Passages

Passages 27

2010-11-26T19:30:00.018-05:00

Somewhere...

The walls of her room fell down. Rayne was cold; she wanted to pull the blanket up over her bare shoulders. She lay on the bed in the forest in the snow and watched as he walked toward her.

It was strange. He always looked the same. He always wore the same clothes and the same blue eyed smile, and he wore them now as he stood over her, although the smile slowly disappeared.

Rayne found the edge of the bed, forced her legs over the side, sat up, wrapping her arms around her body against the cold, and said to him, "You ruined my life."

Gabe sat down next to her. She felt the bed move under his weight, and now he did smile. "I never had your life, princess. I can't ruin what I never owned."

That wasn't true. Was it true? It couldn't be true. Turning to him, Rayne pleaded. "You did. You did! No one, everyone, I kept looking and I never found you, and I dreamed...I dreamed about you. And you me I named you, you said I did...doesn't that mean something? Ryan was about you, it was always about you. It has to mean something. Gabe, it has to mean something."

"Gabe?" He was walking away without giving her an answer any answer even a bad answer. "Gabe"! she called again, "it means something, doesn't it? Please don't go! Gabe?"

Sandy Point - 1100 Bridge Pass: 10 AM

The damned dog was staring at her. She'd overslept. The dream still sifted through her as she felt barefoot for the floor, grieving and lost and unhappy and avoiding the dog's eyes, and wary. She didn't want to step into a puddle of dog pee. "I'm getting up," Rayne grumbled at the thing. "Give me a minute." As if it understood...

Padding through the living room into the kitchen, she dumped dog food into the dog bowl. Spilled it onto the floor. The dog didn't seem to want to eat it so why had he been standing there by her bed with that anxious dog look? Who the hell knew. She should give the thing back to Nic.

Wind tossed the waves outside the window. It was November, and chilly, but only South Beach chilly. Why did she always dream it was so cold? Every single one of those dreams was a cold dream. She was always freezing in those dreams. Her throat tightened. She missed Toad, missed him terribly, and after one of those dreams she needed him. Maybe it would ok to just stop by and see how he was. Of course it would be ok.

You should call first...Rayne thought about it as she hurried through the house, dressing, grabbing car keys, leaving the dog to guard whatever it was he was supposed to guard. Why should she call? If he wasn't there, he wasn't there. And she didn't want to call, couldn't stand hanging around here, had to get out, had to go.

Sandy Point - 6 Big Tree Lane: 11 AM

Jimmy's place was only a 20 minute drive at this time of year, around the bridge and up the hill and down the steep curve his truck could never corner properly. It started to spit cold rain as she pulled up in front of his place, and there was that little red piece of junk with the dented fender, probably with a bag of horse or cow or pig feed stuffed in there somewhere.

Rayne inhaled hard...Pink Sunglasses. And she had worried about not calling ahead...

She didn't bother to tiptoe up the steps, but Mia was in the kitchen singing and banging pots around and didn't notice her until Rayne wrenched open the door and walked right in on her. Rayne let the door slam behind her. "What are you doing here?"

Mia startled, dropped the pot down hard on the counter, shaking her fingers as if she'd burned them. "I don't see your name on the mailbox. I'll come over here anytime I like."

The place was quiet, now that Mia stopped singing and whistling and stirring. Uneasy, it was never this quiet, Toad always had something playing full blast, Rayne glanced around and demanded, "Where's Jimmy?"

Mia stepped away from the counter and the pot. She'd certainly come prepared, there was food all over the place, and since when had Jimmy ever drunk milk. "He's not feeling well, and you are in my way. I'm making dinner." She started to stammer under Rayne's glare. "For the two of us. I'm making dinner for the two of us."

If he wasn't screwing the stupid girl, he really had to be sick. He wouldn't have her here to make a pile of pot roast. Rayne stepped right past her. "Oh please...dinner? That's your best move? Get out of MY way, cowgirl."

His room was cold. The furnace wasn't working, or he'd turned it off, or he'd forgotten to pay for the propane delivery, but he was sitting on the side of his bed half dressed. With what was left of his stash of drugs and some empties spilled out on the floor next to his bare feet. The room was full of smoke and the smell of beer but she absolutely knew he hadn't brought Pink Sunglasses over here and didn't even want her here.

Rayne stood in the doorway. It could have been her. She shouldn't have left him. He wouldn't have left her.

"Toad..." Kneeling at his feet, Rayne looked up at him, knowing better than to touch or grab him, waiting for him to realize she was here.

Jimmy flicked ash onto the floor and focused blurred eyes on her. And smiled. "Hey...Rennie? Where'd you go? You been gone, I know you been gone, but you're back."

She slid onto the bed beside him whispering, "You stupid asshole, you're going to fuck up your contract. What are you doing? You can't get wasted like this, you've got a gig on Saturday. I know because I was going to come."

Jimmy sighed, dropped the still burning cigarette somewhere near his feet, buried his face in her neck and her hair. "Yeah. And I'm gonna be there. I swear I'll be there...but Ren I'm not doing so good."

Rayne started to pull away, uncertain what she was supposed to do. Jimmy pulled her back and stroked her lip with one finger and grinned. "You got to stay with me. Stay with me."

Stay with me...walls falling down again. Ryan had said that. Not seeing her, he'd said that. She'd said that. She'd said it to the man who came in the dark and the cold of her nightmares and she didn't, hadn't, never had seen him either. The woman in the kitchen baking her way into heaven, had she said that? Probably. She definitely didn't see Jimmy if and when she'd ever asked him to stay with her. Who did Toad see when he said it? Did he really see her? Did it matter if he did if she wanted to stay?

"Toad, you have to tell Mia to leave and not to come back. You have to do that."

She stood up. Jimmy leaned back on the dirty bed and looked at her from such a distance, pain in his face, pain in his eyes and his mouth. "Ren I didn't do nothing with her, she's company. She's making me some food."

"I have," Rayne said, fighting through it, through Ryan and Gabe and her father and her mother and that bitch Gemma and all of them and everything, "I have something to do. You have to tell her you don't want her to stay. And I will come back, and when I do, I will stay. If you can look at me and you're not wasted and ask, I will stay. I won't ever go."

South Beach - Coast Road, Stanfield Residence: 1 PM

Refusing to think, leaning into music and the sweep of the road and the cold driving memory of every one of those dreams, Rayne circled the island and downshifted hard in front of her parents' big house on the beach. She got out and hesitated, and there was her baby sister playing in the flowers and the fountain.

"Hi Hugs," she said, "is Mommy here?"

Hugs jumped out from inside the blooms and laughed. "Yes she is but Rainie, NatenEric ate all the lunch. Are you here for the cookies? I helped make them!"

She didn't know she was supposed to be here for lunch. She hadn't answered the phone, hadn't looked at any messages, and couldn't have eaten it anyway. "I don't want any lunch, Hugs. I just need to talk to Mommy."

Hugs dropped her arms, waited, watching her, and then said quietly, "Rainie, don't be sad."

Rayne didn't know children, had never bothered much with Nate and Eric, and they certainly wouldn't have said anything like that. Her breath caught in her throat. "Sweetie, I'm not sad," she assured her little sister. "I just had a bad dream this morning."

Hugs didn't fidget or poke at the dirt with her shoe, she stood there in the fountain sparkles, looking up her, wide eyed. "I have those," she said. "Those bad dreams, I have those. That's why I sleep with Bunny cuz he helps. You can borrow him though. I don't mind."

Rayne knelt in the wet grass, running one hand down Hugs' arm, the soft fabric gentle under her fingers. She was going to cry. When had she ever cried over something this good? When had she ever cried over anything or anyone except that haunted dream? Maybe she should borrow Bunny, although she was sure the magic wouldn't work for her, not anymore, maybe it never had. "Thank you baby, but I'll be all right. I have to say sorry to Mommy for something I did a long time ago, and then it will probably be fine. But thank you, and I hope Bunny does chase away all your bad dreams."

Taking her sister's hand, Rayne started walking toward the door. "Maybe she won't be too mad," Hugs offered. "If you say sorry and you don't yell, she won't be too mad. I'll stay with you."

Rayne smiled down at her. "It'll be ok, Hugs. Everything will be ok." She would go back, she had to go back, she couldn't let him fall. Maybe she could borrow the bunny for Toad. Maybe she could make some things ok. Maybe she didn't need to wait for anyone to help her make them ok. Maybe that's what the dream was about. The wind blew from behind them, from the west, following them, billowing, wrapping them in a long curtain of sheer, clear air .

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Author's Note: Here ends Passages. I hope it worked. It was one of the few pieces I saw clearly from beginning to end.

NEXT CHAPTER: Winter Song (the last chapter in Sessions)

Passages 26

2010-10-16T19:41:00.009-04:00

Sandy Point - 1100 Bridge Pass: 10 AM

"It's nice." Randi stood in the middle of the only big room in the little beach cottage, stepping around suitcases and trying to figure out where the front door really was. In the kitchen? It wasn't that nice. It was kind of too close to the road and the bridge and the ferry, and the backyard was a bunch of rocks. Somebody had hung up purple curtains and painted something strange on the wall behind the tv.

Rayne slammed down a suitcase next to an old sofa. "I don't even care."

Typical Rayne, give her what she wants and she wants something else. Annoyed and hot, Randi snapped, "What's wrong with you? You've been a bitch all day; I thought this was your idea, to move out and get your own place."

Rayne pushed open the door to the narrow deck, walked out to the back and shoved an old chair aside and leaned on the rail. Randi hesitated, then followed her. One great view of the honking ferry, but if Rayne wanted something else, she could have had it. They stood there for a few minutes while the ferry deposited cars on the road and people got in the cars and drove them down the road that was about 20 feet away from Rayne's house. Some of the people yelled at each other; it was a narrow road. Randi knew her friend; she waited.

Rayne brooded, picked at the paint on the rail. "Have you ever done revenge sex?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Revenge sex. You know, when you're pissed at someone, you go screw someone else even if you don't like the person."

"No...why? Have you?"

Rayne turned her back to the ferry business. "No," she said. "I mean, I've probably done worse, Ryan counts as worse, but I haven't done that."

"So, are we talking about Jimmy?"

"No."

"Then who are we talking about?"

Rayne looked at her with troubled eyes, kicked the wobbly deck rail and headed back toward the house. "It was just something I was thinking about."

Intrigued, rapidly going through everybody they knew, might be that girl Nicky had been hanging with but that wasn't anything close to revenge sex and Randi knew Rayne didn't care who Nic did; it couldn't be Will...maybe Sam and Cruz? Cruz was really old news though.

"No it's not just something you were thinking about. Who is it? Is it somebody I know?"

A car pulled up outside, doors slamming. Rayne kept on going and yelled back something about a metaphorical question. A 'metaphorical' question? As usual, Rayne was mixing up grammar with the rest of the strange brew in her head; it meant she didn't know what she was talking about or she didn't feel like explaining.

Randi thought it might be Jimmy driving over, but it was Nic. No surprise there either. He walked up onto the deck from the front yard, whistling, grinning. "Hey Rainie! I brought you a housewarming present! You're here by yourself, and that's not safe, not around here, so I got you some serious security."

"What's his name?" She knelt down and reached out and stroked the big and sort of ugly dog.

Nic smiled, flashed that smile over the top of the dog's head, watching her, seeing her smile back at him. "PD. Personal Dumbass...everybody needs one, don't they Rainie?"

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NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 43

Passages 25

2010-08-04T00:15:00.006-04:00

Sandy Point - #6 Big Tree Lane; 2 PM

"When? But why....Mom, is Ryan involved in this, is that why....ok, ok I know you haven't, I probably understand that better than anybody but I'm just asking - Dad did WHAT? Is he all right?"

Rayne listened a few moments longer, her mother's voice gutted, explaining things, explaining nothing. Cooper had attacked Ryan. Things fell apart. It wasn't one thing. It wasn't another woman, except she didn't sound so certain about that. The twins weren't taking it well. No, Rayne was sure they weren't. Uneasy, stunned, she hung up and walked out onto the back porch and watched Jimmy doing something with an old cooler, packing it because he wanted to go fishing, crushing cans of Bud and RC Cola under ice that had already begun to puddle and melt.

"My parents split," she said.

Jimmy stood up, stretched, hot afternoon sun gleaming on his skin. He was sweating. Sexy in anything including a sheen of sweat and he knew it. "Yeah? Kind of surprised that hadn't already happened, seeing how they been cheating on each other. You all right with it, Ren?"

It shouldn't bother her. Rayne wasn't sure if it did technically bother her, but it surprised her, maybe it did bother her. They'd been together for so long and hadn't let anything break them up, so why now? Her mother had put Ryan aside a long time ago, why would her father be freaking out about him? Something must have happened to set him off. Despite what her mother claimed, Ryan had to be involved. Was that all though? Was it a coincidence that Gemma Wilson had been hanging around? There are very few coincidences, Ryan had told her that, told to look at the detail, look at it again, she would see it if she looked. She didn't have to look very hard before falling right over Gemma.

Jimmy slung a long and somewhat sticky arm across her shoulders, offered something he probably intended to be comforting. She didn't really listen to him; she didn't want or need the comfort. "I don't know, Toad. I fight with them; they fight with each other. It's none of my business what they do."

But if any part of it was her fault, if somehow her seduction of Ryan had blown up their marriage, no she didn't feel good about it, not at all, and no matter how she turned it and turned it in her mind, she could never see any way to fix what she'd done. Settling under Toad's arm though, all of that seemed far away and small, guilt traveling somewhere else leaving nothing but a vanishing whistle, the guilt train grinding away and away.

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NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 33

Passages 24

2010-07-05T18:51:00.054-04:00

Sandy Point - #6 Big Tree Lane; Midnight

"Why did you go up on the roof?"

"I don't know."

"Weren't you afraid of slipping off?"

"Guess I was more scared of something else."

Early morning

"This is the deal," Jimmy was saying, leaning forward on the porch rail in the cool morning air, his bare chest and stomach warm against her back. "We got no money. Doesn't sound like we're gonna get anything out of Cooper, doubt that's gonna happen now."

She rested her hands on the damp rail, it was still drizzling off and on, and gazed out, doubtfully, sleepily, at the surf. Jimmy had enough coffee to make four cups, but no coffee filters. He'd used a paper towel. Her mouth still tasted like paper towels. There was half a loaf of 7-11 bread and some nasty cheese but nothing else to eat. "I could get a job."

He lit a cigarette, he still had plenty of those, snickered, and asked, "You ever had a job, Rennie?"

"No." Rayne glanced west past the pilings toward the pier: it lit up at night, some kind of restaurant and bar that always looked crowded. "I could go see what they have at that place. I could be a waitress."

Propping her up on the rail, her legs wrapped around his waist, Jimmy slid one hand down her thigh and grinned. "You would be one real lousy waitress; you don't never do what anybody tells you to do without bitching about it."

"Don't be naive. Depending on how much I'm wearing, it wouldn't matter if I mixed up the orders or forgot the ketchup." Leaning into him a little, she teased, "Let me down. It's raining on me."

Jimmy shifted, exhaled smoke thoughtfully. His blue eyes caught and held the color from the water and sky, sometimes turning dark, sometimes looking almost purple, but right now they were clear and calm. Reflecting her own deep, quiet peace. Emotion swelled in her throat and Rayne circled his neck with her arms: capturing and holding the heat. "You got some naive going there too, Rennie," he said, still smiling. "We are not pimping you out. Me, I got some ideas but you keep your clothes on."

He got up, walked to the end of the porch, scratching one bare foot against one long leg, knocking off sand and peeling paint, looking east. His house was tucked down under the bluffs; you couldn't see the bridge to the mainland from here, but sometimes at night Rayne could hear the traffic. "Come on sweetheart, get on up. We're going on a little road trip."

University

"Damn," Jimmy breathed, his truck backed up in the driveway, stubborn door finally slammed shut, "didn't think you were in a dorm but damn...what's that place?" Rayne spared a quick glance to her left. Wyatt's beautiful rental soared above her own, three elegant stories of glass and stone. "My brother. That's where Wyatt lives." "One guy lives in that place? In college?" He was still staring at it. It was sort of annoying. "He's not exactly hunting under the couch for spare change, get real Toad. You know who we are. You said you wanted to come here, we're here."

The door shut behind them, and she stood there, dust dancing through filtered sunlight, the glimmer of the pool beyond the arcade, scent of summer flowers and polished wood, every surface gleaming. Someone had moved her Fender Strat, probably the cleaning service. It felt strange to be back here, walking back into time. She'd sat in that chair and talked to Cruz on that phone about something that was a hundred years past now. Looking up at Jimmy, trying to shake it off, she asked in a voice close to a whisper, "Toad, what are we doing here?"

He glanced at the kitchen, toward the room with the pool table, and then gruffly said, "Ren, we need us some cash. I need time to put things together, and you got all this. We got to sell it."

