Chapter One #2
“Oh, I suppose so.” Grandma sighs again. “You did buy me the place. But you’ll have to sleep on the couch. I never got around to purchasing a mattress for the third bedroom.”
“He bought you the house?” My eyebrows reach for the sky. “Holy shit.”
“It’s none of your business, dear.”
“The couch is good,” he says, turning to me. “The couch is a dream. Hey, June, would you do me a favor?”
This is actually my second time cutting hair this week. Which is not to say I know how to do it, but breakup bangs happen. Hopefully just the once because they’re kind of tragic. It’s going to take me forever to grow them out.
Hacking off a ponytail worth of Nash’s hair seems a good place to start.
Then I attack the remains of his mane. There’s an intimacy to this.
To being so close to him. Hairdressers must get used to it, but fondling someone’s hair is a novelty for me.
He’s sitting on a stool in the bathroom, watching me work in the mirror.
In theory he’s going to have a few inches worth of light brown hair left all over.
But to repeat the obvious, it’s not like I know what I’m doing.
“How much do you think I could sell the ponytail for?”
He thinks it over. “I’d be disappointed if you got less than a thousand.”
Grandma deposits the broom by the door. “Make sure you clean up, Nash. I’m not your housekeeper anymore.”
“But I’m a guest, right?” he asks.
“Guests are invited. You showed up unannounced. And ordinary people pick up after themselves.” With these words, Grandma departs.
Nash just smiles.
“It’s nice that you kept in touch when she retired,” I say.
He winces. “I had my people send her flowers on her birthday and a bottle of single malt for New Year’s. It’s not like I put in any real effort.”
“That you have people is wild.”
“I had people. I was a company. But that’s all going away now,” he says. “What do you do?”
“Web design. Building websites and online stores for small businesses.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah. Especially the ability to work when and where it suits me.”
He watches me in the mirror for a while. “You’re still quietly losing your shit about me buying her the house, aren’t you?”
“So much. But like she said, it’s nothing to do with me.”
This house isn’t grandiose, but it is damn nice.
Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, midcentury, with a porch facing the street and a deck making the most of the river frontage out back.
The walls are white and the floors are cork.
Situated in a small town with a brewery and a farmers’ market and other cool and quaint things.
Property like this would not have been cheap.
“What I like most about making this sort of money is getting to do stuff for people,” he says.
“She wanted a beautiful place to retire to, and you made that happen. Thank you.”
Nash’s gaze moves away from the mirror, and he doesn’t respond. Guess he isn’t comfortable with gratitude. “So, what happened with your ex?”
“We’re just baring our souls to each other?”
“Why not?” he asks. “Life is too short for half measures.”
“I wanted dick and respect, which was apparently way too much to ask for.” I keep chopping away with the clippers, hitting a knotted section of hair requiring careful work with the brush. “Sorry if I’m hurting you. How did it get in this condition?”
“The last few days have been kind of hectic.”
I nod.
“I grew it long when I was a teenager cause I wanted to look different to other members of my family, and it was also my answer to stage fright,” he says.
“Having a curtain of hair between me and the audience. Covering half of my face with the beard. There were all these songs I wanted to share, but the idea of being up there with people staring at me made me want to puke.”
“Must have been hard, wanting to perform but hating the idea of going out there.” And now it’s my turn to share.
Properly this time. Dammit. “My boyfriend decided we’d gotten too serious too soon and wanted to take a step back from our relationship.
To go back to just casually dating, even though we’d been living together for a year. ”
“What an asshole.”
“Yes.” And that’s all I have to say about it.
“I’m sorry you got your heart broken. But he wasn’t worth your time. You know that, right?”
I don’t answer. However, the thing is, I’m more angry than hurt.
There might be a small chance I was with someone I didn’t belong with, and maybe he figured it out before me.
Which is embarrassing. I’m thirty years old and as clueless as I ever was.
Making what I thought was the good and safe choice, only for it to spectacularly blow up in my face.
This conversation needs a change of topic. What I want to ask him about is Angus—the person Grandma enquired after earlier. However, he made his feelings on the subject quite clear. There’s a good chance I’m just curious about the rockstar in general.
“How much do you want to bet your grandmother didn’t buy a mattress for the third bedroom because she didn’t want more than one guest here at a time?” asks Nash.
“There’s no way I’m taking that bet.” I smile and set down the brush in favor of the scissors again. He watches me work in silence for a few minutes. Then I’m done with cutting hair once and for all. “This is about the best I can do,” I say. “The length is reasonably even.”
“My head feels lighter.”
“When’s the last time your hair was this short?”
“Eighteen or so,” he says. “The beard came a few years later. This record company kept coming by and was making all of the right noises. But they wanted to market me as this pretty boy. I wanted people to listen to my music, not look at me.”
“How did that work out?”
“They weren’t happy when I refused to shave the beard. But I thought if it was good enough for Willie Nelson and George Clinton and Billy Gibbons, then excessive facial hair was good enough for me.”
“I know the first two.”
“You know…Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top.”
I shake my head, and oof. The disappointment coming from him is extreme.
He starts in on his beard with the scissors and then the razor.
Only this time he doesn’t hold back, and the eventual revelation of his clean-shaven jawline is a thing of splendor.
With no hair to hide behind, the man’s beauty is a slap in the face.
High forehead, sharp cheekbones, and the most perfect lips.
“How do I look?” he asks.
“Different.”
“Different good?”
I can only nod. There was a time when I knew words. But being confronted with his gorgeous self in my unsober state has stolen them away.
And the way he stares at me in the mirror.
The man is a damn flirt. He knows he belongs on a billboard advertising cologne or something.
However, without the long hair and beard, he does look like a different person.
And he gives me a half smile. A lazy, charming, fuck-up-my-life sort of thing. “Night, June.”