Vintage Volume Two (11 page)

fourteen

My dad’s eyes found mine. My immediate thought was Randy, and it terrified me that he was getting closer. He was gaining on us. He’d found Damien, the man my dad had hidden in another state across the country in order to protect.

But Randy had sliced right through that protection.

“Would you like me to go on, sir?” George asked. His voice sounded muffled, like he was farther away than a few feet. But he was surely standing there. I knew Parker’s arms were holding me up, but I didn’t feel them around me. My legs had buckled at George’s pronouncement.

My dad helped Parker get me over to the couch to sit.

“How?” my dad asked. I supposed he figured now that I knew, I might as well hear it all.

“He was shot.”

“Where?”

“His home.”

“I meant where on his body.”

I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer in my mind. I wanted Damien’s soul to find the peace he never found on Earth.

George didn’t speak, so he must have pointed. I was fairly certain I couldn’t handle that particular detail, anyway.

My prayer ended when my dad cursed. “Jesus Christ.”

“There was a note,” George continued.

“A note?”

I opened my eyes and saw George rustling in his pocket. He pulled out his phone, swiped the screen, tapped on it for a few seconds, and then handed it over to my dad.

My dad studied the screen as I felt the anticipation building.

“That’s it?” my dad asked grimly. He texted the photo to his own phone and handed George his phone back.

George nodded.

“Step up security on CC and PJ. Get me two on each of them at all times. Get someone on Arlene and call her to let her know about Damien. And Jadyn doesn’t go anywhere without me.” My dad’s voice was direct, quick, and firm.

George nodded once and left the room to take care of the orders my dad had just issued. I wondered why my dad had mentioned Arlene. My mother. I wondered when they had last spoken. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had talked to her, but maybe they’d kept in touch more than she and I had.

“Dammit,” my dad muttered. “He never should’ve risked coming to that show in New York.”

“New York?” I repeated. So it
had
been him. He’d been there, and he’d seen me.

And it was the last time I’d seen him alive.

“Do you mind if I ask what the note said?” Parker finally spoke up.

My dad glanced up at the two of us, concern evident in his eyes. He sighed resignedly, and I knew that expression on his face. He had to tell me something he didn’t want to tell me. I’d seen that look more than once in my life.
CC, I have to go to New York for a week. CC, I’m going on tour with the band again. We’ll be gone for the summer. CC, I would love if you could accept my new wife into your life.

My dad looked at me. “CC, I am going to read this to you because you and Parker deserve to be in the inner circle. I don’t want you to be scared, because you are protected. Okay?”

I nodded, feeling like the lost little girl who had to say goodbye to her daddy every summer.

“It says, ‘No one cares about the family of a rock star. Are you starting to understand yet?’”

fifteen

I tucked my head into the little nook my arms created. I felt cold. Ice cold. Like I’d never be warm again.

Parker slipped into bed beside me and simply held me. He provided body heat, but it wasn’t enough to warm my chilled skin.

I couldn’t get George’s words out of my head. They echoed on repeat, and every time the word “dead” repeated, goose bumps broke out across my skin.

It had only been a few hours since I’d learned the news.

I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t throw up. I couldn’t talk about it.

I could only catalog my feelings in my mind. I had the Parker category, which meant happiness and warmth and love. Despite the fact that he was beside me, working his hardest to warm me, the drawer to his compartment was closed.

But Damien’s drawer was wide fucking open.

Damien’s drawer represented loss, depression, and darkness.

I couldn’t help but think of the dark times as I reminisced about our relationship, but that only made me feel guilty.

Certainly it was wrong to think ill of the dead, but Damien had been dead to me for almost a year.

I wasn’t sure if the chill that racked my body was because Damien was dead or because of my resentment and my subsequent feelings of guilt.

I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to him. Maybe it hadn’t been the kind of love I shared with Parker, but it had been something. We had substance together. He’d been my best friend for a long time, and I had loved him in my own way. It wasn’t a forever kind of love like I shared with Parker, but it was still love.

And even though it was his own fault that he left me, and even though I no longer blamed myself for it, I still couldn’t help the terror of knowing I’d officially lost two of the people who were most important to me.

I wanted to protect Parker from the curse of being close to me, but it was far too late for that. We were both in too deep, and I knew nothing I could say or do would push him away. I didn’t
want
to push him away.

So instead of being weak and fighting him and playing games with our lives, I was going to be honest with him. I was going to make sure that he knew the rule of threes. I was going to make sure that he was fully aware of the danger being with me could bring to him.

As I shook in bed from the cold or the guilt or the fear, I wished I could form the words to warn him.

