Growing and Kissing (7 page)

I was up on the raised part of the roof, in among all the air conditioning ducts. Playing, when I do it right, feels almost as good as swinging my hammer. Everything else stops mattering. There’s no now, no future...and especially, no past. I even stop being
me
for a while and that’s the biggest relief of all.

Tonight, though, it wasn’t working.

Tonight, the more I escaped into the sound, the more it carried me towards copper-colored hair and pale skin, green eyes I couldn’t look away from and that sweet, spicy scent.

I cursed under my breath.

Louise.
I’d seen her around enough times over the years that I knew her first name. But it had taken on a whole new meaning since the elevator. There was something very clean and honest about it. A
good
name. The name of some pioneer’s wife, tilling the fields, and baking bread. Not the sort of girl I was into, with their hair extensions and their giggles and their long, false nails as they wrapped their hands around my cock. The women who spent half the evening sipping multi-colored cocktails in a trashy bar, tapping their iPhones to tell their friends how fucking
daring
they were, before coming back to my place (never theirs: they wouldn’t want me to know where they lived) and almost dragging me to the bed. They wanted a taste. A little adventure.

I gave it to them. Spread under me or on their knees before me, fully clothed and skirt flipped up or stripped naked, wrists tied to the bedposts. I gave it to them as hard and as long and as fast as they could handle...and then, as they started to come down again, I did it all over again. They used me and I used them. Fucking, it turned out, was as good at making me forget as playing or smashing shit up.

Louise wasn’t like that. Hell, she wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. How the hell had she even wound up in this crappy apartment block?

I closed my eyes and tore a few more notes from the guitar: a rising wave of sound that suddenly crashed down as I slid my hand back along the fret. I was pacing and turning, unable to stay still. The music was doing its job and taking me away from the past, but it couldn’t take me away from her. Every time I closed my eyes, I could feel the warmth of her bare arm in my hand and smell the scent of her skin….

I froze and opened my eyes. The scent of her on the air was too real, too close.

I whirled around and she was there, maybe six feet away from me, watching.

Shit.

She looked amazing. With that red hair in the moonlight, she could have been some sorceress about to cast some spell on me. All she needed was a black cloak wrapped around her...and nothing on underneath.
Oh, bloody hell….

I’d never fantasized about a girl the way I did about Louise. Every time I saw her, it sparked something new and all of those daydreams ended with those long, pale legs wrapped around me as I plunged deep inside her. Normally, if I want someone, I just make my move. I’ve never been into all that love-struck, watching-from-afar shit. But with her….

“What do you want?” I practically grunted it. I didn’t mean to sound like such a dick, but I just had no idea what to say to her. I wasn’t used to talking to women except to talk them into bed. And even though I wanted Louise in my bed more than any girl I’d ever known, I wanted to protect her from me even more.

“Nothing.” She was already turning away. “I just wondered who was playing.” She climbed down the ladder, heading towards the door that led inside. Another few seconds and she’d be gone.

“Thank you,” I called out. The two words hung in the air between us. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d said it, but then I couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something for me, either.

She stopped, but didn’t turn around.

“I used those pots of yours. It’s only been a day but...the plants don’t look so sick.”

She nodded. “Okay.” As she said it, she glanced over her shoulder at me and—

Wait, were her eyes wet?

I put down my guitar, vaulted the railing and jumped down to where she was standing, landing right in front of her. She spun around in alarm and... yeah, her eyes were wet. Wet and red. Someone had made her cry.

Out of nowhere, I felt my chest tighten. Rage sparked and then flared inside me, growing and spreading. Its heat was familiar, but its shape wasn’t.

I knew all about anger. I just wasn’t used to feeling it on behalf of someone else. My hand itched for my hammer. I was going to find the guy responsible and break his skull, not stopping until I’d ground him into powder—

And then I remembered I was no white knight. I was the guy white knights are meant to save you from.

She looked deep into my eyes. Damn, when she did that, it became more than just raw lust. It became something else altogether.

I met her gaze, asking the question with a tilt of my head. But after a second, she shook her head and turned away. She didn’t want to talk about it. At least, not to
me.
But she didn’t head for the door to the stairs. She went over to the edge of the roof and looked out across the city.

She didn’t want to be alone, either.

I followed her, suddenly aware that she’d been listening to me strangle a guitar.
She must think I’m a freak.

Wait. Since when did I care what anyone else thought of me?

My steps got slower and slower as I approached her. What the hell was the matter with me? If this had been some woman in a bar, I’d have just gone straight over there: hell, I’d barely have acknowledged her, just got myself a beer, and let
her
throw herself at
me.
But with Louise, I felt like a kid on his first date. And the closer I got, the more I felt it—a deep, inexorable pull towards her, dragging me in. And I finally realized what it was.

I wasn’t going to be able to control myself with this girl. I was like a boat next to a whirlpool, just barely holding its position. If I got any closer, I was going to spin inwards to my doom. To
both
of our dooms.

But what else could I do? Leave her like that?

“You alright?” I asked tightly.