Aghast, Rayne looked around the living room, the sofa, the rugs, the stereo, the plasma TV, the Fender Strat leaning against the wall. Paintings. Stuff in the kitchen she'd never touched but it was the kind of stuff she'd grown up with, china and silver and and a Jura that made coffee you could probably drink even if you shoved a paper towel down its throat. "This is all I have....you want me to sell it? Why don't we take it and sell yours?"

Jimmy was not looking at her, looking at the room. "Because mine ain't worth shit. You grab what you can get from upstairs; I'm taking some of this out to my truck. Go on, Ren. We don't want trouble."

She stomped upstairs, makeup, perfume, bed linen and towels, but she couldn't haul all that downstairs without making multiple trips and she did not intend to march up and down the stairs like some moving man...her photos, she couldn't leave those, soap, shampoo, as if she was going to sell that stuff, she needed that stuff. If Jimmy wanted the big things, he could just come up here and get them himself.

He'd already grabbed more than she thought he could and piled it up in the truck bed, swearing over the dining room table, when she slammed out the door and there, of course, had to be, no way it could not be, fate was like that, it was going to be Wyatt. And it was.

"Rayne, what's going on?"

Jimmy dropped the table and stepped back, sat down on the table, lit another cigarette, looking at Wyatt, looking at her, waiting. "I'm dropping out," Rayne told her brother. "I'm getting a few things I need. That's all."

Wyatt looked at her, then strode over to Jimmy and said, "Need a hand with that? I'm Wyatt, Rayne's brother."

Toad slid up off the table, moving slowly, stretching. "Jimmy Breaux. And no, uh, don't need the help thanks. We're done here."

"I've heard of you," Wyatt said , quiet, casual. "Impressive work you've done. If Gemma is as good an agent as I think she is, a lot of other people will know your work too."

"Thanks," Jimmy said. "Likewise of course." It didn't sound like he meant it; Rayne was sure he did mean it, who wouldn't be impressed with Wyatt, but Toad wasn't enthusiastic. He was tired and hot and and grimy and neither of them had had anything to eat, and he was saying thanks to her brother who lived in the glass castle while he was trying to figure out what he could sell or pawn so they could eat. She went over there and stood next to him and put her arm around his waist and he felt thin and sweaty, and he put his arm around her too and leaned into her.

Wyatt didn't seem to know what to think, looking at both of them and at the chairs and tables and guitars piled up in the truck. He finally looked right at Jimmy and tossed off something easy, smiling. "If you're with my sister, I hope you know you're entering the event horizon."

Rayne laughed; that was an old silly family joke about black holes, sharing laughter with her brother who laughed along with her, and then she looked at Jimmy.

He didn't have a clue what Wyatt was talking about. He was standing there, looking lost, trying and not getting it. She knew it. Wyatt knew it. It went wider and deeper than 'event horizons'. Jimmy wouldn't understand anything they talked and laughed about. Jimmy didn't have one single book in his house. Wyatt looked at her, and he was still smiling, but the smile had gone cool and quiet and considering. Rayne knew that look: he wanted to offer to help but thought he'd better not.

"I'll call you," she said, uncomfortable and seeing the gulf, and refusing to look down into it, "I'll call you later."

Sandy Point - Night

"He has everything I've ever wanted."

"Yeah? I thought you said his momma died, he fell over her in the back yard. You want that?"

"That was when he was a kid, Jimmy. That doesn't matter now."

"I don't know. You been chasing that Gabe dude since you were a kid and making one big damn deal about it. Things you see when you're little, they stick. He's got some ghosts just like me and just like you. Quit thinking he's got it all, I'm telling you he doesn't, I don't even know him and I'm saying he doesn't."

She nestled unhappily against him, furniture bumping around in her mind, furniture she wanted and couldn't get back, furniture spinning around, stretching out, ripped apart and sucked down. I love you, she thought, and you don't fit in my world. Does that matter? "You don't understand," she whispered.

Jimmy laughed at her. The floor was almost cold but the air was full of heat, still and pressed as full as a barometer about to burst. "Dollbaby, you won't miss your damn rugs and chairs. Give me a couple days and see if I don't come up with something you like better than a bunch of pretty dishes. You gonna trust me I can do that?"

Surely she didn't care that much about the rugs and the chairs and the dishes. Ornaments hung on her life, loosely attached, the first to go flying away, but the larger and more important pieces would inevitably follow. It didn't matter; it was just a hole in the air. "I will. I love you Toad."

"You sure about that? You gonna tell me what's a fucking event horizon?"

A mathematical concept turned real. Infinity twisted inside out. A place where nothing makes sense and you can bring nothing with you but what you feel. A bed with bad sheets where someone with a scar on his mouth holds tight and says I love you Rennie, tell me you love me, say that to me. There is no answer. There is no time. There is no certainty. There is only this kiss, this moment.

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NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 25

Passages 23

2010-07-01T16:47:00.045-04:00

South Beach - #10 Coast Road

Rayne: Cornered in the dining room between the table and the wall and the smaller table with flowers and some kind of goddess statue on it and feeling every single minute of the sleep she didn't get and remembering Toad's face when Cooper forced her to leave and now both of them were going at her, Cooper and her mother. She still had sand between her toes. Nothing felt good.

Cooper: Let me get this straight. That night you ran out of the house, Gabe Lombardo grabbed you, hauled you to his apartment somewhere downtown, and kept you there. You were what, five, six years old? That's the big secret you've been hiding? Rainie, I knew Gabe, what happened there to make you keep thinking about him all those years?

Rayne: Nothing really happened. I think I ate some cereal and took a nap.

Cooper: That's bullshit Rainie. Cereal and a nap? Why didn't you tell us where you'd been if it was cereal and a damned nap?

Rayne: Because he asked me to keep it a secret.

Cooper: Yeah I bet he did. This is fucking unbelievable. You knew nothing about this?

Beth: Of course I didn't know anything about it! Why do you even believe anything about this is real?

Cooper: Why? Because your good old buddy Rafe is in the middle of it! I didn't imagine him driving her home! Come on, Beth! Gabe snatches our six year old daughter off the side of the road, she spends the next ten years trying to get over him and you honestly believe he didn't touch her?! Cereal and a nap my ass!

Beth: You don't want to know what I honestly believe. I honestly believe she imagined the whole thing.

Cooper: She didn't imagine Rafe, did she?

Beth: That's ridiculous. You know Rafe wouldn't protect Gabe!

Cooper: I don't know a damned thing! He knew she was with that son of a bitch, and he did not tell me - you want to explain that?

Sandy Point

~Jimmy~

Digging through Rennie's boxed up shit he'd found the phone number she'd given him. Cooper's private line. He looked at it, at her handwriting, pretty little pointed loops, she'd drawn a swirly line with a sparkle under the number, then he crumpled it up, shoved it in his pocket. Four long hours since the man had gone dragging her off. She hadn't looked good. She looked like she didn't want to go. Might be wrong about that though since why wouldn't she want to go back? Wasn't nothing here for her.

His phone was ringing. He leaped up, stumbled down the stairs, grabbed the phone and shouted, "Yeah? Hello?"

Gemma asking him how he was and if he'd spoken to Rayne and wanting to 'touch base' because she had some kind of new idea. The woman sure had herself plenty of those. "I'm busy," snarling it, slamming the phone down in disappointment.

He'd lived around here his whole damned life, knew the way it got still and quiet before a storm, nothing but bugs moving around in the heat before all hell broke out in the sky. Looking through the window nobody had cleaned, he sure hadn't cleaned it, walking outside so he wasn’t looking at the window, there was flat water and big clouds climbing up the side of the sky. His gramma said you got ball lightning in this house. Jimmy hadn't seen nothing that looked like ball lightning, and he'd been here since she died and left him the place.

The craving to call Rennie was stronger than any other thing he'd ever needed and couldn't get. Don't do it, he told himself, thinking about the bourbon again. You want ball lightning, get it out of a bottle.

~Rayne~

Beth: I'm not the one who needs to explain, and I still think the story is preposterous.

Cooper: Your mother has a point, Rayne. This whole situation is absurd. Using Gabe to negotiate with me like some sort of 'good faith gesture', even if there's a thread of truth to any of it, it's not going to buy a contract for Jimmy Breaux. Trust goes both ways. You should have told us a long time ago. You want to think about it again?

Beth: Gabe wouldn't have taken the time to scrape you off his shoes. You spent ten years pining after Gabe? You're telling us that's the reason you ended up in rehab?

Rayne: &nbspOne more big gun she could fire. Ryan. Telling Coop she'd fucked Ryan. How far would her mother go to protect him...thinking about it, looking at her mother, considering it, considering the splatter factor, bad bad very very bad...

Rayne: Do you have another reason you'd like to suggest? Something you think I should share?

~Jimmy~

Digging around in the cabinet in the bathroom for stash he thought he still had, finding nothing but boxes of rubbers and a lot of dust and a couple of dead mosquitoes. What was left of them after the spiders sucked out their insides.

He sat down, hanging onto the wall, thinking. Nothing left to barter; he wasn't gonna give up his guitar, had a few bucks in a kitchen drawer, that was it. Might be something...

And there it was. Leaning against the chair. The Martin. Damn, that thing would be worth what? He didn't know what but it'd be a hell of a lot. Cooper Stanfield's Martin signed by the man the whole deal. Charlie might take that in trade.

He didn't remember Charlie's phone number, didn't remember where he'd written it down, didn't want to talk to fucking Charlie. Miserable, stomach aching, staring at the Martin. If he ever got her back, that's one thing she wouldn't give any forgiveness for selling. Feeling real sorry for yourself aren't you? What about if you just try to make that call?

~Rayne~

Eric: uhhhh...she's kinda in the middle of something. Who is this? Yeah...well ok hang on man, if it's an emergency, I'll see if she can talk.

Eric: Sorry, but Rayne's got a call, some guy who says it's an emergency.

Cooper: That would be Prince Charming Number Two right?

Rayne: I need to take that call. Don't I, Mom?

Beth: Eric, tell him she's unavailable.

~Jimmy~

One long time ago he'd been up here. Come down. Don't look down. What's down maybe that was the wrong question maybe. Maybe not. All going down depends where you sit. Sitting way up here, down was easy.

~Rayne~

Rayne: Why are you trying to get between me and Jimmy? What is it with you two?! I just told both of you something you don't like and you don't understand so you're going to rip it up and make it ugly and stupid? Something I thought and dreamed about for years, something that changed my whole life means NOTHING to you? All you care about is Rafe and ragging on each other? And I wasn't freaking molested! You got that? DO YOU GET THAT? DO YOU GET ANYTHING? No contract, right? That's what you're telling me?

Cooper: Stop the hysterics Rayne. It won't work. No contract.

Rayne: Then we're done. I'm leaving. Jimmy and I will manage just fine without either of you; he trusts me and I trust him! You two? You ought to envy what we have, and you know it, both of you, you don't trust anybody and you sure don't trust each other and good fucking luck with that, because, to quote you Dad, you're going to need it.

Cooper: You'll manage? Like hell you will! You are NOT going anywhere! Rayne! Do you hear me? Do NOT walk out that door!

~Jimmy and Rayne~

The car slid off the side of the road into slimy sand and a rainwater ditch running high and fast now with dark rushing water. Lightning cracked off the cliffs to the east.

Slipping, stumbling, she was screaming his name, Jimmy shouting get in here Rennie, get in here, I got you! The door opening onto the storm.

And closing behind them.

---------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 24

Note from SB: I think at this point this is going to be the worst thing I ever posted. I can't take it down, and don't believe it's worth rewriting. I definitely will not use the script dialogue again. I would just delete the whole mess except some of the plot will mean something for Sessions, so I can't. Sorry about this.

Passages 22

2010-06-22T19:34:00.024-04:00

Sandy Point Marina - 10 AM

~Jimmy~

Pulling up by the marina, Jimmy took another long scalding gulp of coffee and leaned against his truck. He hadn't gotten more than a couple of hours of bad sleep, drunk sleep, the house hot and full of those girl mosquitoes that bit, and he'd heard Rennie walking around upstairs, when he could remember anything from last night. Couple of hours ago she'd run water and yelled at him to get dressed, and made coffee for him and sat next to him on the back porch for a little while, saying nothing, just sitting there, until they got in the truck and drove here.

"That's his bike. He's early," Rennie was saying nervously. "That's not a good sign."

Hung over and shaky, Jimmy tossed the coffee cup into the bed of the truck, lit another cigarette, his hands unsteady, looking at the big bike. It wasn't no shiny new thing; it had scratches down the side, been used hard. He inhaled smoke and swept the place, trying to find the man and finally did.

Cooper Stanfield standing way down there near the pier, one tall son of a bitch in bike leathers, his arms crossed, looking down at them. He'd been telling himself he could deal with the man but looking at him now, didn't seem so damned easy.

"Hang out in the stores or something," Rayne whispered. "He's going to be really pissed. Let me try to talk to him first."

Cooper had started to stride toward them. I'm fucking dead, Jimmy thought miserably, but he shook his head and insisted, "No way I'm taking that pussy way out. You want to get you some time with him, you do it but me I'm not running and hiding from the man. He wants to say something to me about you, I get to say my own piece back to him."

She glanced up at him with big eyes. She'd been doing good staying there with him, griping about the heat and everything but doing good until last night. "Toad, that's not the best way to work it."

"I left me all the best ways a long time ago." He pulled away from her and met Cooper's hot glare. "You're not doing this by yourself. I got to be here."

Cooper stepped down the stairs, walking slowly now, one long hard stride after the other. He stopped a few paces away and ripped his gaze from Jimmy to Rayne and then back again, and then he stood there for a long silent minute and said nothing.

"Hi Dad," Rayne began and putting on one great big smile. "Let me explain - ."

"I'll deal with you later," Cooper cut her off fast, focusing on Jimmy. He stared at him, took a step closer, his voice dropping lower, one long enraged growl. "Jimmy Breaux. Interesting coincidence that you'd show up with my daughter after I turned down your agent. I've met idiots, but I doubt I've ever met anyone in your category. In what world do you think I'd let you use my daughter to get to me?"

One real good thing about nothing to lose was you got nothing to lose but your own self; he was down to that. Again. He dragged on the smoke and stepped aside from Rennie. Amazing what the man didn't know about his own kid, dump her in rehab and write the big check and don't pay any mind to why she got in that place to begin with. "You got you some worlds that don't got a fucking thing to do with her," Jimmy shot back, and deliberately flicked cigarette ash at the man's boots.

"You don't know a damned little bit about what's been hurting her. She don't belong to you, you look again Rennie she's got herself her own life so back the hell off." Thinking again about begging for a contract, had he got so low he would do that, he let the anger take him, not yet. "And I can make it on my own, you don't go telling me I got to come begging to you. You don't know me either, ain't never gonna happen."

The man was studying him. Hot eyed yeah but he didn't look like he was going to nail him with a knife now. More like he was going to cut him open and see what was inside, what Rennie hadn't told him. Jimmy had heard that about Coop, the man figured things out, he was smart. And Cooper kept examining him until it did feel like he'd peeled back his skin and was looking at his guts.

Something else was playing across Cooper's face, something Jimmy couldn't get, kinda like Cooper thought something was funny. Or maybe nothing funny at all. The man got up right in his space and no matter how much Jimmy told himself he didn't care, it was damned intimidating. "Don't wait for her," Cooper breathed down at him. "And good luck. When you cross me, you fucking need it."

~Rayne~

Cooper was marching her up the steps toward the deck where nobody was, not this early in the morning. Rayne tried to turn around to see where Jimmy had gone and got a terse order from her father. "Don't bother looking back, Rayne."

She did anyway. Jimmy was still there and still looking lost. She was pretty sure he wouldn't get back in the truck and drive home, not without her. Pretty sure but not positive. Her stomach turning with nerves and the acid remains of black coffee, she put one foot in front of the other and followed her father and tried to tell herself that she could come up with something.

He slammed a chair back from one of the tables, making some room, and stood there looking out at the boats for a few long and terrible seconds. She had run through all kinds of scenarios last night and never had come up with one she thought would work, but waiting for him to yell at her seemed like the only way to let it begin.

"Whose idea was it to walk out of rehab?" Cooper demanded. Rayne wondered if that was a real question, hesitated, and then before she could formulate a response, he hit her again. "How the hell long have you been involved with Jimmy Breaux? Is that where you've been? You know I called them this morning - you left a week ago. Did you really think I wouldn't find out?"

She backed up against the table and clenched her hands together. This was one question she had thought about, and she tried to repeat what she'd decided to say, her own voice sounding thin and high and scraped bare, anything but the strong front she desperately wanted to put up. "I left because I didn't want to be there anymore. He let me stay with him. Nothing's going on, Dad. We're just friends. And I did call you, I called you last night."

"Friends," Cooper repeated sarcastically. "Kiss that off Rayne. You're coming home with me, and I'll decide where you're going from there."

