Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Jaxon
“Hey,” I say, unsure what to do with my hands as Izzy and Becca approach the house. Do I go in for the hug? A handshake? Instead, I shove them in my pockets, opting for a closed-lip smile and head nod.
“Jaxon,” Becca says, mimicking my head bob. She continues past me and into their house, stepping over the takeout bag sitting in the middle of the stairs.
Izzy’s dark brown eyes meet mine. It feels so familiar and yet, something about the way my heart speeds up is a completely new reaction to Isabel Harper.
“Hey,” she says, a cautious smile on her lips.
I move slowly, trying not to scare her away. I can tell one wrong move might send her running.
“I brought takeout,” I say, picking up the bag.
“Thanks,” she replies, looking anywhere but at me.
“I did promise I’d feed you.”
“It’s a top five requirement of a fake boyfriend,” Izzy says, biting her right thumbnail. “Do we feel this is more of a kitchen-table conversation or a front-porch conversation?”
I take in her front yard, and despite having sat here for the last forty-five minutes, I’m suddenly seeing it through a new lens.
The light-tan house sits behind a big grass lawn, divided perfectly by a narrow sidewalk.
The street is in a part of town I didn’t frequent much growing up, despite being just a few blocks away from the middle school.
There’s space between the houses, but not enough that they won’t overhear us if we talk too loud.
“Inside seems safer from town gossips,” I reply.
Izzy shrugs like she couldn’t care less. “I had them convinced I was fighting with an ex-boyfriend who wanted to get back together after I yelled at you on Sunday, but based on the way you’ve made yourself at home on my porch, I’m going to assume it’s too late for that.”
I follow Izzy into the house, stopping to toe off my shoes when she does.
“I may have been waiting for a little bit,” I confess.
“Well, I hope you’re ready for everyone to know you’re back in town and spending a lot of time with me. Though, that ship sailed the first morning you picked up coffee for me at Wild Brews.” She seems to be considering it. “It’ll probably work out well for our fake-dating charade, though.”
“No one came out of their house since I’ve been here,” I reply. “I’m not sure any of your neighbors are home.”
From the disbelieving look on her face, Izzy seems to disagree, so I continue, “No one came and asked me for an autograph. That doesn’t happen if people are around.”
She snorts, though lifts a hand to her mouth like she’s trying to keep it in. With a shake of her head, she starts to clear a pile of mail off the small, four-person table.
“Make yourself comfortable, big shot,” she says on a laugh as soon as the table is clean.
Doing as I’m told, I place the bag of takeout on the corner before sitting at the table, folding my large frame into the slightly too small chair.
As she sits across from me, my phone buzzes.
“Feel free to get that,” she offers. “No need to pause your very important life on my account.”
“Iz,” I say, shoving my phone into my pocket.
“Isabel,” she reminds me.
“No one calls you Isabel,” I say as a lyric streaks through my mind, moving too quickly for me to catch. “And you can call me Jax if you want. You’ve never called me Jaxon before now.”
Izzy rips a page out of the notebook she has in her stack of papers and hands it to me with her pen.
Unsure what to do with it, I shoot her a confused look.
“Write your lyrics down,” Izzy says on a sigh. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ve seen that face a million times before. It’s your ‘I have a brilliant new song idea’ look.”
I shake my head, pushing the paper back toward her. “I already lost it.”
“That’s what you get for not bringing your own notebook with you, I guess.”
“It’s just…I’m not used to it,” I say, staring at the spot on the side of my thumb where a much larger callus used to be. “It’s been…a while since I’ve been able to write a full song.”
Izzy’s face morphs into something like contemplation. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” I confess. “The lyrics just…stopped showing up about eighteen months ago.” I tap the table, taking Izzy’s lead and avoiding eye contact.
She reaches forward and pats my hand in what I’m sure is supposed to be a completely platonic gesture of sympathy. Unfortunately for us both, my awareness springs to life, every fiber of my being focused on the spot where Izzy’s hand is now covering mine.
