He didn’t back down. “No. I’m saying she and I had stopped sleeping together weeks before she told me she was pregnant. I don’t know who was in her bed after me or if I was even the only one she was sleeping with. We weren’t dating. It was casual fucking.”
I grabbed his shirt, twisting it so I was right in his face. “That’s my sister you’re talking about, asshole.”
“Sister or not, she agreed to the terms,” he said without a hint of remorse, not even upset that I was in his face and five seconds from hitting him.
“And exactly what terms were those?” My voice was deep with the raw emotions the entire morning’s shitstorm of news had hit me with.
“Just what I said. Sex. When I needed it or she needed it. We took precautions, so if she ended up pregnant, it wasn’t because I was irresponsible.”
“Sleeping with a student is one-hundred-percent irresponsible.”
“She wasn’t my student. In fact, she wasn’t a student at all. She’d already graduated the night she approached me at the bar. She initiated it, and I was clear about what I could and could not offer. This little college has just been a résumé builder. After this semester, I move on to Harvard, and that means more to me than a baby I don’t want.”
His lack of emotion spiked the wrath building in me. He truly didn’t give a rat’s ass about my sister or her baby. He didn’t care about anyone but himself. I didn’t understand Cassidy at all if she had walked into a bar and picked up this prick.
I shoved him away from me and took several steps back before I lost control and pounded him in the face a few times. Before I lost my cool and did something that ended with me in the headlines with a prison cell as my backdrop. Dani would kill me. Then, I remembered she’d turned in her resignation. I no longer had a PR manager until we replaced her.
More loss. Piles of it.
“You truly don’t care that you’re going to have a kid? That there will be a piece of you out in the world?” I said gruffly.
“Quite the opposite. I do care. I care that she’s having the baby when I would prefer it didn’t exist at all. It was why I told her I’d pay for the abortion, regardless of whether it was mine or not.”
I just stared at him.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” I said quietly.
“It isn’t the first or last time I’ll be told that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an important paper to finish writing.”
He straightened his clothing and took a seat behind his desk. He started typing and ignored me while I continued to glare. He was a complete and utter waste of life?a completely selfish human being.
As I turned to leave, my furyat him turned inward because it was obvious I knew nothing about my sister. I’d made assumptions about her based on the little girl I used to know before I’d left for Juilliard. I may not have been hovering around her like my parents, but I was refusing to let her grow up just like they were.
I stormed out of the building, shaking.
I knew nothing about my family, and they knew nothing about me. Love wasn’t knowledge. It needed to change.
My feet crossed the campus and headed in the direction of downtown. The dark clouds finally broke, sending down a stream of water that had me jogging toward the overhang of the buildings along Main Street. As I stalked toward the music store, I barely registered any of the other businesses that had been a permanent fixture of my youth.
The bell above the door jingled as I walked into the shop. The smell hit me first: vinyl, old instruments, and the oils for cleaning them. My heart clenched. God, I’d loved this place.It no longer looked like the happening spot to get music it had once been when I was growing up. Even then, the push to digital had been casting the CDs to the side. Now, with the resurrection of interest in records and Elana’s volume of them, I would have expected the store to have the same number of customers as the antique shop on the other side of the road.
Just being in the store eased my heart a little as I tried to shrug off the rolling depths of emotions surging through.But being in there also amplified the loss I was feeling as my fury receded. It felt like someone had grabbed my heart and sliced it with crisscross cuts. Not deep enough to bleed out, but deep enough to leave multiple scars.
“I’ll be down in a sec,” a female voice hollered from the stairs at the back leading to the practice rooms and a dusty storage area.
I pulled my beanie down lower, almost covering my eyes, and scratched at the beard. I slid the sunglasses to the top of my head and eased down the A row. I flipped through a stack and came up with aBack in BlackAC/DC album that would fit right in with my collection back in New York City.
A clatter on the stairs drew my head around, and my entire body froze as a woman came into view. Streaks of mahogany mixed in with a golden mane pulled back into some sort of knot at the top of her head, barely holding itself together with curls spiraling everywhere. I blinked twice to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, but no, the bun was secured with paintbrushes?two large, one small?as if this person was using the mound of hair like a seamstress used a pincushion.
She had a smudge of what I assumed was paint on her cheek, and she was wiping her hands on a cloth. She was delightfully curvy, but it was partially hidden under an enormous sweater that landed almost at her knees where a pair of black leggings trailed down the rest of her. She wasn’t tall or short. She was somewhere in between, and I found my body traveling to her before I’d even considered it.
When I got closer, her hazel eyes looked almost golden in the stream of the stained-glass lights that had hung over the counter for as long as I could remember. This woman had a hint of Elana in her. Something about the eyes or the mouth. And maybe that was why I had an odd sense of déjà vu when she squinted at me. Like I’d met her but not. I met a lot of people each year. Thousands. I didn’t remember them all, but if I’d met and forgotten this woman, I was going to bonk my head into the side of the wall a few hundred times.
“Is that all you need?” she asked, referring to the AC/DC album stuck in my hand.
No. It wasn’t why I’d come at all.
I’d come because of a damn sticky note saying one of the most influential people in my life had died and no one had told me.I’d come because I was not only angry, but also hurt and sad, but now I wasn’t sure what I felt because this woman was looking at me as if I needed something else. Something more. Something I couldn’t name. And hell, hadn’t I had those same thoughts myself? The gaping hole in my soul was growing wider and wider.