A bird flew by and dumped on the table. Rayne looked at the bird shit and thought about shit in general, a whole load of shit going back to her mother and Ryan, her father and Stevie, Camilla the Whore acting righteous, Gabe laughing at her, and she started to get mad. Every single one of them had done something stupid, just as stupid as what she'd done, worse, a lot worse. And would he be yanking on Wyatt like this? Oh Wyatt, you have to come home and then I'll tell you where you can go. I don't think so. She stepped around the table and leaned back against the rail, the tall grass on the other side scratching her bare arms, and swallowed hard, thinking about Jimmy who hadn't backed down and was still out there waiting for her. Not even remotely sure of what she could do about anything, Rayne did her best to appear in control. Drawing a steadying breath, she looked up at her father and said, "No. I'm here to talk to you. I'm done with the crap I did, I'm clean, and I'm not even really here for myself, and I love you Dad and I'm sorry about the stuff I did, but I'm here to talk. I can walk off right now. You know I can."

~Cooper~

Cooper looked back at her, fighting anger, anger directed at his daughter and at the asshole waiting for her, still waiting despite what he'd told him. What was going on here? Wyatt had been difficult, but he understood Wyatt. He could forgive his son's anger and resentment; he'd hurt Wyatt by walking out on him and Jules. Rayne...he'd done everything he possibly could to ensure she felt safe and loved, spent as much time with her as he could, ripped time out of his schedule to be with her. But here he was again with one of his children staring him down and breathing resentment and pain, and this time he had no idea what was wrong.

"Come over here," he told her, moving away from where Jimmy Breaux could see them, kicking aside a chair and someone's discarded cooler. Rayne followed, and he saw the nerves now in the way she stumbled against the chair and fidgeted with her hair. She was trying to hide it, and that bravado was familiar. He'd come up against that with her mother; he knew how to force his way through it. "All right," he said, working hard to disguise his anger, to sound reasonable, "You want to talk, tell me what's going on. Jimmy Breaux. Rehab. All of it, Rayne."

She picked at her fingernails, something he'd never seen her do, then clasped her hands and shifted on bare feet and cleared her throat, and started in on what sounded like a speech she'd prepared the night before. "Didn't you ever need someone to trust you? I know you did. I know about Stevie. She took you in when she didn't have any reason to trust you at all. I'm asking you to trust me to do the right thing, and to know who I can trust. I know you have a lot of reasons not to do that, but I'm clean, and I know what I want. And this is...well it's about trust."

He eased up against the side of the building, thankful the bar was still closed, watching his daughter, waiting. Rayne didn't say anything more. Trust. What the hell? "Rayne," he said, "I don't know what you're talking about. What's this got to do with Stevie? You mean back before I met your mother? What's your point?"

She closed her eyes, leaning against the deck rail, gently rocking back and forth against it, "That is the point. At least you know who I am. If I ask you for something, you know what you're getting. Somebody trusted you when she had no reason to do it and no idea who you were or what she was getting."

This was going round and round. If she was asking for something, he didn't know what it was. Why was she asking him to reach back to a time in his life he had buried once and for all? Grasping at something he could give her, he responded, "Rayne...yes, she did but I ran into people who weren't willing to take a chance, and in retrospect I can't blame them. One of them, Gabe Lombardo - one of Randi's cousins - could have put me in touch with Slim and ended the whole thing if he had been willing to take that chance. I wish he had, but I understand why he didn't. You haven't spent the time, you haven't worked to build your reputation. What's this about? I don't even know what you're asking me to do."

Rayne had perched on a table; she looked up at the hot blue sky, and at the boats moored motionless in the marina, and out past him down the boardwalk where he suspected Jimmy Breaux was still crawling around somewhere, and she bit her lip, distracted. He was tired; he'd driven out here after a long dream haunted night that never seemed to end only to crash up against some of the same shit, and the place was a damned oven. Increasingly frustrated, wondering what he was missing, had she started drinking again, was it Jimmy, Cooper was ready to end this. If she was going to play games, she could play them at home where he was more comfortable, not out here in public. He started to turn away from her when she finally, in a low flat voice, said, "I'm asking you to give Jimmy a contract. I'm asking you to remember what it was like when someone helped you through something that hurt. And I'll tell you something you don't know about me in return. I'll give you the name you wanted. I guess you already know him. Gabe."

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NEXT CHAPTER: Rising Above Chapter 13

Passages 21

2010-06-15T00:37:00.035-04:00

Millwood - #24 North Lake Drive: 10 AM

Rayne

Gemma was standing aside until all of them finally made it through the door, Rayne and Jimmy first, Jimmy's grip on her hand tight, reminding her maybe, maybe still reminding her to let him handle it. She didn't even want to walk into that place and kept thinking she should have called her father first, but she hadn't, and she didn't know about the Gemma/Julia woman so she couldn't have asked him about her. Jimmy was almost dragging her in. Vince waited over by kitchen talking to Adrian in a low voice while Woody wandered around looking at the pool in the back and trying to get a yellow cat to come to him. Rayne balked. She wasn't going any further in there. Three steps into the foyer, she stood where she was and watched Gemma until she finally shut the door and turned back.

"We may as well get it out of the way," she said pleasantly. "I'm Julia's cousin."

Her father never talked about his first wife; that was a black hole in his past and nobody ever asked him about it because they knew better. It was possible she was a cousin. Did cousins look that much alike? Jimmy was standing right next to her, his arm brushing against hers, and she told herself she'd committed to being sweet. She couldn't challenge Gemma about Julia and whatever that meant, but she could go after what she did know. "You know my dad? I just know he's thrilled! I mean, how exciting! Julia's cousin just showing up and you're already into the business how great is that! You told Jimmy you had a contract. It must be so wonderful, considering the old family connection and everything. Can I see it?"

Jimmy glanced down at Rayne, and she saw his mouth tighten. Something was wrong and he knew it now. She backed up against him and glared at Gemma, and felt the Toad push his foot against hers, warning, he'd said he wanted to handle it and he knew her and knew what she was doing, and wanted her to back off. "You said you got us a contract," he said to Gemma.

Gemma gestured toward some couches off to the right in a little room past the stairs. She didn't blink, didn't answer him, didn't wave a contract. She walked. She walked gracefully. In the other direction. "Let's have a seat and discuss the situation."

Gemma

Gemma stepped aside, holding the door open, watching them trail in one at a time, and hardly able to contain her excitement as Cooper's daughter swept through. Jimmy was still hanging onto her hand. Perhaps he thought he was taking care of her, but it didn't take more than one quick exchange to know that Rayne was the one holding onto him. Or perhaps it was a mutual death grip. Either way, they came in together and moved up close to each other, forming a little army of two.

The three stragglers, Vince and Adrian and Woody, they were extraneous. If they worked out, they did, and it would make her job easier. If they didn't, she knew they could be replaced. Jimmy was the only one who mattered.

The girl, tall and tan and wary, stalled in the foyer, played with her hair, and jabbered a long string of almost childish compliments ending in an obviously disingenuous request to see the contract. Gemma hesitated as she tried to read her.

"You said you got us a contract." Jimmy Breaux, still hanging onto Rayne's hand, but trying to take the lead. Gemma took her time, studying them. How on earth had these two come together? She'd heard the girl sing and play; she didn't remember the details but Rayne had an interesting voice for a female vocalist. Nothing as striking as what Jimmy brought, and she struggled to remember how she'd played.

"Let's have a seat and discuss the situation." Both Jimmy and Rayne exchanged glances before she threw him a smile and breezed past everyone into the living room. It took a moment for Gemma to begin. "There has been a small complication."

"There is no contract is there..."

Gemma didn't give him a chance to finish his thought. "Look Jimmy I don't need to remind you how many bridges you burned. It shouldn't surprise you that Cooper is hesitating. His reputation is on the line as well as his label. No one wants to be saddled with cleaning up after your episodes." This wasn't how she wanted it to play. Drawing a calming breath Gemma tried to put a better light on it. "No one can deny your incredible talent, Jimmy; it's your bankability that leaves you vulnerable. I just need a little more time and some kind of assurance I can offer."

Gemma looked over at Rayne. If there was some angle she could use with her that could seal the deal maybe she could make this work. Understanding Rayne's position here would help - or blow it up completely. "I can get the contract Jimmy, you just need to trust me one more time. If I don't deliver, you can fire me."

Rayne

Rayne glanced at Jimmy. He looked flattened, thinner and paler and older and empty. He was flattened. Gemma had just run over him with a truck and now she was trying to spin it so it was his fault: he shouldn't have been standing in the road. "I can get the contract Jimmy," Gemma was saying. "Trust me one more time. If I don't deliver, you can fire me."

Vince stood up, made a disgusted sound, and said, "Well I'm out of here. I've got things to do." Adrian followed him but not without casting a withering glance at Gemma and adding, "A phone call would have been polite. I don't suppose you're offering gas money to cover the trip we made out here for nothing."

Jimmy was staring at the floor. What kind of assurance could he offer? Rayne wondered. He'd just hopped out of rehab early, and that was the only good faith effort she could think of. It's not my fault, she told herself. This time she had nothing to do with it. It was up to him to work it out with Cooper. That's what she'd told him. That's what she'd always said. If he couldn't get a contract then he'd have to go back to playing in clubs and forget about it. Almost nobody got a contract anyway. It wasn't her problem. He was pressed close to her on the little couch and she could feel him breathe, rapid irregular breaths.

"What kind of assurance?" Woody asked. Rayne had forgotten about him; he'd settled down in a corner and said nothing until now. "You mean like collateral? He wants the pinks slips on our cars or something?"

A car? Between Gemma and her 'trust me' and this idiot and the other two who didn't have a freaking clue about what it would take to get something through her father, Rayne snapped. "What would my dad do with your old junk rides? You think you can negotiate with him using pink slips? Get real - you've got nothing that would mean anything to him! Everything you're collectively worth multiplied by the power of ten would mean nothing! Who the hell do you think you're dealing with?"

Gemma sat back, caught her attention, held it. All right, there was no point in playing dumb anymore, she'd blown that. Rayne leaned into Jimmy, feeling his tension as she watched Gemma. Blue eyes in Julia's face, but they were clear and cool and keen and reminded her, a jagged and still bleeding memory, of another pair of calculating blue eyes. She'd been wrong about him. She might be wrong about Gemma. Gemma didn't want Cooper. Gemma wanted the deal. They both wanted the deal, definitely not for the same reason, but they both wanted it. Gemma smiled. "That's right, Rayne. We are negotiating. And I wonder, do you have something to suggest?"

Everyone stopped and looked at her as if she was hiding the answer in her pocket and was just waiting for the right dramatic moment to whip it out and hold it up and save the day. Uneasy, Rayne struggled to come up with something until the Toad got up abruptly and said to Gemma, "Don't be looking at her to fix it for you. I'm thinking that's what you get paid to do. Come on Rennie, let's go."

But even as he said it, he searched her eyes and her face just as if he were hoping it might be true.

It wasn't true. She had nothing, and he knew it. No magic tricks, nothing. A pocket full of empty air.

Sand Point - 9 PM

Jimmy

"I'll talk to you about it tomorrow...no I am not going to tell you anything more I said I want to talk to you in person tomorrow...Dad you're going to have to trust me." Rennie'd been at it for a while up there in the attic, trying to get her some privacy and he hadn't been listening close but he did listen to some of it. She wasn't yelling. She was telling him something, telling Cooper Stanfield something, giving him one long piece of her mind. Unreal. Fucking unreal. She was sure trying it and trying it hard. One very sweet girl. He smiled thinking about her, and shut it down. He couldn't do a damn thing for her now. Nothing was any good anymore. Not a single thing.

----------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 22

Passages 20

2010-06-09T14:21:00.027-04:00

Millwood - South Lake Shore

Windshield wipers smacked ineffectually at the mist while Jimmy struggled with an old map, coffee stained and cigarette burned, and Rayne stared silently out the window. No he didn't have GPS. No he didn't know where he was going. No he wouldn't stop and ask for directions. It was early in the morning. She hadn't called her father yet because he probably wouldn't be up. She'd looked at the restaurants and shops they'd passed until they drove way past them, and she was wondering morosely what she was going to do about money, and wondering how high Cooper was going to blow when he found out she'd left rehab. And found out she was staying, even if temporarily, with the Toad.

They were way out somewhere near Millwood. Her grandparents lived out here somewhere with the pine trees and the rocks and the lakes. It was the kind of place grandparents lived, not agents. Jimmy had pulled off the road and spread the map out on the hood. "What kind of agent is this?" she grumbled. "Where'd you find her, in the classifieds on Craigslist?"

He'd yanked at the map so hard he'd torn it. He swore, muttered, dragged one hand through his hair and glared at her. "She's good. She said to me she knows your dad and she's got a contract."

Sighing, Rayne leaned back against a rusty wet light pole. Her back hurt. She'd slept on some piece of crap bed in a hot attic, awful scratchy sheets, sheet count zero, and pillows she had covered with one of her shirts because they looked dirty. Cooper didn't like Jimmy. Jimmy was being evasive about an actual real contract he'd actually seen, which meant he hadn't seen one, which probably meant there wasn't one. "Toad, you're being naive. My dad's had a lot of women. She couldn't use it - you don't know him."

He quit studying the map, lit a cigarette and, sounding affronted, like it was his responsibility to defend the woman, "Jesus Rennie, I didn't mean she screwed him."

"Yeah well you don't know that, do you? That's what most of them mean when they say they know him. He wouldn't do any favors for her even if she did, and if you haven't seen a contract, I'll bet you there isn't one." Rayne paused, another thought crawling up the inside of her head. "She's hot, isn't she?" she demanded.

Jimmy dragged hard on the cigarette, snapped it down and stepped on it. "No. Yeah maybe she is. Look you don't get it, me that's not why I'm working this with her. She says she's got her some connections and I need that. I fucked up bad. Cut it out and help me find the damned road."

Brooding, unhappy, suspecting he was going to get slammed hard, already disliking this woman, whoever she was, Rayne straightened, stretched, and pointed north. "It's probably over there. Jimmy...if it doesn't turn out, I mean you need to be prepared that it won't."

He looked away from her. "It's gonna work, Rennie. I'm gonna make it work."

Millwood - North Lake Drive

Rayne slammed the truck door, slammed it twice since the frame seemed to be bent and it never closed on the first try, and walked around to join Jimmy. "This is it?" she asked. "It looks like somebody's old vacation house." He was taking a last drag on his cigarette and looking at the house. He fought with a lighter, turning his back to the wind. “Look, let me handle this ok? Don't be getting all pissy with her. She don't know anything about you."

Exasperated and confused, Rayne looked at the house again. It was a two story stone building with a garden, the lake behind, heavy bluffs crowding the other side of the road, a cat running around under the shrubbery. Except for the fact that it was stone, it looked a lot like every other place in Millwood. “If she’s been working with my father, she’ll know who I am. You ought to be more concerned about me knowing who she is.”

Two old cars pulled up to the curb, one of them belching oil. Jimmy smiled, leaning close to her. "That’s them. Be sweet for me, Rennie. Will you do that? When we get back, you call Cooper like you said and tell him we’re good. You call him, call him and tell him we're good. You let me work the rest.”

All the sugar in the world wasn't going to sweeten this mess, but she mumbled all right and let it go.

The other three members of the band huddled up on the sidewalk and shared a few tense, inaudible words. Rayne started sorting out what she knew and what she didn't know. Vince Salvatore, the other guitarist and the one with the blackest scowl; Adrian Rutherford who looked about as blond and fey as his name but she knew he'd done work in the studio for Storm Warning, and he was good; and the drummer, Woody. She thought she'd met him once at a club, and remembered he was loud and energetic, laughing and joking and drinking and flirting and generally making up for the fact that he wasn't the greatest looking guy in the world.

Vince strode up, still frowning, glanced at her, looked directly at Jimmy and said, flat and cold, "I thought this was a working meeting. We agreed not to bring girls when we're working, or have you thrown that out along with everything else we agreed on?"

Jimmy stepped in front of her, cutting off her stunned and furious retort. "You want you some rules Vince?" Jimmy shot back. "Here's a rule for you - I make the fucking rules."

Adrian, watching them, maybe not as angry as Vince but he didn't look happy, sliced in one long cool complaint. "Jimmy, you know we had to cover it when you didn't even show for the last gig, and I had to borrow the money. You owe all of us."

Something like oblivious, Woody slid past them with a big grin on his face. "Rayne? Rayne Stanfield? Hey, remember me? The Backyard, maybe a month ago?"

Vince was still up in Jimmy's face, his voice hard and angry. "Make a rule? You can't make your way across the damned street. What the hell are you doing here? You're supposed to be in rehab."

"You think you'd be here without me?" Jimmy towered over him, and he was using it, leaning forward, blowing smoke into Vince's face. "I'm thinking it's me who doesn't need you. You got yourself a prissy little cover band without me is what you got."

Adrian had caught what Woody said though, and he looked past the other two with a strange expression on his face. "Rayne Stanfield? Cooper Stanfield? That Stanfield?"

Brushing aside Woody's question, wondering if Vince really believed anybody would show up to watch Brew perform if Jimmy wasn't there, uncertain whether the Stanfield name was a good thing right now or a bad thing, Rayne cautiously replied, "I didn't bring him with me, but that's the right Stanfield."

