BRIAN (The Callahans Book 1) (73 page)

Joey

Music was pulsing through my body as I dodged hands and feet, trying to make my way through a Saturday-night crowd. Beer, beer, and more beer, sloshing over my hands, splashing on the front of my t-shirt, breathed on me from over-exuberant customers. I couldn’t wait until the day I could walk away from this job. I’d never touch another beer again for the rest of my life.

I set a pitcher on a table and spun around to deliver a mug to another. Then I headed back to the bar to pick up more. It was non-stop. But at least the constant activity helped the time pass quickly. And it kept me from analyzing the article that appeared on
Dear Elizabeth
this morning.

I’d read the entire thing after Jason left. I read it three, four times. Over and over. I couldn’t stop. No one had ever said things like that about me before. I mean, I know the dress I was wearing was tight. But it wasn’t that bad, was it? I’d seen women wear far worse. Yet, someone jumped on it and decided that I was a slut just because I chose to wear a dress that showed off assets that other women showed off in much more obvious ways. It was like whoever was writing these blog posts knew me personally and had a reason to dislike me.

Who could that be?

I didn’t know the people in Jason’s world. I had never met a reporter; I had never spoken to a congressman before I met the one at dinner. I knew absolutely no one at these parties except for Jason. I simply didn’t understand who could hate me so much that they would say something so cruel about me. The only thing I could come up with was that it was someone who was jealous, someone who had feelings for Jason and was taking out their jealousy on me because I was an obstacle.

Was that it? Was someone who was secretly in love with Jason doing this to me? To us? But these articles were hurting Jason, too. They were hurting his reputation and his ability to conduct business. Most of the clients at JB Graphics were family-oriented companies. They didn’t want to work with someone with less than a stellar reputation. And the foundation was built on the family reputation, on their ability to convince people of all moral compasses to give up a little of their money. He needed to maintain a certain public persona. These articles were hurting him, too.

It was confusing. But it was also worrisome.

My parents called this afternoon.

“Someone mentioned this blog,” my mom began, and my heart immediately sank. They were worried about me. They hinted that maybe I should come home. Home was in Dallas, hundreds of miles north of here, hundreds of miles from Jason.

The thing was, if not for Jason and the fact that Rosie would never leave Jackson, I might consider going home. I wasn’t going to find a good job here, not with these blog posts following me around. Paying for the townhouse was taking a huge chunk out of my budget, leaving very little to pay off my student loans. Another month or two and things were going to get very complicated with my finances.

I didn’t know what to do.

“You look like you could use a drink,” the bartender said, as he filled my tray with yet more beer.

“I could use a very stiff drink.”

“How about some vodka?”

He set a shot glass in front of me and winked. I glanced around, making sure the boss wasn’t watching, and quickly swallowed the drink.

“Thanks.”

I turned to deliver the contents of my tray and almost ran straight into Rahul.

“Hey! What are you doing here?”

“Stopped in for a drink,” he said, his eyes moving slowly over me. “When are you off?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“Oh, well, I’m supposed to be off at ten. But I don’t see Cindy.”

“Come find me when they let you go.”

I nodded as someone called to me, yelling for another beer. I was so ready to sit down and kick my boots off by the time my relief, Cindy, finally came running out onto the floor. She was a part-timer who’d only worked at the bar for a couple of weeks. I actually trained her, so she was apologetic for being late.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, touching her shoulder lightly.

But I was relieved when I settled into a chair across from Rahul. He pushed a bottle of beer in my direction, but I ignored it. The only thing I hated more than the smell of beer was the taste.

“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“I wanted to talk to you away from Rosie.”

My eyebrows rose. Rahul is Rosie’s work partner, friend, bodyguard, and half a dozen other things. He goes with her when she delivers singing telegrams. He was with me the night I climbed into a cake in Jason’s entryway, but he had to leave me alone because it was a different sort of situation. There was no party. It was just a simple surprise. His presence would have tipped the recipient—Jason—off. If he’d stuck around, I probably wouldn’t have fallen asleep. But I also wouldn’t have spent the night with Jason, so I guess it was a double-edged sword.

“Is something wrong with Rosie?” I asked.

“No.” He leaned forward, reaching over to touch the back of my arm. “I just…I saw the article about you on that blog.”

I groaned. “Yeah, it seems like all of Houston has seen it. Even my parents saw it in Dallas.”

