Page 28 of Resonance
“You okay?” Owen glanced over from some of the framed album release posters he was itemizing. We’d been at it for a couple of hours, and I realized the last hour or so had been silent between us, each engrossed in our work. My mind swam with the names of musicians, various songs tangling around each other like a jukebox skipping, and I was edgy, the last call of whiskey still faintly throbbing against my temples.
“Yeah.” My first instinct had been to snap out the word, like some animal with its leg caught in a trap, but the sympathy in Owen’s expression erased the instinct before it crossed my lips, and I found myself dully staring at him for a moment before I looked back down at the record in my hands. The one Ryder had released right after I’d walked away. It was a good album. It’d broken my heart all over again, but it was solid music. Lyrics he’d written all on his own. Good ones. “Ghost notes,” I murmured. And it was strange, but I could swear the stack of records in front of me still held Ryder’s scent.
I’d never really made room for anyone else after him. Ragequit the idea of love like an angry teen throwing the controller of a dumb video game. And some days I felt like I didn’t know how to get back. Didn’t know how to open myself up to it again. If I even wanted to. Or if I’d be any good for someone else. God knew I had my quirks. Bossy, opinionated as fuck, set in my ways. My life wasn’t unsatisfying, but I couldn’t ignore the sense of emptiness that crept over me sometimes.
“I hear them, too.” Owen gave me a smile so soft and warm and reverent that I knew he meant it.
Chapter 10
After dinner with Iona that night, which somehow managed to be both awkward and not, on account of Dan and Iona treating each other like each had a hot poker in their hand but were trying to be polite about it, I wandered through the house looking for him. He’d said he was going to his room, but when I checked a half hour later, he was gone. Iona and I had lingered in the dining room over a too-long, too-empty table, while she told me stories about her former music career like my own private insider session. I could’ve listened all night, but eventually she’d stood and started to clear plates, saying as I jumped up to help her, “Dan’s a good man. Always was.” I hadn’t known what to say to that.
The hallways were quiet and dark. No one was in the kitchen.
Finally, as I got to the end of another hallway, I heard a sound that led me to a partially opened French door. The scent of chlorine wafted toward me, and humidity enveloped me and made my forehead sticky as I stepped through the doorway to the indoor pool. I glanced up in wonder, jaw slackening. The ceiling was made of glass, the night sky a black backdrop for the rippling reflection of the water beneath. The lights were off except for those in the pool, some fancy ambient lighting system that morphed from purple to green to blue and back again. I’d never seen anything like it.
In the middle of that shifting color scheme, Dan floated on his back, staring up into the nothingness, goose bumps over his chest, his boxers plastered to the tops of his thighs, all of him outlined in wavering lines. I struggled to focus on his face.
Clearing my throat did nothing, but when I dropped to the edge of the pool and rolled my pant legs up, he took notice, shifting upright and shaking his head side to side to clear the water from his ears.
“Are we supposed to be in here?”
“She said make yourself at home.” He shrugged. “I get the idea it probably hasn’t been used in a while.”
I wiggled my toes in the water, then decided fuck it and stood to unzip my jeans. Dan looked away as I shucked my pants, which I was glad for since I felt self-conscious about my knobby knees in the face of all the meaty curves of his body. I eased into the water and then ducked under in one whoosh.
“So you’re one of those,” he said when I surfaced.
“One of what?”
“There are two kinds of people: the ones who jump right in and the ones who gradually ease in.”
I shrugged.
“I always thought it was kinda funny, because you’re getting wet either way, right?”
“Which kind are you?”
“I jump right in.”
My expression must have shown my surprise—I’d figured Dan to be the type to wade in slowly—because he grinned, then leaned back against the edge of the pool, ducking his shoulders under once before stretching his arms along the tile as he inclined his chin toward the roof.
“It retracts.”
I glanced up to the glassed roof panels, occluded by grime, impossible to see through with the light coming up from below.
“You’ve been here before.”
Dan submerged his shoulders, settled his head back against the tiles, and closed his eyes. “Once. A little after Ryder bought the place. We were still working out the details of the split on our albums. He added this immediately. A wedding gift to Iona, but it was really for him. He used to talk about it, saw an indoor pool in some movie mansion when he was a kid. It was an emblem to him. I never figured out if he was actually interested in seeing the stars or just what it meant that he could.” Dan’s mouth twisted briefly with something like hesitation and then relaxed. “Guess I could’ve had something like this if I’d stuck with it.”
“But would you have wanted it?”
He skimmed his palms over the surface of the water and looked around while I tried hard not to stare too long. He wasn’t hairy, not full-on bear, but there was a healthy representation of testosterone thick on his chest, slicked down by the water and laying dark and flat over his pecs. His nipples were tight and lighter by comparison. Most guys I knew shaved or waxed or were less hairy to begin with. I found those dark whorls of hair unexpectedly sexy.
“Hmm,” Dan murmured, his gaze sharpening on me so fast I wondered if I’d been caught staring before I realized he’d sort of drifted off and was now homing back in.
“Maybe,” he began, then paused again. “That first year we were playing it was all velocity. Breakneck speed trying to make a name for ourselves, and then when that happened it was on to the next goal and the next. And they switched, these goals; somewhere along the way it became a financial measure for Ryder.” He glanced around again. “Obviously.”
“But you?”