Finally the noise must have alerted someone in the house, because the door swung open and a woman walked out. Rayne took one look at her and gasped. Wyatt's mother. Wyatt's dead mother. This was the agent? The wonderful great agent with the magic contract? The one who was working with her father?

The guys quit arguing. Jimmy unexpectedly stepped close, touched her waist, and asked very quietly, "You ok?"

Rayne felt heat in her face and goosebumps prickle up her arms, hot and cold, as she stared at the woman. The woman stared back. Jimmy wouldn't know. He hadn't even known Cooper had a daughter. He certainly wouldn't know about Julia. Something was seriously wrong. The Toad dropped one long arm across her shoulders, weight and warmth, probably his attempt to make it clear she belonged there with him. Maybe he thought the Julia woman would intimidate her, or maybe he was trying to remind her to be sweet. "Hey," Jimmy said, "I brought a friend. Her name's Rennie. Ren, this is Gemma Wilson."

Vince pushed past them on the left,walking in the wet grass. "And we're overjoyed you've got a friend. Can we get down to business?"

She curled her hands into fists, nails biting into her palms, and her nails were pretty short so she was really clenching. The same last name? What was she, some kind of bizarre long lost twin sister? Or a fraud. A woman trying to use the creepy resemblance to get close to Cooper. And she was going to use Jimmy to get there, use his hope and his talent and give him nothing and he was going to be crushed. Reputable agent my ass, she thought angrily.

Gemma Wilson stepped out onto the porch where the wind off the lake blew her long black hair away from a smooth, quiet, and absolutely perfectly lovely face. She smiled. "Rayne," she greeted her. "What a surprise...it's a pleasure to finally meet you. Please, come in."

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NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 21

Passages 19

2010-05-06T18:54:00.015-04:00

Sandy Point - #10 Big Tree Lane: 8 PM

Late, sweating, Rennie taking a shower and me checking calls from two weeks. Vince crawling up my back. Gemma, that was a good one. Called back on that one, and maybe she’s not as positive as she claimed to be last time I saw her, but we got a meeting tomorrow at her place. Not sure where that is, address somewhere way the hell out in the north; I’ll make it. Definitely I am making it.

My stomach was turning around and around. Should eat and didn’t want to eat, and had nothing in here to eat. Light bulb burned out. I had some stuff in the bedroom under the table, or maybe I’d used it already and maybe shouldn’t think about it. What the hell was I thinking to bring that girl with me?

And there she was sitting out on the porch and writing whatever girls write in their little books. Rennie had herself a Martin though and kind of thinking she wasn’t writing chick poems in her book. She’d come down out of the bathroom and stomped my Strat through some shit I knew I couldn’t do.

I went outside and took her little notebook and looked at it and she’s way over her head. She’s good, got a touch, and voice like her daddy would if he was a girl but she can’t do that. "Come on you can't play that. Me I don't think I can play that. That's Coop's riff from Ashes at Night."

"No it's not,” she says and she got up and perched her sweet ass on the rail and said again, “Not exactly."

Tossed it down and sat on the swinging chair and looked at her, thinking about it. Vince wouldn’t like it, not sure about the rest of them, but you get you an angle and you’re one dumb fool if you don’t follow it when it hits you. She was better than what we had, a hell of a lot better, interesting to put up a fucking hot girl who could shred it instead of that idiot we had. Later though, not now. "Yeah you're right,” I said to her wanting to see how she took it, “you made it girly."

She curled up and put her hands on those pretty bare toes and smiled and didn’t give up. "A girly riff you said you can't play. I can play it; I wouldn’t have written it if I couldn’t play it."

She might be right. Kind of a nice moment, me and my smokes, one very extremely fine girl who can shred and smack it back at me. Felt good to be with her. Real good. I’m thinking, damn, I can get used to this. Trouble but me, I can deal with trouble like this, and it’s the best kind of trouble. Pure perfect trouble, the melody you want and you work to get. And then I asked her, “You want to use the phone? Call Cooper and let him know where you are?”

She got up and walked away and said, “I don’t want him to know where I am yet. He can wait.”

It was starting to spit rain, and the wind was blowing, and I heard what she was saying but didn’t get it, and something about the whole deal started to turn in another direction. She couldn’t do that to me, that would fuck up everything. Everything turning dark, I got up and followed her and tried to explain it to her. “Rennie, you can’t do that. You got me in a bind if you do that. I might have a deal with his label – you’re gonna piss him off. Go call him.”

“I said,” she said to me, snapping hard, “that I am not ready to do that. If you want a deal with my father, that’s not my problem. Close it yourself.”

Sucking air hard, Ren standing there like it was nothing and this was my whole damned life I yelled, “What the fuck? What kind of shit attitude is that? Why’d you come with me if you don’t give a damn what you do to me?”

She swirled off and ran down the stairs and said, “I don’t know why I came with you. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I do know I’m not your ticket to my father. Nobody uses me as a ticket to him.”

Wasn’t sure if I thought she was but considering everything, she was more like a ticket out than a ticket in.

I had me an agent, and a good one, and a chance. What I didn’t know was why this girl had come with me. You know sometimes you ask a girl to come and you don’t think she will. Surprised the hell out of me that she took me up on it, and now that she was here, she wasn’t just any old girl. She was Cooper’s kid. And she was getting to be a hell of lot more than that. She had her some good choices so why’d she come with me if she was acting like that? “You want to tell me why you thought you were coming with me?”

She sat down on one of the pilings and dug her nails into it and said, “You know that guy at the gas station? You remember him?”

Hard to forget that asshole but didn’t get to the answer for the question I’d asked. I was taking a breath and trying to listen to her and, for a girl, she didn’t talk much. She was waiting and watching me and finally she said, “He’s Gabe’s son. I was hooking up with his son. You don’t have any idea what that feels like. I never finish anything, I never get done with anything, it’s all still out there, I run away from one thing and end up in the same place. Nobody I ever meet is outside of it, and I just want some time to think about it. I want to finish it, and I don’t know how yet. But I will do it, Jimmy. I will finish it. And I thought you'd give me, I don't know, some space, without my Dad or my mother.”

Thunder coming from the west, storm coming in, not going to sit out on the beach and get me struck with some lightning. What was she trying to say to me? I still didn’t get all of it but know this, I didn’t want to make her fight for it by herself. The guy at the gas station, maybe I wasn’t up to that, and her? Safer without the girl, she’s like a lightning rod bringing it down on me, didn’t matter, didn’t want her to go and now I was worried she would. Sparkly silky little crazy bitch. Got down in the water and said, “Yeah but Ren, I’m outside all that shit.” And took a real deep breath and told her, “Rennie, I want you to stay. Stay here with me. But you got to take care of that. You got to call him, you can’t throw me under the bus like that. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“You’re scared of my father,” she said, smiling, making it soft, dark satin voice, sliding her arm around my shoulder. “Is that it? It’s just about him? That’s the price I pay to stay here? I protect you from Cooper?”

“Hell yeah.”

“You’ve got more than my dad to be scared about.” She didn't say it like a girl teasing me with it; she said it straight. She didn't look away and she didn't move. Sky opened up emptying rain on us on both of us.

And I took her face in my hands, lightning ripping the air wide open, and let it go. All of it. “Shut up,” I told her. “Shut up Rennie….”

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NEXT CHAPTER: Chameleon Chapter 8

Passages 18

2010-04-23T16:13:00.021-04:00

Oceanside - Starfish Cove Wellness Center: 6 AM

R's Journal

I thought someone would try to stop us. The people who run around in the freaking dark before the sun comes up, a couple of them looked at us, watching the Toad throw suitcases in the truck bed, but nobody said anything. Jimmy strapped the Martin down like it was a baby, like he thought it might try to crawl out on its tuners and hurt itself. If my dad hauled it all over the place for years I doubt it's going to break just sitting in the back of a truck. Excited, this feels like an adventure, like I need more of those, but I'm glad to be leaving this place. I didn't even ask where we were going, and Toad was quiet and worked fast. It was chilly, goosebumps on my legs, dew on the grass so wet and shining and full of those spiders who only spread their grass webs in the dew and the dark. Why am I still writing in the journal? Maybe because it helps make sense of what really makes no sense. It's me making my web in the grass.

Bridgewater - 10 AM

Must have fallen asleep because then it was full daylight and hot and Jimmy was pulling into a gas station and telling me to run inside and get some drinks and something to eat. "We need gas, and me I could use something to eat. You got some money?”

The truck engine was ticking in the heat, waves of heat wiggling over the hood, and my legs were stuck to the plastic seat. Sweaty. I don't know why I hadn't thought about money, but of course I'd need money. I felt stupid and embarrassed, and groggy and strange. I didn't know where we were. I told him no, thinking about the credit cards, pretty sure they weren't working anymore; my dad would have cut them off. “Then you better get some while we’re here," Jimmy was going on. "They got a machine right there. I’ll get the gas; you pick up sodas and something to eat.”

So I get out of the truck, still sticking to the seat, watching Jimmy. He seemed really on edge and uncomfortable, serious, not joking or teasing me. Leaving with him might have been a mistake. He's got what, an old beat up truck and for all I know he lives in a trailer. And probably expects me to pay for him. Feeling down, I thought I might as well try the cards, maybe one of them still worked, when of all people in the world, well almost all people in the world - I can think of a couple who would be worse - Cruz walks out of the place and sees me. And he was with a girl. He was looking at me, and then looking past me at Jimmy, and Jimmy was standing next to the gas pump and looking back at him. “What are you doing here?” Cruz asks. “I thought you were, uh, in a place.”

I knew I was gross. I was sweating, greasy sweat on my face, makeup running, and I was hoping I didn't smell. Cruz wasn't sweating. He was just as buff and glossy and tan as he'd been the first time I ever saw him. The girl wasn't sweating either and she was pretty. I'd never seen her before, but she was sort of obviously with him since she was standing right behind him. It was annoying. She could see I was talking to him. I told him, “I’m taking a break.” He leaned back against his bike and took his time and finally said, "Is that guy giving you a ride to your break?” The Toad had quit pumping gas and was standing with his arms crossed now, staring at both of us. “It’s either him or I walk, and I might have to walk. I don’t have any cash.”

He flashed that long, white, deliberate smile at Jimmy, pulled out his wallet, peeled off a couple of hundred dollar bills and put them in my hand. He closed his hand around mine as he did it. “That would be a damned shame if you had to walk. Here you go.” That was strange and humiliating, but I took the cash, and then decided I'd better say something. He was still looking at Jimmy. The girl walked off. Cruz didn’t pay any attention to her, or to me either, doing the stare down with the Toad I guess, which was ridiculous. "Cruz,” and I was trying to be quiet, “don't tell anyone about seeing me here. Please don't do that. I just need a little time to think about things."

He sliced another long cool look at Jimmy and shrugged. "I won't, if that's what you want."

Jimmy flicked a cigarette in the direction of the gas pump despite about a hundred DO NOT SMOKE signs. He didn't say a thing, just looked at Cruz, and Cruz looked back and smiled again. "Be careful," Cruz said. "You know how to reach me if you need me."

Then he did that thing he does when he's getting on his bike, using it, mounting it, letting it idle between his legs while the engine rumbles and he controls the gas. Every move is sex. He did some business with the brake, slid one last glance at Jimmy before easing slowly out of the parking lot, disappearing down the road fast toward the city to the east. At least, I think that's where the road goes. The girl didn't go with him. Maybe he was fixing her car. Or something. Probably or and something and fixing both or and something at the same time.

"You done with him?" Jimmy jammed the key in the ignition and started the engine. It stalled. He stomped on the clutch and forced it hard enough to flood it, poor old truck, but it did start.

Judging from the way I felt, the way Cruz smiled, the girl with him, I wasn't sure. Did I want Cruz? Maybe. Why? Because he was with another girl? Because he reminds me of his father? Wasn’t that what I did to Ryan? And how do you get 'done'? When had I ever been done? Nothing was ever done. It just went on and on, tangling and knotting and strangling and tripping me up. So I told him, "Shut up, Toad. Shut up and drive."

Think I’m going to start hiding this journal.

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NEXT CHAPTER: Rising Above Chapter 12

Passages 17

2010-04-03T21:06:00.006-04:00

Oceanside: Starfish Cove Wellness Center

J's Journal 1

First night here. Puked my guts out. At least I got my smokes. I can't sleep, don't want to sleep. Been staring at that big rock out in the ocean. Stared at it all day. Saw Cooper Stanfield, larger than life, right here on the beach walking around with one extremely fine girl. Thought he had some kind of trouble with that, reason he quit touring, so who’s that? No matter, ain’t my business. He’s set up for life and I’m out here fighting the shakes.

J's Journal 2

Got some shit for not writing in the book. Made a mistake in group and talked about my nightmare. Writing it down don't make it go away. Got to get through this and get out. Get back to my music. I know what they want; I'll toss them a bone. All I got is my music. No one's gonna take it from me. Ought to just up and leave but I gotta keep my band, my music. That was the deal.

J's Journal 3

Gemma come to see me today, said something about a contract, shopping me around, working a deal with Cooper's label. That's a good thing right? Means I got something to go back to. Didn't know Cooper had himself a daughter until I ran into her last night. Right under my nose all this time pounding on my damn wall. Might be I can use this. Girl's got her own demons.

J's Journal 4

Damn Rennie’s one very fine little girl, fine and broken golden glass. Didn't want to say what I thought about her deal, whoever it was she fucked or fucked her. It's not right, her momma's boyfriend, he’s gotta be one sick son of a bitch, didn’t know it was Ren yeah right. I know wasted and I’d know if I got that in bed. Hey Princess, take another look at yourself though; no reason to think you're better than me. And where's she get off calling me 'toad'?

J's Journal 5

If that don't beat all, Cooper Stanfield brings his little girl a Martin. Ebony bridge, long saddle, ebony bridge pins, vintage nickel tuners. What's she gonna do with it? Smash it against the wall most likely. I would like to get my hands on that acoustic. Yeah the guitar. Need to get that girl out of my head.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

R: Day Seven

Dad blew in and blew out and brought his Martin for me. I wasn't expecting that and I'm kind of excited. Something's not right with him though. He didn't stay long and he paced around the terrace and took a call and talked for about 15 minutes standing in the corner under the tree. I don't even remember the last time I could see how someone felt. Could I ever? It feels like I have eyes now. Is that new or did I always have them and didn't know it?

R: Day Eight

Mom called. I told her I don't want to go back to university. I was expecting her to argue with me but she didn't. It's hard to talk to her; Ryan's always between us and I guess he always will be. She asked if I was eating and said Nic stopped by and did I need socks and underwear. I tried to use the 'eyes' thing on her but maybe it doesn't work through the phone. I wonder if she even likes me anymore. She wanted to get off the phone. I could see that much. Felt kind of shitty the rest of the day. Played with the Martin but stayed inside. Toad banged on the door. I let him bang for a long time before I went out and sat on the beach with him. Kind of wondering where he's from and why he's so fucked up, but I’m not going to ask. I know what it’s like to have something you can’t share.

R: Day Nine

Ate lunch with Toad. I'm tired of eating by myself, that's all. He saw Dad bringing in the Martin and wanted to know what I was doing with it. I wouldn't tell him. A Martin? What’s a Martin? Oh you mean that guitar? That front desk girl kept hanging around staring at us; actually I think she was staring at the Toad. He was tilting back in the chair and flirting with her. God she must be really desperate if she thinks he's hot. It was annoying. I told her to go find a phone and answer it and Jimmy laughed at me.

R: Day Ten

I let Toad come into my room. I know what he wanted, he wanted to get his hands on the Martin. I didn't let him, not yet. He spent a long time looking at some photos I hung up, me and Nic and me and Cruz. "Those are the guys you told me about?" he wanted to know. What, like I would hang up pics of Gabe and Ryan? I sat down on the couch and watched him look at them, and just told him, "No." His turn to get the laughter in his face. He was a little pissy about it. He's actually not bad looking, and he's cute when he's mad. Let him wonder about Nic and Cruz.

Day Eleven

A cool clear evening, and Rayne took the Martin out on the beach and sat down and ran her fingers across the strings, pulling out quiet music. Dreaming music. She hummed, sang softly, closing her eyes and finding the chords and the rhythm she wanted. It was an old song but one she loved and one she'd changed to suit her voice and her mood.

"Rennie, what the hell, girl you can play?"

Rayne set the Martin down and looked up. Jimmy had found a way to sit up on the edge of the terrace wall, a perilous perch, and he was way way up there looking down, watching her with a very, very satisfactorily astonished expression. She tossed her hair back and smiled. "Of course I can. Come on down, show me what you can do."

She sat back, waiting, silent, hearing the music in her mind, Jimmy striding out and curling up next to her in the wet sand. "Damn, that’s good, Ren," he said. "No shit, I mean it. I never heard it done like that. How’d you come up with that riff? It might be better a little faster though. I can show you, if you want."

No he never had heard it done like that, and it was extremely sweet to hear it from him; he was good and he didn’t have any reason to bullshit her. “Sure! I said show me what you can do. So show me.”