The only other time I could think of when I’d been unable to speak from trembling so hard was when I’d drank too much one night. I remembered a horrible night of shaking in my bed. The room spun around me, just as it had the night I’d been drunk. Only this time, I didn’t have the pleasure of a night of drinking. Last time, at least I’d been able to throw it up to get it out of my system. I wasn’t sure how to get the guilt and remorse and sadness I felt out of my system.

My teeth chattered, and I knew that talking would be impossible.

So our conversation would have to wait until morning.

sixteen

Morning came at three o’clock, apparently. I woke up in a cold sweat. Parker had piled blankets on me to try to warm me, and once I’d fallen asleep tangled in my fiancé, his heat plus the heat from the blankets was overbearing.

I must’ve fallen asleep, because I woke up from a nightmare. In it, Damien and Katie stood by a doorway surrounded in white clouds. They were beckoning Parker to come with them. 

I shook Parker awake, tears finally streaming down my cheeks. It felt good to cry, but the dream had terrified me enough to push me out of the cold shakes. I needed to tell Parker what was going through my mind. I needed to tell him about that dream.

“What?” he mumbled. I kept shaking him. “Are you okay?” he finally asked, his voice groggy.

“No,” I cried out, a louder sob than I’d intended.

He reached to the bedside table and flicked on the light.

He leaned up against the headboard and pulled me against his chest.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice gentle and soothing. He was always so much more than I deserved.

“I’m so scared, Parker,” I sobbed into his chest. He stroked my back comfortingly while I cried into him.

“I’ve got you. You don’t have to be scared of Randy.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it, baby?” he crooned softly.

“I’m not scared for me. I’m scared for you.”

“I’m right here. I’m safe.”

“You don’t get it. That’s what I thought about Katie and Damien, too, and now you’re the third. You’re the third person who became the most important person in my world, and bad things always happen in threes.” I paused for a moment to let out a sob that I couldn’t control. “I’m terrified you’re next.”

“You don’t need to worry about me. Your dad is taking all sorts of precautions. We’re both safe. I’m not going anywhere.”

He could say that all he wanted, but he had no control over fate. And I was fully convinced that fate was working against me to take everything precious.

Just like I’d told Parker, life was a series of tragedies. And I was terrified that the next tragedy would somehow involve him.

When I awoke later that morning, I knew that I would be worthless at Vintage for the day. Part of me wanted to go in just to escape my own head, but the other part of me wanted to hold Parker close by my side for the entire day.

I called into work. I spoke with Tim, who expressed his condolences and told me not to worry about my shift. Virginia would cover for me.

I snuggled back into Parker, glad to feel his warmth beside me.

I loved him, and I was ready to begin my future with him. I didn’t want to wait a second longer to be his wife, especially not when I thought about Damien’s passing. He was only a year older than me, dead at twenty-three. It was such a waste of a beautiful soul. He had so much ahead of him, and he’d simply gotten into a bad situation with the wrong people.

It was a tragic reminder about how short this life was.

But that was the thing… Life wasn’t just too short.

It was too unpredictable.

It was too volatile and precious to waste away when your heart knew what it wanted.

Maybe I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, but Damien had met Randy through my dad, and he’d met my dad through me. So if I was out of the equation, Damien would be living and breathing somewhere in California instead of dead in Connecticut. I couldn’t help but take some of the blame for what happened to him.

A fresh wave of tears came at that thought. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever feel normal again. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever get past the awful guilt that seeped into every cell of my blood.

Parker sat up in the bed beside me. He didn’t speak. Instead, he pulled me into him. He seemed to instinctively know what I needed, and at that moment, it was him. Just the feel of his arms around me was enough to comfort me.

“I love you, Jimi.”

“I love you, too.”

“I don’t want to wait to marry you. Life’s too goddamn short.”

I looked up at him. “It’s like you read my mind.”

“Did you call in today?”

I nodded.

“Let’s make plans today, then. Let’s set a date. And let’s see if we can stop by Vintage and talk to Barry.”

“Today?” I suddenly felt rushed, but he was absolutely right. Life was too short to waste what precious little time we had, so if we wanted to get married, we would get married. If we wanted to buy Vintage, we’d buy Vintage.

And apparently we’d get it all taken care of in one short day.

I untangled myself from Parker and threw off the blankets.

“Where are you going?”

“Shower. If we’re planning a wedding and buying a store today, I at least need to shower first.”

He chuckled. “Wait a second,” he said, and I stopped mid-stride on my way to the bathroom.

“What?”

