CHAPTER 5

The growl would have made me jump if I wasn't so buzzed. I'm not trying to be a brat. He doesn't need to pretend when we're alone. Its not like with Dad and Haley, when civility is a must.

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit of a brat, but I'm protesting Chris, the fuzziness in my head, my own stupidity in thinking I could win these people over.

Plus the shirtless hottie Mc Traitor in my pool house. The one who sinks onto the bed next to my head, making the mattress dip with his weight. My fingers brush his thighs.

"Emily, drink the damn water." There's a note of worry in his impatience. "You can hate me again after."

I sit up and drink, studying him over the rim of the cup as he studies me. We're closer than we've been in months, except for maybe the other day at my car when he moved down my body.

But now he's searching my face, not for my emotions but for marks, for trauma, for signs of something that shouldn't be there.

"You won't find anything." I murmur when I finish drinking my water. His dark gaze comes back to mine. "Anything worth finding is underneath."

But he takes my chin gently in his hands, turning my head and brushing back my hair. His fingers gaze my cheek, and I flinch at the sting.

"He scratched you, Emily." Timothy utters the words as if they're vile, and I twist out of his gasp.

"I fell into a rose bush. It bit harder than Chris."

I reach past him to set the cup on the nightstand, but he takes it from me before I can.

"It doesn't feel as good as I thought it would." I inform him.

"What doesn't? Tell me, Emily."

I drop back onto the bed, my eyes closing before I hit the duvet.

"Hating you, Timothy."
When I wake, my head's on a pillow, and it smells like home. No. Home is a fabric softener brand. This pillow smells like sunshine and cedar.

Like him.

Blinking my eyes open reveals I'm in a strange bed.

And I'm not alone.

Timothy Adams is stretched out across the sheets as if he owns them. He's as beautiful asleep as he is awake. Maybe more so.

His firm mouth looks more forgiving with his lips parted in sleep. His eyelashes are black and so long I want to trace them with a finger. Thick, dark hair falls across his forehead, shielding him from the world.

I wonder what boys who have everything dream of.

The sheet is twisted around his legs, and his chest is bare. I drink in the cut lines of his body.

What the hell am I doing here? Did I crawl into bed with him? Did we...?

Please, God, tell me I didn't sleep with him.

Not that I haven't imagined having Timothy Adams pop my cherry back before he revealed himself as an ass who cares more about popularity than me.

But, hello, that's why we have dreams and the privacy of our own heads so we can fantasize about stupid shit we'd never admit to ourselves in the light of day.

He groans stirring when his lashes flutter my heart leaps into my throat.

Shit, shit, shit.
He stills once more, and I exhale slowly.





Pulling back the edge of the blackout curtain reveals the soft colors of the early-morning sun peeking over the hills and trees along the horizon.

I make a lap of the room I haven 't visited in months.

Timothy's schoolbooks and bag sit on the desk my Dad and my stepmom got when he moved in. His guitar rests against the wall by the door. He got it secondhand from my Dad's label, played it until his fingers bled.

A pile of street clothes is neatly folded on the dresser. faded T-shirts, black and gray. A Henley. Two pair of jeans.

The same day my Dad's agent sent him a car for his final album hitting platinum, I got Timothy a Ramones T-shirt for his birthday.

He wore that shirt until the hem frayed.

I miss those days. We didn't care about anything but having fun and being alive. Every second we spent together messing around with music on my Dad's tour-bus-turned-studio, or questing to find a best cheese fries in Philly, or doing impressions behind the soundboard felt like we were taking control of our lives. Making new memories.

Timothy didn't value our friendship. He traded it for popularity at Oakwood.

I'd figured the pain would fade over time, but seeing him every day, even for a moment in the hallways or before or after school means the ache in my gut never quite goes away.

He saved your ass last night.

He saved my ass because if something had happened, my Dad might've thought he was involved in the party and come down on him. It's the only explanation.

The boy I knew, the one I laughed with and dreamed about, is long gone.

I tug on the door of the pool house and step outside in my bare feet. The speakers have long since gone silent, and there's no breeze, but I can still smell him as if he's followed me.

I clean up the patio, collecting bottles and cans before putting the bags behind the pool house.3

When the clean up is done, I sneak upstairs to my room.

I don't bother hitting the lights. The ominous, lumpy shapes are my king-sized bed, my dresser and desk, and the comfy armchair by the window I use to read and do homework. The dark spots along the wall across from my bed are music boxes, lined up on the shelf like guardians.

