His For Keeps: (50 Loving States, Tennessee) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  HIS FOR KEEPS

  Theodora Taylor

  http://theodorataylor.com/

  Ⓒ 2015 Theodora Taylor

  ISBN: # 978-1-942167-01-3

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THAT NIGHT

  “Cool. Let’s meet up at my house around eight. Parents will be gone.”

  That was the text that started it all. It was from Mike Lancer. My boyfriend. Well, sort of, but not really. We’d been hooking up all summer, and he only ever invited me over when his parents were out. But his parents were out a lot, so we’d settled into a routine: I was the girl he called when his parents weren’t around. And if I wasn’t due to perform with my mother that night, I was the girl who went over to his place.

  He’d called me his “secret girlfriend” a few times while we were making out, before he stuck it in me. So I guess that made us… something.

  This was his first text message though, because I’d just gotten a new phone the day before. My first cell phone, an early birthday present from my mom, bought because she was feeling optimistic.

  She’d finally landed a gig for the following weekend at The Rusty Roof, one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest and most legendary country music venues, and she’d just gotten a call from the club’s manager that Lee Street, from Big Hill Records, was coming all the way down from Nashville to see her perform. Really, he was coming to see the band of twenty-year-olds slated to go on right before her—the club manager told her that straight up. But Valerie Goode had always been on the crazy side of confident about her career prospects.

  She didn’t care who Lee Straight was really coming to see. He’d be in the room. And for a magical thinker like Valerie, that had been enough to make her buy the daughter she called her “right-hand guitar,” her first cell phone. Of course she did it with money she didn’t have, because she was banking on Lee Straight making her a big star after he saw her perform on stage—and/or in bed if need be. In Valerie’s mind, she was always just a performance and one really good fuck away from becoming the world’s first black female country music star.

  As far as she was concerned, the only reason she hadn’t made it to fame and fortune before the age of thirty-five was because she’d gotten pregnant with me in her prime contract-signing years. According to her, my birth ruined everything: her relationship with my father, her ability to get the gigs she needed in order to be seen by the right people. Everything Valerie deserved but had never gotten was because of me.

  We got along just fine for the most part, but whenever Valerie drank too much—which was often—she let me know just how far I’d set her back. I and I alone was responsible for where she was now: thirty-five and pinning every last hope she had on one gig at the The Rusty Roof.

  In reality, this would end up being the gig that finally convinced Valerie she would never, ever make it in country music. The gig that would finally convince her to toss out her “right-hand guitar” and go to L.A. by herself to try to make it there.

  But she didn’t know that the weekend before what happened happened, so she bought me a phone. And the first thing I did after I got my new cell phone was text the only other person I knew my age who also had a cell phone. Mike Lancer, the rich boy I’d met at the state fair. On purpose. I’d cornered him at the cotton candy booth after I’d seen him walking around with Beau Prescott, the quarterback of the Forest Brook Vikings. Beau was the boy I’d been secretly watching from afar for years now. The boy I’d never been able to bring myself to talk to.

  So I’d gone after his friend, a beefy blond who was more than happy to hook up with me as long as I was okay with going straight to the servants entrance when I came over, because, “No offense, my parents would freak if they knew I was hanging out with a black girl.”

  Which was why I was surprised to receive a text message right back from him, just a few seconds after I sent mine.

  “Who’s that?” my mom asked, hearing the ding of my phone. “Somebody about a gig?”

  She was on the couch, one shapely leg bent beneath her as she painted her toenails. Valerie might have been thirty-five, but she looked at least ten years younger thanks to an insane eating regimen, a wardrobe made up of Southern party girl staples, and her insistence on wearing toenail polish the color of candy. Today she was painting them neon pink.

  Pretending to be her manager, so she looked like she’d already had one, was one of the duties my mother had given me, along with playing guitar for her sets and singing back-up when needed. Thanks to an extra serving of T&A that had come in over the past school year, I looked a lot older than fifteen years, especially when I wore stage make-up. Like Valerie, in reverse.

  “No, it’s that boy I met at the fair back in June,” I answered her. “He wants me to come over, and we’re not performing tonight…”

  My mom actually looked up, her heavily mascaraed eyes flicking over my outfit. Denim Bermuda cut-offs and an old Dick Tracy movie t-shirt I’d cut to hang off one shoulder.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, I don’t like to look like I’m trying too hard.” Especially with Mike Lancer, who was always more concerned with getting me out of my clothes than noticing what I was wearing.

  But my mom, the queen of trying too hard, just sucked on her teeth.

  “You been taking your pill? You know I’m not—”

  “Taking care of no grandbabies. Yeah, I know,” I finished for her. “I’ve been taking it.”

