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I stopped walking, too. “More than once, yes.”
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She didn’t wear any makeup, and in the cloudy light her skin was flawless, except for the crease between her brows where she was frowning. “Finn, I’m an asshole,” she said.
“Only sometimes.” I bent to get in her face a little, because her voice sounded distressed. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”
“What do you like?” She dropped her hands and rubbed her palms on the hips of her jeans, a nervous gesture. “That I say dumb shit that offends people? You might have noticed that even my own family has no patience with me.”
How anyone could be so wrong-headed was sometimes surprising to me. “What I’ve noticed,” I said, “is your family begging you to come to Vicki’s wedding to be a part of it, and you running in the other direction until I offered you fifty thousand dollars to go.”
“I’m not taking your money,” she said, riled. “And it wasn’t fifty thousand.”
“I just upped it,” I shot back.
“I swear to God, Finn, if you give me that money, I’ll call up Max and give it straight to him.”
I stared for a second, stunned at the sudden rush of pure, undiluted jealousy running through my veins at the name of someone I’d never heard of. “Who is Max?”
“He’s a friend of mine in L.A. He runs a bunch of homeless shelters down there. Your fifty grand will go straight to the junkies, the crazies, and the sex workers. People who could use it. I won’t take a dime.”
She never failed to surprise me. Not once. But this was pure Juliet—to give money to people worse off than her while she struggled to pay her bills, and to have a bad attitude while doing it. It was her moral code, and she never wavered from it.
I put my hands in my pockets. “Well, there isn’t any money until the wedding happens and you actually go. So we can argue about it then. Max will have to wait.”
She caught the slight emphasis I put on the guy’s name, and the derision that slipped into it. She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Finn. Max is sixty-five. I know him because The Muffins played for a fundraiser he organized years ago. Cool it with whatever this macho thing is.” She waved up and down, as if I was doing anything.
“There’s no macho thing,” I said. “And you’re not an asshole, because you’re right.” I moved my gaze past her shoulder, into the trees. “Dad died three years ago. The surgery was two years ago. I’ve made music, but I haven’t released anything because I’m afraid to do it. It’s been on my mind ever since you said it.”
When I finally looked at her, she didn’t look triumphant. She looked stung, and I knew it was because she didn’t like to be the truth teller all the time, to play the role of the one who said what no one wanted to hear. It was exhausting, and just for this weekend, she didn’t want to do it.
I stepped forward and cupped her face in my hands. I kissed her, long and deep, and she kissed me back. I let my tongue sweep over her lower lip, then into her mouth as her arms snugged around my waist.
I broke the kiss slowly, coming out of it in stages. My hands were still cupping her face. “I like it when you tell me the truth,” I said.
“Fuck you, Finn.” Her voice was shaky.
My fingertips moved over her cheekbones. I kissed her forehead. “I like it,” I said, moving my fingers up to gently brush her temples, “when you tell me what’s going on in here. Even when it’s just a glimpse. Even when you think it’s too blunt to be polite. What you think about is interesting to me. And what you think about me…Well, I can take it. My ego is so immense that the honesty barely registers.”
That got me the ghost of a smile. What I wanted to tell her was that she could say anything at all as long as she was wearing my jacket, walking in my woods, after a night in my bed. She could tell me the ocean was pink and that trees grew upside down and I would just nod, enraptured. But I wasn’t going to say that.
Gary bumped purposefully into my leg, giving a polite bark. The moment broke, and Juliet pulled away from me.
“He wants to go back,” I explained. When she raised her eyebrows in question, I added, “When we get home from a walk, he gets a certain something that I cannot say aloud.”
Gary was on to me. He got excited even though I hadn’t said the word treat, wagging his tail and pulling at the leash to go back toward the house.
“Gary is right,” Juliet said. She waved at the trees around us. “This is a lot of outdoor time. I’m allergic to fresh country air. And I’m hungry.”
We walked back the way we came. I’d make her lunch. The weekend wasn’t over, and I would make this last as long as I could before she was gone again.
TWENTY
Juliet
I made him play me the music he’d recorded in his basement. We’d eaten, and Gary had passed out in his dog bed as the sky clouded over outside.
Finn pointed out the files on the computer, and as I played the tracks on his sound system—God, it was nice to live in a place you owned by yourself, with no roommates to complain about your music—he took the cushions off the sofa in the corner. He scattered the cushions on the floor and lay on them on his back as the songs spun one after the other. It was a perfect lazy weekend afternoon, listening to music after a long walk as the weather darkened outside.
I sat cross-legged on my own cushion on the floor, and by the second song I was into it, my own existence vanished into the world Finn had made. His music was melodic, a lot more pop than what I wrote myself or what I played with the Road Kings, focused mostly on the sound of acoustic guitar and keys. His voice was soulful, the hooks and the bridges skillfully done. By the third song, and then the fourth, I fully understood that Finn Wiley had songwriting talent that ran laps around any other songwriter I had ever met.
