The Duet(70)

Loving you is the sweetest sorrow

Too much today, not enough tomorrow

If this is what it’s like

Then I chose wrong



I stood there for another moment, hoping he’d keep singing, but then I heard the distant sound of his cell phone ringing. I pressed my ear closer to the door. Of course I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I was so close to really learning something real about Jason. I couldn’t just walk away.

“Hi angel,” he spoke softly. “No, I’m not too busy to talk. Did you sleep okay last night?”

“What are you doing?” Cammie asked, making me jump at least three feet in the air.

I spun around to face her, holding a hand to my chest as if that would calm my racing heart. She stared up at me from the second-floor landing, but I had no words. My mind was frozen as I tried to memorize the lyrics I’d just heard him sing and also process whether or not they could potentially be about me. Loving you. Loving you. Loving you.

But who was he on the phone with?

“Are you spying on him?” Cammie whispered, stepping closer to the stairs. My eyes widened even more.

I shook my head and shot down the stairs past her, grabbing her hand as I went.

“I’ll play you what we have later. Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said, not bothering to turn around to see what she was thinking.

…



Cammie left later that afternoon.

As I stood in the doorway watching the car pull away to take her to the airport, my stomach twisted itself into knots. She’d been my buffer for the last two days. With her in Big Timber, Jason and I were on hold. But with her gone, there was one less obstacle sitting between us.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and my red boots so I could wander around the property. I paid Dotty a visit and even convinced Jasper to take a sugar cube from me. (The damn horse sniffed it for like thirty minutes before he decided it wasn’t poison.) I walked through the woods around the house, breathing in the fresh pine smell and trying to work through the unsolvable equations in my head. I helped LuAnne with lunch and sat with her for an hour after, flipping through home makeover magazines and picking out my dream kitchen.

Basically, I did anything to avoid seeing Jason.

The night before, I was still deluding myself into thinking that he and I were on the same page. We were having fun. No commitments, just sex. But then, hearing him sing that song about love made me realize that I wanted that. I wanted him to write a song about me. I wanted his love for me to be greater than the complications in his life. I knew he was complicated. Everything about him spelled that out, but someone had to be able to break through that exterior, right?

So why couldn’t that someone be me?





Apparently I wasn’t the only one playing the avoiding game that day. When I finally worked up the courage to go upstairs, Jason wasn’t there. His room was empty, the porch was empty too, and when I glanced over the railing, I saw that his Jeep was gone.

The massive house was quiet and I was left with nothing to do to get my mind off him, so I went into my room and worked through some emails and did an extra workout. My trainer would be proud to know I’d done an additional power yoga session, but even that didn’t cheer me up. I just wanted to see Jason and ask him what he was thinking.

…



It’s interesting to consider that I was a full believer in love. I’d built my career on writing songs about love because I truly believed in what they stood for. But now that life was presenting me with my very own version of a love song, I was trying my hardest to rewrite the lyrics. There were so many things standing in our way. We’d only known each other for three weeks; he wasn’t ready for a relationship; there were more things we didn’t know about each other than we did know; relationships between celebrities hardly ever worked out. It was easy to construct the brick wall between us, so easy that when he burst through my bedroom door at midnight, I should have held strong behind that wall—but it took one look at him standing in my doorway to completely bulldoze it down. Just like that, I was lying there defenseless once again.

“I don’t want to talk about anything,” he said, walking toward the bed and tearing his shirt off.

I pushed myself up off my pillow. “Neither do I.”

And that was the truth. I didn’t want to talk to this man about the logistics of our love. I wanted to feel our love, to soak in it while I still could.

His pants fell as he unbuttoned them at the waist, and I pulled my nightshirt over my head.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said as he crawled up onto the bed, pulling the blanket off me.

“Neither do I,” he answered. We were mimicking each other’s answers, and it was clear that any decisions that needed to be made wouldn’t be decided that night.