Out of the Blues (18 page)

Harper looked across the limo. I followed her gaze, finding Kilby watching us both with curiosity as he talked softly with our mother.

“With a mother like her…I don’t know. Sometimes I just want something normal, but I have no idea what normal is,” she said after a moment of watching Kilby. “He’s good for you, Mason. Or he could be if you’d let him.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to think about what she saw right now,
if
there was anything to see. I didn’t want him to be good for me. Or bad for me. I didn’t want him…but I couldn’t stop wanting him.

I’d taken one look at him when I’d gone upstairs to change and that’s all it took to have me on my back with him making that dark place inside me not be so damned dark.

“It’s just sex, Harper. I’m going back to Napa Sunday morning and this will all be just a memory. So…Hunter. I like Hunter.”

“You’ve told me that already.” She didn’t sound happy. She sounded miserable. “It makes me happy that you like him. I don’t give a shit what the parents think about him, but I worried…”

“That I wouldn’t like him?” I think that hurt me. “You shouldn’t worry about what I think. If he is an asshole to you, feel free to call me and I’ll be back here in a minute…but, Harper, I’m so happy you’ve someone to love you like he does. Don’t fuck that up.”

She laughed and I could hear the sob she was hiding. “I promise not to be…” she nodded toward the other side of the car and let the comment hang in the air.

“I seriously wish I could make that same promise…but I think I am doomed to wear her tiara.”

“And I thought I was the princess in this family,” she said with a huff.

I patted her hand on my elbow. “When I abdicate, and not a moment before.”

“I want to be a princess,” the little girl said, she’d heard the last part. “Can I be a princess, mommy?”

“We’ll ask Mr. Mason, sweetie, he might not like anyone trying to take his tiara.” Melissa winked at me.

“But he’s a boy, he can’t be a princess. He’s supposed to be a prince,” Cynthia said her bottom lip poking out. “Can I have a pony?”

“Dear lord,” Melissa said and Harper smiled a real smile for the first time that day.

“Tell you what, Sunshine, I’m going to put in a stable at my house and get a pony for you to ride, how’s that sound?” She looked over at Melissa who looked grateful to be saved from breaking the little girl’s heart. Then she turned to me. “I’m going to remodel the house…if you’ll let me.”

I knew what she wanted to do. I think I knew anyway. “It should be perfect for a new family, lots of room for horses, air conditioning, and a pool. Anything you want to do. Do it.” Because the ghosts in that house needed to be tossed out with the broken furniture. I leaned in to whisper. “He’s in our hearts, Harper, he’s not in that old house. Tear it down. Build a new house. Make it yours.”

“Okay.” I could hear the sad in her voice again, but we were stopped in front of the church and there was no more time to talk about sad things. “Okay, so I’m getting married and having a baby and a house and a husband who loves me and…”

“It’s everything you deserve.”

She looked at me with the same sad in her eyes. “If I deserve it, so do you. Mason, let yourself deserve to be happy,” she told me as the door opened and we ran out into the rain to practice walking my sister down the aisle.

So if this was supposed to be my sister’s big day, why was the only I person I saw at the end of that aisle a tattooed Marine who made me want something I wasn’t supposed to have?

Chapter Twenty-Four

Kilby gets the blues.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. The ceremony was over. I wanted to rip my tie off and quietly get drunk somewhere.

Last night had been hell. Well, not hell, I’d been to hell, but last night was a social version of hell that I wished I’d never had to endure.

Mason had been forced to walk his mother down the aisle. Arden hadn’t liked that Doug had a spot in the wedding and she didn’t. Mason had suffered through the whole debacle without saying what I could see simmering behind his eyes.

The flower girl came with the maid of honor, or rather matron of honor. Her husband was serving in the sandbox as we spoke. Only one of Doug’s kids…I had to stop and rethink that, considering Mason and Harper were his kids as well. I think I was immensely happy that my parents hadn’t had more kids after they divorced. But then I could have siblings all over the country and wouldn’t know it. Still, the only one of Doug’s boys that had come was the older one, Travis. He was the ring bearer to the little girl, Cynthia’s flower girl. I could tell that just like his older brother, Travis would rather be shot than be walking down that aisle over and over.

