His Pretend Baby Read online

“No, no, no, Grandma. I'm still coming up, and I can't wait to see you, but I was wondering if I got a package.”

  “You sure did,” she says. “But I didn't open it. Because I didn't want to have to put up with your tall ones about it being against the law to open my own grandbaby's mail.”

  “It is against the law,” I tell her. “I wish you would stop acting like that's a story I made up. But in this case, I'm going to let you go'on ahead and open it.”

  My grandma doesn't have to be invited twice. I immediately hear the sound of ripping paper, then a “Hmmph…”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It's a book with some white woman on the cover…” Grandma answers. The sound of pages flipping. “It's got a signature on the front page. Let me get my glasses. Looks like an autograph, but I can barely read the name. June… Cortes… Cosh, I think?”

  “June Carter Cash?” My whole heart floods with warmth, and suddenly my good day turned bad turns right back to good again.

  “Is that the white woman on the cover? I guess it could be-hey, a card just fell out of the book. Let me bend down here and get it…” Rustling sounds and then my grandma says, “All it says is 'From C'? Who's 'C'?”

  “Um…” I answer.

  “And why's he sending you a book with June Carter Cash on the front of it?” she asks me.

  “Um…” I say again, feeling almost as uncomfortable as I did on the phone with Josie. “It's a long story.”

  “A long story?” My grandma repeats, suspicious as Halloween night in a big city. “Best Grandbaby, do you need to bring this 'C' person round to see me?”

  14

  “Do you know how hard it was to explain to my grandma about the June Carter Cash autobiography?” I ask Colin the next day, when he calls me while I’m putting together Beau’s lunch.

  “What, she don’t like Mrs. Carter Cash?” Colin answers. He doesn’t sound remorseful at all. Just amused.

  “She’s more a ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ sort of grandma. Even Kirk Franklin’s a little rowdy for her,” I answer.

  “Well, pass on my apologies, then,” Colin says. “I hope I didn’t upset her too bad.”

  “You didn’t upset her at all,” I say, throwing two chicken breasts into a pan with a little olive oil. “But she’s nosier than a bloodhound, and I know she’s going to be asking me to bring you around to see her on every phone call from now on.” Only after grumbling all this do I remember my manners enough to say, “And thank you by the way. That was a nice gift. Real thoughtful. I can’t wait to read it when I go home on Friday.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything in there that wasn’t in the Lifetime movie.”

  “You did not watch the Lifetime movie!”

  “Why are you always trying to tell me what I did and didn’t do, Purple? Lifetime ain’t just a woman’s network no more, you know.”

  I do know, but at this point, I’m laughing too hard to answer. I do that a lot with Colin, I notice. Laugh.

  “How about you?” he asks. “You like your grandma?”

  “Nosey? A little bit, I guess. But I’ve got a ways to go before I get as bad as her.”

  “No, I meant religious.”

  The question startles me, and I answer carefully. “Well, I believe in God, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Me too,” he says. “But I’m talking about the other stuff. Like saving yourself for marriage and all that.”

  “Um…” To say I’m surprised by this turn in the conversation is an understatement. But I go with it. Colin and I have had some pretty heated conversations about politics over the last few months. Why not religion, too?

  “I guess that’s fine for some folks, but I’m not really one to wait until marriage to find out if the sex is bad or not.”

  “Me either,” Colin says with a wry chuckle. “So when’s the last time you had sex, good or bad?”

  I blink, nearly choking on my own spit. “Excuse me?”

  “Okay, I’ll go first,” he says, like I’ve just won some sort of negotiation I didn’t remember having with him. “It’s been a while for me. Since the beginning of the year, and I got a full check-up before starting this tour. So I’m clean. How about you? Had a check up with the lady doctor lately? Did it come back clean?”

  “First of all, I don’t think anybody calls gynos ‘lady doctors’ anymore. Second of all, there’s no way I’m telling you that!”

  “Because you’ve got something embarrassing you don’t want to tell me about?”

  “No, because it’s none of your damn business!” I flip Beau’s chicken breasts.

  “Okay then, I’m going to take that answer as a ‘Yes, Colin, my STD panel came back clean, but I’m too much of a wise-ass to just go ahead and tell you that.’ Same goes for whether you’re on birth control or not?”

  My mouth falls open, I’m so outraged. “I’m not telling you that.”

  “Look, Purple. Let’s both be adults here? I’m okay with condoms, but I think we’ll have more fun finding out if the sex is bad between us if we don’t have to bother with them. So I’m asking you to either keep on taking your BC or get on it right now. Your choice.”

  My heart stops, and I just stand there at a loss for words, as the chicken sizzles in the pan.

  Eventually I say, “You seriously want to find out if the sex is bad between us?”

  His answer comes after his own bit of silence, quiet and grave. “Yeah. Yeah, I seriously do.”

  More shocked silence on my part. Honestly, I have no idea what to say, or how to deal with this out-of-the-blue proposal for possibly bad sex.

  “You still there or did you hang up on me?”

  “I’m… still here.” It feels like the words are struggling to climb out of my throat. “I’m just… surprised.”

