Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance (22 page)

Emme heard the telltale inhale through the phone. “Are you sneaking cigarettes again? Do you really think Donald doesn’t know?”

“I wash my hands afterward. I tell him I’m gardening.”

Emme almost choked on her laugh. “Mom! Devious. I like it. So does that mean when you go to the Garden Club meetings, you’re all really just sitting around getting trashed on wine and cigarettes?”

“Emily!” Her mother sounded shocked. “Lower your voice. Someone might hear you.”

Ah, there it was again, that very real fear that she couldn’t joke away. The disappointment that always crept into their conversations. Combined with her own sadness, it was more than Emme could take.

“No one in Atlanta cares if you drink and smoke, Mom.”

“I’d think you of all people would know what can happen when someone isn’t discreet.”

So much for mother-daughter camaraderie
.

By the time Andy got off the plane, Emme was in an utterly foul mood, but at least he didn’t ask too many questions. He gave her a hug, asked her if she was okay, and when she said she didn’t want to talk about it, he just nodded.

That night’s show was rough. She didn’t feel like bantering with the audience. She didn’t feel like singing her more triumphant songs. She wanted to croon about her heartbreak and frustration, and, yes, cry. But one hundred strangers hadn’t paid money to hear her complain about the state of her life; they’d come to see a bombshell and hear some good tunes, so she pulled it out, somehow.

They played the show, then drove all night to get to South Carolina. By the time they’d pulled up to the hotel in Columbia, Emme’s eyes were gritty with lack of sleep and unshed tears. She waved off the guys and locked herself in her room, and fell asleep before she could even work up the energy to cry.

It felt like she’d just shut her eyes when someone pounded on her hotel room door hard. At first she thought it was just the headache that was pounding behind her forehead, but as she dragged herself out of the dark comfort of sleep, she could hear what sounded like Dave shouting through the door.

“Emme! Come on, answer the door!”

Her head was still fuzzed with sleep and despair, and it took her a few moments to pull her body out from under the covers and pad her way over to the door in the oversized T-shirt she wore as pajamas.

Tom’s T-shirt, actually. She’d lifted it from his suitcase as he packed. It smelled like him. If that made her a little pathetic, so be it.

When she opened the door, all three of her bandmates practically mowed her down to get inside.

“We have a problem,” Guillermo said. He sat down on her unmade bed, holding his laptop.

“Make yourself at home.” Emme meant it to be sarcastic, but none of them seemed to notice.

Dave was pacing, and Andy—calm, quiet, normally laid-back Andy—had his hands clenched into fists and was biting at his knuckles. She rubbed her eyes and tried to come to consciousness. “Guys? What’s going on?”

“Have you seen the SoundGap blog today?” Dave spit the words out like they tasted bitter.

“I’ve been awake for three minutes. No, I haven’t.”

Guillermo turned the laptop screen to face Emme. “Here.”

There she was on the blog’s front page, her picture as big and clear as anyone could ever hope.

But of course it wasn’t a promotion of her tour, or her album, or a concert review, or even an interview.

No, it was a picture of her with Tom at the Hotel M bar, his mouth near her ear, her turned toward him, no mistaking their position for anything other than intimate. And next to it was a picture of Andy hugging her at the baggage claim in the Atlanta airport.

Succubus Songstress Strikes Again!
The headline read.

After causing the breakup of indie-rock favorite Indelible Lines five years ago, Emme is at it again with her own band on her own tour. Sources tell us she’d slept with bandmate Tom McKinney, her bassist for this tour. But when she tired of him, she sent him back home to Louisville, only to immediately bang his replacement!

“God, who writes this crap?” Emme looked up from the screen. “ ‘Succubus songstress’? Really? What decade is this?”

None of her bandmates were laughing, though. In fact, Andy looked downright pissed.

“Emme. I’m
married
. Look, I know I told you that my day job couldn’t spare me for this tour, but I’ve got to be honest. A big part of why I didn’t go is because my wife wasn’t really comfortable with me being on tour with you. And now something like this turns up the first day I’m here?”

The sick sinking feeling that Emme had felt so often after Indelible Lines broke up was back. She hadn’t missed it, not one little bit. “Andy. Your wife knows you. She trusts you. Right? You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her!”

His eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but you might.”

Dave interrupted. “Look, I know I told you guys I was okay with you and Tom. But I said to be careful. What part of this is careful? You’re in the middle of the bar, at a party full of bloggers, and you’re practically kissing! How professional does that look, especially when he leaves so soon after?”

“We didn’t know he was going to be leaving.” Emme wanted to scream, but she kept her voice
low. The last thing she needed now was an accusation of hysteria to go with the accusations about her sex life, her morals, and her judgment. “Andy, I’m sorry that you’re up on that blog. I’m sorry if your wife is feeling threatened. But no offense, man, I am not even remotely interested in any kind of sexual relationship with you. And I’m not the one who took the picture, and I’m not the one who posted it on the Internet.”

“Dude, if your wife doesn’t trust you, maybe you ought to be talking to
her
,” Guillermo said. He sighed and shut the laptop. “Emme, I almost didn’t want to tell you about this because I knew it would upset you, and there’s not anything you can do about it now. But these two”—he pointed at Dave and Andy, and his face twisted—“thought it was important.”

“You want to get signed by a label?” Dave asked. “This is not the way to make it happen, Emme. You’ve got to prove that you’re reliable. Respectable. Professional. This is not professional. No one wants to risk money on a singer whose career falls apart every time she gets a new boyfriend.”

“Unfair, Dave.” Guillermo shook his head.

