Chapter Fourteen
I should’ve been in my room playing it smart. But instead I was out on the balcony, hoping Calista would show.
Hoping for more of Calli and Mase.
The last time I saw her, she’d been in the kitchen making herself a sandwich. Without looking at me, she’d told Pete she’d be in her room going over old intel on Amir Bakir and Ahmad Sindi and she’d pass on dinner.
I didn’t believe her, but I kept my mouth shut and didn’t call her out on it.
I’d waited until Fallon and Pete had left to go pick up the SUV Shep had secured for us to use. They’d do a sweep for trackers and take a drive around the city watching for a tail before they came back.
Calli and I would be alone for hours. Stupidly, I wanted that time with her on our balcony where, as she put it, we could be normal. No work. No evil bad guys to take out. No lies.
I didn’t admit it to her last night, but I needed normal.
I wasn’t burned out or tired of my job like she was, but that didn’t mean I didn’t take full advantage of my downtime.
The normalcy of working behind the bar of the Dirty Plank, drinking coffee off the back deck of my condo, going to the beach at night and using the rhythm of the waves to clear my head.
As much as I needed normal, Calli craved it, and I wanted to be the one who gave it to her. So there I was playing a dangerous game, waiting for her to show, hoping she was wearing last night’s robe while at the same time hoping she’d found a snowsuit in the closet.
Her sitting in a lounger next to me with those long legs on display was an exercise in control.
Last night, I’d bested the temptation.
Tonight I’d have to dig deep—that was, if she came out and joined me.
Not interested in the view, I had my eyes closed when I heard the whoosh of the slider. With a smile, I opened my eyes but quickly hid my relief she’d come outside.
Her gaze and her feet immediately went to the chaise next to mine. My gaze ate up the view of her bare legs. It was time to dig and find my legendary control.
I gave her a few minutes to settle in before I asked, “Calli and Mase?”
“Yeah,” she said softly.
I lobbed an easy question her way. “Favorite song?”
“I don’t have a favorite, but I have a favorite album. Fleetwood Mac. Rumours.”
“No shit?”
“Something else we have in common?”
“Can’t say it’s my favorite, but it’s in my top five.”
I waited for her to ask her question, keeping my gaze on the skyscrapers that were now dwarfed in comparison to the Burj Khalifa.
But she didn’t ask a question; she elaborated.
“Stevie Nicks is one of the best storytellers ever to live. Her breakup songs are golden, made better because Lindsey Buckingham had to sing harmony on the very fuck-you songs Stevie wrote. I want to be her when I grow up. Not that I want my man to cheat on me, but damn, she’s brilliant.
If I could only listen to one song the rest of my life, it’d be ‘Dreams.’”
So she did have a favorite song.
And a damn good one at that.
“Though,” she went on sheepishly like she didn’t want to admit the next part. “They both were assholes and cheated.” I heard Calli shift on her lounger and turned to look at her. “Beauty born from heartache.”
Calli was staring right at me, but she wasn’t seeing me. She looked miles away and lost in her head. I wondered if she was thinking about her sister—the ugly end to her. Nothing beautiful had come from Calli’s heartache.
I didn’t get a chance to ask. She continued down her morose path.
“Look at Eric Clapton and the Beatles guy, George Harrison. Add in Pattie Boyd and you have an epic love triangle that inspired one of Clapton’s best songs, ‘Layla.’ And I’m not a Beatles fan, but I can’t deny Harrison’s song to Pattie, ‘Something,’ is amazing. ”
She wasn’t wrong. There was a lot of bed-hopping in the seventies and eighties.
The music scene was rife with cheating and drugs and men taking women who weren’t theirs under the guise of trying to find their muse—whatever the fuck that meant.
I could argue Clapton’s song “Tears in Heaven” was his best, though bringing up the death of the man’s son would veer us down a path I didn’t want to take us.
I didn’t have to redirect the conversation—Calli did, bringing us full circle back to Fleetwood Mac.
“Though Lindsey’s ‘Go Your Own Way’ is an emotional sucker punch.
A man accepting he couldn’t give the woman he loved what she needed and loving her enough to let her go.
On the other hand, that acceptance meant he didn’t fight for her. ”
I didn’t miss the loneliness in her tone, the whisper of what was left unsaid.
“Did a man not fight for you?” I asked gently.
“Never had a man, but I have a mother who let me go my own way and didn’t fight for me or herself. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to explain why that song hits me in the feels.”
Never had a man?