  “Tell you the truth, I am, too. You’re not my usual type, but I’m feeling something between us. Something I’ve been thinking about following up on for quite a few of these phone calls now.”

  The thought of him thinking about me like that… I feel my face heat and I’m glad he’s on the other side of the phone, because he’d for sure be asking me why I’m blushing right now.

  “What’s your usual type?” I ask, too curious to keep the question inside.

  “Submissive,” he answers. Casual, like he’s talking about the weather.

  And I laugh, because Colin really is the king of saying the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate moment.

  But he doesn’t laugh, and in the ensuing silence, I realize… he’s serious.

  “I’m… I’m not submissive,” I tell him. “I mean, I haven’t even read Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s how not submissive I am.”

  “Nope, you’re not,” he agrees easily.

  “Then why me?” I ask him. “I mean, you’re a big deal. Don’t you have, like, a truckload of groupies dying to be your sub or whatever it’s called?” I send a silent thank you to Grandma’s talk shows for educating me about the finer points of kinky sex lifestyles.

  “Sure,” he says. “But you got something they don’t.”

  He goes quiet on the other side of the line, forcing me to ask, “What?”

  “A smart mouth,” he answers. “And I want to close it.”

  Outrage. That is the only emotion I should be feeling at this moment. But instead I feel heat. Not just in my face. No, this time, a crude, undeniable hotness floods my entire body and pools between by legs, tugging so hard, it makes my core ache.

  It’s not a familiar sensation. But it is one I’ve had before. A very long time ago, when I was too young to handle it. And for moments on end, I’m stuck between then and now, with feelings I shouldn’t be having raging so intense inside of me, they steal my voice.

  “I’m in town for a few days at the end of the month,” he says into my silence. “Thursday through Monday. I’ll send you the details and the address for where to meet me. Then I won’t bring it up again. If you show up, you show up.”<
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  I should say no. No, of course I’m not going to use my days off and a couple more besides to meet up with him so he can live out his BDSM fantasy on me. That would be crazy. And what about our friendship? This thing we’d been building for the last two months now. What is he trying to do here? Doesn’t he value what we already had? Because I sure do, and I’m not looking to wreck it with… weird sex.

  But instead of saying that, I ask. “And what if I don’t show up?”

  “If you don’t show up… alright then,” he answers.

  That’s not really an answer. But I get pretty quickly that it’s the only one I’ll be getting from him.

  “I guess I’ll… think about it,” I say carefully, not quite believing the words coming out of my mouth even as a I say them.

  “Alright,” he says. “I got a show tomorrow in Grand Rapids. I can never remember if Michigan’s on Central or Mountain, but count on me calling you sometime around four your time.”

  “Alright,” I stupidly parrot. My body is still on fire, and it feels like I’ve had most of the words I’ve ever learned flushed straight out of me by this sudden fever.

  I hear Ginny’s voice in the distance say something to Colin, and he answers casual as you please. “Yep, sure, I’m finishing up here. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  “My manager wants to go over the set list,” he tells me. “Talk to you tomorrow, Purple.”

  “Alright,” I say again.

  And then he hangs up.

  “Kyra? Kyra? You out there?”

  It takes me a few moments to realize it’s Beau’s Alabama accent coming at me now. Not Colin’s. Colin would never call me by my real name—I’m not sure he even remembers it from the one time I told him.

  No, it’s Beau. The only man, other than my Paw Paw, I’ve ever truly loved. His voice is now calling to me through the intercom, located on the kitchen wall. And the two chicken breasts I’m making him are close to burning.

  I slide them out of the pan and onto the waiting plate before pressing the intercom’s talk button.

  “Yes, Beau, I’m here,” I say, trying not sound as flustered as I feel. “What can I help you with?”

  15

  I take Beau’s lunch with me when I go to meet him in his basement workout room.

  I’m not sure what the room looked like before, but Josie told me Beau and his old assistant, Mac, had rigged it out. Getting rid of the traditional workout equipment and barbell racks that were there beforehand, and replacing them with machines Beau could safely use on his own.

  Beau is very independent and usually comes to the kitchen to eat his lunch as opposed to making me bring it to him. But I see why he’s called me down here almost immediately.

  Or rather I hear it. “Alabama Girls Bring the Party,” Colin’s hit song about… well, how Alabama girls bring the party, is blasting on the room’s sound system. And Beau’s standing underneath his chin-up bar with his hands covering his ears.

  “Hey, Beau,” I yell over the music.

  “I need you to turn this crap off!” he yells backs, holding out his phone to me. “I’d do it myself, but it’s a Pandora station, and I need you to do that thing where you tell it to never, ever play this fucking song again.”

  I set the plate down on the room’s only table and do what he says. But I feel all sorts of weird as I push the thumbs down icon and Beau’s phone skips to an upbeat Luke Bryan number. What would Beau say if he knew I talked to the guy he considered his worst enemy every day, because his wife asked me to? A chill runs down my back just thinking about it.

  “This is a good song for working out,” I tell him, and I try to hand the phone back to him, but he says, “You can just go ahead and turn it off. I was about to break for lunch anyway, and it smells like you brought it with you.”