  Another disapproving up and down, and my mom went back to her candy toenails.

  “Well, see you later, I guess.”

  I knew I ought to be grateful to have a mom who didn’t care what I did or where I went at night, as long as it didn’t interfere with my ability to play guitar for her the next weekend. But I remember it grating on me as I left our apartment to wait for the first of the two buses it would take to get me all the way to Forest Brook, Mike Lancer’s neighborhood. Sometimes, I remembered thinking, it would be nice to have a mom who actually gave a shit. For that matter, it would be nice to have anybody who g
ave a shit.

  An hour later, as I walked through Forest Brook, one of Alabama’s richest suburbs, I recalled my grandparents in Tennessee who I used to stay with during the summers. That was before I learned how to play the guitar and Valerie decided she needed me down here in Alabama more. My grandparents gave a shit, and I felt a tug of guilt knowing how much they would disapprove of what I’d been doing with Mike Lancer all summer.

  And as I walked past the Tudor mansion Beau Prescott lived in with his parents, I remember wondering to myself why I was doing this. Taking two buses to hook up with a boy I’d met at the fair, just because he was friends with Beau.

  But I kept walking. Keeping my head down, so it would be easy for folks to assume I was either one of the many black live-in servants who worked in Forest Brook or one of their daughters. It wasn’t that hard of a role to pull off. My mom used to be one of those servants. So really, I was just acting like what I would have been if she hadn’t decided to pursue her country music career full time after having me.

  Still, I remember feeling a little stupid as I slipped around the side of Mike’s large colonial house and scuttled to the servants entrance in back, like a cockroach who did booty calls.

  However, this time when I got to the back stairs, I didn’t find them empty like I usually did. There was a boy there, sitting at the bottom of the steps. Like he was guarding the staircase.

  This boy, from what I could tell, looked to be around my age, but he was very long. It took five steps to accommodate his bent legs. I’d sat on these steps before to wait for Mike and knew it only took two or three drops before my feet found a place to rest.

  I stopped short, not quite knowing how to handle this. I’d never run into anybody back here before. Hell, sometimes Mike wasn’t even there to greet me, which is why I knew how many steps my legs took up. From waiting, since I wasn’t allowed to knock or do anything else that might draw attention to me.

  This boy on the steps was blond, too. But he didn’t look like Mike. While Mike’s hair was combed back in lacquered waves, this boy’s hair fell past his ears in stringy locks that made my hands itch for a bottle of shampoo to throw at him. The rest of him wasn’t too much better. He was sporting what looked like a huge black eye behind a pair of thick, square glasses. And his clothes were worn. Not in a cool way, but like they’d originally been bought at a deep discount store, given away to the Salvation Army, then bought out of the dollar box by him. High-water corduroys and a dingy t-shirt.

  The boy was also “skinnier than a pile of sticks” as my grandmother might say, with long knobby arms hanging out of his t-shirt. Even before I spotted the violin case, sitting at his feet, the word “nerd” ran through my mind. Maybe he was Mike’s younger brother. A sibling who’d inherited even more height, but not any of Mike’s wide receiver beefiness.

  But somehow I didn’t think so.

  This kid had a different energy than Mike. A kind of feral presence I recognized well after nearly a lifetime spent in honkytonk bars. Even with the glasses and the violin and the fact that he was here, he looked like what he probably was: poor white trash. Especially with that black eye.

  To me, he looked hungry in ways that had nothing to do with food, and I didn’t know who he was or why he was here but I recognized him for what he was from the minute I laid eyes on him: a coyote in human clothing.

  “Hi,” I said tentatively. Just like I would have if I had run into an actual coyote in the woods behind my grandparents’ house.

  He gave me a lazy coyote up and down look, before asking, “You one of Mike’s girls?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer his question, seeing as how I wasn’t supposed to be claiming Mike out in public. Also, I didn’t love hearing myself called “one of Mike’s girls.” So I didn’t say anything.

  Which was answer enough for him. He leaned back, resting his knobby elbows on the steps behind him.

  “Figures. He likes them from the wrong side of tracks—as long as mommy and daddy don’t find out.”

  His voice was deeper than I would have expected it to be, coming from such a skinny body, and it rang with authority. Like he didn’t need me to confirm nothing, because he already knew everything he needed to know about me.

  This time when he looked me up and down, I could see judgment in his eyes as they tracked over my dusty brown hair, my cut up clothes, and most of all, my light brown skin.

  “So which wrong side of the tracks are you from?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Where did you get that black eye?”

  The corners of his lips tugged up. “Alright, so you don’t want to tell me where you’re from. What do you think we should talk about while you’re pretending not to be waiting for Mike to get here then?”

