Hot and Bothered(59)

                “Can I ask you a question?” She had to pull away from him a little, because she knew this wasn’t an easy question, and it felt like cheating to have her face buried in his chest.

                “Anything you want.”

                “Why’d you do it? Let that producer convince you to play with Sliding Up? Was it really just that you were broke and needed money?”

                He turned away, giving the eggs and bacon more attention than they probably required.

                “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” she said. “I just thought—it seems so far from who you are. Maybe so far from who you ever were. I mean, I didn’t know you then, and maybe you were really different, but I feel like—” She stopped.

                “Like you know me now?” he said.

                “I guess I feel like I do.”

                “I feel like you do, too.”

                He caught her gaze and held it, and she felt heat wash upward through her body and sweep down again. Behind the heat was something, too, some emotion that filled her and swelled her heart, making it hard for her to keep looking at him.

                He crossed his arms protectively. “I guess—I guess I did it because I wanted someone to convince me that the music mattered. It’s pretty thankless, you know, being a musician. You work your butt off, you pour your soul into it, and you’re lucky if you have an audience, and then you’re lucky if the audience enjoys themselves. And these guys came to me and they said, hey, we can make you famous and rich, and you’ll have an audience every night, and they’ll show up and clap and throw themselves at you. And maybe it was just too much for me to resist.”

                He flipped the cooked eggs onto two plates, not quite meeting her eye. The lines on his face looked more pronounced, making him seem suddenly old again, the way he’d appeared that first day in the restaurant. She hadn’t realized how carefree he’d become with her recently. She thought of the man in the restaurant, how angry and worn-out he’d been.

                “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.

                “I sold out,” he said quietly. “I sold out my music.”

                His voice cracked with the pain of it, and she felt it in herself, like a line fissuring through her own chest. She wanted to do something, anything, to give back to him what he felt he’d lost. He’d made a very human decision all those years ago to be recognized for his work.

                “It’s not finite,” she said. “It’s still in you. I heard it the other night. It’s not something you sell out and then it’s all gone. It’s still there for you if you want it. If you wanted to make the blues thing happen, I am totally convinced you could.”

                He let out a breath then, as if he’d been holding it, all the time they’d been talking. All the time she’d known him, maybe. Maybe all his life. He’d been waiting for someone to absolve him.

                He took her in his arms and kissed her so fully and so deeply that she almost said, “Forget breakfast,” so she could take him back to bed. But then her phone buzzed and she pulled back, pretending she hadn’t seen the look on his face—still quizzical, but now disappointed. The beginning of the deeper disappointment he would feel in her one day not too far off. She went in search of her phone, finding it in her purse on the floor of the bedroom. She wasn’t sure how it had failed to wake her up, because she seemed to have twenty-two new voice mails.

                There was no way that could be good.