Page 47 of You Spin Me

He shakes his head. “Just Jones. That’s what everybody calls me.”

“Got it.” I gesture at the photos. “The receptionist told me to wait for you here, and I was…”

“Looking for Cal?”

“Guilty as charged.” Hanging on to my purse strap like it’s going to escape, I search for a way to ask what I really want to know. “So, what, he’s a vampire? Works at night, can’t be photographed?”

He doesn’t bite.

“Seriously, why wouldn’t he be up here?” I scan the array of pictures again. “These are station DJs posing with musicians, right?”

“They are, but”—hands shoved in his pockets, he tips his head to one side?—“Cal avoids the spotlight.”

“But why?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“I feel like I have. He’s very good at dodging that question.”

Jones skirts around me to the other side of his desk. “It takes time.”

“For what?”

“For him to trust people.”

“I don’t get it.”

A sharp bark of a laugh escapes his mouth. “Believe me, it’s not you. It’s him.”

My harsh laugh matches his. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

“Have a seat, Jessica.” He slides a stack of papers across the desk, likely whatever it is he needs me to sign, but instead of addressing them, he swivels his chair to look out a large picture window. “Don’t give up on him, okay? I can tell he really cares about you.”

“How would you—”

His hand makes a stop sign in the air between us. “Listen to this.”

Rolling his chair over to a stereo setup, he hits the play button on a cassette deck. It takes me a few beats to recognize my own voice. I sound so sweet and innocent. When I hear Cal’s voice, an image rears up in my mind—a guardian angel with a fierce but desolate face, like the character in that movie,Wings of Desire. There’s an ache, a desire to join, but he can’t. He has to be separate.

But why?

I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at the tape deck—or even if he played our entire conversation—when Jones taps the back of my hand to get my attention. “Like I said, it’s his story to tell. He will tell you. He’s already started.”

Nodding dumbly, I sign the papers in front of me without even reading them because, dammit, something about Jones’s words have tears threatening. Swallowing them back, lifting my chin and the corners of my lips in a professional smile, I shake his hand and let him usher me out.

I’m almost out the door when he says, “You have a wonderfully expressive voice, Jess. Do you have a voice-over reel?”

Since this is the last thing I’m expecting to hear, I mumble a no and keep walking. By the time I’m back in my car, my heart feels like a too-full balloon that’ll pop if I even breathe wrong.

Despite the humiliating things I revealed to the world, all I heard in my voice on that tape was how much in love with him I already am. Like Juliet, I let him—and the world, for that matter—“overheard’st, ere I was ’ware, my true love’s passion.”

In my opinion, Romeo was wiser about romance before he met Juliet, when he called love “a smoke raised with the fume of sighs.” A madness that we fuel with our own imaginings.

How can I be half in love with someone I’ve never met? Obviously, it’s more of an obsession, which probably would end as quickly as it started if we actually met. If I cut him off now, he can remain a perfect guardian angel who really only exists in the space between my ears and my heart and I can be the sweet princess that he rescued. He’ll never have to know how fucked up I really am.

If I never let him see me, never let him touch me, never hear him lie to me, he won’t find out I’m not the sleeping beauty he thinks he’s been whispering to.

Who needs that sniveling wannabe, anyway?

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