Chapter 5
Finn
She wasn’t home. Why would she be? According to Alistair, Juliet had a new, steady gig with the Road Kings. She had a life.
She didn’t have a boyfriend, though. If she did, she wouldn’t be going to the wedding alone.
When no one answered my buzz to her apartment, I left and wandered Portland for the afternoon. It wasn’t a hardship, because Portland was a fantastic city. I walked the streets and saw the sights, enjoying myself even in the cold, unrelenting February drizzle. The only place I got recognized was in the music store, where the employee spent an hour talking guitars with me. “You really know your guitars, man,” he said when I settled on a Gibson and bought it. “Who knew?”
Who knew I could actually play music? Not most people. I had never stopped playing; I had a studio space in my house. I had played even when Dad was sick. It had kept me sane to the end.
But I hadn’t bought a new guitar in a while, and hanging out in a Portland music store on a rainy weekday afternoon was a special kind of pleasure. When I stowed the Gibson in the back of my car and drove back to Juliet’s, it was after six.
Juliet still wasn’t home, but her roommate was. The roommate told me over the intercom that she wasn’t going to let me in just because I claimed to know Juliet, and I didn’t blame her. I decided to wait.
I could have called her, or texted. Alistair had given me her number. But every time I thought of it, I lost my nerve. I pictured Juliet’s confused voice on the other end of the line, saying Who did you say you were again? Then I pictured her hanging up, leaving me holding the phone in complete humiliation. If I was going to be rejected, I would have the pleasure of seeing her in person first. If she didn’t remember me, she could tell me to my face.
When her car pulled into the building’s parking lot twenty minutes later, I knew it was her.
I was leaning against the brick wall next to the building’s door. Shady, maybe, but no one who passed by seemed to think so. I had taken Alistair’s advice and gotten a haircut, and my beard was trimmed neatly. I wore a navy wool coat, dark jeans, and Timberlands. I looked like someone’s boyfriend, waiting for his girl to come out.
Juliet didn’t see me at first. I watched her park, watched her grab her bag from the passenger seat and press the button to open the trunk. I watched her get out and pull a guitar case from the trunk, juggling it with her shoulder bag.
She was fucking beautiful. Her hair was blond now—her natural color, I thought—and tied on top of her head. She wore jeans and a waist-length canvas jacket. Her clothes were as well-worn as her guitar case, which was scuffed and weathered. On her feet were high-top sneakers. She frowned in concentration, her gaze lowered as she sorted her belongings, locked her car, and turned toward the door.
Then she saw me.
She stopped, and the recognition in her eyes was instant. It didn’t matter that it had been thirteen years.
She was too far away for us to speak, so I met her gaze and waited.
Finally, Juliet moved. She took a few steps closer, into talking distance but not getting too close. “What are you doing here?” she asked. Not hello, not is it really you? But my first fear had been groundless, because she definitely knew who I was.
I swallowed, because her voice—soft and throaty—had the same effect on me as it had in my kitchen when I was nineteen.
“I want to talk to you,” I said.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. See you never, she had said in that same voice, the one I wanted to hear again.
“How the hell do you know where I live?” she asked.
I didn’t move, even though I was being soaked with cold drizzle. We both were. “Invite me in and I’ll tell you.”
“I’m not inviting you anywhere.”
I shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll never know.” My gaze moved to her hair. “You lost the red.”
She blinked, surprise crossing her expression before she shut it down. She hadn’t been sure that I remembered her, either. Did she think it was possible I’d forgotten? “That was a long time ago,” she said.
“Not so long, really,” I said.
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t be here, Finn.”
I looked patiently up at the darkening sky. “It’s raining. On both of us.”
She licked her bottom lip, just a swift glimpse of her tongue telling me that she was as unsure in this moment as I was. That she felt something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
She hesitated another moment while both of us got wet. Then she took her keys out of her pocket and stepped toward me.
“I guess this is never,” she said. “Come in.”
“This isn’t your kind of place,” she said in the silence of the elevator.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
Juliet rolled her eyes. The doors opened, and she motioned to the dim hallway of her rental building, the worn carpet, the cheap fluorescent lights. “Come on. Don’t play stupid.”
Even though I had insisted on carrying her bag for her, she thought I was a rich snob. A fair assumption. I certainly was rich, not by Bill Gates standards but by anyone else’s. My wool coat was expensive. I had just bought a Gibson on impulse without thinking of the price.
