Chapter Twenty-One #2
“I didn’t realize things were that bad. I can see why this place is important and special to everyone,” he said, his eyes locking on mine. “Why we have to save it.”
I nodded, glad he saw what I did.
Jake watched me for a moment, hazel eyes shifting from soft to intense, then back again, before looking away and down at the kitten. “Listen, I owe you an apology for that first night.”
“First night?”
“My first night back,” he elaborated, before his mouth crooked upward in a closed-lipped, lopsided grin. “You know, when you about took my head off.”
“I’d never.”
“Right.” He gave me another amused look. “But to jog your memory since you clearly blacked out how you almost attacked me—”
“The key word here being almost.”
“Pretty sure the key word here’s attacked.”
I reached over the cradle of Jake’s arms to tickle the kitten’s tummy, my fingers gliding over her silky, mosaic-patterned fur. “Don’t worry about him, he’s a lyricist. He loves a dramatic turn of phrase.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I told you Marie sent me down here.”
“Right.” That hadn’t exactly been the best moment. It’s not like I had a choice, he’d told me. Why was he bringing it up?
“Well, that’s not the whole truth,” Jake confessed, eyes flickering away. “Marie was with me, but she didn’t send me here. She wasn’t even a fan of the idea at all until I called her about the livestream and she thought it’d be a great way for her to get promo while getting the band back together.”
What? I froze, my arm unmoving as it draped over Jake’s to reach the kitten, the pads of my fingers paused over her fur.
Coming down here hadn’t been his manager’s idea, it’d been Jake’s?
Of course it hadn’t been Marie’s, I realized.
She’d created the bad boy image. Why would she need to fix it?
I’d been so distracted: The fighting (and forgiving) band.
My allergy bender. The truth bomb from my mom about the money situation.
My old feelings surfacing anew. It didn’t even dawn on me what the truth about Jake’s persona also meant.
“I should’ve been honest at the start,” Jake admitted.
“So why weren’t you?” I asked, trying to figure things out. “Why keep up the whole charade?”
He squinted, scrunching up his face. “I don’t know—stupid reasons, I guess. Like, when I first came back, I thought maybe you’d be happier to see me. Then when you weren’t, I thought maybe I should act like I didn’t want to be here either. You being defensive made me defensive.”
That made sense. I hadn’t exactly been welcoming. I’d been so thrown by him showing up like a thief in the night; when I thought he’d been throwing attitude at me, I tossed some back at him.
I winced. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m the one who should be sorry,” Jake insisted, shaking his head.
“I didn’t think it through. I kept leaning into the idea you already had of me, instead of trying to change it.
I shouldn’t have made you think I didn’t care about the café.
Or about you.” He met my eyes head-on, locking in on my gaze. “Because it’s the opposite.”
He was looking at me in that way of his again, just like he used to. Moments like these felt like there was an invisible string winding around us, and all I had to do was pull.
But I released it instead, looking away.
It wasn’t a question of forgiving Jake; that’d already been done. I liked this new Jake.
I liked this new Jake a little too much.
It was only a question of trusting him.
I wanted to focus on him being here now and his kindness—for it to outweigh the four years of silence. But I still felt as uncertain about what the future with him held as I felt about my future with college and the café.
Clearing my throat, I said, “Well, hopefully our livestream in two days works. And then I guess . . . you’ll be gone?”
There was a stretch of silence, where Jake’s gaze clouded for a minute like he forgot about that fact too, before he echoed, “I’ll be gone.”
I knew this, I was the one who brought it up, but I still felt a stab of regret in my chest.
Why, I wondered, when his leaving was not remotely surprising?
Still, Jake had chosen to come back himself. Not because of Marie.
That had to mean something, right? It must.
“Hey,” he said, dipping his head down toward the kitten in his arms and making his dark locks swoop across his forehead. “How about we name her Arpeggio?”
“Arpeggio?” I questioned, skeptical. “That’s too big of a name to saddle on such a tiny little kitten.”
“Why?” he asked stubbornly. “She’ll grow into it.”
“Yeah, but try saying all those syllables when you have to get up in the middle of the night to bottle-feed her.”
“But it’s a great music name. We can call her Peggy for short,” Jake tried. “And her brother can be nicknamed Gio for Adagio.” He really loved those music terms, didn’t he? “You know, just like Lucy for Luciana.”
“My name’s not musical, though.”
Jake opened his mouth as if to protest my point—but then Mom appeared in the doorway.
