She thought about that for a moment. “I was a little older, able to understand Mom when she promised she’d never, ever leave like Dad did. And I had music. That’s when I set my goal of being a singer-songwriter. If I lose that…” Her voice trailed off. Right now, losing music was a real possibility. She’d heard of dry spells lasting for months. Years. “Mom keeps what’s hers,” she finished.
“Maybe that’s why you can be the way you are. You know she won’t ever give you up.” He smiled at her, rakish and so heartbreakingly vulnerable all at once.
She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. She knew how he felt. In some ways, an unreliable parent was worse than one who cut out on you. Abandonment gave you something to push against. Unreliability kept your hopes up until you refused to hope anymore.
She and Emily couldn’t trust their father, but at least they had their mother, who was the picture of reliability. Conn had no one. His mother died. His father treated fatherhood like something he could walk in and out of like a revolving door. But Conn didn’t behave the same way. He did a job that at its most basic was a commitment to show up when called at the worst time in people’s lives, day after day, year after year. He looked after Shane’s nieces and nephews like they were his own. Conn expected people to duck out on him, with a glance, with their lives. So she met his gaze without flinching, and found that meant letting him see deep inside her, too. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t.
Because she was falling in love with Conn.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” he said, out of the blue.
She laughed, shifted her weight, rested her elbow on the door panel and her temple on her bent fingers, the better to look at him. “Because you’re not that scary.”
He looked at her, one hand on the wheel, the other loose on his thigh, eyes heartbreakingly dark and vulnerable. “Most people are.”
“Then they don’t really see you.”
“And you do?”
“I think so,” she said, well aware that the dark cocoon of the car, the night, their unreal circumstances all contributed to an intimacy that might not stand the bright light of day, much less real life.
“I’m terrified of me.”
“Why?”
“I’m capable of what you saw in that picture.”
She considered this. “We all are. Pushed the right way, by the right person, we all are. But you don’t act on it.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t. But I have that temper.”
“And a fairly long fuse,” she replied. “You’ve got people in your face all day, every day.”
“Don’t try to make me a better man,” Conn said. “Don’t idealize me.”
That stopped her. She thought carefully before she spoke. “I’m not,” she said at last. “All I can speak to is what I see. You have a shadow side. That doesn’t make you bad. It makes you human.”
They were on the long, straight highway out of town, heading for Whispering Pines. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“See the shades of gray.”
She shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about this lately. Love songs are easy. Songs about hooking up and dancing in clubs and broken hearts, all easy. Ramp up the beat and no one pays much attention to the lyrics. I’ve got an album ready to drop that’s nine songs about all of those things, with nothing new or different or unique about it. It’s got all the right collaborators and all the right beats. It’s slick and shiny and about as human as slick, shiny things are.”
He cut her a glance. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s not bad. It’s just not what I want to be doing. We get one life, you know? One human life. I don’t know what to do. One thing lights me up inside. The other makes the most sense, capitalizing on momentum, fame, more money. All the big voices in my life are telling me to drop the studio’s album.”
He aimed the clicker at the gate. “Who are the small voices?”
“Mom. The voice inside me.” The road to her house was dark, silent, only a few porch lights dotting the darkness, far fewer of them than the stars overhead.
“Add me to that list,” Conn said.
She parked the car inside her garage, leaned over the console and kissed him. It was the least practiced kiss she’d given since high school, landing awkwardly on the corner of his mouth and obviously startling him. But then he turned to her, pressing his lips to hers and returning the kiss. His lips urged hers open, his tongue sliding in to rub against hers. She tightened her grip on his rough, flattened sheepskin collar and added the strength of her right hand, fisting her fingers in the front of his coat.