But a snob? I didn’t think so, but how would I know? The set of Juliet’s jaw, the way she kept her gaze ahead as if she was slightly embarrassed, said that she had made up her mind. I filed that information away. Maybe it would help me get what I wanted. If she wanted a rich snob, I could give her one.
Inside the apartment, a woman sat on the sofa, watching TV and eating pad Thai from a takeout container. She looked up at us.
“This is my roommate, Amara,” Juliet said as she took off her sneakers and hung her jacket on a hook. “This is Finn.”
“Hi,” I said politely, nodding as I took off my boots. “Nice to meet you. Sorry about the confusion over the intercom.”
Amara frowned. She narrowed her eyes—she knew me from somewhere, but she couldn’t place where. “It’s fine,” she said, giving up in apathy, and she turned back to her dinner and the TV.
“What confusion?” Juliet asked, her voice sharp.
“I told her I knew you,” I explained. “It didn’t get me in the door.”
Amara didn’t answer. She had decided I was too boring to acknowledge any longer.
Juliet gave her roommate a long look. She had said This is Finn, along with me showing my face, and the other woman hadn’t put it together. Maybe she didn’t know who Finn Wiley was. If she did, she hadn’t expected him to appear in her living room one random day after work. I got that a lot. People saw my face and wondered if they had gone to school with me, or if I had played on their softball team or something. It took them a minute to realize they had sung along with “Ice Cream Girlfriend” a long time ago, then never thought of me again.
I looked around the small apartment. There was nowhere private for Juliet and me to talk. Well, nowhere except one room.
Juliet thought of it the same time I did, and she scowled. “Follow me.”
Her bedroom was small, with a double bed, a dresser, a messy closet, and—of course—an amp in the corner. It wasn’t hooked up to anything. Juliet had stacked books on it: Keith Richards’s memoir and Debbie Harry’s memoir, both well-thumbed, with A Court of Thorns and Roses on top. God, this woman. She had me in a chokehold already.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said. Then, “Finn, get off my bed.”
I had put her bag down, and I stretched my legs out on the bed and propped pillows behind me against the headboard. “There’s nowhere else to sit,” I argued innocently, and then I patted the bed next to me. “Have a seat. I’m a gentleman, I swear.”
She didn’t take me up on it. “Go fuck yourself,” she said, but I didn’t miss the way her gaze darted over me before landing back at my face. My coat was off, and I had a regular routine of running, sit-ups, and push-ups. I wasn’t bulky, but my stomach was flat, and my biceps were decent below the sleeves of my crisp white T-shirt.
“Finn,” she said, unaware of the way my name in her mouth made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. “How do you know where I live?”
I gave her a grin. “I have an inside source.”
“Alistair?”
“Alistair doesn’t have your address, only your phone number. I figured you would hang up on me, so I had to go deeper.”
She looked horrified. “You called my mother?”
“Josie likes me,” I argued. “She thinks I’m charming and sweet. I sent her flowers for her fiftieth birthday.”
She was so easy to read. She hadn’t known that I sent flowers to her mother. Juliet was very good at willfully ignoring the fact that we were part of an extended family. That ended now.
“Oh, God,” she said, as if reading my mind. “Is this visit about that fucking wedding?”
I nodded. “This is, in fact, about that fucking wedding. And the fitting weekend that we’re going to. Where you’re the maid of honor, and I’m the best man.”
She dropped to sit on the foot of the bed. She kept her gaze trained on the wall, not on me, so I let myself look at the line of her neck where her hair was tied up, the set of her chin, the silver hoop earring in her earlobe. She looked good. Older and wiser than the girl she’d been, her cheekbones sharper, but she was still brimming with restless energy and life, as if she was about to spill over. It was hard to look away.
“I can’t do the fitting weekend,” she said. “I already told them. I can only do one day.”
“It’s a weekend, so you’re doing the weekend.”
She gave me a glance of withering scorn. “I’m sure it’s easy for you to take a weekend in a posh Seattle hotel. It isn’t like you have anything else going on.”
An insult. I gave her a dead-eyed stare. “The hotel isn’t that posh, unless you book the penthouse suite.”
The scorn got even more withering. “Which, of course, you did.”
“What can I say? I like comfort.”
“Finn, I get that you have tons of money and time on your hands, so it isn’t a big deal to you that the wedding got out of hand. But it’s a big deal to me. I’m working.”