On impulse, I stop by the last one and lift the top.

"It's a Small World." streams out until I shut the lid again.

It's the same song every time, the same arrangement, played by gears instead of humans. The little dancing dog in a tutu ha always been the best part.

I'll figure out how to keep my part in the musical and keep Carla and her damned minions at bay without Chris' help. Without anyone's.

In my suite, I reach for a washcloth, but the reflection of the girl in the mirror makes me freeze.

Not because she's hungover or lonely.

Because she's wearing a frayed Ramones T-shirt.

Sunday morning. I shower off the booze and party, dress in jean shorts and a tank top, and fluff out my damp hair.

There's a text from Avery with a picture of the Villa they've rented, asking how the party was.

I enter and delete a few texts, settling on: No one died. I don't think Carla and I are destined to be best friends. Go drink more wine.

Timothy's T-shirt sits on top of my laundry hamper. I toss the T-shirt and some other clothes into the laundry, then grab The Great Gatsby for English class and pad down the hall. The sound of a guitar pulls me toward the kitchen.

I pause to listen, my eyes closing as I lean a shoulder against the wall.

Thousand of years ago, human beings should have spent every ounce of their precious time finding food or shelter or safety. Having sex.

Not singing songs and creating instruments.

We did it anyway. Maybe we knew then what we seem to have forgotten since: life isn't about money or winning or even surviving. It's about finding meaning in the time we have

When I peek around the corner, Uncle Rudy is laughing from a chair at the table and Timothy's playing on a stool at the island.

He's a magician. There's no other word for the way that instrument sings under his hands.

I don't believe in Gods, but if they ever existed...

Their ashes stir each time that boy lifts a guitar.

I swallow my envy and enter the kitchen. "Morning."

"It's afternoon." Rudy points out.

"Like you and Dad ever got up before noon on tour." I head for the coffee maker without making eye contact and pick out a pod. My stepmom found his killer Columbian blend I could live on. "Dad call you this morning?"

"Not yet. But far as I know everything went fine. Now is when you bribe me." he adds with a wink as I set my mug under the stainless nozzle and hit Start.

Uncle Rudy's attention shifts to Timothy. "You play like a prodigy, kid, but that guitar is a piece of shit. Get Eddie to give you a new one."

Rudy's phone erupts into a rendition of my Dad's band laughing their way through a cover of Johnny Cash, and I glance over my shoulder.

"Tell my Dad no Carlton belongings were harmed in the making of last night's gathering." I call as Rudy heads down the hallway to answer.

The coffee finishes brewing, and as I go to retrieve it, I sneak a look at Timothy.

His presence shouldn't suck the air out of the kitchen, but once Rudy's gone, all I see is the guy who lives in the pool house. Gray sweatpants cling to his hips, and the white T-shirt outlines every plane of his torso, leaving his arms deliciously bare.
I remember that chest bare last night, too close to ignore.

His body's beautiful, but it's the way he uses it that's impossible to forget. The control in everything he does.

Timothy uses that body like he's had it before, like it's his favorite suit of armor and they've been through countless battles together.

His hair isn't falling across his forehead like it was when I left his bed hours ago, but standing up as if he woke the moment I walked out the door and has been running his hands through it since.

Which is impossible.

I clear my throat. "Why did I wake up in bed with you?"

Timothy lifts his chin, assessing. "Why did I wake up in bed without you?"

The way he says it sends shivers up my spine.

"You passed out." he goes on, setting the guitar against the wall before rising and crossing to the counter next to me. "I didn't want you to wake up somewhere unfamiliar alone."

I shift a few inches, giving him access to the coffee maker and cupboard overhead. "I would've figured it out."

"But the seconds before that are the worst."

I take a sip of my coffee, burning my tongue. "What do you mean?"

He reaches over me for a mug and to change the coffee pod. I don't think he's going to answer, but finally, he does.

"My Dad used to padlock the door if he was drunk or in a mood. Never knew until I got home from the label or school or hanging out if it was one of those nights. The worst part wasn't finding a place to crash. It was waking up and not knowing where I was." He grimaces. "Especially somewhere cold."

I set my coffee on the counter, my stunned gaze never leaving his face as I think of the T-shirt he must've pulled over me after I passed out, the blankets tucked in around me. "Timothy---"

"Emily! Your Dad wants to talk to you." Rudy's voice comes from down the hall.
"Be right there!" I shout back, then lower my voice.