Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
She looked to the cold fireplace, reminding him one of the chores that he was going to be seeing to in order to put him visibly in her space was getting her some firewood. Fall was there, winter was coming, and she didn’t have any.
She took another sip, then returned to him. “So, you write your own songs?”
“Yup.”
“I…they’re really good.”
“Thanks.”
“Really good, Hutch,” she stressed. “I…well, I was just a kid, and it’s a long story, but I had occasion to be around a lot of musicians.”
Yeah, through her fucked-up, piece-of-shit bio dad, Frank Groove.
“And again, I was a kid,” she kept on. “But when I say a lot, I mean a lot, and you just soak that kind of thing in. You’re one of the best I’ve heard.”
That surprised him.
And it felt good.
“You don’t want to do anything with your music?” she asked.
But this didn’t surprise him.
Push harder.
Have ambition.
Hustle for more.
“I play guitar because it relaxes me. I write songs because that’s just who I am. None of them are on paper—”
“What?” she gasped.
“They’re all in my head.”
“All those songs are just in your head?”
He wasn’t sure if he was feeling uncomfortable or getting pissed.
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
“Well…yeah. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t read from sheet music during a concert, Mabel,” he pointed out. “And he has a fuck of a lot larger library than I do.”
“True,” she murmured.
“He writes it down because he has a band. He writes it down because he records. I don’t, and never have played with a band. And I have no interest in recording. It’s mine. It’s part of me. Songs wind their way into my head and stay there. I play them and sing them simply because I like doing it. I don’t want to be rich. And I really don’t want to be famous. So I play for Lug, because he’s a bud and it lures people to his bar. And I play for me. And that’s it.”
A slow grin spread across her face before she said, “That’s ridiculously cool.”
Hutch’s heart stopped.
She sipped then leaned forward to put her beer on a coaster on her coffee table, sat back and said, “I mean, your songs are so beautiful, your first inclination is, ‘everyone has to hear these.’ But they actually don’t. They’re yours. They’re your story. They’re obviously personal.”
They were that.
And he hadn’t sung his new one that night, the one about her.
“There are probably countless masterpiece poems that died with their poet,” she went on. “Words we’ll never read. Feelings we’ll never have the opportunity to be voyeur to. And if that’s the artist’s choice, that’s how it should be.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, because he had to push the word out due to the fact he couldn’t process how deeply she just got it.
“All right,” she stated in a way that was prelude to an announcement, punctuating this by hopping a bit on her ass and turning more fully to face him. “I’m in this. And you’re in this.”
He had no idea what she was talking about.
“And I think we both know where we are in this,” she continued.
He now had a suspicion of what she was talking about, but he still didn’t know.
“So, as you can tell,”—she swept her hand in front of her—“I accepted your ‘let’s stop squabbling’ invitation. So, just to be sure I’m reading this right, now we’re friends.”
Right.
That was what she was talking about.
“We’re friends,” he confirmed.
“Okay, then, don’t get me wrong. It’s taking something to suggest this, but I’ll get it if you decline. I know where we are. If you say no, this won’t change.” She flapped her hand between them.
He was back to being baffled.
“Not following, May,” he replied.
Her eyes lit for some reason when he said that.
And then she pulled the earth out from under him.
“What I’m suggesting is, we’re friends, and we know we’re good together…that way…so how about we be friends…with benefits?”
He was glad he wasn’t taking a sip from his beer, or he’d have spewed it on her.
She was watching him, and he didn’t miss the tension in her body.
The tension had hit his body too.
But one particular part of his anatomy was springing to attention.
“Make no mistake, I want you again, Mabel,” he said low.
She licked her lips—not fucking helping—and nodded. “Okay.”
“And I want that bad,” he added.
He watched her swallow.
“But shit like that goes south.”
“Not between two adults who get it,” she refuted.
“You are not her, not even close, know that to your soul, Mabel. But Bree was essentially a fuck buddy. We didn’t have the same interests, but she was passable in bed, she could be good when she wasn’t being lazy and acting self-involved. We shared some drinks. We’d go out to dinner for the company. We’d hang for the same reason. But for the most part, anytime we got together, we did it with the end game of fucking. There were no promises. Nothing building. No deep conversations. I didn’t share about me, and I didn’t ask about her. What we had was surface, you couldn’t interpret it as anything else. We never discussed exclusivity, for example. And still, she got it in her head that there was more, and it twisted her up to do some seriously stupid shit.”