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The years slipped away. He curled over the guitar just as she remembered—stroking, persuading, inflaming. Candlelight flickered off a pair of reading glasses lying on top of his notebook pad. The wild, long-haired, rock-and-roll rebel of her youth had turned into an elder statesman. She could have—should have—gone back inside, but the music was too sweet.
“Do you ever wish for rain
So you don’t feel alone again?
Do you ever wish the sun away?”
He saw her, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he played to her as he used to, and the music rippled over her skin like warm, healing oil. When the last chord finally drifted into the darkness, he let his hand fall to his knee. “What do you think?”
The wild girl she’d once been would have curled at his feet and ordered him to play the bridge again. She would have told him he needed to clean up the chord change at the end of the first verse and that she could hear a Hammond B3 sweeping into the chorus. The grown woman gave a dismissive shrug. “Vintage Patriot.”
It was the cruelest thing she could have said. Jack’s obsession with exploring new musical trails was as legendary as his scorn for the lazy rock idols who only repeated their old tricks. “You think so?”
“It’s a good song, Jack. You know that.”
He leaned down to lay his guitar back in the case. The candlelight outlined that bladed nose. “Do you remember how it used to be?” he said. “You heard a song once, and you knew whether it was good or bad. You understood my music better than I did.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and gazed out over the pond. “I can’t listen to those songs anymore. They remind me of too many things I’ve left behind.”
His voice drifted toward her like cigarette smoke. “Is all the wildness gone, April?”
“Every bit of it. I’m a boring L.A. career woman now.”
“You couldn’t be boring if you tried,” he said.
A deep weariness overcame her. “Why aren’t you at the house?”
“I like to write by the water.”
“It’s not exactly the Côte d’Azur. I hear you have a place there.”
“Among others.”
She couldn’t do this. She unclasped her arms. “Go away, Jack. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you anywhere near me.”
“I’m the one who should be saying that.”
“You can take care of yourself.” Old bitterness bubbled to the surface. “It’s so ironic. All the times I needed to talk to you, you wouldn’t take a single call. Now, when you’re the last person in the world I want to—”
“I couldn’t, April. I couldn’t talk to you. You were poisonous to me.”
“So poisonous that you wrote your best music when we were together?”
“I wrote my worst, too.” He stood. “Remember those days? I was washing pills down with vodka.”
“You were drugging before I met you.”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m only saying that living in a jealous frenzy made it worse. No matter who I was with—even my own band—I kept wondering whether you’d gotten to them first.”
Her fists curled at her sides. “I loved you!”
“You loved them all, April. As long as they rocked.”
Not true. He was the only one she’d truly loved, but she wouldn’t be drawn into defending those ancient, misplaced feelings. She also wouldn’t let him shame her. His sexual body count was as high as her own.
“I was wrestling my own demons,” he said. “I couldn’t wrestle yours, too. Remember those ugly fights? Not just ours. I was punching out fans, photographers. I was burning up.”
And taking her with him.
