Wild Child Page 4

  “Well, it’s a sordid tale. Not for everyone.”

  “Trust me, my ignorance doesn’t make you any less a celebrity.”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what it does.” She was actually enjoying herself. Amazing.

  “I read your first book. The one about groupies,” he said. Her heart kicked at the reminder. That was how she’d met Jenna. A kindred damaged soul, Jenna had spent her formative years backstage making the same bad decisions Monica was making.

  “So you were the one,” she joked, pushing aside her grief.

  “I read your book of poems, too.” She groaned, putting her head in her hand, and he smiled, that half-boy, half-man smile that went right to her knees. They each took a sip from their glass as if rinsing out the end of that conversation.

  “You’re awfully young to be a mayor, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He stared down at his wineglass as if the liquid had something to tell him, but then he shook his head and took a long sip. “No one else wanted the job,” he said. “And aren’t you a little young to be a worldwide bestselling author?”

  “Well, considering I was a sixteen-year-old runaway, I had a lot of room for improvement.” Her heels kept sinking in the lawn and she pulled them out, lurching toward him by accident. His hand grabbed her elbow, the bare skin there warming on contact. The younger her, the damaged kid, would have gone bonkers to have this handsome man touching her in any way. On that kid’s behalf, Monica memorized the sensation.

  “I can’t imagine that improvement was easy.” He let go of her, one finger at a time, and the intimacy of the conversation, his touch—all of it was too much.

  “Well, it made for good reading.” She stepped away, popping that small inclusive bubble of intimacy around them. “It looks like you were going to entertain a crowd. I’m sorry I wasn’t who you were expecting.”

  “I’m not. Sorry, I mean.” His words did something to her heart, disturbed the mechanics, and she thought she was past all that: the blushing, the sweaty palms, the heart thumping. Those were things for another woman, lifetimes younger.

  And yet here she was contemplating a girlish giggle.

  Coy behavior was for the old Monica she had spent years burying, and so instead she stared right at him.

  “Are you flirting with me, Jackson Davies?”

  “I thought you were flirting with me.” His smile was an invitation to deeper secrets, darker rooms.

  “It’s mutual, then,” she said.

  “I can’t believe I’m so lucky.”

  Me neither, she thought. The only man in the world who hasn’t read that damn book. They smiled at each other in silence, until Jackson finally blinked and turned away slightly as if the moment had been a little too much for him.

  What are you doing? she asked herself. What is the point of flirting with him? There’s no way any of this will go anywhere.

  And that was the appeal. Flirting in a safe place, dropping her armor, revealing herself in glimpses and side glances. All the while knowing nothing would happen.

  He was too much of a gentleman to pursue anything without the right signals from her, and she was far too broken to even know what those signals would be.

  “I remember you,” he blurted, and then winced. “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, bracing herself internally, but externally she laughed. A version of the trick from Jenna, only Monica was far better at it. “That day outside the police station? It looked like most of the town showed up.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and that was shocking. The apology actually took a few moments to assimilate. “After what you had been through, you deserved better than people standing around to watch you leave.”

  She glanced at her lemonade and lifted it, as if to take a sip, but realized she had no taste for it.

  “Thank you,” she said, meeting his eyes again.

  “So, Monica,” he changed the subject with grace. “How long are you staying in our fair town?”

  “Indefinitely,” she said and he blinked and straightened, as if he’d been poked.

  “The Wild Child is moving to Bishop?”

  Her heels sunk again and she jerked them out, uncomfortable with the nickname, a leftover from that ill-fated two-year reality show Simone had signed them up for when Monica was a teenager, ripe for rebellion. And while the moniker might have worked when she was sixteen, at thirty it was wearing thin. She hadn’t danced on a table, started a fight, smoked drugs, screwed another girl’s boyfriend, or any of the other things she did on and off the screen in years, though no one seemed to care.

  Titling the book Wild Child had been her publisher’s idea, and all it did was make sure no one ever forgot the girl she’d been.

  She’d written two works of nonfiction, the first a pretty crappy exposé on groupies, the second a bestseller about growing up a wild child, a life lived on the road and backstage, traveling around the world and through the rocky and terrible terrain between girlhood and womanhood.

  She’d written bad poetry, waited tables, traveled the world, and had held her best friend’s hand while Jenna died in near poverty, too proud to ask for money until it was too late.

  But no one was interested in those things.

  It was as though she were in frozen animation—a wild child forever.

  “Not quite. I’m here to write a book, and I’m not sure how long it will take.”

  “What’s your book about?” He eyed her over the edge of his glass before taking a sip.

  “The night my father was shot.”

  He swallowed and coughed. “The murder?”

  Inwardly, she cringed. She really was growing to hate that word.

  “Yeah. I’m a little behind and my deadline is coming up quick, so I need to do some interviews this week.”

  “Interviews?” He made it sound as if she’d said rectal exams. “With whom?”

  “Some of the people there that night.”

  “This has to be a joke,” he muttered. “It has to be.”