  “We don’t have to talk,” I pointed out.

  “No, we don’t,” he agreed.

  That got me a whole minute of silence. But eventually it became so uncomfortable, I had ask, “Is there a reason you’re sitting out here as opposed to going inside?”

  He shrugged, his thin shoulders going up and down like two knobs underneath his thin t-shirt. “Putting together some thoughts, I guess.”

  “Trying to figure out how you’re going to explain that black eye?” I asked him.

  A sad smiled passed over his face. “Nobody in there’s going to ask, so I don’t have anything I’ve got to explain. Especially if I lay low until it fades.”

  “Laying low ain’t too bad a deal,” I said after thinking on it for a few seconds. “At least you’ve got air conditioning.”

  He let out a sound between a bark and a laugh. “Yeah, I guess that’s how I should look at it. I’m not hiding. I’m staying in the air conditioning.”

  My eyes wandered to the violin case at his feet. Wondering about it. Wondering about him. Even as I said, “Well, you should probably go on and see about that A/C.”

  “Yeah, I probably should,” he agreed. But he didn’t move. Instead, he followed my gaze to his violin.

  Leaving me to grow more and more curious in the second silence, until I just had to ask, “So you play violin?”

  “Sometimes. Come fall, I’ll be back performing the classical stuff with the Alabama Youth Symphony. But it’s been a long day.” A thin smile crosses his face. “Got in an argument with my dad in Tennessee, and decided to take the bus home. So tonight, it’s probably going to be a fiddle.”

  That was a joke I sort of got. Violins and fiddles were basically the same instrument. You could call either the other, as long as you were playing the right song.

  I also got that the part about the argument with his father was his way of explaining the black eye, which made my heart constrict with sympathy for him. But he didn’t seem like the kind of boy who would take well to sympathy, so I kept my voice casual as I said, “I should have brought my guitar. We could have played something sad and depressing together.”

  Now his face lit with curiosity, and he tilted his head to reassess me, which put his eyes directly in line with the overhead light. I could now see they were an incredible blue, a blue so pretty, they caused my breath to unexpectedly catch. The boy might not have been much to look at, but his eyes packed one hell of a punch. That’s another thing I clearly remember thinking That Night.

  “What kind of music do you like to play?” he asked.

  “This is and that. Mostly stuff I make up,” I answered. A sip of my story, not the whole glass. I’d learned a long time ago that admitting I was basically a unicorn—a black girl who played and wrote country music—brought up more questions than it answered.

  “Do you sing?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  The boy raised his eyebrows, like he didn’t quite know whether to believe me. “Alright then, let me hear you.”

  This was before what happened happened, before I stopped singing in front of people ever. But even back then, I can remember thinking there was no way in hell I was going to get up the nerve to sing in front of this
weird teenager with the intense blue eyes on Mike Lancer’s back steps.

  The boy wasn’t nearly as cute as Mike, but he made me nervous all the same. Maybe because of the way he was looking at me now. Like I’d suddenly gone from being a simple math problem to a complicated one.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I answered, my stomach fluttering with butterflies at just the thought of singing one of the songs I’d written.

  “Why not?” His voice sounded different now. Even deeper and huskier, like we were involved in some kind of secret conversation.

  “Because…” I started, searching for a plausible excuse.

  “What are you doing here, Fairgood?”

  I turned to see Mike coming towards us in a tux, face screwed up with irritation, glare aimed at the boy sitting on the steps.

  “Decided to come home early from Tennessee,” the boy answered Mike. “Was out here fixing to put in some fiddlin’ time before I went to sleep. How about you? Wasn’t tonight was your parent’s big charity ball? Surprised you’re not still there.”

  Mike huffed. “They don’t let me drink at those things, so I put in an hour and left out since they weren’t letting me have any fun.”

  The boy Mike had referred to as Fairgood lifted his eyebrows, probably thinking what I was thinking. Mike’s explanation for leaving his parents’ charity ball early made him sound like the worst kind of spoiled rich kid cliché.

  But Mike didn’t seem to care what the boy on the steps thought of him. He turned to me and said, “I thought I told you eight.”

  “I can’t control when the bus gets here,” I answered him, a wave of irritation rolling over me. “I got here early and came back here to wait for you. I wasn’t expecting to meet…”

  “Colin,” the boy finished for me. To my surprise, he actually stood like a true Southern gentleman, and took my hand in his with a charming smile. “Colin Fairgood, and it’s real nice to meet you, sweetheart.”

  That smile, combined with his words and blue gaze, caused my heart to backflip inside my chest. What the hell, I thought to myself. Is he flirting with me?

  Mike must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, “It’s going to be nice to beat you if you don’t get out of the way.”