“Ms. Cooke,” I say, quickly suppressing the guilty pang of finding Haley’s mom kinda hot.
She smiles, and it’s like the sun is shining directly at me. “Call me Wanda. Come on in,” she says, standing aside. I step through the doorway, looking around the room like a detective scanning for clues. “She’s not here,” Wanda says, noticing my tensed muscles. “She’s out in the shed.”
“The shed?”
“It’s where she likes to record and play. Me too, sometimes,” she says, as she leads me through the house toward the back door. “It’s a kind of studio. And a guest room.”
She pushes open the kitchen door to the long lawn of neatly-cut bright-green grass, colored blooms and bushes lining it all the way to the end, where a ramshackle wooden structure sits amid the greenery like some miniature English cottage that time forgot.
“Look. Wanda,” I say, turning back after she holds the door open once again for me to step past. “Thanks for telling me she was here. I know she probably told you not to.”
“You’d have found her here eventually. Better sooner rather than later.” Wanda looks down sadly. “Haley’s like a wild flame: Quick to start, and quick to calm. But if you leave her to herself, she can burn everything around her.”
I know Wanda’s right, but something about the way she says it makes me feel like I’m hearing a secret.
“I can see where she got her poetic side.”
Wanda takes my hand in hers and looks at me with mint-blue eyes. It feels like she can read my mind.
“I hope she didn’t inherit my taste in men.”
As soon as she says it, she drops my hand and steps back into the house, closing the door. The message is clear: You’re on your own, buddy. I spin around to face the shed across the lawn, which seems a thousand miles long now, and start walking.
By the time I get close to the shed door, my head’s swirling with so many thoughts, so many emotions, so many memories, that I can’t tell if the sound I’m hearing is real or imagined. It’s only when I get close enough to put a hand against the deeply-grained wood that I know it’s really her. She’s singing. Low and long, a sad song. She stops every few lines, then starts back up again, the same way she always does when she’s writing.
I listen for a while, taking deep breaths, and then brace myself once again. I glance back toward the house and see Wanda looking through the glass pane of the door. She offers me a gentle look of sympathy before turning away and heading back into the house.
I knock.
Haley calls out something that gets muffled through the wall, then gets back to playing. I knock again. This time I hear her stop, and the thud of what’s probably her guitar being put down. I take a step back from the door.
“What the fuck?” she snarls, her face twisting with uncontrolled anger as soon as she sees me. “No! Go away!”
As she screams this last word she puts her hand on my chest and shoves me as violently as she can. I stumble back, and she storms toward me.
“Just fucking leave already! Get out of my life!” she screams, her voice breaking up with how loud she’s screaming. She shoves me again, putting all of her strength into it.
“Don’t you fucking get it already? I don’t want anything to do with you!”
This time I grab her biceps and hold her before she can shove me again.
“Stop it!” I shout, my voice so loud it seems to swallow hers, to boom off the surrounding mountains. “For fuck’s sake, Haley! Stop.”
We glare at each other, chests heaving, jaws clenching. Two animals in a fight to the death.
“I’ll never forgive you for what you did,” Haley hisses, her voice as sharp as a blade.
“I’ve done a lot of dumb things, Haley. Made a lot of mistakes. But that wasn’t one of them.”
“Fuck you!” Haley says, shrugging my hands off her, rage pouring off her in waves.
Something in me snaps. “No, Haley. Fuck you! I didn’t come here to beg. I didn’t come here to apologize. I’m sick of fucking apologizing. This whole tour I’ve been twisting myself into knots over you. Praying you’d give me another chance. Wondering how fucking long you were going to stay mad at me. And then for a whole month before that I didn’t even leave the house. I felt like I’d give anything to see you again, and it still wasn’t enough.”
Haley glares at me even more fiercely.
“And for what, Haley? For what? A stupid bet that I didn't care about from the second I realized how good you really were. A stupid bet that I won, and still feel like I lost. A stupid bet that I'd make all over again, because it's the best damn thing that happened ever happened to me - and maybe to you, too. I'm not the one hung up on the bet, Haley, you are. You keep treating me like I’m an asshole – and maybe I am, but not for the reasons you think. The only mistake I made was feeling the way I do about you. But I’m done. I’m done being the nice guy. I didn’t come here to apologize. I didn’t come here to beg you for another chance. I came here to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Haley spits, her voice even harder and tighter.
“That I fucking love you.”
The words seem to light a fire in her face, her eyes flickering over mine, her lips opening in an angry scowl, trembling with anger. Her cheeks go hot red like I just slapped her in the face.
She leaps at me again, even more aggressively, even more fueled by her hot-headed temper, even more out of control. Only this time it’s not to push me. It’s to kiss me.
Chapter 14
Haley
On the drive back to LA I have to struggle to stop myself from smiling. I hang my arm out of the window and watch Brando as he focuses on the road, feeling weird in a happy kind of way. He notices me watching and laughs.
“You look pretty happy to return to LA,” he says
“I’m just happy right now. Take the 1.”
“Why?” he says, frowning. “It’s longer.”
“Yeah. But I like the ocean view.”
I lean toward the window and let the wind caress my face, stroke my hair. When I open my eyes I see Brando, notice the lines of his arm muscles, the Italian nose in profile, the way he looks like he’s dreaming when his face is at rest.
He glances over at me and notices me staring again.
“I feel like I should be charging you when you look at me like that.”
“I hope I can afford it,” I giggle, as I lean over to turn on the radio.
We listen to the tail end of a half-decent song, both of us only half-listening, until the two DJs start talking.
“…an interesting story. Rex Bentley – you like Rex Bentley, Sara?”
“Who doesn’t? ‘Put on your red shoes…’”
“Well his daughter, apparently. Haley Grace Cooke: The girl who just supported Lexi Dark on her tour and is set up to be even bigger.”
“She’s his daughter?”
“That’s what people are saying.”
“I can believe it.”
“What do you think? Is this just one of those publicity things? Or you think she really didn’t want people to know?”
Brando presses the off button so hard he nearly breaks it. We drive on in silence for a few minutes, but the sense of something wrong hangs in the space between us.
“What do I do?” I finally ask, turning to Brando. “What do I do about this?”
Brando focuses on the road, sighing deeply before he speaks.
“Rowland wants to use this, of course. Play up the connection. Milk the publicity, really drive home the ‘estranged daughter of the musical legend is just as talented’ angle. He’s already talking feature pieces about how you always knew the music was in your blood. Me: I want this to go away. Disappear. You can stand on your own talent, you worked your ass off for this career, and you’ve got no reason to want to be associated with a scumbag like him. If it were up to me, this story would be dead and gone yesterday.”