He shrugged. He didn’t want to get into the whole reason he’d quit with the lessons.
“So—what do you do these days?”
“Like you said the other day. Live off Sliding Up’s hit, do birthday parties for groupies and fans, play weddings and bat mitzvahs.”
She made a face at him that suggested she knew how he felt about that. “Doesn’t seem like you.”
He shrugged. “What do you know about me?”
She turned away. She was blushing again, for a different reason this time, but his body chimed in anyway. His balls tightened, blood rushing into his cock. He liked her off balance. What did that say about him? He wasn’t a nice man.
She fidgeted with the tie on her shirt, a gesture so un-Haven-like he wanted to reach out and still her hand. “I just—do they let you wear those ratty T-shirts when you play weddings?”
“I have a suit,” he said. “Once in a while, I rent a tux.”
“You told the hostess—” Her eyes narrowed.
“I was making a point.”
“I should have guessed.” She frowned. “I can’t see you at a wedding, or with some little kid who’s trying to figure out basic chords.”
“I hate the weddings,” he admitted. “But I loved the music lessons. Seventy percent of the time it was just paying the bills, but I’d get through to my students sometimes, or I’d see some talent in them, or a kid who was kind of dead, you know, would come alive playing. A parent tells you their kid won’t do their homework, is flunking out of class, but practices two hours a day. It’s a rush, then.”
He was pretty sure he hadn’t talked this much in years. He wasn’t sure what had made him confess these things to Haven. She got him so heated up, and at the same time, lowered his defenses. It didn’t make sense.
“Why’d you quit?”
She was looking at him as though she could see straight through him again. He was pretty sure she knew the answer to her own question, or at least had her theories. “I screwed up,” he said. “Bunch of bad stuff happened in a row last year.”
“The video?”
Yeah, she knew all right. He’d been caught on someone’s iPhone, making out with two different women at the same party. Problem was, it wasn’t the same party. There’d been no way to prove the two spliced-together clips were from different nights because he’d looked identical in them—same hair, same two-days’ beard growth, same torn green T-shirt. He’d had his hands up one woman’s shirt, down the other’s pants. The thing went viral. “And then the DUI, a few days later. Meltdown city. Articles everywhere, blasting me for being a bad role model. You’d think the press wouldn’t care anymore, they’ve always had this love-hate thing with me. And all those articles were right. I was a shitty role model. So I quit the music lessons. I had to stop pretending to be good for kids.”
He’d toned down the drinking and the partying after that, too, and quit driving under the influence, but no one had reported on that.
“Your students—every single one of them—said you were the best teacher they ever had.”
“They were just being nice.”