A pained expression crossed his face. I wanted to smooth it away; I wanted to tell him not to worry about me so much. But I also didn’t want to encourage this crush he seemed to have on me.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I said, trying to downplay the whole thing. “Jason’s getting his lawyers on it, trying to stop whoever’s behind the whole thing.”

“Is he having much luck?”

I shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

Rahul squeezed my arm, then sat up and took a long swallow from his beer. He looked around the bar a moment, watching the rowdy patrons getting a little rowdier as a popular song came on the jukebox. I settled back and crossed my legs, rubbing my ankles through the thick leather of my boots. I always tried to remind myself that I should be happy that I didn’t have to wear heels to deliver drinks, but that didn’t make the pain any less real at the end of a long shift.

My cellphone buzzed in my back pocket. I pulled it out, but Rahul reached over and lay his hand over it.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, his voice deep and heavy with something that felt like guilt.

“What’s going on, Rahul?”

“You remember last month, when those blog posts first started appearing?”

I shrugged. “About the time I started seeing Jason.”

“Yeah.” He dragged his fingers through his hair. “Someone called my cellphone one day, wanted to know about you.”

“What?”

“They said they were doing a story about you because of that fancy party you went to. That fundraiser.”

“That was right before the posts started.”

“Yeah.” He took another swallow from his beer bottle. He set it down slowly, thoughtfully. “I didn’t put it together, at first. They called, and I told them I wasn’t the right person to tell them anything. But they kept calling. And when I saw you walk out with him and then…”

“What did you do?”

“I gave them information. Told them about the cake you were supposed to jump out of, but how you fell asleep, and about your job at JB Graphics and your job here. I told them everything they wanted to know.”

There was guilt in his eyes and a need for my understanding. I didn’t understand.

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was just a curious reporter. And I was a little annoyed—”

“Annoyed? Annoyed about what?”

“About you and that…that guy!”

“Jason?”

“The reporter said that they were doing a story on Jason Brooks and they wanted to know everything they could about the people in his life. I just told them where you worked.”

“And then someone wrote a blog post about how Jason was forcing me to sleep with him by threatening my job!” I wanted to reach over and slap him. Instead I just took a deep breath. “It didn’t occur to you that one might have something to do with the other?”

“By the time I figured it out, the stories were starting to lose steam.”

“But they’re back now.”

“I didn’t tell them anything else. I wasn’t even around last night.”

I shook my head. “But you helped get this whole thing started.” I stood, needing to get out of there. “Thanks for the friendship, Rahul. It’s really appreciated.”

“Joey, I never wanted to hurt you. Not really.”

“But you did.”

I walked out of the bar, wondering how many of my other friends and family this person had contacted.
Why Rahul?
It’s not as if we go out together. It’s not as if a lot of people even know we’re friends. He hangs out at my apartment, but that’s my apartment, my private space. Someone would have to watch me come and go to know what goes on there. The only time Rahul and I go out in public together is when I fill in for Rosie at her singing telegram job. And the last time was the night Jason and I…was someone watching us that night? Was it the security guard at the front gate of Jason’s housing complex? Or a neighbor?

Did they call Rosie? What did Rosie tell them?

My phone buzzed again.

Two messages:
Are you off? Come by the house.
And then:
Joanne? Everything okay?

I wanted to scream. And then I wanted to go home and hide under my covers. And then…I just wanted to fall into Jason’s arms and pretend this whole day hadn’t happened.

And that’s what I did.

Jason

I was waiting at the front door, watching as the taxi pulled into my circle drive and let Joanne out of the backseat. She looked exhausted, dark circles under her perfect brown eyes, as she approached me. I tugged her against me, offering a gentle kiss.

“Hi. Long night?”

“Long life.”

It would have been funny if she didn’t look so absolutely miserable. I took her hand and led the way inside, leading her to the couch. I encouraged her to sit, then poured her glass of wine—a white Moscato. She sighed as she took a long sip of the sweet wine. I sat on the edge of the coffee table and lifted her feet into my lap, carefully removing her boots and then rubbing them, trying to wipe away the ache that I knew always settled in her arches after a long shift.

She pulled them away. “My feet are nasty. Sweaty.”

“They’re fine,” I said, tugging one back up onto my lap. “I want to.”

She watched my hands work, a sigh slipping from her lips as she settled back and sipped more of the wine. I kept rubbing, just wanting to make the day disappear for her. I knew she’d been working too hard since that woman fired her from her job at my company. I’d tried to get her to come back, to take a better position with the company now that I’d revamp the executive-level jobs. But she refused, afraid it would look like favoritism. But she wouldn’t take money from me, either. Proud woman. It was one of the things I liked about her.