“I’m sorry that’s happening to you,” she says, as if she’s completely unaffected by the energy now flowing between our two bodies.
I nod, forcing myself to pull it together. “The hardest part is that I promised the Lupus Foundation I’d write a song for their big fundraiser coming up, and it’s due to them…soon. Too soon.”
The sympathetic look on her face reminds me that Izzy’s not just some random person. She’s the girl who held my hand while I mourned when my mom passed away, the only one who knew how much my dad resented the fact that he had to raise me after my mom passed.
Luckily, she doesn’t know the truth I found out the night before my eighteenth birthday—that my dad not only resented me but actively blamed me for her death.
Before I let myself focus on that, I continue, “And, I mean, I guess if I don’t put a new album together soon, like really soon, it’s possible my label will drop me, and I’ll lose any semblance of control over my old songs, not to mention my entire identity.”
Izzy blinks a couple of times. “I’m sorry. That sounds like a lot. I’m sure you’ll get it done. You are a professional musician, you know.”
“Me?” I tease.
She pulls her hand away, and I feel inexplicably sad.
“I’ve written a few lines, mostly in the mornings when I got home from seeing you.
Hey! Maybe you’re my lucky charm,” I joke, though even as I say it, I realize it might be true.
I do tend to write after I’ve seen her, and this week has been absolute shit on the writing side of things.
I don’t know if I have enough data to draw any conclusions yet, though.
Izzy takes it all in stride and does the most Izzy thing possible—she deflects with humor. “I actually have that impact on everyone. Just last week, our accountant pulled out a tuba and started composing a song on the spot just from being in my presence.”
“Damn, a tuba? That’s the hardest instrument to compose on,” I joke.
“You’ll have to be careful spending time with me. You may not be able to sleep since you’ll have so many lyrics flying through that little brain of yours.”
“Fuck,” I say, running my hand through my hair. “I haven’t had that in years. I’d love to lose sleep because the songs were just flowing so quickly.”
I can tell Izzy wants to dig in more, but this isn’t about me. Instead, I ask her, “So, fake dating? Why’d you take me up on the offer?”
She pulls her hands through her long hair. “Well, like I told you before, I need a date for Bryn’s wedding. And the more I thought about it, it can’t just be any date. My family would know it was just a date. It wouldn’t get them off my case. I need them to believe I’m dating someone,” she says.
I have questions, but she must be able to see them because she continues, “I need my family and friends to stop feeling bad for me now that they’re paired off and happy.
But if we can convince them we’re dating, it solves that problem.
So, we pretend date, we go to the wedding together, none of my family or friends pity me for being at my younger sister’s wedding alone, and then we break up.
” She uses finger quotes as she says the last part.
“Won’t they just pity you again?” I ask, digging into the takeout bag and setting one container in front of each of us.
“When I tell them you just ghosted me again, they’ll avoid the topic like the plague. It’s worked the last fifteen years, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t work this time too,” Izzy says, popping open her food container.
There’s no world in which I let that be the narrative Izzy shares with her family. The people of Wild Bluffs, I don’t care, but the Harpers? Carter and Kelsey? No way. And I tell her as much.
“Okay, well, you’ll have to go do famous musician things, and we’ll decide long-distance isn’t for us.” She waves my comment off before replying, “It doesn’t really matter.”
“This feels like a real half-cooked plan,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck.
“Of course it’s half-cooked, Jaxon!” she practically yells before dropping her head into her hands. “I agreed to fake date you on a whim last night because I’m tired of feeling so alone every time I’m with my family—my favorite people in the world.”
“Okay,” I say softly. “Okay. Fake dating makes sense, and we’ve got time to figure out how we end it. Plus, since I’ve never actually dated someone, this could be a fun trial run.”
She nods while taking a huge bite from the bacon burger. I got her that, hoping she still likes the same thing she did when she was seventeen.
I take a bite as well, and feeling a bit rebellious, ask the next question with my mouth half full. “So you mentioned something about conditions.”
