Inspire (15 page)

I place the bottle down on the coffee table and lean back into the couch. I can feel the pressure of Kalli’s arm behind me, and she’s still sitting on her hip, tilted toward me. For the first time all night, I’m able to resist looking at her as people evacuate to the kitchen, but that’s just because I know what will happen after I look at her. I see Mick walk to the kitchen out the corner of my eye, and Lennox follows close behind. In a matter of moments, it’s just Jack and us in the living room.

Kalli stays close by my side even though the rest of the couch is open. Jack glares at me for a moment before he, too, stands and goes into the kitchen. She slides away just an inch, and for just a moment, I think I feel her touch the collar of my shirt. But it’s gone before I can be certain.

“What changed?” she asks.

I sigh. “This isn’t exactly normal get-to-know you talk.”

“I thought we ruled out normal.”

I look at her, and for a moment I get lost in her face. The high arch of her cheekbones and impossibly long eyelashes and perfectly symmetrical features—she’s stunning. Absolutely stunning, and I keep thinking I’ll get used to it. That it will stop twisting my insides with want eventually, but I kind of hope it doesn’t. I hope she always makes me feel this way. Because it makes me willing to do some crazy shit. Like come to a party full of strangers and put myself on the line and tell her about my dad. And I just don’t talk about that shit. Not with Rook or Owen or Bridget. Not with anyone.

“About a year ago my father was convicted of fraud and embezzlement. He was sentenced to forty-five years in prison, and my mom lost her house, her car, any asset that had my dad’s name on it, which was pretty much everything. We knew it was coming. The evidence against him was pretty damning. It was just a matter of how long and how much he’d owe in restitution. I came home a few months before the conviction. I applied to school, and a family friend helped get me into the business program last minute. I got a normal job in an office and started saving money for the inevitable. So yeah, everything changed. I had to step up. It was time for me to quit messing around and be a real, productive member of society and all that shit.”

When I finish, the living room is silent, filled only with the echoing conversations happening in the kitchen. I rub the palm of my left hand over the knuckles on my right, and glance at the Atlas tattoo that she’d been fascinated with. Rook and I had been about halfway through with my sleeve when I changed my mind and told him I wanted that on my forearm instead of our original idea. He’d reworked the design to fit in the mythic figure.

I’d been regretting it for a while by the time Kalli had pointed it out that night. It was back when I’d first returned home, and I was wrestling with bitterness over what Dad had done and what I’d chosen to do because of it. Then I got more comfortable around Gwen. I saw the toll that it was taking on Mom. I got used to not being in the bars night after night. And I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I missed parts of it sure. My friends. The freedom. The fun. But worse than the thought of losing that was the feeling every time I looked at my arm and remembered that there had been a point when I’d considered my family a burden. A punishment. Gotta love feeling like a selfish bastard every time you catch sight of your own arm.

When Kalli had told me, all matter of fact, that it wasn’t the world that Atlas held up, but the heavens … she’d changed the tattoo for me. When I’d woken up the next morning, the first thing I did after searching the house and coming up empty was to jump on the Internet and see if she was right.

She was.

Not that I’d expected anything different. By that point she was already taking on mythic proportions of her own in my head. Now, I could look at that tattoo and see not a burden, but a responsibility. The ink held strength instead of bitterness.

I lift my head and finally meet Kalli’s gaze. She’s as close as she can possibly be without touching me, and I wonder how that sliver of space between us can feel so small and so big at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I shake my head. “Don’t. No one should feel sorry for me. I spent a lot of years being a spoiled prick. And I’ve still got it a lot better than most.”

She toes off the ankle boots she’s wearing and pulls her socked feet up underneath her on the couch. Then she leans on the arm she has perched on the back of the couch, her cheek resting in her hand. She’s still not touching me, but she feels closer. If we both happened to breathe in at the same time, we’d make contact.

She says, “There’s this funny thing about empathy. It’s not actually in limited supply. Just because other people have it worse doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be understood. To feel comfort.”