“I talked to my lawyers,” I said, but she waved me off with a single gesture.

“I’m done talking about that today. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “I just want to forget for a little while. Can we do that?”

“We can do that.”

I dropped her foot and slid onto the couch behind her, wrapping my arms around her ribs and cradling her against my chest. We just sat there for a little bit, sharing her glass of wine and not really talking. It sounds boring, but it was actually quite nice. You know when you’ve found the right person when sitting in silence isn’t frightening.

“I smell like a bar,” she said after a while.

“You smell like you.”

She chuckled. “Then I must smell pretty bad all the time.”

She started to climb off the couch, but I grabbed her arm and pulled her back down onto the couch with me. I wasn’t ready to let her go just yet.

“I’m nasty,” she said, as I nuzzled against her throat. “Sweaty and covered in spilled beer.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t seen you in hours.”

She giggled a little—even as I pulled her closer against me. We kissed for a long moment, our tongues playing together, the taste of the wine like an aphrodisiac that neither of us could get enough of. I was so excited just to touch her, just to feel her skin against mine. I slid my hands under her shirt, sliding them up along the valley that covered her spine. She pulled back just a little, just enough to draw my bottom lip into her mouth, suckling at it softly before she nibbled on it. The sensation rushed through me, grabbing me deep in my balls. If it was up to me, I would have stripped her right there and made love to her on the same couch where my parents sat the first time they came to visit me in this house. But she had other ideas.

“Do you want to take a shower?” she asked, as she nibbled at the tender flesh of my earlobe.

“With you?”

“Yeah.”

“For the rest of my life.”

A sound that was kind of a mixture of a laugh and a moan slipped from between her lips. I pushed her off my lap and stood, holding out a hand to lift her to her feet. But just as we turned toward the stairs, my cellphone rang with a ringtone I knew only too well.

We had company.

I cursed under my breath, as I pulled my cellphone from my back pocket.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s the front gate.” I studied the screen on my phone. “Sara.”

“Is she not aware that it’s midnight?”

“I don’t know what Sara knows half the time.”

It wasn’t as if this was the first time she’d stopped by late at night. She used to do it all the time. But she hadn’t done it since she was advanced in her pregnancy.

I could tell Joanne—Joey—was annoyed, but she didn’t say anything. She just let go of my hand and made her way back to the couch, curling up in a corner of it with the wine glass back in her hands.

I would have much rather gone back to the couch with her. But the doorbell was already ringing. I could have ignored it, but then I remembered that Sara had a key.

“Hey,” I said, running my fingers through my hair as I opened the door. “You’re out late.”

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “I meant to come this afternoon, but the baby took a late nap. And you know how I am about party planning, always waiting to the last minute for everything.”

“Party?”

“That luncheon I’m throwing on Wednesday? I need the silver punch bowl your mother gave you.”

“It’s in the bar.” I gestured with a thumb over my shoulder, indicating the sitting room where I’d left Joanne.

Sara came into the house and waited for me to close the door before following me into the sitting room.

“This party is pushing me to my limits,” she was saying as we stepped into the sitting room. But then the words died on her lips as she spotted Joanne—Joey…I’ll never get used to calling her that!—sitting on the couch, her eyes closed as she waited.

“I’m sorry,” Sara suddenly said. “I didn’t realize you weren’t alone.”

“It’s just Joey,” I said, mentally patting myself on the back for getting it right.

I went over to the bar and dug the silver punch bowl out. When I stood again, Sara was staring at Joey, and Joey was watching her, but neither was saying anything. The tension was pretty intense. I’d never noticed tension between the two of them before. I thought they liked each other, but this felt…odd.

“Here it is,” I said, gesturing with the bowl.

“Great. Thanks,” Sara said, coming over to take it from me. “You’re a lifesaver, as usual.”

“What’s one more time in such a long list of moments?”

Sara laughed, slapping my arm lightly. “I saved your life a few times, too, you know.”

“Yeah? When?”

“When your parents nearly caught you sneaking into the house that one summer night? I made a noise in the bushes so that they wouldn’t go around the side of the house. Can you imagine how that would have gone? Your mom in that fancy dress?”