Her tone said that, unlike her, I most definitely didn’t work. It was starting to needle me. It was intended to.
“Look,” I said. “This is family. Your sister. My brother. They’ve been stupidly in love for a decade, so I’m going to assume that this is the only time that either of them will get married. You have no other siblings, so unless your mother remarries, this will be the only family wedding you ever have to go to. Call me crazy, but I think you should show up.”
“I planned to show up,” she argued back, her cheeks going red. “I agreed to a simple wedding, not a circus with other bridesmaids and dresses and fitting weekends. I got an email from one of the other bridesmaids about organizing the bachelorette party.” She swiped the strands that had come loose from her ponytail from her face. “I thought I’d take Vicki out to a dive bar for a few shots, and now there’s supposed to be a party? What the hell do I know about organizing a party?”
“Then I’ll help you,” I said.
“I don’t need your help.” She leaned toward me, and without thinking, I leaned toward her, too, as if she was a planet and I was in her gravitational field. “What I need is to keep my head down and make the most of this opportunity with the Road Kings. I need to be focused.”
“Yeah?” I raised my eyebrows. “Now whose career isn’t going so well?”
We locked gazes. I wanted to kiss her. I could nearly taste her already, could imagine what her mouth would feel like on mine. Juliet was a mystery to me, yet she was also terrain I already knew. Maybe because I had already imagined kissing her a thousand times, starting that night in my half-dark kitchen.
As if reading my mind yet again, she said, “You know, when we first met, I actually thought you were a nice guy.”
“I am nice,” I shot back. “Let me tell you how nice I am. If you do the fitting weekend and the wedding—the bachelorette, all of it—I’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars.”
She went pale, her eyebrows dark slashes of outrage. “You what?”
“Fine,” I said. “Thirty thousand.”
She was shouting now. Her roommate was probably wondering what was going on. “What is wrong with you?”
“Thirty-five thousand, but that’s my final offer.”
“You asshole!” She grabbed a pillow and hit me with it, right in the chest. I emitted an oof sound. “You spoiled piece of shit! You think that just because you’re a rich sellout has-been, you can throw money around to get what you want. You can’t buy people, Finn!” She hit me again, and I grunted. “You can’t buy me!”
She dropped the pillow, panting, and she seemed to be finished, so I ignored the sting of the phrase has-been and said, “You drive a hard bargain, Juliet. Forty thousand it is.”
She launched herself at me, but I was faster. I spun her to her back and pinned her to the bed, my knees bracketing her hips and my hands on her wrists. She bucked, but her breath was coming hard, her lips were parted, and her pupils went dark.
I braced over her, our lips only inches apart, and I knew. I knew, as I felt the rush of her pulse in her wrists against the pads of my thumbs, that we would be so good together it would be unlike anything else. I knew what the skin at the notch of her collarbones would taste like, how she would arch beneath me when I twisted my hand in her hair. What it would feel like for her skin to slide against mine, what her teeth would feel like on me, exactly how I would put my mouth to the crook of her neck and taste her sweat after she’d just come. I knew it all.
We stared at each other for what felt like forever and like no time at all.
In a voice that was almost a whisper, she said, “Get off me, Finn.”
I let her wrists go, shifted my weight back. Juliet put her hands on my lower stomach, just below my belly button, her palms hot through the cotton of my shirt. Her fingers splayed to notch just into the waist of my jeans, behind my belt.
That contact blasted through me with the heat of a furnace. Her hands were just there, and if she moved a few inches, we would cross a line with no turning back. We would catch fire. I wouldn’t stop her. All she had to do was slide her hands down, down.
Instead, she drew back and shoved the heel of her hand hard into my stomach, surprising me. I let out an undignified grunt and unbalanced, shifting back and catching myself just in time. My knees freed her hips, and she pulled her legs from between mine.
“I’ll think about it,” she snapped. “Now get out.”
I regained my breath and my dignity. “Alistair’s wedding is going to go perfectly,” I said, warning in my voice. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“I don’t care what you do. Just leave me out of it.”
I shook my head. “Not possible. You’re in this, Juliet, whether you like it or not.”
“Finn, get out of my bedroom.”
I did. I picked up my coat, walked past the still-oblivious roommate in the living room, put on my boots, and walked out the door.
I had let her win, just a little. But I still felt triumphant.
She had said my name four times, as if she couldn’t help it.
And before she took her hands off my belly, she hesitated. As if she didn’t quite want to let go.