do to turn up looking decent. One had to torment one’s sisters, even into adulthood.