  “Yep, sure have, and I already put it on the table. Do you need me to—”

  “Nope,” Beau answers, taking back his phone before I can even halfway finish offering to guide him over to the table. “Got the room memorized. I know where the table is. Mac made sure I did when he put it there.”

  “Alright then,” I say. Then I blush, because I’ve somehow suddenly come to associate those three words with Colin.

  “Have a nice lunch,” I say to Beau, before I turn to make a hasty escape.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I answer.

  “You sound kind of weird. Like something’s on your mind.”

  “I’m fine,” I say again. Lie again. “Just let me know when you need me to come get your plate.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I can get it to the kitchen myself,” Beau answers with a smile so dazzling, I can easily see why Josie took him back with marriage on top at the beginning of the summer.

  I start to leave again. But then he asks me, “Did you maybe date somebody on the Forest Brook football team? I remember DeAndre Fields had a girl from Beaumont, and that’s where you’re from, right?”

  I shake my head, which is stupid because it’s not like he can see me do it. Then I say out loud, “I’m from Beaumont, but I’ve never heard of DeAndre Fields.”

  Which is not the same as saying I’d never dated anybody on his team, but luckily Beau accepts that as my final answer. He seems disappointed though.

  “Damn, I was hoping that would solve the mystery. I know I’ve heard your voice before. I just can’t remember where.”

  “Tell me when you figure it out,” I answer again, this time putting way more effort into keeping my voice light than in schooling my face to look innocent. Wow, I must really be getting used to being a home aide for a blind person. I’m even lying differently nowadays.

  “I’ll do that,” he says to my back as I rush out of the room.

  I hope he’s wrong. I hope he never figures it out. Because if he does, then it will all be over, this job, the small relationship I’ve managed to build with him, my friendship with Josie. And that is something I can’t abide even thinking about—

  My frantic thoughts are interrupted by the sound of my phone beeping with a text message. I stop in the hallway to take a look.

  It’s one line from Colin. A house number, the name of a road, and a zip code. And somehow this text scares me even more than Beau figuring out who I really am.

  16

  True to his word, Colin doesn’t bring it up again. He calls me every day, just like before, and we talk about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with his invitation to meet up with him when he returns to Nashville. Things like all the places he’s been traveling on his world tour, current events, what we’ve been watching on Fyos, the movies we want to see, the sitcoms that make us laugh. Our mothers.

  Colin tells me his dad left him and his mom when he was eight, “for his real old lady, Booze.” He tells me about how his mother worked her fingers to the bone at various minimum wage jobs to provide for him. And when it turned out Colin was a violin prodigy, she took a live-in servant job with a family of rich assholes so she could use the money she saved on rent to get him the training he needed.

  “A family of rich assholes.” That’s what Colin calls them. And of course I know he’s talking about the Lancers when he describes them as a pack of snobby, well-groomed demons who never worked a day in their lives, thanks to the dad being the only son of an oil baron. However, according to Colin, the older Lancer’s lack of employment didn’t stop him from thinking he truly deserved everything that had been handed down to him, and he’d taught his only son to expect the same. Colin tells me Mike was only a few years older than him, so he had to spend nearly his entire childhood under that prick’s entitled thumb, taking his shit so his mother wouldn’t lose her job.

  When I make the comment that living with a guy like that must have been hard for him, he tells me it was harder for his mother. That’s why he bought her a big house across the street from that family with his first big royalty check.

  I think I know the house he’s talking about, and I
go to my attic window to peep out at the sprawling white colonial down the street. It looks just like the Lancer Colonial, except it’s both taller and wider, like its whole point in life is to overshadow the house sitting across from it. I can see why Colin bought it for his mom, but I feel a little sad thinking about her rattling around that big old house by herself.

  Colin says he thinks she enjoyed living like the people she used to serve. But he could only guess because Rose Gaither wasn’t the type to lord it over others, even though she had every right to do just that.

  “She lived in that house for most of the rest of her life. But after she got sick, I bought her another house in Nashville so I could visit her more often when I was in town. That was a mistake. I should have come off tour. Stayed there with her. If I’d known…”

  “Hey, you had no way of knowing,” I say, gripping the phone when I hear the sadness in his voice. “Your mom might have gone on a few more years whether you were there or not if she hadn’t filed that DNR, and I’m assuming she didn’t tell you about that.”

  “No, she didn’t. Probably cuz she knew I would’ve gone through the roof if I found out. Make her take it back.” Colin’s voice gets a little quieter now. “But she’s always been stubborn. Always wanted to do things her way. I guess I got that from her.”

  “There are worse ways for a mom to be,” I tell him, thinking about Valerie. “Believe me.”

  “Sounds like you got a story to tell about your mother, too.”

  My first instinct is to change the subject, to make this another one of those things I’m not telling him about. Like Mike. And Beau. Or how I’m looking right at his mama’s old house as we speak. But he finally opened up a little to me about his mom, and it feels like I should pay that back.

  “What mother?” I joke, trying not to sound as bitter as I am about the situation—and failing. “There’s only Valerie Goode, and she never admits to having a daughter.”

  “Where have I heard that name before?”

  “Did you see that documentary, Standing Back, about back-up singers that won the Oscar a few years ago?”