“Do you ever get one of those little waves in your chest where you realize how much you fucking love someone else and how much you never want to be without that person? Because I get those for you all the time.”

Despite the gravity of the night before and the catastrophe of losing someone I cared about, Parker managed to get my heart beating faster again.

“I just got one,” I answered. “Just this very second.”

I turned toward the bathroom for my shower. I heard a joyous laugh follow behind me, and that euphoric feeling of being in love lanced through me.

As awful as what had happened to Damien was, and for as much guilt as I felt, I had something to look ahead to. Many things, actually. And as long as I kept Parker close, at least until someone found Randy, everything was going to be okay.

I kept that thought in my mind while I showered, trying to focus on the truth in it.

The steam from the shower helped my guilty feelings. As much as I wanted to blame myself, it was Damien’s bad decisions that had gotten him into trouble. Nothing I could have done would have changed that. Deep down, I’d always known that. It just took realizing it in the quiet moments I had alone in the shower.

I met Parker at my kitchen table. He was munching on some cereal he’d found in one of my cabinets.

“Want anything?” he asked. I shook my head. I just wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t work up an appetite with everything going on. It was like I was being pushed and pulled in a million different directions at one time.

“So wedding date,” he began, and then he shoved a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. I raised an eyebrow at him. He chewed and swallowed before he continued.

“Let’s get planning. Neither of us wants to wait. It only takes a few days to get a marriage license. Fitz is working on a tour with our manager, and it looks like we’re hitting the road for a college campus tour in the fall. Probably end of August through mid-October. Life’s moving too fast and all I know is that I need you to be my wife.”

He was right. Neither of us wanted to wait, and if he was going back on tour, I loved the idea of getting married before he left. That gave us at least five weeks to figure it out.

Shit.

Five weeks.

That sounded way too fast. 

And then Parker shot my five weeks being too fast theory right into the ground.

“We’ll be in the studio until we head out on tour. We’re set to finish the album we started before we left for the Black Shadow tour. I’ve got the next two weeks off before all that starts. Let’s get married next Saturday at your dad’s house. Then we can take a week for our honeymoon before I have to be back in the studio.”

Did I hear that right?

“Next Saturday?” My voice was an octave too high and a decibel too loud.

Parker laughed. “Not soon enough?”

“Parker, I need to find a dress. I need to invite people. I need to book flowers and music and food. I can’t pull that together in six days.”

“Are you kidding me? You are aware that your father could buy the world if he wanted to, aren’t you?”

A frisson of fear darted through me. He knew what my dad was worth. Why did he bring it up?

I pushed the insecurities to the back of my mind. Parker wasn’t marrying me because of my father. He’d more than proven his love for me over the past couple of months.

But it was still difficult for me to believe that someone loved me just for me.

“What?” Parker asked me.

“Nothing,” I muttered.

“Hey,” he said, putting his spoon down. He took my chin between his fingertips and forced me to look up at him. “What are you thinking?”

“Just my insecurities.”

He looked confused for a minute, as if he was thinking back over what he’d just said.

“Do you know that I fall more in love with you every day?” he asked me, his eyes genuine as they focused on mine.

“You know I’m right there with you, don’t you?”

He nodded, and then he stood and pulled me up with him. He wrapped his arms around me, and I rested my head against his chest.

“I have a little story for you,” he said. His chest rumbled against my cheek at the deep timber of his voice. He didn’t wait for my response before he continued. “As you know, I didn’t grow up with parents who had a great marriage. I’m not even sure if they really loved each other. It seemed more like tolerance. They were used to each other, and it was easier to stay together. Their relationship taught me that it would never be okay just to settle. I know what I want out of a marriage, and it definitely isn’t what they had. I plan to get married once. Only once. It will be forever. And I plan on that happening with you, because once you know, you just know. And I know. I’m sure.”

“I’m sure, too,” I said, tears filling my eyes.

“So next weekend. If it’s not good with you, the weekend after that. And if you want to wait longer, I’ll wait longer.”

I leaned back to look up at him. He was, as always, strikingly handsome. Scruff lined his jaw, and his hair was a mess, but his brown eyes looked upon my blue ones with so much love that I could practically swim in it.

I pressed my palms on his chest. I could feel the steadying beat of his heart under my hand. Solid beats created a rhythm that was the symphony of my dreams.

I was suddenly certain that everything would fall into place just as it was supposed to.

“Next weekend,” I said.

“Next weekend?” he repeated.

A smile broke out on my face. “Oh fuck, Parker. We have a lot to do!”

He grinned, kissed me, and we both sat back down at the table to get to work.