“Yeah. First, I think we need to start hanging out more. Be seen out at dinner and things like that.” She pauses.
“If you still want to come over for coffee in the mornings, I think that’d be good…
though I’m happy to supply my own coffee.
Or I could get it every other day or something,” she says, her tongue darting out to lick her lip after she stops talking.
It makes a small fire come to life in me.
Well, either the view of her tongue or the fact that she’s worried about me buying her coffee.
Since I mostly interact with my employees, it’s almost always just assumed that I’m buying whatever food they’re consuming—either at the time or later through some reimbursement process that I, thankfully, have only a very broad understanding of.
She knows I’ve got more money than I know what to do with in this lifetime, and yet somehow, she’s not trying to take advantage of it. This might be fake, but she’s definitely not trying to get any and everything she can out of it.
And, fuck, I like that.
“No way. It’s my new favorite part of the day. I’m getting the coffees,” I say.
She narrows her eyes at me like she’s trying to figure out my angle, but eventually, she nods.
“Anything else?” I ask, feeling like going on fake dates while fake dating seems like a fairly obvious rule.
“No kissing,” she says in a rush.
“No what?” I ask, unsure I heard her right.
“No kissing,” she says again, slower this time.
“Okay, Pretty Woman.”
She stops chewing and stares at me. “Did you just equate me with a prostitute?”
Shit. No. I mean, technically, yes.
I cough before shaking my head. “Nope. I’m obviously Julia Roberts in this scenario.”
Izzy scans me before rolling her eyes. “I’m serious, Jaxon.”
“So am I, Izzy. You make a hell of a Richard Gere.”
“No kissing,” she repeats.
“Except if it’s required to uphold the farce, right?”
“Who are you hanging around with that you think people will require us to kiss to see proof that we’re together? It will not be required in the next four weeks.”
“Just know, if the situation calls for it, I’m not breaking character.”
“Fine, Jaxon,” she says on a sigh. “But if it’s not required, I will punch you in the face and pretend you had a huge bug on your cheek.”
“You’ve always had a feisty streak,” I say, teasing her. “How many games did you foul out of sophomore year in basketball.”
The corner of Izzy’s mouth twitches, and I feel like I’ve just won my first fucking Grammy.
“So it’s a deal?” she asks.
“Deal,” I agree.
We eat dinner and talk about our lives, and truly, the most surprising thing about the whole evening is just how normal it feels.
Izzy was always the person I could tell anything to, and it still feels that way.
She laughs when I tell her about setting up Annie and my gate guard Tim.
Beer almost comes out my nose when she tells me about her cluelessness about customs when she flew private to my concert in Australia last year.
It's a great hour, and it’s definitely over too soon.
Once I make it home, I look at the unread messages on my phone. The ones I’ve been studiously ignoring, proving to myself and Izzy that I can make time for her—for our friendship.
Carter
Well, your location is officially, officially out.
One of those entertainment magazines posted an article ten minutes ago about you golfing at WBCC last weekend.
Got the picture from one of the guys you golfed with.
Your full team will be here by morning. Once you’re done making an idiot of yourself at Izzy’s, don’t leave your house.
Ignoring him and a text from Andre about the song for the benefit, I text Izzy.
Me
You might’ve been right. The world knows I’m here. Best get our story straight now. Are we already dating?
Izzy
God, no. No one would believe that.
Also, do you think people are going to check our relationship status on social media or something? If anyone asks, just tell them we’re hanging out.
Me
So, I should return the shirt I just ordered you that says Steele Squad #1 Fan?
The Steelie4Life bracelet is probably okay, though, right?
Izzy
People are going to have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around me spending time with you, so let’s not get too crazy.
Me
Ha.
I’m pretty sure she’s kidding.
Me
You don’t think the famous musician part will help?
Izzy
No.
I wait for her to say something else, but I’m still waiting when I finally go to bed that night after completing an entire verse for the Lupus Foundation’s song.