Chapter Twenty-One #2
“If she doesn’t inherit her father’s money, she can’t spend her father’s money, don’t you see? She wants to make change where she sees it needed, from inside of the broken machine. Why should a woman play by the rules of men who wrote the game?”
I look at the staircase, one I imagined her striding down each morning for freshly prepared breakfast with servants and scones.
It feels shameful to have considered, now I know she lives in a one-bedroom flat above a bar.
Or she lends it to those in need.
It’s not at all what I expected from the adventure-seeking, rich girl I thought I knew.
Nothing has been expected with her since we started this arrangement. All the things that persuaded me to keep a distance from her, the risks, the sugar daddies, the status and behavior, all of them were a facade.
And if she lives above the bar, why did Jeremy call me last night? She could have walked up to her room and slept safely there. I would have worried about her all night, sure, but what did she have to gain by calling me?
Unless she asked for me.
Her friend’s words from last night replay in my head. Silver hair dads with tented sweatpants are the new in.
And her own words.
I love you.
“She is more than meets the eye,” Amelia finally says. “She sparkles.”
“I know,” I admit.
And I’m finding it harder to look away.
Papers rain over the luxurious office space of Perkins Manor, and a crumpled notepad hurls past my face on the tail end of Lemon’s curses.
I follow her madness over the threshold but stop in my tracks. This is no ordinary office. I stand with my jaw hung beneath thousands of books that line the neatly organized walls. “What is this place?”
“The library,” she teases. “Is this your first time being in one?”
“The first one in someone’s house, brat.” I grin when she hears that word and twists her lips. I shouldn’t love it, and neither should my cock.
She leans against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest and blowing a strand of hair away from storming purple orbs. “I’m looking for a note. A love letter, if you can even call it that, from years ago.”
My throat tightens at her desire to read letters I didn’t write her, and the need to ask her if she still plans to leave after the summer is through drops like an anchor in my gut.
“You look like I just slapped you in the face, Oliver. It’s not my love letter; it’s Papa’s…from Sylvia.” She pretends to gag on her finger before a spontaneous giggle. “Just think, if it was yours, it could be called Love’s letter.”
I shake my head. “Already wish you didn’t know my middle name.”
“Don’t wish that! I love knowing it’s Love.” She kisses my cheek. “Anyway, it’s better than Lester.”
One of the notebooks from earlier crunches beneath my feet. I pick it up by the binding.
Generational Wealth and the Duplicity of Giving by Lemon Anne Perkins, 15.
Stacks of essays are scribbled on crinkled, college-ruled pages. I trace the bubble letters on the bright yellow cover, Valley High School.
Fascinated, I flip through the headstrong ideals of an angsty teen Lemon, turning the page to realize those include taxing the rich and re-allocation of federal funding to community gardens and affordable childcare centers. “I didn’t peg you as a public-school kid,” I say.
“You didn’t peg me at all. Yet.”
She pries the old schoolwork from my grasp while I’m busy imagining that scenario and shoves it into a filing cabinet beneath the desk, another door she closes to shield me from the layers of her life I long to peel away.
“Look for something on parchment from the Hotel De Lutz in Centerville. The woman he’s with tonight, they met there years ago.
She’s done this dance with him before, Oliver, and her recording studio has been trying to ride on the backs of Perkins for years, poaching popstar after popstar from us as soon as they hit the top charts.
I don’t know what she offers them to move over their contracts, but she always gets her way in the end.
She only wants him for his money or his connections.
Those are the only reasons she’d come crawling back to his favor. ”
“You don’t think it could be that she likes his personality? He’s a fun guy. Good taste in…cigars.”
Lemon quirks a brow. “Right. So, you agree she’s using him.”
“You can’t know that.” I struggle not to side with her father. I understand him in many ways she couldn’t know. “Maybe you should trust his judgement.”
As a father myself, I don’t know what to think. But Lemon’s not wrong. I’m privy to the Clements name. The record label has been poaching our artists for years. Could it be a lapse in her father’s judgement?
An idea suddenly lights her eyes that has her crossing the room and getting to her knees, counting books from left to right.
When she’s counted all the way to twelve, her finger catches something on the shelf and a book slips out. “Got it!”
A door opens from the wall of the library that exists in this woman’s home. I thought I knew how the other half lived, but I only saw a fraction of this luxury on the road with musicians. Penthouse hotel suites and five-star dining, sure, but this…
“This is—”
“Completely over-the-top consumerism at its finest?” She shakes her head in agreement as she stands in the center of floor-to-ceiling signed records and a fully operational recording studio.
Behind a bookshelf.
