“Remind me to tell her when I come back to New York at the end of the tour.” He cleared his throat. “If you'll have me, that is.”
I blushed again. “So you’re definitely coming back to New York?”
“Always have been. I record in January and most of my band lives in the states, so there's no reason to go back home.”
“Well, of course I'll have you. I want to see you. That's why I called. You told me to call only if I’m serious. Remember? If I wasn't ready to try. This is me trying.”
“Good. That's all I wanted. Truly.”
“So when would you get here?" I rolled back on to my side and swished my foot back and forth across the duvet. I'd never thought of myself as the type for phone sex, but Eamon was making me reconsider everything. “I hope it's not too long. Now that I've seen you, I'm anxious to see you again.”
He sighed on the other end of the line. “Three weeks.”
“So forever, basically.”
“A lifetime.” He laughed it off. “We'll make it work. Lots of phone calls. Maybe some late night ones. When I'm alone and need to unwind after a show.” His inflection was leading me right down that phone sex path. I was going to have to brush up on my dirty talk, practice saying “cock” out loud without giggling.
“After Amy moves out. She's very nosy. She's probably out in the hall listening right now.”
He chuckled again. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. We're leaving for the venue.”
“Okay. Have a good show.”
“Talk tomorrow?”
“Talk tomorrow. Definitely.”
“Bye then.”
“Bye.” I hung up and simply stared at my phone. For all of my stupid trepidation over the decision to call him, I was so glad I'd done it. I felt as light as air.
“I wasn't listening. I happened to be walking by,” Amy said from somewhere beyond the confines of my room. I noticed then that she hadn't closed the door all the way.
“You're terrible,” I called. “A grown woman deserves her privacy.”
“Not with her sister around. You should know that by now.” My door swung open and there was Amy with an armful of magazines. She waltzed right in, uninvited, and dropped an avalanche of bridal mags onto my bed.
“I always hoped you'd get some damn manners one day. Apparently not.”
“Let's talk bridesmaid dresses.” The bed shook when Amy flopped down next to me. “I picked one out and want to see what you think.”
“Yay. Can't wait.”
“You don't have me around for that much longer. We should get as much of this wedding stuff out of the way as we can while I'm still living here.”
The end of Amy and Katherine, roommates, was coming. Things would never magically wind their way back to the way they'd been in this apartment, the way they'd been when we'd shared a room at home. Being close to Amy was the only thing that had kept me together all these years. Well, aside from Eamon. But he'd been his own kind of drug. And I still wasn't sure it was a good idea to start using again.
But damn, I really wanted to.
Chapter Six
It was morethan twenty years ago, the day after Mom's funeral to be exact, when Amy moved her stuff into my room. The three of us—Dad, Amy, and I—were clinging to each other, but we girls had become especially inseparable. We were too scared to be apart, too freaked out by everything that had happened. We were little rabbits jumping at noises and always looking over our shoulders, ready to scamper off to save ourselves.
Amy had no idea I was carrying around a separate set of worries. She thought the horribleness had passed and we were simply dealing with the aftermath, adjusting to our new sad life. Amy had no idea I was convinced Mom's boyfriend, Gordon, was going to come and take her. Just her. She was the special one.
The move-in had been my idea. Amy eagerly agreed and Dad acquiesced. The man loved having a project, and the truth is that he would've done anything for us during the days and weeks immediately following the accident. He was our rock, treating us to whatever we wanted at the grocery store and reading us stories before bed. He was Super Dad. It wasn't until later that he fell into hundreds of tiny pieces.
With some extra muscle from the high school boy who lived next door, Dad moved Amy's bed across the hall. I coordinated the careful migration of Amy's kitten poster collection to my walls. Dad added an extra shelf to the inside of my closet and since we were only ten and eight, he stepped in when we struggled with space planning. It only took one day to create our new sisters' refuge, and Amy and I lived like that for another eight years, through zits and training bras, homework and breakups. We were together until I went off to college.
