“I got lucky several times,” she said. “The big tip was the guitar. It’s rare enough that I was able to track down who sold it to you.”
“Smart. Didn’t realize you knew your guitars.”
She shrugged. “I don’t. Paul from the Sonic Kings told me. I found them to see if they knew where you were.”
I was dying to ask why it was critical she found me, but I figured she’d tell me in her own time. No sense rushing things.
The doors opened to a standard hotel hall, patterned carpet and wall lights. She tugged her key card from her back pocket and slid it into a door a short ways down the corridor. When the handle clicked, she seemed to hesitate, but then soldiered on.
Curious. If she was so worried about being alone with me, why come at all?
It had to be connected to the newspaper articles.
I followed her into the room. She seemed unsure where to sit. The bed was still made, her suitcase open on the bedspread. “I should move this,” she said, her voice at a slightly higher pitch. She shoved the dress she was wearing earlier into it and flipped the lid.
“Let me get that,” I said. I lifted the suitcase and set it on the floor by the wall. The big hat hung over the corner of the television. I touched it. “You were hiding your hair?”
“Didn’t know if color was a thing here in Tennessee,” she said. “I was going out on a limb trying to weasel information out of people. I didn’t want to look alternative.”
“Redmond said you were with my mother.”
Her head snapped up. “She’s a lovely woman,” she said quickly.
I walked up close to her. “She’s a difficult woman.” I gave in to my temptation to touch her hair, fingering the soft dreadlocks. “Did she see these?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, her voice catching. She was achingly close. “But she apparently reads Star magazine.”
“Yeah, I knew she’d seen the photos. Were they in color?”
“Yeah. Maybe she forgot.”
Not likely. My mother had the memory of six elephants. “She was nice to you?” I asked.
“Very. Took me to tea. Showed me your bedroom.” She shoved at my arm. “I saw your Pokémon cards.”
“Yeah, that room is not the room I left,” I said.
“I figured. Unless you left at age ten.”
“She sanitized it. She thought my Grateful Dead posters were tools of the devil.”
She laughed. “I asked her about that. Why there wasn’t anything dealing with music.”
“She had an answer for everything, I bet,” I said. I didn’t get mad anymore about how she’d destroyed my room. It was past. She needed her fantasy about the kid I once was.
I knew we were talking about that director guy when we came upstairs, but I didn’t care about that part anymore. She was close, and I’d gone weeks without her, without anybody. I took another step in and pressed my hand gently at the small of her back.
She sucked in a breath, still looking at my chest rather than up at me, like she was trying to decide what she wanted. I was absolutely going to tip the scales in my direction.
“I think about the beach every day,” I said to her, and it was true. “You are one crazy impulsive woman.”
She looked up then, those silver eyes fixing on me. Her face was perfection, not a flaw on it. And she looked more natural today, not all glitzed up like at the party. Just simple. Easygoing.
I tweaked the hair near her forehead, using my hand on her back to keep her close. She smelled even more divine. “I like you like this,” I said. “Regular clothes. Like a real girl.”
This made her smile.
She had told me she was with that other guy only for show, and I believed her. Who knew how those Hollywood types worked? But she was here with me now, and that counted for more than something.
I could feel the puff of air from her breath as I leaned down and brushed my lips against hers. She melted a little against me, and I knew this was where she wanted to go. Maybe the beach had haunted her too.
I pressed in harder, sliding my tongue across her mouth until she parted for me. She tasted minty, like she’d brushed her teeth just before coming back downstairs. Her hands stayed by her sides and it became a little challenge of mine to get her to hold on to me. I’d play it nice and slow until she was the one to urge me on.
My hand in her hair slipped into all the dreadlocks and cupped her head. I drew her even more deeply against me, plumbing the sweetness of her mouth, breathing her in. I massaged the small of her back, the soft T-shirt bunching up beneath my palm until I found her skin, hot and smooth.
At my touch on her naked back, she jolted beneath me, moving forward. Then it happened, her arms came up and hung on to me. I jerked her tight against me, letting her feel the raging of my need for her. We were back, not on a beach in LA, but in my hometown now.
She was mine.
Chapter 42: Jenny
I hadn’t expected to get all up in Chance straight off, but here we were.