She swallowed, and I thought she was going to start crying. That pressure in my chest again, like it was me who was in pain. Then she said, “You ever feel like the future’s just...bearing down on you and there’s nothing you can do to change it?”

I thought about it. It was rare enough that I spoke to anyone, let alone have someone ask me something deep. Eventually, I said, “No.”

It can’t have been the answer she was expecting, because she snapped her head around to look at me.
Ah, fuck
. In the moonlight, her skin was so pale it almost glowed and with those lush green eyes looking up at me...she was just the prettiest fucking thing I’d ever seen.

I turned and nodded towards where my hammer was leaning against a wall. “Most of the stuff I have to deal with gets out of the way,” I told her. “Or I smash it out of the way.” I paused. “I get the feeling your shit’s more complicated.”

She swallowed again and nodded a couple of times, then turned to the city and sniffed back a tear. She took a deep breath and what I normally would have been doing was watching that fantastic chest rise and swell under her t-shirt. Instead, all I could think was,
she’s about to tell me. She’s about to tell me what’s going on with her.
We were connecting. I reached out to put a hand on her back to comfort her—slowly, so as not to spook her—

“I wish I was more like you,” she said.

And reality slammed up to meet me. My hand froze an inch from her back.

The last thing she needed was to be around someone like me. Everything I touched turned to shit. I knew that. Why had I forgotten it?

“You don’t want to be like me,” I told her. And I turned and marched away. I didn’t even stop to retrieve my guitar or amp before I hit the stairs. All I grabbed was my hammer. That was all I needed in my life.

Just before the stairwell door closed behind me, I heard her intake of breath—she’d turned around and realized I’d gone. She was probably amazed at what an asshole I was. She didn’t realize she’d just had a lucky escape.

Whatever problems she had, they were nothing compared to the shit she’d get into if she came near my world. For her sake, I had to stay as far away from her as possible.

I had no idea that our lives were already on a collision course.

Louise

Early the next morning, I called Stacey. I didn’t know what else to do.

Stacey is the anti-me. Confident. Successful. Smartly-dressed. We were at college together: she majored in business while I did botany...except she actually graduated. Even if my folks hadn’t died, I don’t think we would have been on remotely similar paths. I was heading for a quiet lab where I could be around plants, not people; Stacey was born to be in business.

That’s why I’d called her. She was the only person in my life who I could even imagine using the phrase “half a million dollars.”

I hadn’t told her on the phone why I needed to see her, so she arrived all smiles, carrying two takeout coffees. I knew what she was thinking: I’d finally changed my mind and wanted to take her up on her offer of a job at the cupcake store. She was one of the franchise’s star achievers: in the short time since graduating, she’d already made manager. I gave it five years before she was running the company.

Her smile faltered when she saw my face. I sat her down and laid it out for her: Kayley, the hospital, the Swiss treatment. Her tears made little dark spots on her perfect gray skirt. Hearing myself tell the story made it all real again and, when Stacey looked up at me with her face pale, I very nearly lost it myself. I was relying on her. If she didn’t know what to do, who would?

After a few agonizing minutes, though, Stacey sniffed back her tears. “Right,” she said, half to herself. She fixed her hair and smoothed down her blouse. “Okay,” she said, still sounding shaken. She adjusted her skirt, stood up and took a deep breath. “Don’t panic,” she said in a steadier voice. “We’re going to fight this.”

And I knew I’d called the right person.

“First of all, you know that I’ll give you all the money I can—you know that, right?” she asked urgently.

I nodded.

“But that’s not going to be nearly enough. Let’s attack this thing.” And she pulled a notebook and pen from her briefcase and wrote “$500,000” at the top. “We’re going to add up everything we can lay our hands on,” she told me. “Let’s start with the apartment.” She held her pen poised.

“Rented.”

“Your car?”

“Are you kidding? We’d have to pay someone to take it away.”

“Savings? Stocks? Anything your parents left you?”

I let out a long, despairing sigh. There
had
been savings. But Kayley’s unexpected arrival had changed everything. My parents had suddenly found themselves with a second child to care for and that had meant radically changing their outlook. They’d gone from comfortably prepared to scrambling for Kayley’s college fund and that had meant taking risks they otherwise wouldn’t have. Not all of them had paid off. Long-term, we probably would have been just fine. But when they died, they’d left very little behind. I still had college loans to pay off and my job barely covered the rent and bills. “We’ve got a few thousand. That’s it.”

“Could you run up debt? I mean, even if it takes the rest of your life to pay it off….”

“I’m going to have to do that anyway. Even with insurance, there’ll still be hospital bills. And my credit’s nowhere near good enough to borrow half a million—not even close.”

“And the Swiss clinic needs the money in advance? They won’t let you pay it off in installments?”

“I called them. They won’t. Why would they? They’re for the rich. You pay up front or they don’t want to know.”

We both stared at the notepad and its vast, empty white space.

Stacey flipped over the page. “Okay,” she said. “You’ll just have to earn the money.”

“You’re nuts. I mean, I love you, but you’re nuts. Half a million in six months? You think someone’s going to take me on at a million dollars a year?”