  She laughed, awkwardly trying to fend off his tension, his increasingly obvious dismay. “Is this a problem for you?”

  “A problem? That you, Monica Appleby, are writing a book about the night your father was shot dead by your mother in Bishop, the most notorious crime in our history? And you want to talk about it with people here? This week?”

  She didn’t like it said that way, the part about her mother—it was like someone dragging a rake over a chalkboard, and all of her internal organs cringed.

  “I’m not sure why this is important to you, or why you’re suddenly being an insensitive jerk about it.”

  “Oh Jesus.” He put down his glass with a thump, his eyes widening as if he’d just thought of some new horror. “Is your mother coming?”

  “No. And who the hell cares if she does?”

  “I do. I have one week, Monica. One week to get this town to win that damn TV show, and I can’t have any drama or theatrics get in the way.”

  “I’m not here to cause trouble.”

  “But isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that what you’ve always done?”

  She stiffened and set down her own glass. All that lovely buzzing awareness, all that sweetness behind those eyelashes—it was all gone. He was just a pigeonholing jerk, like so many others. “I’m going to go back to the Peabody. Thanks for the lemonade.”

  She took off across the lawn and left Jackson swearing under his breath. She was inside the house before he caught up with her. His touch on her elbow made her whirl. Life had not done her a whole lot of favors in the last few months. She was raw with grief and confusion, and more than ready to use smacking the daylights out of his handsome face as a reason to feel better.

  He held up his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Good.” She continued walking; the sound of her heels hitting the oak floors of the Big House had a satisfying violence. If only she could punch holes through that floor.

  “No, Monica, pl
ease.” He stepped around her, barring her exit. She huffed to a stop.

  “This is a little much, Jackson.”

  “I am deeply sorry for the way I was talking. Especially about your father’s death. I extend my sincere regret.”

  “You can stick your sincere regret—”

  “Please.” He smiled, but it was careful again, strained—that whole lying with his face, telling the truth with his body thing—and for some reason that made her pause. “I … I am heavily invested in the results of this show. The whole town is, as you can imagine. The okra-rocessing plant has closed, the recession has hit us particularly hard, and the town needs this competition. And it needs to win. And perhaps I’m paranoid, but I have worked very hard to make sure that nothing jeopardizes our chances.”

  “And you think I will?”

  “I think … you,” again he gave that careful smile as if he were trying to sidetrack her from the horseshit he was throwing at her, “and talk of the murder might be a … distraction.”

  “I have a book to write. A deadline. People are counting on me.”

  “People are counting on me.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “On this show, I mean.”

  Total deadlock. They stared at each other.

  “Just spit it out—what do you want?” she asked.

  “Can you … leave? Just for the week?”

  It took some effort to pretend her heart didn’t take a dent after all that flirting to be told it would be better if she left. Another reason why flirting was best left to the young. She was not nearly as resilient as she used to be. She took this shit personally.

  “Screw you.”

  “You asked.”

  “Well, I’m not about to leave and I’m not about to stay locked in my hotel room, Jackson.”

  “There’s a compromise here,” Jackson said.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Sure.”

  “Can you just not … interview people for a week?”

  “No.”

  He sighed, hard. “Do you know what ‘compromise’ means?”

  For a moment she contemplated giving him nothing. Contemplated, in fact, setting up a booth in his precious downtown and inviting everyone to come and tell her their favorite story about her and her mother.

  Maybe she’d organize some reenactments.

  “Monica,” he said, dropping all that charm for the moment, and she saw just briefly the strings he held, the control he was trying so hard to exert. It was somehow so vulnerable she wanted to turn her head away; it was like seeing a car crash on the highway. “I cannot express how important it is that nothing jeopardize this America Today contest. They’ll be examining us closely this week and that night … I don’t want them to see that night.”

  Monica had very little practice in not doing exactly what she wanted, exactly when she wanted. Outside of taking care of Jenna, she’d spent the last few years answering only to her publishing house. And, she supposed, to what passed for her conscience. She was as spoiled as Reba. So her compromise was rusty and came out petulant.

  “Okay, because I understand the situation, even though you’re a jackass—”

  “True. Very true.”

  “I’ll interview people quietly.”

  “Quietly?”

  “I’ll be discreet. That’s all you get.”

  “Then I guess I’ll take it.”

  Sun fell through the window over the door in a box of light, right between them, filled with glittering dust motes and the stench of his judgment. They stared at each other, all pretense gone. That zinging awareness from the backyard had turned sour.

  I see you, she thought. All the parts you hide behind that smile. And they aren’t all pretty.

  “I liked you better when you were polite,” she said.

  “I liked you better when you were flirting with me.”

  Like that was ever going to happen again.

  “Goodbye,” she said and passed through that glittering box of sunlight, through his judgment, to the other side and right out the front door.

  Turns out The Big House—and Jackson—were a disappointment, like so many others.

  Chapter 4

  Twilight sank over Bishop, and the Big House always got dark the moment the sun slipped behind the oak trees. Jackson pulled his shirt on over his head and walked the shadowed hallways to his sister’s room.

