Page 9 of My Song for You
“Actually, it’s guitar.” I’d tried playing Mason’s drums once. After he’d stopped howling with laughter, he told me to not quit my day job and to leave drumming to the professionals. I hadn’t thought I was that bad, but the guys’ expressions had suggested otherwise.
Sharon nodded, the corners of her lips curling down slightly. “Are you any good?”
“He’s brilliant.” Callie’s face reddened, and she busied herself with serving the pizza.
An odd sensation in my chest stirred at her words. She wasn’t the first person who had told me something along those lines when it came to my guitar playing. Groupies and fans said it all the time. But somehow hearing her say it felt different. Like her opinion meant more to me than anyone else’s did, including the critics.
Shit, what was I even thinking? Callie was just an old childhood friend.
A friend with a young child, a complication I didn’t need.
An incredibly sexy friend whom I suddenly wanted to get to know better, and not in the same way it had been between her sister and me. I wanted to get to know more about the woman she had become.
Chapter 4
Callie
“He’s brilliant.” Even back when he was first learning to play the guitar and hit more wrong notes than right ones, I’d loved listening to Jared. His excitement for the instrument, which his parents had given him for his fourteenth birthday, had been contagious. I was his first groupie and the president of his fan club. A very exclusive fan club, with me as the only member.
Later, after he started dating my sister, I’d remained his biggest fan. Luckily for me, he hadn’t minded me sitting in his room while he strummed on his baby. It was always just him and me, the only time I got Jared to myself.
A memory revisited of when I’d been seventeen and he’d straddled me from behind to reposition my fingers on the strings in the correct chords. His body had been pressed against mine, his subtle scent doing all kinds of crazy things to me. I had been close to tossing the guitar onto the bed and kissing him. That was the first time I’d realized my attraction toward him, an attraction I’d never told anyone about.
My body heated at the memory. Needing a distraction, I grabbed pizza from the box and placed the slice on Logan’s Winnie-the-Pooh plate. And because my body hadn’t gotten the hint yet, I gave everyone else a slice of cheese pizza too—anything to hide how unbalanced I felt with Jared’s unexpected return into my life.
It’s only temporary, I reminded myself.He’ll go on tour soon and forget all about us.
Logan was watching Jared in the way kids do when they worship someone, as if he somehow sensed the stranger sitting across from him was his father. But that was ridiculous. There was no way he could know. Right?
Jared made a funny comment and laughed. His dimples came to life, and his mirror image’s dimples came to life too. Sharon looked between the two males, and for a second I could’ve sworn something passed in her eyes that wasn’t good news for me.
I brushed it off. I was being paranoid. There were millions of guys with dimples. And I was sure a large percentage were dark-haired. Okay, the odds that I just happened to be friends with several dark-haired guys with dimples were low, but Sharon didn’t know that.
The quick glance she gave me was far from reassuring, but that was all right. She wasn’t the one I had to worry about. Fortunately, Jared would never piece things together. As far as he was concerned, I was Logan’s biological mother and he knew he’d never had sex with me.
My secret was safe.
I shoved the slice of pizza in my mouth and watched Logan laugh so hard at what Jared had said that he almost fell off his chair. For the first time since the accident that stole my sister and parents from me, a fissure formed in my bruised heart. Ever since their deaths more than three years ago, I’d been strong, doing my best not to fall apart under the newfound responsibilities piled on me, and doing my best for Logan. When my boyfriend—the guy I had loved and believed was the one—dumped me because the last thing he wanted was a kid, especially someone else’s, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart. When Logan developed meningitis and lost his hearing, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart. And when I had to make the decision by myself as to whether or not Logan should have the cochlear surgery, I didn’t allow myself to fall apart.
No matter how difficult it had been to remain strong through all of this, I had done so for Logan.
But now, with the adoring way he looked at Jared, you could’ve sliced me across the stomach with a dull knife and tossed me to a great white shark, and it would’ve hurt a lot less.
I would do anything for Logan, but I couldn’t give him the one thing he needed. I couldn’t tell him and Jared the truth and risk destroying Logan.
I blinked back the tears threatening to form. Logan would never have a father. If I had learned one single fact during the past three years, it was that other guys weren’t much different from my ex. They weren’t interested in dating a woman with a child. Add the challenge of the child being deaf—cochlear implant or not—and any interest they might have had in me plummeted to zero.
I pushed the painful memories away, did my best to temporarily patch up the crack in my heart, and joined the party. I laughed at Jared’s jokes and listened to Sharon tell Jared about some of Logan’s escapades. I avoided redirecting the conversation when she did that, even though I didn’t want her to involve Jared in his son’s life more than necessary. To do so would’ve added to her suspicions.
“Open my present first,” Logan said, his excitement barely contained as he handed Sharon the gift he had wrapped himself. A ton of clear tape held the happy-face, potato-print wrapping paper together. The package would’ve looked a lot better if we had at least put the gift in a box, but I couldn’t find one in the apartment and Logan had been too impatient to wait.
Sharon turned the package around in her hands, her expression thoughtful. “I can’t imagine what it is. Is it a soccer ball?”
Logan giggled. “No. Soccer ball round.”
“That’s right, Logan,” she said. “A soccer ballisround.” The gift was flat. “Is it a lion?”
Logan giggled again. “Lion is big.” He also signed it.