Jimmy pulled the Martin into his lap, long fingers sliding across the frets, making the guitar moan and sigh. He changed up, replayed what she'd created, the same long, complex, quiet and intricate riff, but subtly different, richer, and even more melancholy, then he stopped and looked at her.

He placed the Martin gently to the side, stood up and glanced away from her and then back, lit a cigarette, dragged hard, flicked it still lit and burning away into the surf. “Rennie,” he said quietly, “tomorrow, it’s gonna be my last day here. I got something to do, and I’m cutting out. I was thinking, maybe you don’t want to stay either. You got a guy waiting for you? Something you want to go back to?”

Stunned, Rayne didn’t move, staring up at him, blank. What was he saying? Or asking, was he asking her something? What did she have to go back to? Cruz? She didn’t want to see him yet; she might never want to see him. Home? With her mother? That was never going to work. If she left now, she’d disappoint her father, and that was just about the only thing she clearly did not want to do, disappoint him. Maybe she would anyway though; no matter what she did, she wasn’t Wyatt. She couldn’t see her way; it was all dark and cloudy in every direction, nothing but darkness behind her and nothing much ahead except the strange road right in front of her. All she had to do was take it.

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NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 23

Passages 16

2010-03-24T16:28:00.026-04:00

Oceanside - Starfish Cove Wellness Center: 9 PM

Day Six

“I do what I want,” Rayne declared. “I’ll stay outside or go inside.” She paused. She heard voices up on the terrace. Would they really come looking for her or was that another part of the package, the threat she was supposed to take seriously but she could push past, ignore. It was an interesting challenge. “Maybe I’ll stay outside.”

Jimmy Breaux leaned back against a rock and smiled and glanced back up at the building and then back at her. “Maybe you will. I don’t know you but you got to know who I am, and you bang on my wall and shout and I hear you too. I don’t give a goddamn, do what you want, sit out here and talk to me or go in.”

“I slept with my mother’s boyfriend.” Rayne said it, said it without thinking twice about it. Without any hesitation. Just took it and threw it down and then thought, oh my god. And then thought, it doesn’t matter. Toad won’t remember anything I say. It was liberating. This was Toad. Fried Brain. She could say anything. Things she would never say in group – oh yeah spill it all and see it all out there somewhere the next day; that was not going to happen, she wasn’t naive. Toad? He wouldn’t remember. She was safe.

Jimmy glanced at her sideways and dragged smoke into his lungs and coughed and said, “Damn….why’d you do that?”

That, of course, was the real question without the real answer. She didn’t have the real answer. Energized, almost enjoying this, Rayne gave him the only answer she had. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I was in love with him; I guess I thought he was somebody he wasn’t.”

He looked doubtful. “Yeah? Him, who’d he think you were?”

She'd already told him but maybe he couldn't make the connection between 'mother's boyfriend' and 'mother.' With exaggerated patience, Rayne replied, “My mother.”

He laughed, leaned over until his head was on his knees and laughed until his shoulders shook and finally, in a muffled and half strangled voice said, “Sorry darlin….he’s got some trouble with his eyes?”

“He was drunk,” she huffed; he hadn't misunderstood, he'd made an assumption, caught something she hadn't, and she didn't find it all that amusing now. "I sort of look like my mother.”

Rayne could tell he was trying not to laugh anymore, the long supple curve of his lower lip tightening, blue eyes flashing at her, sliding away. “That’s why Cooper brought you here? He figured it out?”

“He doesn’t know,” Rayne explained, cautiously, not sure she understood what he meant.

Jimmy lit another cigarette, looked at the surf, scratched his bare ankle and said, “How’s he not know? Cooper’s not the boyfriend? Me, I’m confused.”

She climbed to her feet and glared down at him. Even for someone as stupid as Toad, this was ridiculous. “What’re you talking about?” she demanded. “Cooper’s not my boyfriend, he’s my father. You didn’t know that?”

He stared at her, grinned, and shook his head. “Saw you walking around with him but I don’t know shit about his kids, didn’t even know he had kids. Wait, I’m wrong, there’s that boy, he’s good, I saw him open for Cave. He was damn good.”

He sure was. Wyatt could howl like Cooper and rip fire out of the stage with his guitar. Rayne picked at the thought, looking for jealousy, that roach crawling around her brain, intending to stomp on it. Be honest, she scolded herself, look at it, kill it if you see it. It was quiet, just the water and the wind and that silent search. Uncomfortable, Rayne said, “Yes he is.”

Jimmy studied her just as if he knew there was more there, but he let it go and finally said, “That’s the big secret, you did your mother’s boy, you got here for that? Kind of surprised Coop would put up with her having a boy on the side.”

“He didn’t,” Rayne insisted, suddenly defensive on her father’s behalf. “He wouldn’t. She ditched him.” Memory flared, Ryan quietly talking, telling her that her mother had almost left Cooper, never mind what he’d said that night in bed when he thought her mother was with him. Powerful love based on what? Her mother’s loneliness? Whatever it was, Ryan got it wrong. She’d gotten it wrong. She hesitated, thinking about getting it wrong, thinking about Gabe, wanting to empty Gabe out on the beach, upturn the whole bucket and dump it. “There was more.”

He tapped ash, muttering about his cigarette getting wet, but he didn’t go inside, waiting and watching her. “You got a lot of shit for a girl like you. Tell the rest then.”

This was the silly part, the part nobody would ever understand. Toad would never remember anything she said though, and it was comfortable sitting out here with him and saying anything she felt like saying. Rayne leaned forward, making it something close to a whisper. “I crushed on a guy I met when I was a kid and kept looking for him. At Christmas I finally ran into him, and he blew me off. It hurt, it really hurt, and yeah it sounds crazy. He…I thought he was something different, unreal, you know, a dream person. The one person for me. I didn’t know he was…something he wasn’t. And an asshole.”

Jimmy shrugged. “His loss. Some old dream dude, got some gray hairs on him, you don’t want him. Is he hot for your momma too?”

For some reason that struck her as hysterically funny…Gabe and her mother, wonder if Gabe could get past her father much less freaking Ryan. Rayne laughed until she choked, until he pounded her on the back, laughing along with her.

“Guess not,” he finally managed to say through the laughter.

“You want to get out of here?” he asked abruptly. “Go somewhere?”

Restless, Rayne considered it. If the offer had come from someone else, if she was sitting here with Nic and he suggested it, or Cruz, she would probably go. She wanted to go. Instead of tossing out a flat refusal, she tried to twist it a little. “If we leave, they’ll kick us out.”

“No they won’t.” Jimmy eased up, a long and lazy stretch, watching her, and his voice changed, dropping lower, softer. “I don’t know what your daddy’s paying them, but I’m putting out big bank. Let’s say you flunk the piss test, you think they’re going to toss you out? Hell no. They’ll be happy; they think you gonna fail, make their day, give em something to do the next day, for them that’s a good thing. Come on, you want to go, I see you want to go, let’s go.”

Go somewhere with him? Talking to Toad was one thing; going anywhere with him was a totally different thing; and if he thought he had any chance in the world with her…after the men she’d had, she’d hook up with this loser? Even blind drunk she could do better. Rayne stood up and knocked wet sand off the back of her jeans with one firm slap and smiled. “Not with you. Nite Toad.”

Jimmy yelled at her back, “What’d you call me?”

Without turning around, she didn't have to turn around to know he was there, didn't have to look at him to know his expression, laughing, Rayne shouted, “You heard me! Goodnight Toad.”

-------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 17

Passages 15

2010-03-03T16:23:00.026-05:00

Oceanside - Starfish Cove Wellness Center

Day One

Sleeping

Day Two

Finally stopped sleeping…my stomach hurts. Keeping a journal because they make me. It doesn’t mean I have to say anything though. It’s warm. I saw a bird. I saw a cloud that looked like a bird. I ate toast. Meant to say something to Dad about Nate and forgot and can’t do it now. He’ll figure it out. Ryan would have taken him apart. I guess I'm never going to see Ryan again.

Day Three

Jimmy Breaux arrived; they put him in a suite right next to me. I saw him perform once and he showed up late and stumbled all over the stage. Was Randi with me? Don’t remember. He’s such a toad. He pukes on the balcony. I was never that bad. I always make it to the toilet. I think I do. There was that one time but it was in the bushes and no one saw me. I asked to be moved to a different room but they said I have to stay where I am. I don’t plan on hanging around here very long anyway.

Day Four

I went swimming. I keep watching the phone like someone is going to call. Can’t get calls yet. It’s an obsession, watching the phone. Thinking about Cruz and wondering if I ever want to see him again, and if wondering means I do or I don’t. Have to put something emotional in this so there it is. Here’s your emotional THING. Enjoy picking it apart. Toad spilled Pepsi all over me in group. Don’t know if it was deliberate or if he’s just incapable of holding anything now. Why am I writing about TOAD?

Day Five

Had nightmares again...I don't remember them. Toad started banging on the wall yelling at me to shut the hell up. Like he doesn’t have bad dreams. He does; I’ve heard him.

Tomorrow I finally get a visitor.

Day Six

Applying mascara, examining the effect, not bad, at least the dark circles under her eyes were gone, Rayne stepped back from the mirror and smoothed her hair and tried on a smile. She was nervous.

"Hi Dad I'm fine," she practiced saying and watched her own face in the mirror. If she gave anything away, Cooper would catch it. Those counselors were easy to work, hearing what they wanted to hear, closing the blanks with their own expectations, but he wouldn't be. It had been six days, almost a week. Her head was clear. She wanted to see him. She could do this.

"Miss Stanfield," the intercom lady announced, "you have a visitor."

Intercom Lady wasn't much older than she was and she stammered when she was flustered and she was flustered now. Rayne smiled again, straightened her shoulders, and left her room to meet the source of Intercom Lady's fluster.

Cooper was standing around the reception room, tall and easy, gazing out the window toward the dining deck with idle curiosity. Rayne stepped out of the elevator and waited a couple of seconds before greeting him. He'd chosen this place; driven her here; stayed with her for the intake and had left looking exhausted. She hazily recalled her mother arguing with him, trying to convince him to let her come too. It hadn't happened. She didn't remember why. Another hole in her memory, one of many, many holes.

"Hi Dad," she said, and watched him turn on the heel of his boot, see her, and his eyes lit up before he grinned at her.

Taking her hand, Cooper looked her up and down, still smiling. "Hi Raindrop. You're looking good sweetheart."

She'd spent some time planning this, where to go, what to say. There wasn't much else to do except think and plan and plan again. The anxious knot in her stomach eased a little now that he was actually here. Tightening her grip on her father's hand, Rayne said, "Can you stay a little while? We can go outside, out on the beach, if you'd like to do that."

He cast what seemed like an automatic glance around the room, moving closer to her before he replied. "Sure I can stay, that's why I'm here. Outside is good. Wherever you want to go is fine with me."

The path to the beach led through the dining deck. Or, alternatively, through the spa. There was no direct route, no way to get there without everyone watching, taking notes, talking about it. She's going to the beach. She's eating now. The first few days she hadn't given a flying fuck who saw what she did or where she did it. Now, taking the path past the kitchen, Rayne was intensely aware of the eyes. She didn't look at them. If Cooper noticed, he didn't show it. “How is everybody?” she asked.

Cooper grinned. “Nate and Eric...they’re not very happy. I know Nate’s game – he’s getting the worst of it.”

The weather had been volatile, storms blowing in from offshore, flat out yellow blind suffocating heat, a cycle that left her uncertain what to expect. It was clear. It was clear now. It might stay that way for another couple of hours. Nobody was wandering around the beach because it was group time. Except for Jimmy. He was sitting out by the trees, smoking and drawing pictures in the sand. He couldn't even hold onto his cigarette.

Rayne tried to steer her father in the other direction, away from fried brain. Cooper pulled up briefly and stared at the Toad, who didn't notice because he was doing whatever he did. "He won't bother us," she assured him. "He’s a brain wipe."

"Jimmy Breaux," Cooper muttered. "Damn it, I didn’t know he was here. Keep away from him, if you can."

She started to say something, defending the Toad, and bit it back. Toad didn’t deserve any defense from her; whatever her father didn’t like about him, she could add more to the list. Cooper had not, she was sure he had not, ever slept anywhere near Jimmy.

There was a place she could see from the balcony outside her room, a place where the rocks held water in a dark pool. She'd spent hours looking down at that dark water and felt comfortable with it. Settling down on the warm sand, the surf at low tide, Rayne tucked her hands in her lap, looked out at the ocean and then back at Cooper. He sat down next to her and looked at her and waited.

She'd considered beginning with an apology. Sorry mom and dad for fucking up. She'd written it out. It was high school. It was like apologizing for blowing curfew or an exam. It did not even begin to cover what had happened. Sorry mom for screwing Ryan and making him think it was you and then messing with his head by telling him it wasn't. She could never and would never expect sympathy from her mother for that act of singular selfish stupidity, nor could she ever tell her father about it.

Cooper shifted in the sand. It was hot. He didn't look uncomfortable but he looked uneasy. Rayne thought about the Gabe factor. The second paragraph in that apology...well she didn't owe anyone an apology for being a fool. She'd struck that out of her imaginary composition. What did that leave? Nothing much. A lot of sand on a hot beach and a thousand hangovers and her father, watching her. Waiting.

"None of this is your fault," Rayne blurted out and almost gasped. That was not what she had planned to say.

He seemed surprised, and then he leaned back and studied her. "You're going to have to help me out here. I don't know what happened. Any chance you're going to explain it to me?"

She opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again. Searching, wanting to offer something, something true, a gift of truth, she found nothing, nothing that wouldn't hurt. She'd already hurt too many people, spreading that pain to include her father was not an option. Compromising with herself, looking up into her father's face, the line of his mouth hard, Rayne leaned back against the wet granite flank of the boulder and told him, "I had a crush on somebody. I thought it was something it wasn't. I drank too much and made a big deal out of nothing. I just drank too much, Dad. That's all."

Cooper's eyes narrowed. He sat up. "A crush," he repeated flatly. "Come on Rayne, don’t bullshit me. I know who you’ve been running with; don’t try to tell me you jumped down the toilet for Nic Taylor or that kid with the garage. The blood letting went the other way. You want to try again?"

The image of Gabe's face, the clear and cold smile and the laughter, you're a liability...pain like broken bones shifting against each other. Rayne took a breath. Held it. Directed her gaze out there somewhere past the blue horizon until it eased a little. It wasn't real, she had to keep telling herself that. She slid quietly to her feet and walked a couple of steps away. "Like I said, I drank too much," she said, making it light, making it meaningless. "That's why I'm here. What difference does it make why I started?”

"Rainie,” he started, and he stopped, and Rayne wondered if he was going to keep going. Cooper looked down at the rippled sand, looked up, “Rainie, I never intended to cut out on you or your mother; I thought I could have it all, my music and my family. I'd made mistakes with Wyatt. I didn't want to make them with you, and if I wasn't there when you needed me, yes, that was my fault. Whatever you've done, whatever happened, I'm not judging you. Give me a chance to help."

She could see it, all of it, splayed out broken and open and bleeding and ugly, an autopsy of her life. Reveal that? No. Rayne shook her head, looking directly up into her father's eyes. "If you're going to blame yourself for something, choose something else. Not this. You can't claim fault for this, Dad. You just can't. I made some stupid decisions. That's my fault, not yours."

A bell chimed behind those white stone walls. She was running out of time. "Listen to me," Cooper told her firmly, "I'll be back tomorrow, and I'm bringing your guitar. I know what they let you have here and what they don’t, but you’re getting your guitar. If you won’t let me do anything else for you, I’m doing that much."

They started back, Rayne thinking about the guitar, wondering if she could request a particular guitar and deciding not to push it. This time the slope from the beach felt steeper. Every step a trudge. Trudge trudge. Cooper talked to her as they walked, quiet, talking about music, drawing her out, and she heard him and she tried but she couldn’t think of anything to say.

Cooper stopped at the sidewalk, hugging her while the driver started the engine. “It’s ok,” he whispered, holding her. “It’s going to be ok. I came back from worse.”

Then he was gone.

He’d come back from worse? Well yeah, he was Cooper Stanfield. It was not the same. What was she? A girl with a guitar. She'd have to hop up and down in her underwear before anybody paid any attention, and the attention would be on the panties. She needed a better idea. She needed a drink.

She started toward her suite, stopped, and returned to the beach and stood there, restless and fighting with herself about what she wanted and what she thought she should want. One big escape was at the top of her list. Find the door and get out. It was getting dark. She wasn’t allowed outside this late.

"They can't make you go inside,” he said, that long hoarse Southern drawl, ditch water and alcohol and smoke. “You paid. Don’t matter who your daddy is, they can’t make you do what you don’t want to do. Nobody owns you. Sit out here and fuck em."

It was the Toad. He stood in the surf and smoked, skinny and dirty and fucked up and watching her like he wasn’t sure she even heard him, but he didn’t look away. The ember on his cigarette glowed, sucked into life, shattering into little sparks, falling blowing, catching and carrying fire in the wind.

