“No, no broken heart. Just an unavailable girl.”
Milo stretched his legs out in front of him and nodded. “Ah, you know the cure for that don’t you?”
“What?”
“An available girl.” Laughing, I made my way to the fridge and held up a beer in offering. Milo nodded, and I grabbed one for each of us. He said, “I’m serious. I happen to have it on good authority that you picked up a phone number the other night. Forget the unavailable girl . . . both of them . . . and call the blonde from the other night.”
That wasn’t a bad idea.
Dating was the solution to my Bliss (and now Max) problem.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I told him.
I picked up my phone to find her number, and he said, “Whoa! Whoa! Don’t do it now, hermano. You’ve got to give it a few days. You know the rules.”
I rolled my eyes. Right . . . Milo had rules for just about everything—drinking and dating being the two most prominent.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
He made a face and said, “Eh, better make it the day after. That girl was all over you at the bar. We don’t want to encourage too much clinginess. The day after tomorrow will be much better.”
So Sunday afternoon, with Milo obnoxiously watching from my sofa, I called Cammie. I pulled out my cell, found her in my address book, and hit send quickly, before I could change my mind.
She answered on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Cammie?” I asked.
“Yes?”
I said, “This is Cade.” Then I couldn’t remember if I’d actually told her my name at the bar, so I added, “We met at Trestle a few nights ago.”
“Oh.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Hi, Cade.”
“Hi.”
Milo whispered, “Set the date up for this weekend. Give her plenty of time to get nervous about it.”
I rolled my eyes, but asked, “What are your plans this Friday night, Cammie? And whatever it is, can I steal you away from it?”
“Steal me? I think I’d go quite willingly.”
She giggled.
Now I just needed to figure out where we would go. And how to get her there. If I were still back in Texas I would have picked her up, but I didn’t have a car, and it seemed odd to pick someone up for the subway.
“Excellent,” I said. “It’s a date. I’ll call you back in a few days to let you know what we’re doing.”
20
Max
My phone rang so early the day after Thanksgiving that it should have been labeled cruel and unusual punishment. I reached out toward my nightstand, knocking off who knew what until my fingers finally closed around my phone.
“What?” I grumbled.
“Good morning, sweetie.”
Ugh . . . it was way too early for this.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Your father and I are at the airport. Our flight has been delayed.”
Oh no. If she said that they were going to stay even longer, I would go crazy. I had to get back to the band and back to work, and I had reached my crazy quota for the week.
“I’m sorry, Mom. There’s no chance they’ll cancel it, is there?”
“Oh, no, honey. Just something about the pilot’s plane being late the night before, so they’re required to give him so much rest. We’ll be back in Oklahoma by this evening.” Thank God. “But your father and I were talking, and we just wanted to tell you again how much we liked Cade.”
I was pretty sure that was already abundantly clear, thanks.
“You know, we’ve been worried about you. Your father and I had a lot of difficulty with your decision to drop out of college.” A lot was an understatement. I wouldn’t be surprised if they discussed having me committed as mentally unstable. “But we came around.” After a year of fighting, yeah. “We’ve been helping you pay your rent so you can afford to spend time doing your little music thing.” God, I was going to break out in hives if she called my career and lifelong dream a “little music thing” one more time. “It’s just . . . you’ve been here so long, and your father and I were starting to feel that perhaps it was time to face the facts and grow up.”
No. Please no. I was so close. I could feel it. The gig next weekend at The Fire was going to be huge for us. We were even doing a live recording of the set.
It wasn’t like they didn’t have plenty of money. They both had high-paying jobs, and the insurance money from Alex’s death had made our already wealthy household even wealthier. They gave me five hundred bucks a month to help pay my student loans from those pointless two years at UPenn that they’d been the ones to insist upon. You’d think when they were the ones pushing me to go to college, that they would have at least paid for it. But since they hadn’t helped Michael, they didn’t help me. Some bullshit about making my own way. Too bad it had only ever been their way.
Five hundred to them was nothing, and to me it was the difference between doing what I loved and dreaming about doing what I love. I just needed a little more time.