Page 113 of Best Served Cold

“Oh, did you hear about the toilet-papering?”

He gives me a quizzical look, which slips into amusement. “Did you really toilet-paper his house?”

I duck my head into my hands, embarrassed. “Yeah, it was unplanned.” I tell him everything, including about the video his neighbor sent us. “Hannah thinks it might be GingerBeerBabe and that they’re together now.”

His gaze turns sharper, harder. “I don’t give a fuck who he’s seeing. He could be dating half this town for all I care, as long as he’s not dating you. Doyoucare?”

He sounds almost jealous. My pulse skips a beat, and I wrap a hand around his leg. “No. Not like that. I don’t care about this woman, but Hannah does. She doesn’t think he deserves to be happy.”

“He doesn’t,” he says, his jaw tensing. “You asked what he did to me…”

I feel like water starting to bubble on a hot burner. He’s going to tell me, and then I’m going to have to tell him.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened when you were younger, Sophie,” he says with a knowing look, reading right through me. “Not yet. But I hope you’ll want to. I don’t know how we can ever hope to know each other unless you do, and Iwantto know you. Just like I want you to know me.”

I swallow nothing, feeling lost. Feeling hopeful too.

“What did he do?” I finally ask, squeezing his thigh, needing the solid feel of him.

He lifts his right hand and shows it to me. I’m intimately familiar with it. Its calluses, its long, clever, well-formed fingers. The little white scars.

He points to the scars with his other fingers.

“I told you I was in Bad Magic. We were supposed to go on tour ten years ago. I was twenty-one. It felt like the beginning of everything. My life finally taking off. My mother was doing well…” His hand starts to tremble, and I take it in mine, feeling a rumble of foreboding.

“Jonah slammed my hand in a door. So hard it broke. He says it was an accident, but I saw the look on his face. He wanted to hurt me. Maybe he didn’t set out to break my hand, but he did it on purpose.”

I squeeze his hand, tears pricking in my eyes as horror blasts through me.

“I had to get surgery,” he continues, softly. “I couldn’t play for months. The doctors weren’t sure I’d ever be able to play the way I used to. Sometimes I think they were right. Anyway, I couldn’t go on tour with Bad Magic, so David, our lead singer, found a guy to take my place. The next summer they blew up. I cowrote a few of their first big singles with David, so I got a good amount of money from that. Still do. But that was it for me. I…we’d started the band together in his garage when we were in high school.”

Jonah had always acted like Rob was a loser, a leech, a burden on their family, and yet he had taken something precious from his brother. Worse, my heart told me that Rob was right. That Jonah had done it knowingly, maybe out of jealousy, and was only sorry afterward.

“Thatasshole,” I say tightly. Then I remember what Rob told me a few weeks ago about regret. How regretting the bad partsof the past would mean forsaking every good thing that had happened since. “What you said the other night…do you really not regret it?”

He gives me a faint smile, his gaze far away. “Depends when you ask me. I went through a pretty dark time after that happened. I drank away three years of my life. I’ll always be ashamed of that, after having watched what my mother went through with alcohol. I knew what would happen, and I did it anyway. At the time, I didn’t care. But then I met Travis, and he saved my life. I’m proud of what we’ve built. I wouldn’t have any of that if I’d stayed with the band.

“So no, I don’t regret being here, with you. I don’t regret the life I’ve made, and I wouldn’t dismantle it for all the money Bad Magic has made. I still get royalties from some of their songs anyway, so I was able to buy this place and contribute to The Missing Beat. Otherwise it would all be on Travis.”

I feel tension building inside of me. He told me something that obviously wasn’t easy for him to share.

We made a deal…

Rules matter to me. They have ever since I broke one.

I take my hand away, feeling my whole body trembling.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Sophie,” he says.

“I think I want to.”

Smiling, he says, “You don’t sound like you want to.”

“You understand.”

“I do.” Then he surprises me by pulling me onto his lap, his arms wrapping around me like they did when we took that photo the other week. “Maybe it’ll be easier like this,” he says into my ear.

I nod, feeling the familiar shameful burning in my eyes. “I got an RSVP from my parents this morning. They condescended to attend my cancelled wedding, and they’d both like the fish.”

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