“No, it’s fair.” Emme looked longingly at her bed overtaken by angry band members. She wanted to crawl back inside it for a week, pull the covers over her head, and ignore everything she was feeling. All of it was too big for her. Frustration, fear, anger. Pain. A feeling like mourning, one she hadn’t felt since her grandmother had died.

“I mean, it’s not fair, but Dave’s right that labels will see it that way.” She looked down at her lap and saw that she was playing scales on her thighs again. She’d made it to e-flat, somehow, before noticing.

“You’ve got to do some damage control,” Dave said.

Andy nodded. “Give them an interview. Tell them you were never involved with Tom, that the picture just caught you at a bad moment where it looked that way. Deny it, for God’s sake.”

No, I wasn’t involved with Tom. Don’t be ridiculous. The camera just caught us at a bad angle. I’ve learned my lesson
.
She could hear the denials in her own voice as if she’d spoken them aloud
.

And she could picture the look on Tom’s face if he saw the interview. If she denied them. If she said
no, no, it was nothing. He means nothing to me
.

If she talked to him, he might understand her reasons. But it wouldn’t help the betrayal of her making an official statement that they had never existed as anything more than coworkers.

Dave and Andy were looking at her expectantly. Guillermo just looked resigned.

“Okay,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I’ll call SoundGap and offer them an interview.”

Tom had just finished gathering the last of the empty bottles and had begun to consider just throwing out some of the dishes in the sink when Katie came home, her arrival announced by the slam of the front door.

Her hair was greasy and her eyes seemed to have grown bigger in the past month. Maybe that was because she’d lost weight, a noticeable amount. Her jeans hung loosely on her frame and her movements looked uncomfortable like her skin was stretched too tightly over her bones. The hole in his heart at the sight almost swallowed his anger and frustration.

“Tommy?” She stopped in the doorway when she saw him, tensed and poised like she might just turn around and run. “Why are you home?”

“Funny thing, Katie.” Tom wiped his hands on a paper towel and shut off the kitchen sink. “See, Marcos called me a couple of nights ago.”

He could see the flicker of uncertainty cross her face, four or five fleeting expressions, each a different emotion, as she tried to decide how to play him. Angry defensiveness? Wide-eyed innocence? In the end, she opted for neutral, blank. “What did he say?”

“He told me that there was some money missing from the bar. The night you took the money to the bank.”

Katie crossed her arms and rubbed at her elbows. “You can’t trust Marcos, Tommy. He’s such a shitty manager. I’ve been trying to help out because I know he can’t keep up on his own with you gone. And I thought it would be a good thank-you since you’re letting me stay in the house rent-free.” She nodded sharply like she was trying to convince herself that she was sincere.

Tom knew better than to give her any ammunition against Marcos. This was a game she’d played before when their dad was alive, the constant side-taking, the distortions of reality. It had made him feel crazy seventy-five percent of the time, and he couldn’t trust his father’s recollections either, since he either manipulated for his own ends or was blackout drunk and couldn’t remember what he’d said or done. He thought about his conversation with Marcos, his current conversation with Katie. There was a sick kind of familiarity to that interaction and he was struck with awareness of it.

“Speaking of the house …” That topic should be safe enough since the evidence of her actions was quite literally all around them. “Katie. I see you haven’t been going to your meetings.”

“Those aren’t mine.” She tossed her purse on the coffee table and pulled out a cigarette. “Those
are Eric’s.”

Eric was her ex-boyfriend, one she’d dated on and off for years. Tom remembered him as precisely the kind of guy no one wanted their sister to date, which was exactly the kind of man Katie seemed most attracted to. “Does your sponsor know you’re seeing Eric again?”

“No.” Katie blew smoke out roughly and Tom found himself perversely missing cigarettes. Odd, since he didn’t find anything else about her current circumstances even remotely appealing.

Appalling was more like it.

“You’re as sick as your secrets,” he said, remembering hearing that phrase at the support-group meetings he’d attended for a while. Before running the bar had taken over his life and left him with no time for sitting in church basements drinking bad coffee with strangers.

“My sponsor is a stupid jealous bitch,” Katie said. “She keeps telling me that I shouldn’t date until I’ve been sober for a year, but that’s because no man in his right mind would want to sleep with her. And I’m a grown woman. She can’t tell me what I can and can’t do.” She went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, shut it again.

“Look, I don’t care if your sponsor is Stalin, going to meetings was our deal. You stay here, you go to meetings.” Tom felt himself getting angry at the holes in her story and he followed her into the kitchen. “And if you stay in my house, you don’t turn it into a fucking trash heap. What the hell, Katie?”

“Your house?
Your
house? Dad left it to both of us. That means it’s my house, too, and I can live however the hell I want in my own damn house.”

“Who put the work into fixing it up? Who invested the money to make it livable? And no, Dad
didn’t
leave it to both of us, he left it to me. So yeah, it’s my house, and when you’re staying here, you have to follow my rules.”

Tom could hear himself speaking, could hear himself getting ugly. He could hear his own voice as a kid, desperately trying to get Katie to do what he said, resorting to angry threats and retorts that he knew would hurt her feelings out of sheer desperation.
I don’t want this, but I don’t know how to stop it
. He watched, almost like he was watching some kind of cheap drama or a sad, pathetic reality show, and he was one of the stars.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult, Tommy. And why would you bring that up? That Dad left everything to you, because you’re a boy, and that was the only thing that mattered to him? I’m the one who took better care of him.” Katie stubbed her cigarette out on one of the dirty plates sitting
on the counter. “Fuck you. I’m going to bed.”

“It’s noon, Katie. Why are you going to bed at noon? Where were you last night?”

“None of your goddamned business!” She left the kitchen and he heard her bedroom door slam shut.

God, it was like being stuck at twenty with a fourteen-year-old sister. For eternity.

I don’t want this
.