---------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 22

Passages 14

2010-02-24T17:36:00.027-05:00

Treeline Heights - 8 PM

Devlin Holloway got out of his truck, quietly shut the door and shifted his feet in the snow covered parking lot. “Damn, it's freezing up here. You’re both going inside? Won't that attract attention?”

“He can’t go in there by himself,” Nate insisted. “Someone’s got to distract the girl at the counter. Eric can’t do that.”

Eric shivered and rubbed his left ear, the one that didn’t work. They were way up the hell on the other side of the North Front, up where the party was supposed to be. It was cold; it was freaking snowing in March. He didn’t know the guy who was throwing the party and wasn’t sure Dev did either. This was another one of Nate's plans.

Dev glanced at the store. “That girl might not even be working tonight. Who said we’d bring the beer? I don’t even know the dude.”

“She’s here,” Nate assured him. “That’s her car, that piece of shit VW over there. I know him and I said we’d bring it. Keep the motor running; we’ll be back in two minutes.”

“You know what you’re doing, right?” Nate strolled a step ahead, Eric dragging behind him. Eric didn’t know what he was doing or if there was supposed to be some kind of method to boosting beer. If somebody else brought it, he’d drink it, but grabbing it himself? He’d never done anything like that.

“No,” Eric told his brother flatly. “I don’t know.”

Nate pushed through the door without looking back at him. “Come on man, it’s no big deal. Pick up a case, walk around the back of the aisle and out the door. Just be cool about it.”

Nate sauntered up to the counter and started flirting with the ugly chick, who got all flustered and played with her hair and hid her teeth behind one hand. Nervous, trying to be casual, trying to walk casual, trying not look at anybody, Eric headed down the snack and beer aisle towards the back of the store.

He ignored the cooler; he knew he couldn’t grab more than a couple of bottles without dropping them, and Nate wanted more than that. Boxes and cases of Bud and Heineken…glancing at them, he wondered if he could manage those either. There wasn’t anything to hold, nothing he could casually hoist and casually walk out with. As usual, Nate’s great idea had a big flaw. This place was a mess of unopened crap and crowded aisles.

The carton of Budweiser seemed like the best bet. Eric slid his fingers through the handhold, quietly testing the weight, pulling the box toward him. Maybe he could manage; he doubted it, but he couldn’t walk out with nothing.

“Eric!” Nate abruptly called out his name.

Startled and sweating, he jumped away from the box and stared down the aisle at his brother, who was walking away. Just walking right away. And why was that? Because, Eric noted with horror, there was a cruiser sitting outside at the curb.

Ugly chick was nowhere in sight. A blonde ran up and pointed at him and yelled, “There he is! He’s swiping the beer!”

Was she pointing at Nate? No, not a chance. Nate was gone. Dev was gone. The cop marching in his direction wasn’t looking for or at anyone but him.

Taking a deep, shaking breath, suddenly furiously angry, knowing how this was going to play out, knowing he was going to get stuck with the blame, again, Eric clenched his hands, looked down at the dirty floor, and quietly, casually, said, “Fuck you Nate.”

Rockwood

They pulled up in front of the house after spending an hour traveling down windy roads in the wrong direction, parked, got out, then looked at each other. The trip from the store, no beer, no Eric, had been made in close to total silence. Raw wind scraped through the pines.

Dev glanced uneasily down the steep hill into the night then rounded on him. “We shouldn’t have left him there.”

Resentful, cold, Nate retorted, “Eric can handle himself. He’s not a little girl.”

Glaring at him, Dev snapped, “That’s not what I meant and you know it. This isn’t the first time you stuck him with shit he didn’t start.”

Payton and her sister Anna brushed by them, laughing. They were the reason for the trip all the way out here in the first place. “Are you guys coming in?”

Nate considered them, knowing what he was likely to get if he stayed, but it wasn’t as if there wouldn’t be another time. He couldn’t get into it. Trying for a smile, no point in burning all the bridges tonight, Nate shook his head. “No. Sorry babe, I changed my mind. Come on, Dev, let’s get out of here.”

South Beach - Stanfield Residence

The lights were on. His mother's car wasn't in the drive, and he knew his dad wasn't home. Nate hesitated, thinking he should try to call his brother and knowing it was a bad idea or at least a useless idea. Shit he thought morosely, started up the walk toward the door when it opened.

And there stood Rayne. He couldn't see her clearly, backlit and shadowy and skinnier than he remembered. The last time he'd seen her, she looked bad. Even at her worst though, Rayne wasn't someone he wanted to run into right now.

"Rayne?" he began cautiously, "where's Mom? What're you doing here?"

She looked at him out of the dark, long and quiet, then turned and walked back inside. "You know where she is. She's cleaning up your mess. And I'm cleaning up mine."

Then she slammed the door on him.

Nate stared at the door, then shrugged it off and walked around the back of the house and wandered down the patio. He didn't get his sister; he didn't know what the hell was going on with his dad, whether he was staying or moving on; he'd ditched his brother and he shouldn't have done that. And he'd left his mother to deal with it by herself. All of it.

The phone started ringing. He waited, expecting Rayne to get it. She didn't. Nate walked inside, picked up. That familiar hoarse voice began demanding, "Beth? What's going on?"

Nate shifted the phone in his hand and firmly said, "No Dad, it's Nate. You can talk to me about what's going on. I got a few questions myself."

-----------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 15

Passages 13

2010-02-12T13:10:00.048-05:00

Metro Southeast - Exit 5 Garaage: 10 AM

"You're his son?"

No one answered. Camilla was leaning against the chair in the corner of the office and checking her shoes. Cruz was looking out the window. Cold air was prying through a crack in the garage door, under the door. Neither of them looked at her; neither of them answered.

Wyatt was coming into the foyer, pausing to wait for Cade, stepping aside to take her arm before coming through the door and letting the door close behind him. He stamped his feet, knocking snow on the floor, looking at Camilla, looking at Cruz, looking at Rayne who was standing with her back to the wall. "Hey Cruz. Uh...hi Cam."

Camilla murmured a low and distracted word that might have been 'hello' or might not have been.

Cruz looked at Wyatt and looked back at Rayne. The snack machine kicked in. A loud mechanical whump and the light flickered on the front panel and flashed orange. He breathed, slowly, carefully, and did not respond or answer her question.

Turning to Wyatt, he said, "Yeah, ok, thanks Wy, Rayne needs a ride, appreciate it."

"I do not need a ride, I need some answers." Rayne walking unsteadily out of the snack machine light, ignoring Wyatt, ignoring Camilla, glaring up at Cruz. "You're his son? You - you let me - you did that - you knew - did he know? Did he know, did you both know all this time? Is somebody here going to tell me what's going on?"

Wyatt was glancing down at Cade, and back again at his sister, moving to intercept. Cruz trying to explain, finally faced her.

"No, wait a minute, Rainie I didn't know anything - "

"You didn't know? You expect me to believe you didn't know?" She was screaming now, screaming, "You're his son?! I didn't even know he was real and you're his SON?"

Camilla shoved between Wyatt and Cade and Cruz, half pass across the floor, heels tapping on the wet tile. "Oh my god Rayne, shut up. I have no idea what Gabe did to you or with you but nobody wants to hear you whine about Gabe. You sound like Amanda and believe me darling that is no compliment."

Staggering forward, slipping where Camilla had not slipped. "You stupid whore, like I need compliments from you, you don't know shit, all you know is what you can fuck," Rayne spat, "and you got damned lucky with Heydon."

"You'd better take the wheels off that training bra and learn a few things yourself sweetie since it's pretty obvious you do not know one single thing about men not one single simple little thing. You don't even know when it's not just fuck and when it's more than that. And look at your face do you even know what you look like now?"

"We're leaving," Wyatt announced grabbing Rayne around the waist with one arm and shoving the door open with the other, Rayne protesting “wait wait let go let me go” while he tightened his hold on her. "Cade will you bring the car up closer? I don't think she's going to make it across the parking lot."

Cruz watched them, offering no final promise to call her, offering nothing, Rayne walking with Wyatt, still fighting it, Wyatt growling, "Can't believe you said that about Cam in front of Cade." The door closing on them, the room quiet now, Camilla still there.

Leaning against the desk, Camilla softly spoke to his back. "If Gabe had her, she won't come back to you."

"He never touched her." He still gazed out the window. Wyatt was stuffing Rayne into the car, little brunette girlfriend trying to help, he could see her trying to console Rayne. The latch on the door was sticking, Wyatt swearing, Rayne still yelling, Cade raising her voice in return.

He repeated the phrase because there wasn't anything else to say. "He never touched her."

Camilla sighed, walked around him, put one hand on the door and paused. "Yes he did. Maybe not the way you're thinking about it but something happened and you can't deny it and you can't undo it. It's just exactly too late. I'm sorry honey, I really am."

She left, striding down the sidewalk, long model strides, one foot and then the other foot, very sure in those heels, not looking back.

Cruz stood in the empty street in the pale cold light, stood there in the snow, long after she’d gone. The snow fell on him. It fell on the street. He could no longer see the end of road through the snow.

----------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 14

Passages 12

2010-01-25T15:05:00.038-05:00

Metro Southeast - Exit 5 Garage: 9 AM

The coffee scalded his tongue. Cruz held it in his mouth, letting it cool before swallowing. It was bitter, too strong, but he needed the caffeine. Through the glass door he could see Rayne still crashed out on his bed and took another deep swallow. It had been a sleepless night for him, the girl restless in her dreams. He’d finally stretched out on the couch, cold and almost as restless, and waited for light.

Cruz wandered around the room and stood looking out the window at snow flurries, the ragged bottom hem of the storm. Dry snowflakes tapped on the glass. Look at me, see me, I’m going to fuck up your day. They’d have to stand in line behind a hungover girl and a man wearing his face.

Sleeping Beauty was still sacked out, her mouth open, gently snoring as he contemplated her. She needed help Cruz didn’t think he was equipped to provide: a shrink, rehab, a week at some fancy spa, something. He didn’t know what to expect when she woke up. The Gabe connection lay there between them, the fuse lit and burning. Running his hand through his hair, exhausted and uneasy, knowing what he was likely to find when he started looking at that bomb, it would be better if she wasn’t here.

He started to pour another cup of coffee when the phone rang, juggled it, phone in right hand, coffee pot in left hand, almost dropped it, swore, and mumbled, “Yeah?”

"Cruz, it's Wyatt. Is Rayne there with you?"

Glancing at the long tangle of dark blonde hair spread out over his pillow, the curve of Rayne’s bare ass peeking out over the sheets, he cleared his throat, shifted over to the couch, and said, cautiously, "Yeah."

There was silence on the other end of the phone. Cruz had met Wyatt only a couple of times, briefly, and wasn't certain what Rayne's brother thought of him. Probably not much.

It was raining on Wyatt’s end of the conversation, such as it was so far, raining hard enough to hear, and a girl’s voice rose between the raindrops as she informed Wyatt that she was going to look around the back of the house, then Wyatt's voice calling her back.

He’d begun to wonder if he was supposed to say something else when Wyatt finally asked, "Is she ok?”

Cruz almost replied with the same one word response when he decided he'd better come up with more than that before Wyatt got pissed and added angry brother to his list of problems. "She's not feeling great. She had kind of a bad night."

"A bad night," Wyatt repeated, and there was an edge to his voice. Sarcasm maybe, sarcasm definitely. "I bet she did. Look, I know she’s been drinking.”

Cruz heard him fumble with the phone and say something to the girl before he continued, this time without the sarcasm. “You want me to come get her? Our father’s going to get involved and it might be better if she was with me. Just offering."

He hesitated, tracing the edge of his teeth with the tip of his tongue, casting a sidelong look back at his bedroom. What bothered him about the notion of turning her over to her brother? She’d been dumped and dumped hard, and might consider this some variation on that experience. He needed time alone though, and it would be easier on both of them if he got it sooner rather than later. “Thanks,” he replied. “That sounds all right.”

Wyatt was still talking to the girl, and Cruz thought about Gabe, thought about the holes in his information, and quickly added, before he could change his mind, “Got a question for you. You ever hear of a guy named Gabe? Somebody Rayne would have known?”

“We’ll take my car,” Wyatt said to the girl, then turned his attention back to the question. “Uh, not really. The only Gabe I ever knew was some guy related to Camilla and Rafe, Gabe Lombardo I think. He might have worked for my dad a long time ago. Can’t see how Rainie would have known him though. It’ll take us about an hour to get there. Thanks man, for taking care of her.”

He had an hour. The internet beckoned like a girl, come check me out, you’ve got the name, slide over here and try me on. Rayne was asleep. The place was quiet. Christmas Day – even if some idiot drove up and wanted help with a car, he was officially closed. He rationalized. He could do one quick search before Wyatt arrived. Cruz eased into the chair, pulled up to the desk, and carefully, warily, typed in the name. Gabe Lombardo.

He’d had no expectation of immediate success but the links exploded across the screen.

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,730,000 for gabe lombardo. (0.42 seconds)

People. Us Magazine. Probe. Thumbnails. Newspapers. A recent string of tweets. Tribalpages, some damned genealogy site.

His guts felt loose, watery, and he reflexively leaned forward. Holy shit, he thought, incredulous and alarmed. No way. Tentatively, holding his breath, disarming the bomb, he clicked on the first link.

A marriage to some rich party girl named Tessa Paolini. Then he was missing. Maybe dead. Maybe murdered by one Amanda Alcaide. Or not. Link after link. Poker tournaments. Society gossip about women. He was related to that crazy bitch from the club, Camilla Lombardo, and she was a porn star (a porn star?) who may or may not have screwed Cooper Stanfield but she was hooked up with another guy in that band now. More on that. More on Amanda. A link to someone else related, the guy Wyatt had mentioned, Rafe Taylor, who had his own links. It looped back on itself, too many of them and all of them running around some insane family game board.

What the hell was Gabe? A player? A con artist? Some kind of gigolo? Where’d the money come from? Cruz tightened his grip on the mouse and stared at the screen. What had happened to him? Obviously he hadn’t gone the way everyone thought he had since he was walking around bigger than life, and for some reason – duty curiosity something else incomprehensible – he’d figured out he had a son and had taken the trouble to put a name to said son.

A name he’d thrown at him last night and laughed when he’d done it. Here’s a hard ball, think fast.

Shoving the chair back until the wheels rocked perilously on the edge of the stairwell, Cruz sunk his right thumb through the mesh seat, gripping the front rail, and studied the floor.

Identity established. Gabe’s son. Rayne’s Gabe. It had to be. He breathed hard, tasting the tail end of the coffee. Was one of those women his mother? He’d bet on the blonde. Amanda. There was a shot of her, big and pregnant. Was she still among the living too?

Someone leaned on the buzzer downstairs. Shaking, Cruz got up. Ran sweating palms against his jeans, and put one foot in front of the other and went to answer it. It would be Wyatt. One good thing since he’d have time to digest all this before he had to decide what to say to Rayne.

Framed in steel, there she stood on the other side of the door, looking in. It wasn’t Wyatt. It was Camilla. Cruz wasn’t certain exactly what she was, aunt or cousin, but she wasn’t a sister. The way he felt about it right now, it wouldn’t make any difference if she was his sister. She didn’t know he knew. He considered leaving her out there but the temptation to throw what he knew right back at her was irresistible.

He let her in, dragging cold air behind her, and slammed the door shut and glared at her. “Let me see if I can guess why you’re here. Camilla. You’ve got a brother or cousin or some relative who goes by the name of Gabe and he’s suddenly taken a familial interest in this particular part of the world. Right?”

She stood there looking at him for what felt like a ridiculously long set of moments. Now that he knew who she was, Cruz was even less impressed. Retired porn star, something like that, nothing he’d ever respect. He kept his distance from her and hoped Rayne was still asleep and waited.

“Gabe didn’t tell you did he?” she said.

Wyatt was trudging through the four inches of snow on the sidewalk, approaching the door and looking around. Cruz didn’t see the girl but she was probably right around the corner behind him. Camilla chewed delicately on a fingernail and looked past him with a peculiar expression.

He was shutting this down now before it spread any further, taking a stand, letting this woman know the way it was and the way it was going to stay.

“No, he didn’t tell me,” he told her coldly, glancing past her at Wyatt. He didn’t want Wyatt in the middle of this cluster fuck. “He’s playing games and evidently so are you. I want you out of here, and I don’t want you coming back. You got that? But yeah I know who he is. Gabe Lombardo is my father.”

---------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Chameleon Chapter 7

Passages 11

2010-01-12T12:21:00.057-05:00

I took my love and I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
Until the landslide brought it down

Metro Southeast - 11:30 PM

Shivering under the inadequate cover of an old jeans jacket, Cruz briefly closed his eyes and tried to come up with one good reason why he was doing this. The girl had money; she had family; she had friends. He didn’t have money; he wasn’t part of her family; and he grumpily wondered if he wanted to be her damned friend.