“Hey, just checking in to see how the kitten’s doing,” Mom said, her eyebrows going up at the sight of the kitten swaddled in Jake’s shirt and snuggled against him. “Got you wrapped around her paw, I see.”
I grinned at Jake. “Told you.”
“I’m going to be taking them home soon,” Mom told me. “Dinner’s at six, Lucy. Please don’t stay late today, okay?” She turned to Jake. “You should come over too. I’m making one of my special home-cooked meals tonight.”
Jake studied her for a moment before a grin crossed his face. “So, takeout?”
“You remembered my specialty.” Mom beamed at him. “We’re having Chinese tonight. Bring your friends.”
She said it so casually, as if she wasn’t inviting four celebrities over.
It’d been forever since Jake was last at my house for dinner. So much had changed since then. Would a chart-topping boy band want to spend their night sitting in our tiny kitchen / dining room, eating takeout with us?
“Thanks, Diana.” Jake beamed. “We’ll be there.”
“Really?” I turned to him in surprise. “You’re coming?”
“Yeah,” Jake said, adjusting the kitten in his arms, something softer than the mischievous grin he’d given Mom earlier crossing his face. “I’d love to.”
Mom sent me a knowing look, somehow not anywhere near as shocked as I was that Jake wanted to come over, just like he used to forever ago.
I didn’t see why he would. After all, he was used to things like screaming crowds and different cities every week and fireworks flaring out over him onstage.
Helping the café was one thing, coming over to eat dinner with my mother was another.
I sent Mom a sideways glance. How had she been so sure Jake would say yes?
But her face gave away nothing, just that she seemed inordinately smug.
“So, six o’clock sharp,” Mom said, pleased. “Dinner with US.”
***
Which is why,” Aspen said, waving around his chopsticks for emphasis, “if I was stuck on a desert island and could only bring one item with me, I’d bring seasoning.”
I blinked at him. “Let me get this straight. You wouldn’t choose a boat, or a machete, or a flare gun, or anything like that. You’d pick seasoning?”
“Yeah. I mean, first of all, the practical answers are boring. And secondly, I’d need something for flavor if I’m going to be eating fish every single day and nothing else.” He paused to think about that. “And maybe seagull.”
Mom stared at him across the table. “Seagull?”
“I’d like to see you try to catch a seagull,” Jake snarked.
“Me too,” Phillip agreed. “Remember that time a pigeon got stuck on our tour bus when we were in Frankfort, in your American South? Aspen screamed and locked himself in the bathroom.”
Jake snickered. “Aspen was shouting, ‘There’s a bird in here!’ through the door, right as Phillip walked in.
Phillip just raps on the bathroom door and goes, ‘You know there’s no girls allowed on the bus, mate.
’ It wasn’t until the pigeon buzzed him that he realized Aspen meant an actual, flying, feathered bird was inside the bus. ”
Twirling chow mein noodles around my fork, I asked, “How’d you get the bird out?”
Phillip cleared his throat. “Well, I wasn’t sure what to do, since we have staff for that at our country house in West Berkshire—”
“Okay, Mister Downton Abbey.”
“But Jake got it out with a sheet,” Phillip continued. “He’s the official bad boy, after all. He might as well handle the dangerous things.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Dangerous meaning a Kentucky pigeon?”
“At least I wasn’t screaming in the bathroom,” Phillip replied primly, shifting in his chair to dodge Aspen’s kick under the table.
I laughed, and they joined in, all our voices crisscrossing.
What would it be like, to have dinners like this regularly? To know they’d come back?
To know Jake would come back?
I pushed the thought out of my mind and got back to the present.
“So this is really how you guys pass the time on tour?” I asked curiously. When they first sat down and started asking random questions, I’d been a bit surprised, until they mentioned it was a game they played.
“Yeah,” Jake answered with a shrug. “We’re not allowed to have our phones thirty minutes before showtime. Or water guns after the Rhode Island incident. So we have to do something to stop the boredom.”
“It’s your turn, Lucy,” Leon told me. “What’s your question?”
Besides what happened in Rhode Island? “Um . . .” I thought it over, my mind landing on one of my favorite hobbies. “If you could dedicate a song to someone on the radio, what would it be?”
Phillip, surprisingly, had an answer at the ready. “‘Love Will Find a Way.’ Dedicated to Seraphina Steele.”
“Seraphina Steele, the supermodel?” I questioned with an arched brow. “Doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?”
Unaffected by this question, Phillip stared at me sagely across the table. “Love will find a way, Lucy.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.” I looked over at Jake. “What about you? What song would you dedicate to someone?”