Chapter 2 #2
“It’s your girlfriend’s apartment,” I say dryly. “That probably gives you first dibs, or do you live here?”
“Live here? With Petra?” She laughs and drags one of the chairs close before sitting down. “We just met at the beginning of the semester. I live on campus. Besides, Petra’s too messy.”
“The place looks pretty clean to me.” I grin.
“Yeah, ’cause I spent the afternoon cleaning it.” She drops her head back, the elegant line of her throat moon-kissed. “It’s why I’m exhausted now.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Eyes still closed, she allows a small grin. “She knows how much I enjoy cleaning.”
“That makes one of us. My mom would kick my ass if she saw the state of my apartment most days.”
She sits up, humor in the wry glance she gives me. “Yeah, my aunt was not having a dirty house when I was growing up, so I learned to clean fast.”
“She raised you?” I ask. “Your aunt?”
Her expression closes off. Oh, shit. Maybe that was a pretty intrusive question.
“I’m sorry.” I lean forward. “It’s none of my—”
“It’s fine, yeah. My aunt Rosalyn—we call her Roz—raised me when my parents died.”
“You lost both parents?”
“In a fire, yeah.”
“Wow. That’s tough.” I hear the inadequacy of my sympathy. “I mean, I’m sorry that happened.”
“It’s okay.” She draws in a breath and leans back, stretching her legs out in front of her. “It was years ago.”
I try not to get distracted by the sleek, curvy length of her body in repose, but it’s not working. I clasp my hands and lean forward, elbows on my knees.
“What about your parents?” she asks. “Since you kinda stepped in it asking the poor orphan girl about her dead folks, you have to bare your soul a little.”
That elicits a chuckle from me, and my shoulders relax, even though I hate discussing my family.
“Divorced.” My voice goes flat, but I keep a smile pinned in place.
She searches my face in the dim light of the porch, and I wonder what she’ll find.
Not that I’ve demonstrated it at this party, but I’m usually one of those guys who seems like an open book.
Most only get an abridged version. Not so much an open book as a gutted one, with only a table of contents, some of the funny parts, and if you’re lucky, a few footnotes left.
Most of the story I tore out, balled up, and swallowed years ago.
“Bummer,” Verity replies. “How long ago was it?”
“My senior year in high school. So four years. It got ugly, and coming to Finley felt like an escape.”
I’ve shocked myself with how forthcoming I am, but she merely nods, all the while toying with the hem of her frothy skirt.
“Any brothers or sisters?” she asks.
“One older brother and a younger sister. They actually stayed there instead of going to college and they work with my father now.”
“What’s your father do?”
“He’s a pastor.”
Her brows go up and her pretty mouth falls open. “No way.” She recovers with a grin and leans forward, mirroring my posture and resting her elbows on her knees, too. “So are you, like, religious?”
“Not really. I believe in God. I just don’t believe in people as easily as I used to.”
Whatever is left of my faith is buried under cynicism and channeled into my music, which I still think of as a gift from God. I’m not getting into church stuff with the girl I’m both coveting and lusting over.
“Church is complicated,” she says. “My aunt Roz was super-active in our little Baptist church growing up, but when she came out and was open about having a girlfriend, they kind of kicked her out.”
“For real? I mean, I’ve seen the homophobia firsthand, of course, but to kick her out?”
“It broke her heart, but now she’s found a church that’s more accepting of her and the woman she married.”
“So I guess it wasn’t a big deal when you came out?”
“I don’t know that I ever had to come out.
” Her smile is full of affection. “Aunt Roz and Aunt Grace were together when I had to go live with them. Queerness had always been normalized for me, so when my first crush was a girl, I didn’t think twice about it.
And they didn’t make a big deal, like celebrate with a we got us another lesbian party or anything. ”
That catches me off guard and I bark out a laugh, which coaxes an easy smile from her.
“I honestly wasn’t even sure I liked boys, like at all,” she goes on, “until around the tenth grade.”
My smile slips at this new information. So she’s bisexual. Or maybe she just had a crush and now exclusively dates girls.
None of my business. Either way she’s still dating Petra.
I also shove away Ezekiel’s offhand comment about Petra and Verity’s open relationship. That shit gets complicated.
“What happened in the tenth grade?” I ask. “Who was the lucky guy?”
“Billy Lang.” She laughs and rolls her eyes. “When I showed a picture of him to my aunt Roz, she said, ‘Girl, he white. Least let your first man be Black, then you can start making decisions about what kind of dick you want.’”