“Says the girl who took only one night of comfort for herself.”

“If you had any idea how big a step that was for me …”

“I don’t have any idea. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

She lifts her head from her hand, her fingers trailing down her cheek. But just as I start to hope, her expression goes blank, and she draws that hand in a fist to lean against. And I know … she’s not going to tell me anything.

Still careful to keep our bodies separated, she bends toward me and places a chaste kiss against my cheek. It’s light, so damn light, but I swear I can feel the exact texture of her lips. The bow at the top and the tiny grooves that form when her lips pucker. It should feel good to have her lips against me, but instead it’s torture. Not just because I want more. But because everything about this kiss feels like an apology, the metaphorical ‘but’ before everything goes to hell. A goodbye.

Then she’s pulling back and climbing to her feet.

“I’m going to go get my own chaser.”

She walks to the kitchen without looking back, and the words come to me then, as fresh and easy as if I hadn’t been quelling the urge for nearly a year. I picture the stroke of my pen on the page, the messy script as I always hurried to scrawl the words down before they left my head. The notes I occasionally drew in above, already imagining how it would sound against the strum of my guitar.

I need a chaser for you, babe.

Something to take the sting away

I’m trying not to chase you, babe.

But my heart wants its own say

No. That’s not quite right.
Its own way
? Maybe …
But my heart just won’t obey
.

I’m still thinking over options, cycling through rhymes in my head for a song I’ll never let myself finish when the party returns to the living room. And in a gesture that no one misses, Kalli sits on the floor on the other side of the coffee table. She’s in the open space between the girls with names I can’t remember and Avery and Jack. Carefully alone, just like she prefers.

As everyone pours out their two shots, I pour two of my own even though I technically won. Because suddenly, I understand exactly why Lennox wants to be drunk on Christmas.

I need a chaser for you, babe.

Something to ease the sting I feel.

I wish I didn’t have to chase you, babe.

But you’re a burn that just won’t heal.

Chapter Fourteen

“Merry Mustache!” Lennox and I scream at the same time. She jumps up from her spot on the couch, hands on her hips. I follow, and when she’s left looking up at me, she climbs up onto her seat cushion so that she’s higher.

“I said it first,” she says. 

“I’m pretty sure we said it at the same time.”

“So what now?”

We look at each other, and I’m grateful when her eyes don’t flick to Kalli. She’d given me one sympathetic look about four shots ago, but since then she’s been my partner in crime, in complete lack of sobriety. Our eyes bore into each other, and somehow we come to a nonverbal agreement.

“Everybody drinks,” I say.

“Yep.” She ends the word with a particularly forceful
p
. I finished my beer a while ago, but rather than getting another and continuing to mix beer and liquor, I decided to embrace the inevitability of getting completely shit-faced.

I pour us both a shot of tequila, and we cheers before we tip them back.

We’re not the only ones trashed. Mick was already quiet, so nobody noticed he had passed out until it was his turn to pick his Secret Santa gift. Lennox had tried to wake him, but the dude was gone. So, Lennox chose his gift for him. Then she got right in his face and said different types of alcohol until he finally groaned and tried to push her away after a particularly loud and drawn out, “Whiskey.” We took that as indication of his guess, and miraculously, his present was indeed whiskey.

That shot was the last straw for one of the you-have-a-name-and-I’m-a-dick-for-not-remembering girls. She convinced one of her other friends to head home, but the third stayed to flirt with one of the preppy dudes. Whose names I have also forgotten. I’m apparently an equal opportunity name forgetter.

I’ve been avoiding looking at Kalli. Because the more I drink, the more likely I am to do something stupid at the sight of her. Like leap over the coffee table, throw her over my shoulder and drag her into the kitchen where I can pay her back for that kiss on the cheek. I could fight those walls of hers. Press my body to hers. Whisper the things I want to do in her ear. I could make her change her mind.