The street was quiet. A little bit of snow and the whole place shut down. The good thing about that was he’d have plenty of work as a consequence. Those South Beach people ran off the road, bottomed out the sports cars, drove the SUV’s into each other. Putting work aside, he tried to wake up and focus on where Rayne might be - same place the rest of them went after totaling their rides, one of the few bars still open tonight. He didn't know where she was but he could make an educated guess.

He started for the parking lot behind the garage, planning on borrowing one of the cars instead of using his bike, when he glanced across the avenue toward Chang’s. He'd start there and walk north through Chinatown. He couldn't think of a better option, and at least the alley was partially covered.

Cruz shoved his hands into pockets that were too small, stepped off the curb and quickened his pace into a half run, as if he could outrun the cold. He'd give this crazy search an hour, give her an hour. After that, Rayne Stanfield was on her own.

“Gabe,” the woman said. "We don't have time for this. We're already late." She was standing right next to the man and she sounded annoyed. She sounded like her mother. Rayne shifted her hands on the slick sidewalk, trying not to fall on her face. Her heart was racing. Running and running and running for the finish line now. It was him. It was finally, finally him.

“It's you!” Rayne gasped. “I knew you were alive!”

He got to his feet, dusting off his own hands, and he shrugged and said, “I’m going to deal with this first.” He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to the woman.

Rayne sat down, slid, grabbed at his leg. He moved away, out of reach, not far but just out of reach she couldn't reach him couldn't touch him, and he didn't, he still didn't look at her.

"I remember you!" she started shouting, screaming, because he would look down, she knew he would because he'd said her name. "I remember you too! Did you come back for me?”

He finally glanced down at her, then halfway knelt, taking care with his jeans, and studied her curiously, reaching out and touching her chin with cold fingers. “You remember me?” And he smiled and shook his head. “You were a very little girl, Rainie.”

He knew her. He remembered. A wave of relief swept through her. It was going to be all right. “I’ve been trying to find you for years! I never forgot you! You said, you said don’t forget and you gave me….you gave me a sword!” she stammered.

“Oh for gods sake this is ridiculous,” the woman snapped and turned and looked back the way they had come before she stared back down at Rayne. “Call 911 if you’re so concerned about some piece of sidewalk trash. She’s obviously drunk.”

Gabe looked aside, over his shoulder. “She certainly is. We have a few minutes to spare. I don’t know if I can reach Camilla tonight, but I intended to contact her while we’re here. If I can reach her, she can take care of it. If I can’t, I’ll turn her over to whoever answers 911.”

The woman glared at him. “You said nothing to me about contacting Camilla.”

He smiled again. “You’re right, sweetheart. I didn’t.” He started to his feet, adding an order. “Hand me the phone.”

This could not be happening, this was not the way she remembered him, was it really him? It was, it had to be, but this was wrong. This was terribly wrong. Frantic, Rayne lurched up, fell again, and cried out, “Camilla? Why would you do that? Don’t you remember what you said? Don’t you remember about the sword? Aren’t you going to take me with you?”

He paused and looked back down at her, his expression calm and cool and strange. “No Rainie. I don’t remember anything about a sword, and I am definitely not taking you with me. You’re a liability; that’s never going to happen.”

Rayne fell back, the tears loose and hot and threatening. All this time, her whole life, and none of it was true? “I’m not! You can’t!” she begged. “Please!”

She heard footsteps behind her. Someone shouted, a familiar voice yelling, “Hey! Back off!” Gabe looked up. The woman looked up too and muttered, “Wonderful. We’ve got a good Samaritan joining us.”

Gabe drew a long, visible breath, and exhaled, his warm breath pluming in the cold air, and his smile widened and flashed. He shoved the cell back in his pocket. “So we do,” he said quietly. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one with the sword.”

He’d caught only a few words of the exchange, enough to know that whatever fantasy Rayne had about some dream guy, improbably, unbelievably, here he was. And he was, as Cruz had suspected, an asshole.

He leaned over, touched Rayne’s shoulder, her hair, and assured her, “It’s ok. It’s going to be ok, Rainie.”

She made an awful little sound like a cat mewing in pain. He couldn’t tell if she even heard him. She was even more wasted than she’d been the last time he’d found her. Yeah the whole dream guy deal was asinine, but the son of a bitch didn't need to kick her when she was down like this, like stomping on a sick kitten.

Infuriated, Cruz stepped around her and got right up in the jerk’s face. “So you’re the famous Gabe. What the hell are you, some kind of perverted freak? You like little girls? What’d you do to her when she was a kid? I ought to rip your fucking face right off your skull!”

He had a woman with him, and she stood there with her mouth open, then stepped back a couple of inches. Famous Gabe crossed his arms and took his time, letting it go like he hadn't even heard him. “You are remarkably like your mother,” he said at last. “She was always chasing what she could never catch.”

Rainie was staggering around behind him. He heard her grab the fire escape, the clink of her rings against the rusted steel. It was cold out here. Cold and dark and he was tired and this prick was working the mother card? “Try that on someone who gives a damn,” he shot back. “It sure as hell isn’t me. I never knew her or my father. Don’t fuck with me man. Don’t do it. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but you don’t want to go there with me.”

“Get me out of here,” Rainie whispered.

“I will babe, hang on.” Cruz tightened his grip on her arm, then turned and looked back. The man was still there, still looking back at him, the same cool smile on his face, blonde bitch at his side, still ignoring her and looking right back at him.

“Take good care of that princess, Cruz,” he finally called out, laughter that rang and echoed off the walls and through the snow that clung to his hair and his coat. Cruz couldn’t tell if that was snow in his hair or streaks of gray. “And you turned out better than I had any reason to expect,” Gabe added before he shook off the snow and turned his back and walked away.

----------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Rising Above Chapter 11

Passages 10

2009-12-21T21:41:00.038-05:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 6 PM

"What the hell are you doing? You're not even dressed! It's going to take us at least an hour to get all the way out to Rockwood!"

Wyatt was dressed up. Prom night dressed up or really big occasion dressed up. Something important was going on. Rayne peered past him through the open door and there was his little red car at the curb, and she looked up at him uneasily and then back down at the floor. Whatever it was, she didn't want to go. She wasn't going to go.

Settling back into the chair in the dark room, Rayne cautiously asked, "Where are we supposed to be going? I don't think I can make it."

Her brother put one hand on the back of the chair as if he intended to yank it out from under her. "It's Christmas Eve, Rainie. We're supposed to have Christmas Eve dinner with Dad and Beth and the twins. This is sort of a big deal. Don't tell me you forgot!"

Rayne shifted on the chair and tried to remember if she knew about this. Maybe, but it was fuzzy and distant and might not even be the right memory. "I didn't forget. Nobody told me. And I'm sick; I have the flu so I'm not going."

He turned around, surveying the room, then marched into the kitchen growling the whole way. "Sick my ass. You're wasted. Look at this place. Nothing in the fridge. Nothing! When's the last time you even had a meal?"

Grabbing a can of coke, popping the top, the fizz loud in the quiet, the dark and the quiet, his bootsteps following the sound of the fizz, he came back toward her again. "This, this is the only thing you've got that's not 90 proof. What's wrong with you Rayne?"

Miserable, she said, "I don't feel good, Wyatt. I really don't. Things suck right now. I can't do a family thing, I can't."

She felt herself being gently lifted from the chair. Wyatt held her firmly by the shoulders and she wasn't sure whether he was going to shake her or what. He didn't; he just looked at her for the longest time. "Rainie, please talk to me. I can help, I want to help, if you just let me in a little and trust me. You're my sister and I love you! Tell me what's going on?" Wyatt pulled her into him and held her almost protectively.

“It’s okay,” Rayne assured him, “it really is. I love you too Wy, but I can’t do this tonight. Tell them I’ll call them. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

His voice was a muffled sigh against her ear. "All right, Rayne, I'll cover for you. But tomorrow morning I'm coming over, making you a decent breakfast, and we're going to talk."

She wasn't even sure she wanted him to go, but he was leaving. He was walking out through the door and under the arch. There were so many circles and parabolas, strange geometry and none of it made any sense. Wyatt in a red jacket going to a red car through blue air under black arches.

She followed him out and watched the car pull out and head east toward the mountains and the bridge over the cold water. The starlight was cold, the wind was cold, and if she went back inside, she would still be cold. She'd been this cold once, a long time ago. You're going to freeze if I leave you here... where had that memory come from? She hadn't been able to stay there. She couldn’t stay here. "So go,” Rayne whispered, she could just go. Go and go because it didn't matter where she went.

Chinatown - 10 PM

The lights threw off little warmth. It was kind of strange how she always came back here. Rayne shivered as she walked through the alley in Chinatown, knowing she should have at least washed her hair. How gross was that, to just get out of her sweats and drive here when she hadn’t even taken a shower. I took one yesterday, she reasoned. Or the day before. And who cares anyway.

Red light poured through the double glass doors into the bar. She wanted to go in there, sit down and stop thinking. She should have gone with Wyatt. She should have sent Christmas cards. She should have finished that first semester project. She should go in and shut up the crazy lady in her head.

Laughter and music spilled out along with the light. It was a room full of happy people singing Christmas carols, even if it was a bar. Did she want to go into that?

Rayne pressed the palm of her hand against the door. Her hand. Where was her purse? She’d put her keys in her pocket but where was her purse? She couldn’t go in there anyway without any money or her credit cards or anything. Well maybe she could because they knew her and they knew who she was, everybody knew who she was. And everybody would be staring at the dragged out piece of crap she was right now.

She turned and ran, stumbling across the courtyard toward the stairs to the park. Not here, she didn’t want to be here.

Someone had put a gigantic Christmas tree up in the middle of the park. It loomed, huge and bright and pointed and hollow and dressed with fiercely yellow glowing bells and stars and packages and horns and grinning Santas. “GRANDMA GOT RUN OVER BY A REINDEER!!” it shrieked from someplace inside the thing.

For a second she thought she was going to hurl right there on the brick in the park next to the tree from hell. Where’s the road? Rayne looked west, saw Chang’s place, that was the way, that’s where she always parked her car. She turned her back to the tree and snarled, “I need me one of those fucking reindeer.”

She made it across the street. Her hands shaking, leaning back against the column because she wasn’t sure she was going to stay on her feet, Rayne punched in the number and waited. It was Christmas Eve. He wouldn’t be there. But he answered after about six rings although he sounded fuzzy like she’d woke him up, or disturbed him in the middle of something, and that visual was more than she wanted or liked or felt good about in any way. “Cruz,” she said, “ummm...Cruz I can’t get home and I know it’s not a good time but can you come get me?” She heard him say Rayne? Where are you?

Then she dropped the phone. It fell somewhere around there, under the fire escape stairs, in the dark and the weeds. Desperate and frightened, there was no way she could drive and she hadn’t even brought her purse, she didn’t have any cash, that’s why she hadn’t gone into the bar, wasn’t that why she hadn’t gone into the bar, she couldn’t pay a taxi, and where was the damned phone? He couldn’t find her if she didn’t tell him where she was. No one could find her. Stupid, stupid, she was so stupid to even come here looking for what?

"What do we have here?" The voice was deep, quiet, and detached. He touched her first with the toe of his boot. She saw the boot. It was black. She saw jeans above the boot, a man's leg, long, so he was tall, a tall man in a black boot. There was another boot just like that one. Yeah, he had two legs and the same boots on both feet and he was tall.

Rayne scrabbled up on all fours, fighting for even that much balance, and peered up at him through dirty hair and a haze of doubled and tripled lights that spun and whirled and made it hard to see. She saw his eyes though. Cool and clear and blue eyes in a dark face. He looked at her with those eyes, seeing her, looking at her as if he recognized her.

He was kneeling down on the cold pavement next to her, studying her while the red and green and gold lights shone over his shoulder and someone sang The First Noel in a high clear voice, and he said finally, softly, "Hello again, and merry Christmas, Princess Rayne.”

--------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Chameleon Chapter 6

Passages 9

2009-12-07T15:36:00.044-05:00

Metro Southeast - Chang's 10:00 AM

Her head still pounding, but it was dull, distant, Rayne passed the entrance to the club and tried to recall exactly where she’d left her car. She felt faintly sick. That has been a mistake, telling Cruz about everything. He’d reacted just as she thought he would, angry and condescending.

It felt like it was going to pour down, that heavy air, and she began to wish she’d just stayed there with him, gone back to bed with him, gone to sleep next to him. It was a wistful, painful ache, long past desire into another place altogether, somewhere she hadn’t wanted to leave.

And there was Chang, looking at his watch, making sure she saw him looking at his watch. “I should have towed your car last night,” he growled. “Anybody but you, and I would have towed it. Move it, Rayne.”

He usually took pretty good care of her, well he would considering the cash she threw down in his club, and Rayne didn’t take the threat seriously. She could leave the car here for days and he wouldn’t tow it. “I’m doing it, I’m doing it right now. God you’re as bad as my mother.”

Rayne paused by a little penned tree on the corner and gazed up at the building. All the way up to the top, an open rooftop. There was a door, and she knew that door. Her skin crawled…she’d been there, she remembered, remembered…the city and how it seemed to go up forever into the sky, higher and taller and bigger than anything she’d ever seen before. And he had laughed about it, right up there on that roof. She’d been here a hundred times and she’d never remembered that before, but she did now.

Agitated, determined, Rayne turned and pounced on Chang, demanding, "I want to see the top floor in this place! You’re taking me up there right now! I want…I want to rent it!”

He stared at her, took a step back, then shrugged. “That’s crazy, Rayne, you’re not renting in this neighborhood, but if you want to see it, sure, you can see it.”

It was three stories up, up a dark stairwell. Chang unlocked the door, mumbling about the time, stood aside and let her enter before him.

There was the staircase, and the light, and the walls that looked like someone had taken a bucket of cement and splattered them with it. Empty and quiet and safe; he had been here. This was the place.

Rayne carefully took a step forward and placed her hand on the rail. Steel. But it was so warm, warm and smooth, steel skin. She closed her fingers around it. “He lived here, didn’t he,” she said.

Still standing a little behind her, his voice echoing in the empty space, Chang responded, “Who lived here? I’ve had a couple of renters but you don’t know any of them, Rayne. I’m sure you don’t.”

She gazed up the stairs. She’d run up those stairs, walked down them. Rayne put one unsteady hand to her cheek; her own skin felt cool, the same temperature as the steel. “The person you thought you saw when you yelled at Cruz last night. The ghost. He lived here.”

He swore softly, under his breath. When Rayne turned to look at him, Chang folded his arms across his chest and declared, "That man’s long dead, years now, and there’s no way you knew him. Maybe he did live here for a while. So what?"

She turned her back to him and stroked the stair rail again, carefully, using only one finger, touching it as if it were alive and might whisper something to her. Everything here was familiar. The pipes in the corner, all of it. The smell was familiar. Iron and wood and wind. He was dead? That couldn’t be, that could not be true. Her legs were shaking now along with her hands. "You're sure he's dead? You saw it happen?"

"Look, Rayne,” Chang said, backing it off, less confrontational now. “Gabe got mixed up with some people. Somebody like you shouldn't know anything about Gabe. I didn’t see it happen, but everybody knows he’s dead. He’s been gone for years."

Now she had a name. Gabe. Rayne took it, tasting it, trying to remember it. She didn’t. Everybody knows it but nobody saw it, a reeking lie. That meant nobody knew it; that meant he might not be dead. "Who was he?"

"I don't know anything about the man,” he insisted, “and I've got work to do. We have to go."

Rayne paused by the door out and looked upstairs one more time. It was so dark and so clear, rain on open windows. "Who knows for sure, Chang? And who knew him?"

Chang sighed, a long frustrated exhalation, as he moved past her toward the door. "Nobody. Nobody knows anything. Leave it alone, Rayne. He’s dead; you need to leave it alone."

Metro Southeast - Chinatown 11:00 AM

Walking through light rain under the heavy canopy of scarlet leaves, Rayne headed for the bar in Chinatown. She needed a drink. She needed to think. She had to call her father, but she needed a drink before she did that. Just one drink.

She eased onto the familiar barstool, waved over the bartender and quietly and comfortably ordered, “Glenfiddich. A double and no ice. And don’t try the house scotch on me because I know the difference.”

The light had begun to fade outside the windows, more than one drink, a lot more than one drink later, Rayne finally focused on something ringing. It was her phone. Oh god, she thought frantically, how late is it?

It was her father. Suddenly struck with guilt, she hadn’t called, she’d let it slip, Rayne staggered up from the barstool and tried to answer coherently. "Dad yeah hang on hang a sec got to get up shit wait a minute ok what?"

He was yelling about her mother, and the bartender was trying to talk to her at the same time, maybe thinking she was walking out without paying.

"Oh yeah! Damn I did pay for that, didn’t I pay for that? Put it on that card not the other one. Dad? They're by a bridge. There's a very big bridge. She does NOT know what they did because I was there and I talked to her. And she doesn't know it. You have to go take care of all of that because you do not want it to be like Ryan. It can’t end up like Ryan! Ok bye."