“Your aunt sounds like a riot.” I chuckle. “And wow. The brothers never stood a chance, huh?”
“It didn’t go anywhere with Billy. He just had blue eyes and blond hair and was on the football team, but it was an unrequited, short-lived love.”
“So you like athletes?”
“Not really. I go for what’s inside.”
“Oh, sure you do.” I give her a disbelieving look. “Whatever.”
“I do!” Her twitching lips spoil the fake indignation. “Not everybody’s superficial.”
“Easy to say when you look like that.”
It’s out before I catch it. Our eyes hold and our smiles melt at the same rate until we are studying each other through moonbeams and shadows.
“Um…” Her eyes drop away from me, maybe anywhere but me, finally landing on the notebook I still hold loosely on my lap. “You out here journaling at a party? Real smooth.”
“Not exactly.” I turn the notebook over in my hands. “It’s where I keep all my ideas, compositions, songs—all of it starts here.”
Her smile fades and her eyes go a little distant. “I rarely go anywhere without my notebook, too.”
“What’s in your notebook?”
“Same. I mean, stories, not music. I don’t have a musical bone in my body. I couldn’t carry a tune if I tried.”
“You’re probably being too hard on yourself. You can’t be that bad.”
“The only place I sing is in the shower, and even then, Petra begs me to stop.”
The image of Verity naked and soapy in the shower sends heat straight to my dick, and the mention of Petra follows fast like a bucket of freezing water.
“You sounded amazing at the club last night, by the way,” she says.
“Oh, thanks.” I shrug. “Just paying some bills.”
“What’s your specialty? Pop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll?”
“Yes.” I laugh at her eye roll. “I can play anything.”
“So modest.” She pulls her legs under her in the lawn chair and leans back, arms crossed over her stomach.
“Music is the only thing that has ever really felt like, when I’m doing it, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be and doing what I’m meant to do.”
She nods slowly, her eyes locked with mine. “I get that.”
And I think, when so few actually do, Verity really does. Maybe that was the recognition I felt when I first saw her last night—this artistic kinship. Could I have mistaken that for attraction? For more?
“You asked before if I’m religious,” I go on, unsure why I’m telling her this—confessing this—but not hesitating on the next words. “When I’m playing music, that’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God. It makes me believe.”
“Believe in God?” she asks, her eyes alive with curiosity and a small dose of wonder.
“I’m not sure sometimes,” I admit. “When you grow up with parents who hold those kinds of beliefs, they’re often fed to you as absolutes.
Right. Wrong. Black. White. Do. Don’t. Always.
Never. The older I get, the more I want to consider the in-betweens, the grays.
The sometimes. I want to figure out what I believe.
When I’m playing, I believe. I don’t even have to perfectly articulate what I believe in.
Just having that sense of hope and faith and confidence of what I’m on Earth to do, when most of the time, I can’t find it… There’s nothing else like that.”
“I’ve never heard anyone speak that way about the thing they love to do,” she says, her voice barely carrying over the music and laughter slipping through the slightly ajar sliding glass door.
“But that’s how I’ve always felt about writing.
My mom used to tease me about carrying a notebook around everywhere.
I grew up in a small rural town, and that notebook felt like a portal to another world.
It’s where I put my imagination into words. It transported me.”
I nod and shift in the lawn chair. “You an English major, journalism, or what?”
“Film studies. Specifically screenwriting.”
“Were either of your parents writers or artistic?”
A shadow falls over her face again, and I immediately regret the question, but she chases it away with a smile that I don’t quite buy.
“My dad could really draw,” she says, looking down at her hands and biting her lip. “He didn’t have formal training or anything, but he’d draw on the walls, painted stars on my bedroom ceiling and on the mirrors.”
A short laugh breezes past her lips. “Drove Mama crazy. I can still hear her saying, ‘Now, Will, if you don’t clean that mess off my walls.’”
She pulls a knee to her chest and wraps an arm around it. “It wasn’t mess, though. He was talented. I can’t draw for shit, but I like to think my creativity came from him.”
“Here you are,” Petra says from the open patio door. “I been looking all over for you.”
I don’t get the chance to figure out if she means me, Verity, or us both. I hide my irritation that she interrupted our conversation. What right do I have to be annoyed that Petra was looking for her girlfriend and found her with me?
“Come grab something to eat.” Petra walks over to Verity and pulls her up and into a hug. “You barely ate and you cleaned all day.”
“Whose fault is that?” Verity asks dryly.