I laughed. I could remember that night. I was supposed to be grounded—at sixteen, it seemed like I was grounded every other week—but I snuck out to go to a party with Sara. And my parents were just coming home from a party of their own when we got back. I made some sound—I think something broke free of the side of the house while I was climbing the trellis—and Sara made a noise in the bushes so that my father wouldn’t go around to investigate.

“Okay, I’ll give you that one.”

“You should. Because if your parents had caught you, you would have been grounded for life.”

“Can you see that? I’d still be locked in that bedroom with all my video games.”

“Some punishment. My parents would have taken that stuff away. If I’d had any.”

Laughter was dancing in Sara’s eyes. It was the first time in months I’d seen that much pleasure in her eyes. But then it disappeared when Joey moved up behind me and set her hand lightly on my arm.

“Sounds like the two of you have known each other a long time.”

Sara’s eyes narrowed as she focused on Joey. But it was only for an instant, quick enough that I could actually make myself believe it had never been there.

“We grew up together,” she said with a touch of possessiveness in her voice. “If there’s anything you ever want to know about this guy, just ask me. I have lots of stories.”

Joey smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Sara hesitated, her eyes moving over Joey briefly. Then she nodded.

“I should go.”

We walked her to the front door and watched as she got into her car and drove off. Then I turned into Joey and slid my arms around her. “Ready for that shower?”

Without a word, she took my hand and led the way up the stairs.

She stripped out of her clothes as I turned on the shower. She was leaning back against the counter when I stepped back out, naked and looking so exhausted that I felt sorry for her. I lifted off my shirt and moved close to her, sliding my hands over her shoulders.

“Do you want to just go to sleep?”

She ran her fingers over my tattoo as she had done dozens of times since our first night together.

“Are these her initials?”

I looked down at my own flesh as if it was the first time I’d seen the tattoo instead of having passed years looking at it.

“Partly.”

She touched her finger to the s, then the larger n, and the tiny e. And then her fingers were back to the s.

“Sara Elizabeth Nelson. You dated in high school.”

“We did. For more than a year. And then Sara’s father got a job that required the family to move back east, to New York. I was devastated, and she was convinced I would forget her. So we snuck out one night and went to a tattoo parlor. I got this to prove to her that I wouldn’t forget.”

“And did you?”

I ran my hand over the top of her head, tugging away the elastic that held her ponytail in place. Her hair fell in a cascade down her back. I ran my fingers through it, stalling for time, as I formed my answer slowly in my own mind before saying it aloud.

“I never forgot her. But we changed over the years. When she came back, I’d finished high school and gone to college, met new people, and became someone I wasn’t when I knew her.”

“And what happened?”

“Long story short? I told her I only wanted her as a friend, and she started dating my brother.”

“Do you love her?”

I groaned because, despite the fact that I’d known this question was coming, I still wasn’t sure how to answer it.

“I was sixteen when I thought I was in love with her.”

“But you did love her.”

“I did. She was very important to me. But she’s my brother’s wife now, the mother of my niece. I love her, but not in the way you mean.”

Joey looked up at me, her eyes wet with unshed tears. I touched her cheek, ran my finger along her jaw. “Sara’s the past.”

“She’s not. She’s still a part of your life. And she’s everything I’m not.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why didn’t you tell me that you had a relationship with her? Why didn’t you tell me about this a long time ago?” she asked, her fingers still playing with the tattoo.

“I don’t know. It just seems like so much ancient history. I don’t even think about the tattoo anymore.”

She didn’t argue anymore. But her fingers kept playing with the ink, and it made me feel like she wanted to continue to argue, but she was restraining herself. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to do that. I didn’t want something like this to fester and become some big thing down the line.

“Talk to me,” I said, touching her chin lightly, forcing her to look up at me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking that I’m really tired, and now isn’t the time for this sort of conversation.”

“Joanne—”

“Please don’t call me that.”

I ran my thumb over her bottom lip. “Joey. I don’t want to be with Sara. Not anymore. The tattoo was just an impulsive thing I did as a kid. I was even thinking of getting it covered up.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. A picture. Or maybe Alexa’s name.”

She nodded, her eyes refusing to move to mine. It felt like we’d stepped backward, that we were right back where we’d been this morning. But then she stood and led the way to the shower, her mouth finding mine the moment we were under the warm spray of the water. I pulled her close, so close, and I still wanted more. I wanted her closer.

Had I ever felt this way about Sara? Had I ever wanted to swallow her up, to be closer than two people could possibly be? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

All I knew was that this was where I wanted to be in this moment. And that was enough for now.