Six times.

How many damned times did they have to do it. It was just walking down a damned aisle for fuck’s sake?

And every time they came down it was Mason and Arden first, and that’s where my brain stopped each and every time, at Mason walking down that aisle with ‘help me’ in his gaze. His gaze locked with mine. As if he was walking to me.

I didn’t loosen my tie because there were pictures still to endure. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pulled up the text message. It was from Hunter. One of the many pictures that were taken last night at the dinner. This one was from after the dinner when the family had gathered around a fire-pit outside. The rain had passed and s’mores and marshmallows were set out for the kids. The alcohol would come later after the kids went up to bed. I’d drank too much because…I thumbed the picture open and found the reason I had drank too much.

We were sitting together on a loveseat. The littlest kid had claimed Mason as his pet and wouldn’t leave him alone no matter how many times Gwen had tried to distract him. The kid was ruthlessly adamant that he was playing with his big brother and that was that. And there we were with the little kid swapping slobber with both of us and talking up a storm. I was looking at the man and the man was looking at the kid and it was too comfortable and I hurt so damned much.

He didn’t wear a suit to the wedding. Not a traditional suit anyway. He wore a pair of brown trousers that fit him as if they’d been made for him. His jacket was leather and fitted without a collar. His shirt was blue denim, his tie a dark purple, almost as if he’d matched it to my shirt on purpose. I’m not sure he had. I didn’t see him buy anything at the store. It just worked out that way. He looked as if he’d stepped out of the pages of a men’s fashion magazine with his hair brushed straight back from his face and once again pulled back in a tight bun at the back of his head.

I hadn’t heard a word of the ceremony. I tuned out when he walked down the aisle on his mother’s arm and tuned back in when the music cue told me I could escape came up. I took the maid’s arm and we almost ran down the aisle to the double doors that obscured freedom.

I rode with Doug’s family. Mason rode with his mother and a few of the older women in their family. I was miserable. Doug kept looking at me. I didn’t know what to say to him.

I’m falling in love with your son…you homophobic asshole probably wouldn’t go over well.

He didn’t seem to know what to say to me. The baby wasn’t there, thank God. I would have lost my shit if the baby had made those big Mason-like eyes at me.

So, I stood on the deck overlooking the lake and stared at the photo of me looking at a man who was too young for me and a kid that looked just like him in a way that left me breathless.

I still had to pretend that I could smile and get through the rest of this evening when all I wanted to do was tear these damned clothes off and hightail it back to Tennessee because what I really wanted to do involved tearing Mason’s clothes off and keeping him in our bed for the rest of the night, and maybe the rest of the week.

We could be the only guests at this lakeside hotel. I could take my time tasting every inch of his skin.

Or I could save my fucking soul and not touch him again.

“You look like I feel.” It wasn’t Mason. Hunter came out with two bottles of beer.

I took one and tilted it up to avoid speaking to him. I couldn’t avoid it long. “Why did you text me that picture?”

“So you could see what I saw when I took it.” He didn’t mince words. “He’s feeling what you are.”

I nodded as a flock of Canada Geese flew over the lake making their noise. “I’m not feeling anything.”

“Bullshit, Kilby. You’re…”

“Not going to hook up with a closet case no matter what the pictures show.” I cut him off. “Besides, he’s not going to give up his life to live in the middle of a cow farm. And I’m sure as fuck not going to California…so forget it.”

Hunter sighed, the sound echoed in the cold air. “Sure, Kilby, sure. Pictures in the ballroom in five, okay?”

“I’ll be there.”

I wanted to throw the bottle. I wanted another bottle. I didn’t know what I wanted.

I finished my beer and made my way through the guests gathered in the dining room and went to the ballroom. The photographer must have seen murder in my eyes. He did me first with everyone I needed to be with. And I escaped to the dining room for another beer and some finger food.

I avoided the brother of the bride, he avoided me. We both avoided his parents. It was fun.

