“I already told you it works. I’m not rubbing your ego any more than that.”
Something sparked in his gaze, something almost flirtatious, but he looked down at the sheet music, hiding it from me. Still, a little smirk played around his mouth.
I couldn’t help but grin. He wanted to say something dirty in response to that. I’d bet my Taylor on it if I had it. Something I was learning about O’Dea as we worked together: he actually did have a sense of humor.
“You know you want to say it.”
He flicked me a wicked look and I ignored the flutter in my belly. “Can we be professional, please?”
“I’m not the one who took something dirty out of what I said.”
“I didn’t.” He shot me a deadpan look.
“O’Dea, I know you’re very good at the intimidating, no one is allowed to know what I’m thinking gig you have going on, but I hate to burst your bubble—I’m learning your tells.”
“You learn what I allow to you learn,” he said arrogantly.
“And I’m learning a lot. Someone must trust me,” I teased.
Looking exasperated, he gestured to the notebook in my hand. “You have lyrics to finish.”
“This is all I’ve got.” I slumped back against the legs of the chair behind me. “I told you . . . sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Putting the Taylor down, O’Dea reached for my notebook. Instead of ripping the lyrics out like I always did, I handed him the entire notebook. Our eyes locked as he took it and my breath caught.
O’Dea lowered his thick eyelashes, masking his expression from me as he read the lyrics. “Is this about people you met on the streets?”
“Yeah. Mandy and Ham. When I met them, Mandy told me their entire life story. How her mom’s boyfriend sexually abused her, her mom knew, blamed her, hit her, until Mandy ran away from home at sixteen. She had to prostitute herself to survive and got so low about it that she was ready to commit suicide. But Ham, a heroin addict, befriended her, offered her his protection.” I felt so much sadness in my chest for her, it was almost too much to bear upon my own grief. “She doesn’t love him but she cares about him so it’s better than what she was doing. But it’s still a form of prostitution. Even sadder . . . Ham doesn’t see it that way. He just loves her.”
“Fuck,” O’Dea muttered, handing the notebook back to me. “How could anyone let that happen to their family?”
“Her mother’s a bitch, that’s why.”
“I can think of a stronger word.”
Grim, I nodded.
“Mandy took the only option she felt left open to her. Maybe she doesn’t see it the way you see it.”
“Oh, she does,” I said, bitter about it. “She’s well aware. And you know what’s worse? I was kind of angry at her that she couldn’t survive on her own. Because I thought that’s what I was doing. I thought I was so smart.” I shook my head in disgust. “I was a naive child.”
“You survived longer than some. You did okay.”
I contemplated him and I didn’t know why I pushed it, why I asked. Maybe I wanted to argue, maybe I wanted a reminder that we couldn’t be friends. “Be honest. You think I was a spoiled brat making a mockery of something real and horrible that other people have no way out of.”
Irritation flickered in his dark eyes. “I think you did what you needed to survive.”
“But the point is that it wasn’t my only option.”
“Wasn’t it? I’m not talking about surviving homelessness, Skylar. I’m saying, I think you did what you needed to do to survive.”
Understanding he meant surviving my mother’s death, tears burned in my throat and I had to look away. If he kept looking at me like that, I would burst into tears. So I continued to prod, to push. “Autumn said you lost your parents.”
When no reply was forthcoming, I knew I’d gotten what I wanted. I looked up, expecting to meet his cold, blank mask but I found something different. I found him scrutinizing me, assessing me, and I didn’t know what it meant.
And then he shocked the hell out of me. “Autumn is my half-sister. Not that I think of her as anything but my sister, full stop. Her dad, Peter O’Dea, adopted me when he married my mum. My real dad has been in and out of prison since I was a baby. As far as I’m concerned, Peter was my dad.
“Our lives changed when I was eleven and Autumn was only six. We were on a family holiday. My parents booked a helicopter ride but Autumn wouldn’t get on it. She screamed and cried anytime we tried to get her in the thing. Dad didn’t want to lose the booking and told me and Mum to go for the ride while he watched Autumn. But Autumn wanted me to stay with her. She howled anytime I tried to let her go.
“Finally,” he paused, his throat moving like he was struggling to swallow. I held my breath, hanging on every word. “I told Mum and Dad to go on the ride. That I’d stay with Autumn at the booking office. The operator promised to watch us, that we’d be fine, and so off they went.” His lips thinned, as if the memory was nothing more than merely distasteful. But his chest, moving with shallow breaths, betrayed him. “The helicopter crashed. It was the last time we saw them. My uncle sued the operator for negligence and Autumn and I won a lot of money in compensation. He managed it for us, invested it well, and we received it when we turned eighteen. That’s why Autumn has what she has without needing a job. Of course, my uncle gloats about it, as if he wants our thanks for providing us with something we’d give away in a heartbeat if it meant having our parents back.”
Grief for him, for Autumn, swelled in my throat and I blinked away the tears, instinctively knowing he wouldn’t want that from me. But my own emotions, ones that had been bubbling closer and closer to the surface for weeks, attempted to overwhelm me.
Why had O’Dea shared this with me?
Now I felt like I owed him. Yet there was something freeing in that. Like I had no choice but to talk, to tell him, because it was a debt to be repaid.
“I wasn’t close to my stepfather.”
O’Dea shook himself out of his thoughts. “Oh?” he said carefully.
The thought of Bryan still filled me with resentment, which was horrible. It only compounded my guilt. “It had been me and Mom all of our lives. My dad died when I was a baby. He was in the army and was killed in action. Mom really loved him so she wasn’t interested in getting into another relationship for a long time. She dedicated her life to raising me, and I think she thought she had to make up for my dad’s absence. Anything I wanted, any dream I had, was hers to give me. Even if she couldn’t afford it, she found a way. My ballet phase. My tae kwon do phase. My photography phase. The art phase. The typewriter phase. My guitar and piano phase. The ones that stuck. I was thirteen when Micah and I decided we were good enough to put a band together. My mom was behind us from the beginning, just as she had been with all my phases. But I think she knew this wasn’t a phase. She saved money to buy me my first guitar, drove us to crappy gigs, paid to get us a slot at a recording booth. My dream was her dream.
“And then Bryan came into the picture a year later. He thought we were a bunch of stupid kids. He made me feel guilty about spending the little money that Mom had. They were in a relationship for two years before they moved in together. He made her happy, but it annoyed her that he couldn’t support me like she did. It put her in the middle. They almost split up because of it. But then we got our record deal, they got married, and suddenly the bastard always knew we’d come through.’”
“It sounds like you didn’t like him very much.”
Suddenly, the memory I tried so hard to keep at bay pushed up and out.