What the fuck?
The woman was stunning, smart, and had a wicked sense of right and wrong. How had she never had a man?
I tried for levity and said, “Let me guess, ‘The Chain’ is your third favorite on the album.”
“There are only forty-four original words in that four-and-a-half-minute song. In a world where people like to hear themselves speak so they use seventy-three words and a lot of filler to make themselves feel smart, instead of the ten necessary to get the point across, ‘The Chain’ proves it’s about the quality of words, not the quantity. ”
I couldn’t argue that, so I didn’t. I moved on.
“Never been tied to a man?”
I saw the flinch, but no left eye twitch denoting irritation. Uncomfortable but not angry at the question.
“I’ve been busy. Never had time.”
She’d had time. She just never made the time.
I wasn’t going to ask about men she’d used to pass the time, because I didn’t want to know.
“I know you’ve never been married and aren’t looking to be, but have you ever been tied to a woman?”
I walked right into that motherfucking land mine.
“Yep, for four years.”
Calli’s lips parted and her eyes flared. “Wow. Four years is a long time to commit to a woman when you were clear there wouldn’t be wedding bells in your future.”
“Was there a question in there?” I taunted, for no other reason than to buy myself time to figure out how I was going to get out of the trap I’d laid for myself.
“Not if you don’t want there to be. Calli and Mase and the cone of silence doesn’t include having to share secrets that don’t want to be shared.”
Cone of silence.
That would imply trust.
Not that my relationship with Emily was a state secret, but I also didn’t broadcast it.
“Tell me the truth why you’ve never committed to a man,” I pushed.
Calista Ventura held my gaze hostage while she broke my heart. “Men scare me.”
Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.
“Do I scare you?”
Without hesitation, she answered, “No.”
Thank fuck.
And fuck me sideways. Now I had to return the honesty.
“I met Emily when I was sixteen. She was fifteen. We dated until I was twenty. Then we broke up.”
“Why?”
Christ.
“She cheated on me.”
Seeing as it was a long time ago, the anger had long since fizzled out, but the betrayal still burned.
Back then, I’d been naive. I’d believed Emily loved me.
I’d believed her when she promised herself to me and only me.
I’d believed her when she told me it was important to her that we wait to have sex until we were married.
All lies.
All bullshit.
The deepest betrayal.
“Now I kinda feel like an ass for talking to you about breakup songs,” she muttered.
“It was twenty-five years ago, Calli. I’m not over here crying in my soup, sad my high school and college girlfriend cheated on me.”
“Well, that’s good news. I’d hate to tell you how lame I thought it was that you’d give twenty-five years to a woman who is clearly a blind and stupid idiot for throwing you away.”
Christ, I didn’t want that to feel good, but it did.
“No one serious after her?”
There had been a lot of someones. Lots of nameless, faceless, empty pussy that at the end of the night left me feeling like garbage.
I shifted in my lounger and took her in.
All that shiny blonde hair, those incredible blue eyes, and I wished more than anything she was not sitting next to me.
I wished she was anywhere but in the middle of an op in Dubai, exhausted and worn out.
I’d give up my condo, my stake in the bar, my retirement, all my possessions in exchange for her being someplace else with someone special and this life having never touched her.
Cone of silence.
“Want some truth?” I asked.
“I want anything you’re willing to give me.”
Christ. A different me would take that statement and run with it until we collapsed into bed together.
That was not where I could go with Calista, or anyone.
“When I was with Emily, we were both virgins. I ended that relationship one. She did not,” I told her.
Calli rolled to her side. The lapels of the robe slightly opened, exposing just enough of her cleavage to make my dick take notice but not enough to be indecent.
Fuck, she was beautiful, and I was an asshole.
“You were with her for four years.”
I understood the question even if she asked it in the form of a statement.
“Her family was religious. She wanted to wait until she was married. I respected that and I loved her, so it wasn’t a hardship. But, there I was at twenty, a virgin after I caught my pious girlfriend fucking a TA in her English class her freshman year of college.”
“That’s really shitty, Mase. I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say. It was fucked she cheated. The end.”
“So that was the end of you wanting to be in a relationship? She fucks you over and that’s it for you? You just let her win?”
I smiled.
She shook her head, and confessed, “That sounded judgier than I wanted it to.”
“Is that your way of admitting you’re judgmental?”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
“Damn, you’re cute when you get huffy.”
Her eyes narrowed, and that was cute too.
“I feel like there’s more to the story.”