But just because I could do it, doesn’t mean I should. For one, I’d feel like an asshole (though likely only up until the moment she gave in, then I’d just be thinking about her, how fast I could get her alone). And more than likely, it would end exactly the same way our first encounter had. Her gone, and me wanting to bang my head into the wall to relieve the ache of pent-up want.

Jack has gradually moved closer to her, inching his chair forward every once and a while in a ploy to get closer to the table, but I know it’s about her. Because it’s probably what I would do, too. I’m tapping my fingers against my knee to keep myself from tensing up in frustration, and eventually I find myself tapping out the same beat again and again. It’s the rhythm to go with the words I’d thought of earlier.

This drunk, with my mind full of Kalli, I don’t think about all the promises I’d made to myself to let go of the music. I’d made a choice when we I came back to Austin, cutting short the band’s tour last summer. The gang had all been really cool about it. No one threw a fit that I’d ruined our summer plans. Rook went back to the tattoo parlor early. Owen took the opportunity to catch up on partying. And Bridget … well, that’s when things had started with us. In the beginning, I tried to juggle it all. We played a few local gigs, bars where we’d gotten our start a few years prior. But there was a reason we had organized the summer tour. We were bored with playing the same old places, tired of feeling like we weren’t going anywhere.

Then things got busy. I was jumping through hoops to get into the business program last minute. Mom needed help. There was all the shit with the lawyers and getting ready for Dad’s trial. I had to skip a gig here and there, and though Owen and Bridget could both sing, they weren’t used to singing lead, and neither of them really cared for it. Then they weren’t so cool about it (not that I blame them). A few blow up fights later, and I decided that I had to cut myself off. It wasn’t possible to keep the music and become the man I needed to be for Mom and Gwen. I’d come home. I’d made the decision to be here, and I had to see it through.

So, I quit the band completely. That was around the time that Bridget got particularly difficult, too, so I welcomed the break. But I learned fast that quitting the band in name only wasn’t enough. When I wrote in my spare time or played the guitar for Gwen, I could feel the bitterness creeping in, whispering that I’d given up too much.

By the time Dad was convicted, I’d forced myself to make a clean break. I am no longer Wilder the musician. I’m the Wilder who goes to school and works part-time at an accounting firm. I’m the Wilder who’s going to get a good, well-paying job and take care of his family. I’m the Wilder who’s determined to prove that I have more integrity than my father.

I can’t be the Wilder who writes music anymore, even if that music is about the most fascinating girl I’ve ever met.

But still, my finger taps on. And I let it.

Finally, it’s Kalli’s turn to pick her present, and I have an excuse to watch her, to drink her in. She bends to choose the last remaining gift, and her curves are burned into my brain. Lush and round, I know what it feels like to have my hands on her thighs, her ass, but that doesn’t make the itch to touch her any less maddening.

She settles back onto floor, and just as she’s about to tear away the wrapping paper, my phone starts ringing. The song is a familiar tune, heavy on the drums. The kind of alternative rock I used to enjoy playing myself. I drag my hands over my pockets, but I don’t feel my cell. Confused, I stand, searching again as the song carries on.

“Try your jacket.” It’s Kalli who says it, and when I look over at her, the phone goes quiet. My phone had been in my jacket pocket that night downtown. She’d been wearing my jacket, and she’d looked so damn good in it.

My phone starts ringing again, snapping me into action, and I grab my jacket, fumbling clumsily through the pockets until I get lucky.

Vibrating in my hand, the phone reads
Mom
, and my stomach sinks. As I hit answer, I step over piles of used wrapping paper, weave drunkenly around the coffee table, and head for the kitchen. “Mom?”

I plug my other ear with my finger to block out the noise of the TV as I step out of the room. I can only pray I don’t sound too drunk as I ask, “Mom, is everything okay?”

There’s a beat of silence on the other end, and I start to panic.

“I’m sorry to do this, honey. I know I told you to go to the party and have fun with your friends, but …”

“What’s the matter? Did something happen?”

“Everything is fine. But the hospital called. They had two nurses call in sick, and they asked me to come in. I would say no, but because it’s the holiday, it’s time and a half.”