  He knocked lightly on her closed door and since it wasn’t latched, it swung open, revealing his sister on her bed, head bent over a book. Gwen’s natural habitat.

  Bubba, the old mutt, lay curled up at the foot of her bed, despite both of them being told dogs didn’t belong on beds.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb, keeping the bubble of distance between them.

  The bubble.

  A few months ago, when things got really dicey between them—that was when he noticed the bubble. The distance that lived and breathed between them. If he shifted left, she shifted right. If he walked into a room, she’d walk out. And it had seemed like a new phenomenon. But lately, at night, aware of the silence in the house and its slightly malevolent nature, he wondered if it had been there longer.

  If it wasn’t in fact something he’d created years ago, coming home from law school to take care of his eleven-year-old sister after the accident.He’d been clueless and sad and resentful, and maybe … he created the bubble. Considering the most recent example of his dynamic and powerful people skills with Monica, there was a very, very good chance that the bubble was his fault.

  And now he had no idea what to do about it.

  She just needs to get to college, he thought. Spread her wings. And maybe she was picking up on the fact that he was ready to spread his wings, too.

  The thought—and the guilt that came with it—gave him heartburn.

  “Gwen?”

  She glanced up, her wheat-colored hair slipping down over one eye. One black-rimmed, heavily made-up eye.

  “What … what’s on your face?” he asked.

  She looked back down. “Nothing.”

  “That eye makeup. Were you wearing that at your shift at the hotel?”

  She sighed heavily, the sigh of judgment. Condemnation. Jackson, the sigh said, you’re a total jackass.

  Yeah, he thought, and you look like a freaking owl with that shit around your eyes. But he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t her father, as she so loved to point out.

  “Pick your battles” was more than just a catchy saying. It was going to be his very first tattoo. Words to live by.

  “What are you going to do tonight?” he asked.

  “Hang out.”

  “With anyone, or by yourself?”

  It didn’t occur to him until after he said it how the words might hurt her. At her age, his whole life had revolved around friends, being social. Her aloneness seemed unnatural. And her reluctance to try to socialize was even more troubling.

  She shrugged, and he fought with superhuman effort not to march into the room, pop the bubble, and shake her.

  “You should invite some friends over,” he urged, worried, always worried.

  “I like being by myself.”

  Right. It wasn’t normal, it couldn’t be normal to want to be alone all the time, but if he pushed, she pulled, and then nothing would get accomplished.

  “I’m going out to The Pour House,” he said. “Text me if you’re going someplace.”

  She hummed in her throat, her eyes still on the book, and he waited another second as if she might look up and smile at him the way she used to. But she didn’t, and he knocked slightly on the door before walking away. He got three steps before he stopped and turned back around.

  “You want to go see a movie or something?” he asked.

  That made her stop reading.

  “What?”

  “A movie, get some ice cream …” He shrugged.

  “It’s poker night,” she said.

  “I know, but … I’d skip it if you want
ed to go see a movie.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, and in her blue eyes, so like their mother’s, he saw his sister and a total stranger. Gwen was a genius, reading at age three, completing complicated algebra problems in grade five. She’d finished the entire curriculum of her sophomore year of high school, including calculus and zoology, during two and a half months of summer school.

  For about a year when she was twelve he’d been slightly scared of her, even went to Memphis twice a month so both of them could see counselors. The counselor he’d seen had told him to make sure Gwen was still a kid, that she did kid stuff.

  So in between her reading the classics and taking online physics classes at The University of Tennessee, he took her go-carting, as well as mini-putting every weekend. He went fishing with her and to the movies. He invited kids her age, tried his best to make sure she had friends.

  He’d worked hard at it, poured himself into it the way he had law school. Normalizing his sister was a job, and it had been all-consuming.

  Those, he realized now with a bittersweet pang, had been the best years.

  “No thanks,” she said, and bent back over her book.

  He sighed, slightly defeated, slightly angry. Always baffled. “Then I guess I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and as he turned again for the hallway, Gwen shifted and he saw what she was reading. Wild Child. Monica’s purple eyes stared up at him from the author photo.

  Gwen glanced up and saw what he was looking at before he could pretend not to be.

  Without a word his sister pulled the book into bed with her, hiding it in her lap, another secret to keep from him.

  Monica searched through the pink dog carrier’s gazillion pockets for Reba’s leash. She found packets of dog treats. Hair ties and lip gloss. Gum. Two cigarettes. From the side pocket she pulled a long silver strip of condoms.

  “Oh, Jenna,” she sighed, fondness a bittersweet lump in her throat. She tossed the condoms aside to the bed, but a white note floated out onto her shoe. When she picked it up she caught a glimpse of Jenna’s handwriting, and it was so unexpected, she couldn’t breathe.

  Monica, the note said in Jenna’s girlish print and the grief bit so deep, she had to sit or fall to her knees. Don’t let the haters win. And that includes you. You’re special and you deserve to be happy. It goes so fast. Take happiness where you can find it.