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kiss down his stomach and find out the places on his body that made him moan. She wondered in what ways he would touch her. She had only gotten the tiniest preview in L.A. and at the charity party. What did he like to do after kissing? Would he be gentle? Where would he want to touch her first? One dirty thought chased the other through her mind, especially when his hips shifted beneath hers. It would’ve been easy to lean, let his lips touch her throat, and then it would’ve been impossible to stop there. They would never make it out of the garage.

Dylan gulped down, staring out the passenger side window. His breaths flowed across her collarbone in concentrated and controlled puffs, cooling her skin. She took a downward glance at his arms, folded across his middle and pressing into the right side of her ribs. He was apparently restraining himself as much as she was. She was both disappointed and
grateful that they were both making an effort to stick to friendship. She wondered if Nina had spoken to him too.

Dylan reached down into the compartment and pulled out his phone before moving back to her seat. She was trembling when she unlocked the screen, still clenched by her desire for him. There was no way she would survive their time together if eve
ry moment played out like this. If all she wanted to do was kiss him all the time. She focused on the screen. “Eighty…sex…six!“ She blushed.
Shit.
What a Freudian slip. A slip of the tongue.
Yeah, she definitely wanted to slip her tongue in his mouth. Dylan took a moment to regain control of her thoughts. “Eighty-six. I was right. I knew it.” When Dylan pushed the “home” button on his iPhone, she noticed the same picture of him and his mom at the lake. Her heart still hurt for him about the loss as much as it did for her own. Dylan handed the phone back to him, careful not to make physical contact. “You’re famous, you know. You should lock that.”

Kai dropped the phone in his lap and brushed the shiny sweat film off his forehead. “You’re good at that game,” he said breathlessly. “Very good.”
He backed out of the garage finally. Two cars of paparazzi trailed when they took off down the curvy roads, past the flatlands, and the mountains, and after a while, buildings sprang up around them.
They didn’t talk much for most of the ride, but it was comfortable, except for his hand resting on the edge of her seat. He probably did it out of habit when he drove, and he wasn’t touching her, but a patch of skin on her thigh tingled just from the closeness.

“
You were so young when your mom died,” she said suddenly. Seeing the picture of her had really dug up the sadness. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it…it’s just that I’ve never known anyone outside of my family who has ever had someone close to them die of cancer.”

Kai took his eyes off the road for a few seconds to look at her. “
Yup. Only fourteen when I lost her.” She understood that part well. Dylan really hated describing it as “passing away.” She didn’t like euphemisms about death that implied anything about it was gentle. She only knew how her brother had battled the weakness and nausea and constant pain, and her own pain, which had crushed her insides in the weeks after the funeral. It was so great a loss
that the only way she could describe it was that it felt
like what she imagined dying was like
but remaining alive enough to remember it…every day.

“It was right after I decided I wanted to pursue singing as a career for real.”

“My brother. It was lymphoma.” The words sort of just fell out of her as she touched the inside of her wrist. “Seven months and somehow it feels like yesterday.”

Kai took another quick glance at her and dropped his hand on her knee. It didn’t feel like what she had been afraid of. It was consolatory, and in return, she put her hand on top of his. They went back to silence and she kept glancing at the sad look on his face as he drove. Kai
eventually returned his hand to the edge of the seat, and she thought that maybe they could do this friendship thing.

“Does it ever stop hurting?” Dylan adjusted her body’s position so that she was angled almost completely toward him.

“Honest answer? No, but you adjust, I guess. Sometimes you put up a wall to help you get through it. You can get a little reckless about your own mortality.  You find your own way to cope.” Mac’s death had certainly redirected her focus on getting serious about her future. He didn’t get his chance, and guilt over his death wouldn’t allow her to squander hers.

“Mom’s best frie
nd took me in for two years before I decided to get emancipated. It wasn’t easy, and I know she didn’t really want to do it, but I was probably awful to live with. No, I
was
awful. I was in that reckless with mortality group. I’m embarrassed to share half the shit I did back then.”

Reckless.
She thought of Taylor, whose personality had swerved one hundred and eighty degrees. The immediate months after Mac’s death had been one irresponsible incident after the other, and Dylan was sure each day would be the one where her parents would send her sister to their grandparents’ house or buy her a ticket to Alaska to go work on pipelines. The scariest moment had been the night she got arrested following a drag race that landed several of her classmates in the hospital.

“Do you think you’re okay now?” she asked, picking at the chipped corner of her nail polish. “As okay as anyone can be?”

“I don’t think anyone has asked me that in that way for a long time. I don’t know. I think the thing I learned is that sometimes you don’t even fully realize what death can do to the living until it happens to you,” Kai said. Startled, her eyes shot up to his face. Kai’s jaw tensed; his eyes darted from side to side. The candid nature of the answer unsettled her, especially when he didn’t expound. “So, you wanna hear about the charity I started in my mom’s honor? You can film this part.”

Dylan didn’t like filming in moving v
ehicles, but the audio from the conversation would be beneficial. She felt honored that he was comfortable with talking to her about it. “Sure, if you don’t mind.” She fished the camcorder out of her bag and he waited until she trained it on him.

“When I visited my mom’s gravesite, it always bothered me that when you die, you’re reduced to numbers, the date of your birth and the date of your death. The part of life th
at matters gets converted to a dash. Obviously, no one can put your whole life on a headstone, but your entire existence is reduced to a really short symbol. My mom deserved a lot better. Those years between my dad getting locked up and my mom dying were amazing. I really got to see a different side of who she was. She was this beautiful spirit, and really funny, and she loved people, especially kids, and she was a little crazy...full of life, right until the end.” Kai smiled at a memory he didn’t share. “Butch had locked all of that away. He wanted to keep her so badly, he was determined to fill her with all his damage, and destroy the part of her he probably fell in love with in the first place, if it meant she never left him. She didn’t get to live her dreams because of Butch, and probably from having me so early in her twenties, so I wanted her legacy to be what she was and what she always wanted to be: a helper to others, and that’s why I started the Hop Emerson Cancer Foundation.”

