Frayed

She leans over and kisses my lips. “I’m not interested in him.”

“So you’ve said.”

Her hand runs up the leg of my jeans. “I am interested in you, though.”

I flick her a glance and the honesty I see in her expression puts a smile on my face—and her touch, well, it’s doing exactly what she intended. Trying to push sex out of my mind for a bit, I say, “Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”

She picks up her phone, looks at the screen, then drops it in her bag before pulling her sunglasses down from atop her head and back onto her face. When I hop on the freeway she presses the button for the window and it slides down. She inhales as the wind blows her mass of red curls all around her face. Then she turns back to me. “I love the feel of the wind in my face. I love riding on the back of your bike. And I love the Santa Anas.”

The sun is shining today and the winds have died down, but they’re still stronger than on a typical day. She points out the window to the smoldering smoke in the distance. “But I hate the destruction they cause.”

“You know surfers think of them as heaven and hell mixed in one?”

She cocks her head in my direction. “Do explain.”

“When they hit the surf head-on they hold up falling lips and hollow out pitching waves, making for an unbelievable ride. They turn reef breaks into emerald green tube-riding playgrounds. It’s f**king awesome. But at the same time they can knock a foot or so off any incoming swell and can actually flatten an otherwise small but rideable wave. That f**king sucks.”

She smiles at me. “You really love surfing, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. I hated living in LA and not on the beach. It really made me miserable.”

She seems to ponder this for a long time.

“But I was asking about you. Tell me something else I don’t know about you.”

My fingers caress circles on her leg and she glances down. “I used to think I had superpowers.”

A huge grin crosses my face. “Oh yeah?”

“It’s stupid.”

“You tell me and then I’ll tell you how I used think I was Aquaman.”

“Aquaman?” she squeaks.

I shake my head and shift my eyes her way. “You first.”

She inhales a deep breath. “Don’t laugh.”

“I can’t promise that. But, S’belle . . .”

Her eyes cut to mine.

“You . . .” I stop, not sure of what I want to say or how to say it. “You know what, never mind. I promise to try my damnedest not to laugh.”

She narrows her eyes at me.

I pinch her leg. “I said I promise.”

She jumps in her seat at my touch.

“Ah . . . I think you might be ticklish.”

She grabs my hand. “I’ll never tell.”

“You don’t have to.” I grin and pull her hand to my lips to kiss it.

“Okay, so when I was little I noticed that I could mix words up or say things I knew didn’t make sense and people would give me what I wanted.”

I nod, thinking about what’s she’s saying.

“As I got older it worked even better. One time just after I got my license, I got pulled over for speeding. I honestly didn’t know I was speeding. The police officer asked if I knew how fast I was going. I answered that I was going sixty. He stared at me. I said, ‘Sir, my car won’t go any faster than that unless I really jam the gas down, so I’m sorry if I was going too slow.’ He looked at me flabbergasted but only gave me a warning and explained I had crossed into a residential area and three miles ahead the speed limit would increase again.”

Clutching her hand on top of her leg, I roll my eyes at her. “He just thought you were cute.”

“No, really it was my silver tongue.”

“Your silver tongue?” I burst out laughing and drop her hand to cover my mouth.

She sits up straighter. “Yes, I used to believe my superpower was that I had a silver tongue.”

My mind wanders back to sex at that comment, but she doesn’t seem to notice and continues with her anecdotes about her silver tongue. When it’s my turn I tell her my story about how I really believed I could grow gills and breathe underwater if I stayed in the ocean long enough. She laughs just as hard at me as I did at her.

CHAPTER 32

Burn

Bell

The glorious Pacific and the serene Catalina Island on the horizon are the only view from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. A hand-forged copper-shingled roof engineered by a master shipbuilder to weather the worst of storms protects it. Ben’s house, built on the bluff and jetting out over the ocean, looks like a physical paean to light, sky, and sea. I can make out sweeping views of the city and the surf breaking on the coastline.

He’d told me all about it, but nothing could have prepared me for how beautiful it is in person. I look over at him. “This is supernice.”

“Thanks. I haven’t lived here that long, but it really feels like home.”

A sadness washes over me when I see the waves rolling onto the shore.

“Where are you going?” he yells.

“To see the beach up close.”

He chases after me around the side of the house and down to the back.

I kick my shoes off as soon as I hit the sand and look out into the calmness of the sea.

He catches up with me and grabs my hips. “You’re crazy.”

“No, I just love the beach. My dad used to take us all the time when we were kids. He’d put the Beach Boys on in the car and sing along and eventually we all joined in.”

He dips his head and skims the skin of my neck with his tongue. “Do you miss your dad?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. The good times blend with the bad and it’s hard to figure out which were more real.”