Once the bride and groom escaped the photographer, the ballroom doors were opened making the dining room much larger. People were still arriving. People who hadn’t been at the service were coming to the reception. I had no idea how that worked so I found a table at the back and tried to stay out of the way as night fell. I tried to keep to soft drinks or beer. I wanted to be sober. I wanted to have my last night with Mason be one we’d both remember.

I was out of my mind. I was already planning one last night of fucking the man.

People danced to the same band that played at the cookout two nights before. Wedding music played: love songs, popular dance songs, some from different eras.

Mason had taken off his jacket. He looked as if he was going to run screaming from the ballroom. I’d forgotten he’d agreed to sing at his sister’s wedding.

There were toasts and speeches and the band took a break and Mason walked over to the grand piano that sat near a bay window.

“I promised Harper I’d sing at her wedding,” Mason said clearing his throat when it broke on ‘promised’. “I was seven. She never let me forget my promise and here we are, nearly twenty years later and I’m up here sweating my ass off.”

People laughed. I couldn’t. I could see his fingers tremble. He rubbed his hands together to try to still his fear. “You see…” he paused and closed his eyes before taking a deep breath and barreling on. “Our dad isn’t here, the one who raised us, the one who…Cody isn’t here, he was taken from us and I…he used to sing to us all the time when we were kids. I found something he wrote a long time ago and I’m going to sing it because Harper asked.”

Harper sat at a table not far from the piano. I saw her press her fingers to her lips, there were tears in her eyes. I didn’t look to see how Doug reacted. Served him right for leaving his kids to be raised by another man.

Mason’s long fingers were as nimble on the piano as they’d been on the guitar that first night. Cody’s influence on him was there for the world to see. He wasn’t ever going to be like Doug. He wasn’t Arden. He was Cody’s.

His singing voice was deeper than his speaking voice, and filled with emotion. The words about a little girl swinging in the trees, little girl skinning her knees, little girl growing up fast, little girl with the tear in her smile, little girl walking down the aisle…little girl stealing my heart.

Harper cried silently when he finished, but he didn’t look up from the piano. He started right into a song that had been played on the radio right about the time the world learned that Cody Gillette had passed away at thirty-five. The media had all assumed drugs. How Mason and Harper must have felt not knowing if he’d left them on purpose.

I’d been there, I knew that feeling.

I knew how the song would gut me. Cody had known. Mason sang the song about the world he wished he’d live to see, the perfect world where his kids wouldn’t know sorrow and they’d all live a happily ever after.

No one whispered a word while Mason sang, his deep voice meant for the bluesy songs Cody wrote. The pain was real. Cody wouldn’t have wanted him to grieve this way, but he would have been proud.

When the song was over Mason sat for a moment and I could hear him trying to catch his breath.

“I have one more,” he said, his voice raw. “If I can get through it. I’m so damned glad I only have one sister.” He laughed. “Don’t do this again, Harper. One time. That’s all I’m doing.”

“Once is enough,” Harper called from the table, her voice as watery as my eyes.

Mason laughed, but the sound wasn’t happy. “Last one,” he said and a couple of men stood up and came up to the stage. He greeted his friends from the other night and they sat at the instruments on the band stage, drums and bass guitar. “We were up till three this morning working on this. I finally got it right, I hope. I’ve never written a song before. Or maybe I have. The tune has been in my head for years and I didn’t know where I’d heard it. I looked all over the internet yesterday, but I couldn’t find anything remotely…anyway, I wrote this and I called the guys and we met at the bar Cody loved to play at when he was scruffy and no one here knew it was him. We used to play backup for him. This whole trip has been…memories… from Out of the Blues.

He picked up a blue guitar that I remember seeing Cody use when he played for the troops a few years before he died.

He let the drummer call the beat and I died.

His voice killed me. The song so full of Cody yet nothing like Cody. Mason’s heart poured out of the song, his pain, his love. He found me sitting at the back of the room and sang to me.

I was a fool.

I left when he finished the song. He turned to look at his sister and I slipped out the back into the night and the cold because I was a fucking fool.