“Hop Emerson?” she asked.

“Her name was Karina, but ‘Hop’ was her nickname in Lake Lure—she ran track in high school and was really fast apparently—and ‘Emerson’ was her maiden name,” Kai explained. A surge of mixed up emotions filled Dylan’s chest when she lifted her gaze to his face. Most people couldn’t be shoved inside a certain kind of box with just one label of who they were, but Kai was a complete enigma to her. Player. Party boy. Fighter. And then there was this other side she really connected to when they talked. The part of him that seemed to push through all the things that gave her pause. And she really didn’t know if that was good or bad.

“Mom was so humble and loving. I wanted the organization to be like her. So maybe that’s why I don’t talk about it so much because she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t need the
constant recognition. She’d probably be mad that her name was even on the building. We raise money for stuff like research and to help pay medical expenses for kids, but the main purpose is to cover the costs of mammograms for low-income women. We even drive them to appointments if they don’t have a way to get there.”

“Are you just a founder?” she asked.

“I don’t like reading so much, if it isn’t lyrics, so I try to avoid it as much as I can…” He paused when Dylan laughed, and he laughed, too. “I’m not on the board or anything, but I’m pretty adamant about knowing where the funds go. I want to keep it in line with what I know Mom would want.”

“Tell me about your other charity work,” she said. 

“Yeah. Definitely.” Dylan could hear the mild excitement in his voice. “When we get back to the house, I gotta show you pictures. Me and my friends have been going to the Philippines, before we go party it up in Thailand, since I was probably eighteen, and we like to stay in this one particular village for a few nights instead of our hotel. They don’t have a lot there—no running water and there’s this really shitty bridge.” Kai twisted his head toward her and smiled. “Can I curse?”

God, that smile. It was an instant blood rush to the brain. “Of course. I just want you to be yourself. Curse away.” She smiled back and he squeezed her knee. She blushed and nearly dropped the camera to her lap. His hand was still resting on her chair, and she had forgotten about that. “I read that you came home broke one time.”

Kai drove with his left hand and angled himself toward her. He was beaming. “The people are always really nice to us. I love staying there, but minimum every day survival is hard for them. They live that life all the time, and here we are on vacation spending more money in a week than they make in several months. So we really just wanted to give back. Got supplies for their tiny clinic, put in some wells and fixed that bridge—”

“The shitty one?” she joked, flicking her eyes up from the camera to him.

“The shitty one,” Kai repeated. “I was there for close to four months once, getting my hands dirty, building. I still send money monthly to one of my friends who works at an org there, and they send me pictures.”

Dylan bit her lip and felt conflicted about her next line of questions, but she thought back to her true objective. She had to. “You
originally worked closely with Jeremy Bunyan on improving the clinic, right?”

Kai glowered and turned away from her. His whole body tensed, his knuckles blanched, and his jaw throbbed in rapid succession. Dylan
recognized his annoyance and gulped down her guilt. She had crossed a line. He wasn’t comfortable talking about Jeremy yet. Whatever bad blood existed between them, it was understandable for him to react physically if Jeremy were actually present. Jeremy wasn’t even there and Kai was enraged. Kai’s anger was definitely brewing deeper than simple music rivalry and royalties.

“Kai?” He refused to make eye contact, and he raised the volume on the radio then drummed softly on the steering wheel with his thumbs. With a sigh, Dylan cut the camera off.

“Nice try,” he said. His voice was flat but on the edge of frustration.

“I did my research about you and his name came up
, obviously.” Her words were somewhere between defensive and apologetic. She angled away from him to hide her scowl.

“Really? ‘Cause I think you were working your way to asking about the fight.”

“So what if I was?” she asked in a defiant tone, glancing at him.

Kai snapped his head toward her and spoke somberly. “It’s off-limits. I know you and Nina think that getting me to talk about my deep down feelings about it will get me out of this mess, but you’re both wrong. I’d appreciate it if you left it out of our filming
, and left it alone, period.” He eased his hand across the air and held it out. “Deal?”

If she shook his hand and went forward secretly with her plan with Nina, she would ultimately have to betray Kai, but her stake was in her future. She had to keep her eyes on the impact of this trip when she was back in San Francisco. “Fine. Deal.” A pinch of guilt squeezed her chest when their palms touched, but what was done was done.

Not Friends – Chapter 11

He pulled into the parking lot on the side of the recording studio from yesterday, and he took his guitar case out of the back before they walked into the building. A paparazzo pulled up behind them and snapped a few pictur
es. So in a few hours, her denim shorts-covered butt would be on some website. Fantastic.

Instead of the control room with the
vocal booth, they went into another one set up to record live instruments. Three guys were in the live session booth, a drummer, a keyboard player and a bassist. Kai explained that they weren’t actually part of his touring band, but they had written the song together they were about to record. One of the producers from the day before was there again at the console, and a young woman was dividing her attention between her laptop and her cellphone. She wore a black bob with blunt bangs skimming her eyebrows, and she was casually dressed in faded skinny jeans and a billowy tank top layered over a slim-fitting one.

She frowned at Kai when she looked up. “You’re late. Nina has been on my ass all morning. You do know I get in trouble if you don’t stay in line?”