Page 152 of Scoring the Player
With everything going down with Denzel, I just want to call him and talk.
It shouldn’t be this hard, I think. Maybe my setup with Lucien spoiled me. When I called him, he came, and vice versa. And even though we hadn’t been exclusive, we showed up for each other when it counted.
This feels different. Like sometimes the man I love is a ghost.
We’ve gone from talking every day to this.
What the hell happened?
“What’sBlue’s guitar music like?” I ask as I click my seat belt.
“Take a song with a post-rock, shoegaze influence, like the one we just heard, and then mix in soul.”
I blink one eye closed. “Uh...I think I got it.”
She nods as she takes off her glasses and uses the bottom of her jersey to wipe the lenses. “Okay, add soul, then spoon in Arnaz’s melancholic moodiness, and mix that ish up.” She slides her glasses back on. “His music would blow if it dropped. And”—she releases a heavy breath—“he’d hate it. I think he knows how good it is, and that’s why he won’t release it.”
“I heard him play the piano once. It still gives me chills.”
“Me too.” She adjusts the mirrors. “Some of his stuff’s so raw it makes me bawl. Where we headed?”
“I need to stop home and walk my dog quick fast. My sitter’s sick.”
“Thirsty Joshua?”
I snort. Blue told her about Josiah? I reach over and click Home on the navigation. “It’s not like that.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, pulling out of my spot. “We’re rarely wrong about that kinda thing.”
“I’m not into Josiah. And I see the guys he dates. They don’t look anything like me. And there’s zero chemistry.”
She side-eyes me, and it’s magnified by her frames. “He wears your clothes?”
“That’s new for him.”
She frowns.
“It’s cold out!” I say defensively.
“This is never off.” She taps her chest over her heart. “We know what it’s like not to be loved. When we feel it, we’re fierce about protecting it. We can sense Josiahs a mile away. He’s never getting off the Watch List.”
“Watch List? Sounds like the CI—Ay-yo!”
My back hits the seat as she slams on the accelerator and guns it.
“Move it!” she yells at the cars on the road ahead of us as she swings across three lanes.
“U-uh, I think I see why Blue would’ve warned me.”
“I’m not the one who—Not your turn, dickwad!” She cuts off a Benz, then switches lanes again like we’re ducking the police. “I’m not the one who crashed my car a week after I got it for my eighteenth birthday.”
“Was he okay?”
“No. He had a death wish.”
The way she says it makes my stomach queasy.
“I once threw a jab about him having silver spoons,” I admit with regret.