“I realize it’s a lot to take in.” She winces, a pink blush spreading across her cheeks. She pulls at a strand of her hair, that nervousness again. I only ever see it around topics like this. “It’s a rich people thing, but just ignore that and help me look, okay?”
Pink turns red as she waits for my answer.
“Okay.” What else do I say?
No, I won’t explore a musical treasure trove with the woman I think I love?
Deep inside, my fingers stir, raw energy igniting from some force I cannot see. But I never could see it with music. Sometimes you can’t see what you’re meant to feel.
Lemon rummages through papers and files behind the mix table, and I run my hand over the glass screen that separates us from the microphone and instruments. My eyes catch on one, and I squint, rubbing them in fascination at what I’m certain I can’t be seeing.
The violin in the corner of the room.
“Is that a Stradivari?” My hand slaps against the glass, the slice of transparency separating me from a dream.
“A what?” She looks up from her pile of papers, dumbfounded as I trip over my feet to get a closer look.
“The violin over there.” I tap the glass. “That’s a…Lemon! That’s a three-million-dollar instrument! How do you not know that?”
She shrugs, impervious to my fanatics. “I stopped lessons when I was like ten. Way more boring than piano or chess, if you ask me. I think Papa just forgot it was there all these years.”
“That was your practice violin? For a ten-year-old? And here I bought the twins the pink ones with the plastic strings.”
“Take a breath, Mr. Perfectionist. The twins don’t care.
I’ve seen. They use them like guitars and pretend they’re at a Shaylyn concert, so don’t get your new seersuckers in a twist about it.
My father had stupid amounts of money to spend on his only daughter’s first musical instrument.
Literally, anything I did was celebrated by a team of maids and nannies with savings bonds or diamond jewelry waiting in Papa’s hand at the end of the line. It was showmanship.”
She trots to my side, placing her hand over mine, still sprawled on the plexiglass in amazement.
If I hold it there long enough, perhaps the glass will disappear.
“I knew you missed it.” She smirks. “Come on.” She drags me past the glass just like I wished.
Magic.
“This is called the live room,” she says. “The music is played in here and fed through the equipment over there so the sound technicians can make it all cool and such.”
“I know how it works, Sour Patch.” I flick her hair. “Remember I work for your father?”
“Then act like you know a thing or two about music, Beethoven.”
“Beethoven’s favorite instrument was the piano. He also found it way less boring. Did you know that?”
“I do now.” She pretends to check her nails to fuck with me, but I grin when she flicks her eyes back up and they seem to be smiling, too. “But I didn’t come for a history lesson, I came for a symphony. Now get on with it!”
“Concerto,” I tease back. “That’s what they call a soloist in the orchestra.”
“Whatever, old man. Are you gonna play the three-million-dollar practice violin or not?”
“Jesus, I can’t believe you just said that sentence. I’m beginning to see what you mean when you say I’m a lousy millionaire.”
She hops merrily onto a side table, swinging her legs while I tune the violin, and it reminds me of the way she sits on her tour bunk, bubbly and bright, annoying as can be and coaxing me on while I ready the bands for their schedule.
It occurs to me, I’ve known this side of her for years. Not just the surface parts I thought I knew, but the caring, intuitive side I’ve seen since she joined my home.
I felt guilty before now. I made a promise to her father, after all, but my feelings preceded that promise, didn’t they? My eyes were so fixed on the chaos, I couldn’t see the strength beneath it.
Intriguing, how it all began with our eyes.
And now, I close mine, wrapping my hand around an instrument I haven’t played since Lauren passed. The smooth spruce and willow finishings shake my hand like an old friend, and for an entire breath, my body tenses.
But when I open my eyes again, and I see the woman I love smiling so wide it nearly touches her ears, I release it all, fingers gliding the strings.
I bow harder, faster, climbing and falling over riffs I’m not entirely sure mesh with the tune I began. My song takes flight, soaring atop crescendos, scaling over bridges, and a climax so tempestuous it feels like Lemon Anne Perkins herself.
It’s a new song. One I’m writing as I go. The chaotic sharps and flats blend with the classical stroke of my bow in a way I never imagined.
My heart beats faster as her eyes sparkle so bright they may burst into the very starlight she chases, and just when I think we couldn’t fly any higher—
Snap!
A string slaps against my wrist.
“I’m so sorry! I—”
“Don’t be.” Lemon beams. “Never be sorry for living.”
“Promise me you’ll live,” a voice whispers in the wind.
My eyes fix on the wild woman before me, dangling from her whims, and offering me the world in a smile, and I finally see.
I am. I promise.