“I’m sorry for what you had to go through when your dad died. My dad died when I was really young too and I don’t really remember that much either,” he says.

I look up at him and that’s when I see it in his eyes. The same look I’ve seen before but haven’t been able to place. I think it’s a longing for family. The thought makes me even sadder.

“How do you know how my dad died?” I’m not upset, just curious. I really never talk about it.

He scratches his head. “I did some research earlier this year for Aerie.”

“What kind of research?”

His silence has started to alarm me. “Ben, what kind of research?”

“You know what? I think you should talk to your mom. I shouldn’t have said anything.” He says it delicately, not angrily, but his refusal to tell me something about my own family still stings.

“Ben,” I plead. “Tell me now.”

He grabs my hand. “Come on, let’s walk and I’ll explain.”

I nod and try to hide that my heart is beating abnormally fast with worry.

He leads us up the steps to a deck that looks out onto the ocean, offering a perfect view. I take a seat in one of the lounge chairs, pulling my legs up and tucking my chin on my knees, and he does the same.

Ben squints into the sun. I can tell he’s teetering on whether to tell me what he knows or not.

“Ben, please.” I say his name softly, prompting him to tell me what he knows.

He takes a deep breath. “I was investigating Sheep Industries’ finances for a story Aerie had me working on after I left the paper this past summer and I came across books for Little Red Records.”

“My father’s label before they let him go?”

“Yes—Little Red is one of the holdings of Sheep Industries. Anyway, what we found proved the sales records had been severely altered and that he was let go under false pretenses.”

“So who altered the records? Damon Wolf?”

He sits up and leans toward me with his arms on his thighs. “Yes.”

“Because he was jealous of my father?”

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

“Does my family know?”

“S’belle, I don’t really know who knows what. I only know what Damon told me the day I yanked Sound Music from his hands.”

I stand up and head toward his glass doors. “How about a tour?”

He pulls me onto his lap, his arms banding around me. “Hey, what’s going through your mind?”

I swallow a few times as I start to cry. “That my father spent his whole life chasing the dream of being famous, and he thought he lost his chance, but in reality he never lost it. Someone stole it from him. Why would anyone do that?” My cries grow louder.

He cradles me in his arms. “Because so many people in the world don’t understand what it is like to be good.”

I bury my face in his neck. “I failed him, you know?”

He lifts my chin to look into my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“The day he killed himself all he wanted me to do was get better at playing the guitar. I hated playing. I was never any good at it. He picked me up early from school that day. Xander always got me. When I asked him why he was there, he had a haunted look in his eyes. He told me he wanted to have more time for us to practice, but I knew something wasn’t right. Then when I couldn’t do what he wanted, he made me do it over and over. Xander came home and heard me crying, saw my fingers bleeding from strumming the strings over and over. My father and Xander argued and River brought me to the neighbor’s house. All I knew after that was that my father had shot himself. My brother blamed himself for the longest time—and I think he still might—but if I hadn’t failed my father they wouldn’t have fought and my father might still be alive.”

He holds me, rocks me, soothes me but doesn’t judge. “S’belle, what happened is not your fault. Your father was in a bad place.”

I shake my head no. Why couldn’t I just do what he wanted?

“Hey, look at me.” His voice grows louder. “There is nothing but good inside you. You should never think anything different. Your family loves you so much. It’s evident by the lengths any of them would go to protect you.”

He holds me for the longest time. Silence fits comfortably between us as the only sounds I hear are the ocean, the sky, and his breathing—all of which calm me down. I know he’s right. I’ve been through this so many times. I’m sure that’s why my family didn’t tell me. I’m not even upset that they didn’t. I know Xander and River and my mother must feel the burden of the information and they didn’t want me to carry it too.

I don’t blame them for not telling me what they had learned. The truth is it’s over, but in a way it makes me proud that although he’ll never know it—my father did succeed.

Once my internal emotional battle settles, I pull away and smooth my hands down his face, but I see that his face looks haunted too. “What are you not telling me?”

“S’belle,” he says hoarsely, and I feel that this conversation has stirred up something. “I’ve never said this out loud to another person before. But I think my father killed himself and made it look like an accident and I think my mother knew. That’s why she never told us his body was found or about the settlement money.”

Our eyes meet and my heart splits open at his confession. The emotion that echoes the loudest is written on his face. He had already told me that his father was hanged by a sail rope that was said to have malfunctioned, leaving his mother with a ten-million-dollar settlement payout. But now he has chosen to confide in me with what he believes is the truth behind the accident. “Why would you think that?”

“When I was going through some old papers, I found his business bank statements and foreclosure notices. I think his business was collapsing and the need to take care of his family drove him to it.”