The Duet(74)

As the car pulled away from the house, I thought about the fact that Jason and I still had the last part of our duet left to finish that morning. We’d been procrastinating the last few days, putting off the inevitable because we knew as soon as we’d finished, I’d have to leave for LA.

But the ending was always there, waiting for me to discover it. Once I had, I’d written it down onto a torn piece of paper and slipped it beneath the door to Jason’s room.



Loving you would be as easy as taking a breath

But to give you up, that’s a dance with death



We were over from the start

You always kept your distance

You never said you’d give your heart



So now it’s time for this to end

After all, a friend is just a friend





Chapter Twenty-Four





I touched down in LA to find five missed calls and three text messages from Jason.



Jason: Answer your phone, Brooklyn.

Jason: I went to talk to Kim because I didn’t know you’d get on a fucking plane and leave as soon as I left.

Jason: I just read the last of your lyrics. Don’t bother calling me back.



“He thinks I want to call him back?!” I shouted before slicing through the apple sitting on my kitchen counter. Cammie had picked me up from the airport and I’d filled her in as much as possible. Most of it was just a string of expletives, but she’d managed to piece together the story: The motherfucking-asshole-whore had a wife.

We’d gone back to my condo and I’d had every intention of calming down, but then I read his final text message and I was back to square one.

The knife slid through the apple with ease and then I pulled it back and kept right on cutting until I’d all but minced it into nothingness.

“How about I take over cutting the apple? You’re going to hurt yourself, or even worse, you might hurt me,” Cammie smiled, trying to defuse the situation.

“Oh, Cammie, don’t be ridiculous!” I said before slamming the blade back down onto the chopping board. It was a millimeter away from chopping my thumb off, a fact that Cammie also noticed. She pinched my arm until I dropped the blade and then I slunk down to the cold kitchen floor.

“Oh, no. No. You don’t get to just lay down on the tile like all of your bones turned to Jell-O,” she said, gently kicking my side.

“Maybe I should just keep laying here, Cam,” I said, letting the cold tile sink into my skin. “Maybe I’m just so sad that I’m going to lay on this kitchen floor for the rest of my life. Boneless.”

“Oh my God, have I ever told you how much of a drama queen you are? You could have been a southern debutante in your past life.”

I kicked in the back of her knee so that her leg buckled and she fell down onto the tile next to me. Misery loves company. Her elbow stabbed my stomach and my knee went into her back as the two of us groaned and readjusted so that we could both fit in between the kitchen island and the kitchen counter.

“This is gross. When’s the last time you cleaned these floors?”

“I don’t know, sometime before the BJ era,” I answered.

She took a deep breath. “I’m about 50% sure that you’re not talking about giving guys blow jobs all over your kitchen floor, but I’m going to need confirmation on what that acronym stands for.”

“Before Jason,” I sighed melodramatically.

With a groan, she pinched my side. “You’re being ridiculous.”

I shrugged.

“Now what?” she said, rolling her head to the side so she could get a better look at me.

I smiled the first smile since waking up that morning.

“Now, we drink,” I said, shooting up to my feet and running to my refrigerator. Being in the music industry meant that I had copious amounts of high-quality alcohol. It was the gift that kept on giving. When I pulled the refrigerator door open, the first thing I saw was a nice big bottle of champagne sitting on the bottom shelf.

“Cammie, grab some glasses so we can have some—” I paused so I could turn the bottle around and read the label, “Bollinger Blanc De Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises.”

When I looked up, Cammie was staring at me with a blank stare. “Speak English, whore.”

“Don’t call me a whore even though that’s exactly what I am,” I said, feeling the tears burning my eyelids. “I’m literally the definition of a whore. No, wait. I’m worse—I didn’t even get any money out of the deal.” I kept rambling as I ripped the paper off of the top of the champagne bottle and started working at untwisting the cork. I’d popped two or three corks in my life, so I figured I had it down pat.