He hung up, or had she hung up? Rayne didn’t know and it didn’t seem to matter. She’d told him. Hadn’t she? “You know what,” she said to the bartender, “I’m leaving. You water the drinks anyway.”

Leaning against that big damned green dog statue, or was it a cat or something else, a dragon, Rayne contemplated the distance back to her car. It looked like a mile. It’s not a mile, she told herself. You’re being ridiculous; you’re letting this get to you. He’s not dead. Chang’s scared, that’s all it is, he’s scared. Why’s he scared? Who cares. Wasn’t there someone else there in that place that day? There was, wasn’t there? Why couldn’t she remember?

She almost made it to the stairs down to the park and back to her car when she slipped and fell hard, banging painfully against the deck rail and the side of a trash can. Grabbing for purchase, she heard it before she felt it, down it went, right down just like her, except she was too big to fit in a trash can. Her cell certainly wasn’t too big.

“Damn it shit shit shit!” Rayne glared briefly at someone who seemed to take exception to her language. It wasn’t their freaking cell in the trash, was it? No it was not, it was hers.

Rayne steadied herself, using her hands on her hips like she could keep her legs from going out by holding them in place, and stared down into trash at her cell. Was it worth digging in there to get it out? She could buy another one. She could buy anything. She could buy that damned loft or the building or this building. She could buy anything she wanted. Let it sit there in the trash.

She walked away, glancing back down the alley; that’s where she’d stood with Ryan, right there on the other side of that tree. And right here by these stairs. She didn’t need that phone. Why did she need a phone? No one she needed would ever answer anyway.

-------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 21

Passages 8

2009-11-26T15:50:00.046-05:00

Metro Area Southeast - Exit 5 Garage: 9 AM

"What's that?"

"Tomato juice," Cruz offered in a low voice, sympathetic, reaching out to touch her shoulder, trying to shove whatever he felt for her down, down where it didn't get in the way right now. "It's sort of good for hangovers, no guarantees but it's better than nothing."

Rayne groaned and turned over on her stomach. "I don't want it, take it away."

Stretching out on the bed next to her, Cruz quietly rubbed her shoulders, her skin warm and tan, dropped his arm across her bare back and left it there while he thought about how to deal with this. He liked having her in his bed, liked being around her. This one he'd enjoy keeping around for as long as he could, if she behaved herself, but the last few weeks...no.

Deciding to at least make an effort to get her to talk to him, Cruz asked softly, "What's going on, Rainie? You don't get trashed like that. Did something happen?"

Rayne sighed, turned over and looked up at him. "If you mean did somebody rape me or mug me, no. Come on, Cruz. I grew up with Ryan. I could probably put you down on the ground in about two seconds much less some loser in a bar."

"Yeah right. You couldn't even stand up." He watched her pick at the pillow cover, shading her eyes from the light filtering in from the window behind him, hesitated, but since she'd brought him up, he added, "What's this about Ryan? You were going on about him last night."

Her voice was quiet, a little rough, always was like that though, hoarse and soft, the female version of her father’s famous voice. "He's a friend.” Rayne shifted uncomfortably, moving around the bed as if she intended to get up, but she didn’t. “He was a friend; I guess he's not a friend anymore."

Cruz stretched back down next to her, uncertain. Was McDermott a friend? They didn’t seem that close, not close enough to throw her like this. "You guys have a fight or something?"

Rayne abruptly started to shove him aside, glaring at him. "It's none of your business. And where are my clothes?"

Anger flashed through him. He'd been ready to take somebody apart because of her, and here she was with the same brat attitude again. Placing his hands firmly on her shoulders, Cruz shoved her back down and growled, "No way. I had to scrape you up off the pavement last night, and after you dumped me the way you did, I should have left you there with the garbage. I want to know what the hell is going on and you're going to tell me. Who's this guy you're looking for? What's Ryan got to do with it? Why're you out getting trashed? You're going to sit here and talk to me!"

Rayne looked startled, then her full mouth curved in a smile and she sat up, leaning back, relaxing, and studied him for a long moment. Cruz glanced out the uncovered windows – he’d taken down the blinds a few days ago when he accidentally yanked them so hard he broke them, and now realized he should have nailed a sheet or something up there. Rayne teased, "I thought guys didn't like to talk."

Just like that, she'd switched off the brat and turned on the charm, and she had it, plenty of it. Charming and sexy little cat, he thought, amused; he wasn't immune, far from it, but she wasn't going to get away with it this time. Cruz smiled back at her deliberately brushing her bare thigh with his foot. "Your clothes are on the floor. How about you take a shower and we talk? I'll tell you when I'm bored."

He could have used a shower himself, but ignoring the beads of sweat on his chest, under his arms, Cruz stood in his kitchen and gazed sort of blankly at everything. He was out of coffee. There was some beer in the fridge. Maybe some day old pizza. He waited, listening to the water running, hungry and tired and wondering what kind of shit he’d stepped into this time.

Rayne strolled out of the bedroom, and Cruz watched her, appreciating every single damn thing about her, breasts and legs, beautiful face, the whole package. He started to at least offer a glass of water when she turned and gazed directly at him at him.

“You wanted to know what’s going on, this is what’s going on,” she declared, leaning back on his couch like she needed the support.

“I’m looking for somebody,” she continued, very steady and calm about it. “He rescued me when I ran away from home when I was six years old, and you don’t need to know why I ran away. I was cold. I was lost. And he rescued me. I’ve never forgotten him. I don’t know his name. I don’t know who he is. I’m still looking for him. And he looks exactly like you.”

She walked right past him toward the stairs, turned and looked back and repeated, “Exactly like you. The same face, the same eyes, the same hair, the same body, everything. I dream about him, all the time, he haunts me. I have to find him. That’s what I have to do. It’s important to me. That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Then she walked down the stairs, heels clicking, just as if she had explained about losing a puppy and how sad she was about it. She’d lost a guy? Somebody from when she was in kindergarten? Maybe, Cruz told himself, maybe she’s still drunk, but she sure seemed clear about it.

Incredulous, Cruz followed her, and stood there, still sweaty and uncomfortable and almost speechless. He put a hand on the wall, drew a deep breath and said, "You're looking for some guy you met when you were a little kid? And you don't even know his name? I don't get it, Rainie. Why?"

She looked down, away. "I don't know why, but I need to find him."

He stared at her, confused and off balance; this was the craziest thing he'd ever heard, some ridiculous chick fantasy. "But Rayne, how do you know...I mean, you were a kid. He might not be anything like what you think you remember. You might be mixing it up with a movie you saw. You know, Sleeping Beauty, something like that. Maybe it never even happened."

Rayne turned her back to him and stared morosely out the window. "It does sound crazy, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it sure does." The other side of that fantasy suddenly hit him cold. Was he part of that? He suddenly remembered thinking how much Colin looked like him, like a brother, and the pieces started falling into place. Uneasy, Cruz pressed her, "You're running around jumping guys who look like him, aren't you? That's what you meant when you said you were going to find out who I was. And Colin, it's the same deal?"

“No...I don't know anymore.” She avoided looking at him, walking around the room like she was lost and looking for the exit, but she added in a small voice, "You look so much like him, Cruz. You look exactly like him. Colin not so much but he sort of looks like him."

Cruz inhaled hard, grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her around to face him. "What the hell do you think you're doing? If he's a real man, what's the point in this crazy shit? You know I didn't rescue you when you were six years old! Colin didn't! You're shopping for a dream guy you're never gonna find, and you're fucking yourself up! Look at you!"

The Rayne he knew would have ripped him a new one, but she didn't. She was limp, she barely moved. "It's not like that," she whispered.

The smart sexy girl he'd been so crazy about, where was she? It didn't make any sense and it scared him. "All right," he tried again, "I could see it if you said you liked that look, wanted to date around and the whole blue eyes black hair thing turned you on, but not if you're waiting for Prince Charming to start singing to you or some crap like that. You're not a little kid anymore; you know that's not real. I can see why you're getting trashed - you don't believe it either. Come on Rainie, I know you, something happened to set you off like this. What happened?"

She looked up at him, eyes shadowed, but her jaw set and stubborn. "I have to go," she announced. "I have to call my dad. There's something I need to do, and I forgot to do it. Thanks for getting me out of there last night. And don’t worry about me, Cruz. I have to work this out, it’ll be ok."

Cruz watched her straighten her shoulders and march right out through the door. She hesitated on the sidewalk as if she wasn't sure which direction to go, but he didn’t know what else to do except let her go. She’d left her car less than two blocks away. Let her walk. Let her go.

He slammed into the garage, distracted, frustrated, angry with himself for letting her walk off like that when something was wrong, something she wasn’t telling him, glaring at the rows of cars, at the work waiting for him.

He turned and caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. A broken mirror, he’d grabbed a drill too quickly and shattered it, always laughed about the seven years of bad luck like he hadn’t lived with bad luck all his life.

He walked forward between the tires and tools scattered on the pavement and studied his own face. That woman at the nightclub...Chang...ghosts and questions and challenges....No. That was insane. That was impossible. What was the name she'd thrown at him? Cruz thought about it, trying to remember, tentatively placing the palm of his hand between the shards as he stared at his own reflection. And there it was. That was the name. Gabe.

------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 20

Passages 7

2009-11-22T02:16:00.033-05:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 10:30 AM

Nine thirty…or ten thirty, the clock didn’t keep time. Rayne looked at it, shifted uncomfortably in the chair she didn’t like at the table she didn’t like and glanced at the phone one more time. Colin hadn’t called her back. Maybe something was wrong. Something was wrong all right. Everything was wrong.

Nate was here. That was one thing that was wrong. Her mother had blasted out because of Stevie, finally, she should have confronted the bitch a long time ago but she’d done it not sure why but she’d done it. That didn’t count as something wrong. But Nate was here. Since she left that place last night, Rayne had gone through half the bottle of Bombay Sapphire she kept in the freezer and now Nate was here.

Rayne didn’t know why he was here. Fuzzy and emotional and restless, she looked at him. "You want some coffee?"

Nate leaned back and flashed that smile at her. "That'd be great thanks." Then sat there, looking at her expectantly.

Rayne glared at him. She’d made coffee, then decided she didn’t want it, but she could smell it and she was sure her brother could too. "It doesn't usually come when you whistle."

He got up, grumbling a little. "Thought you were offering to get it for me."

"No I wasn't. I don't fetch for anybody."

He grabbed a cup and stood in the kitchen doorway and eyed her. "Ok... I know you've got stuff to do, I wanted to make sure you know what's going on, you know, what your role is in this thing."

"My role in what thing?" Rayne asked cautiously. "What are you talking about?"

"Eric and me, we're setting it up so Dad can't find us, pay him back some for fucking around with Stevie." Nate leaned against the wall, looking comfortable. "We want to make sure you know the deal. You know, since you were there last night, you know where we are, you talked to Mom."

She had done that. She’d talked to her in the house Colin worked out for her, some kind of house on the other side of the bridge to Rockwood where it was cold and empty. Her mother had been angry and pacing and didn’t want to talk so not a lot of ‘talk’ had gone down. She drew an uneven breath, trying to focus. "Let me get this straight. You're trying to keep Dad from finding Mom."

He grinned. "Yeah. Eric fixed it so he can't get through on her cell. We've got a couple of things going."

Eric would have fixed it because Nate bullied him into fixing it. Rayne tried to think and nothing came through clearly except they’d done something that slammed her mother and slammed her father. And Nate thought it was funny and it was not funny. Not at all funny nothing close to funny. Absolutely nothing was funny and hadn’t been remotely like funny for a long time now. "And I'm guessing that she's not in on this."

Uncertain now, Nate replied carefully, "No."

Rayne curled her fingers around the hard edge of the chair seat and snapped at him, ”Neither am I."

And that obviously surprised him. He slammed the coffee cup down on the counter, crossed his arms and came right back at her. "We can cut you out Rayne. You going to tell me why you're not in on this? You know he's fucking Stevie. We’re supposed to sit around and do nothing?"

Was he? She'd seen Stevie move on him and didn't believe it was his idea, not that he might not give in but it wasn't his idea. Rayne eased up unsteadily, carefully, and looked out the kitchen window. The red maple leaves scattered outside the window. All those red trees and Ryan standing there in the middle of them looking like the earth had opened under his feet. It was just all so complicated. And she would do that to her father? Even if he sort of deserved it, that didn’t seem to make any difference anymore.

And here was her little brother with his stupid plan…

"I don't know it and you don't know it either! You don't know shit! You never stood there and watched someone you care about realize the person they love is gone forever, it's like watching them bleed to death in front of you! I said I'm not in on it and don't you fuck with me!" She was shouting, screaming at him, and she tried to bite back on the emotion but it slammed into her. She couldn't take it back, shouldn't take it back.

Nate's expression changed. He was watching her now, distracted and wary and maybe wondering if she was going to hit him. And she might if he didn’t get out of here. "Damn Rainie. What the hell is going on with you? It's not that big a deal, couple of days at the most. We know he'll figure it out."

He started out the door, still watching her, and tossed out over his shoulder, “Maybe you should drink some of that coffee yourself Rayne. And I’m not making you any promises.”

She wanted him out of there. She wanted a drink and didn't want to grab the bottle in front of her little brother. "You and Eric unfix whatever you fixed. And I've got somewhere I need to be. Go...go fix it, unfix it, do it."

The wind blew the leaves across her bare arms, so much red. The little shit, he wasn’t going to make any promises…it didn’t matter. That was probably fixable. Some things were. But some things, the things she’d done, the things all the things, they were broken and scattered and blown far far away.

Southeast Metro Area – 10 PM

Cruz parked his bike, thinking about it, his place was one block away, he could walk, but he wanted some takeout and didn’t want to deal with calling them and waiting an hour for food he wanted now. Locking his keys into the chain on his belt, he walked around the no parking signs yeah so what, glanced down the street just in case the tow truck was somewhere nearby, and headed for Chang’s.

He got past the dumpster and the door into the private club he didn’t have the cash to join, if he’d been inclined to join, which he wasn’t, when the door opened and shut hard. One big metal slam and there she was, Rayne, teetering around like she was going to pass out on the sidewalk.

She fell against the fire escape, grabbing at it, and she was crying. Everything he’d thought he understood about her went right down right there. He knew something was wrong and here it was, right in his face. Take it and go with it or worry about it, and he wasn’t going to second guess his instinct. The girl needed him. He knew it and here it was again.

“Rainie?” Cruz took her arm, pulled her out from under the fire escape and into what light there was in that corner. “Hey, what’s going on? Come here, hang onto me, I’m not going to let you fall.”

She looked up at him and tried to stand up. “I fucked up so bad, and I can’t find him. Cruz? I can’t find him. And I fucking hate him.”

Cruz held onto her and tried to get some kind of view through the windows of that place. He couldn’t. It figured, somebody in that damned private club had done something to her, somebody who thought nobody would do anything about it. Angry, trying to shove down that fury, whoever it was, he was dead meat, he told her, “Yeah but Rainie you’re trashed, sweetheart, you’re totaled. Whoever the guy is, maybe we can figure it out together, I'm kind of good at that. But I’m taking you out of here.”

Rayne looked up at him, long and sad and strange and sorrowful. And drunk. They'd partied some but he'd never seen her like this. "Colin isn't him. You're not him. I can't find him. And I messed up Ryan’s life so maybe that’s why I can’t find him. It's payback.”

He didn’t know about Ryan. If she meant that bodyguard, he was supposed to be her mother’s problem. If Colin had done anything to her, and Cruz was guessing that was the guy she'd been hanging around, he could deal with that but not now. She was messed up and drunk and talking crazy; he wasn’t going to go after some guy because Rainie got drunk and imagined something. He'd been there himself. "We'll look for him tomorrow. You come with me now and we'll talk about this guy you're looking for. We'll find him. Is it a deal?"

She looked up at him, leaned into him, and said in a quiet, broken voice, "I wish it was you. Yeah. Deal."

They started slowly toward the parking, Cruz beginning to wonder how he was going to keep her from falling off, whether it would be better to walk back home, when Chang appeared, rushing out of the shadows, and took one look at him and yelled, “Jesus fucking Christ!"

Cruz tightened his grip on Rayne, his hand brushing her mouth, and glared at Chang. "What's your problem man? You look like you saw a damned ghost."

Chang took another cautious step toward them, raked Rayne over appreciatively, then shook his head and grinned. "Yeah, something like that. Sorry Cruz, didn't mean to scare your girl. For a second I thought you were someone else; he's dead though. One very bad and very dead ghost."

----------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 8

Passages 6

2009-11-05T20:36:00.026-05:00

Metro Southeast - Anaconda: 10 PM

Cruz eased into the parking space right at the front of the club, mildly amazed he’d found one so close, he’d been prepared to walk a couple of blocks. He stretched, looked around before going into the place, and saw her.

Rayne had her back turned to him. She was wearing some kind of leather thing, her back bare, and that got to him, that long bare tanned back, her hair pulled up and the nape of her neck exposed. She was flanked by that blonde he’d privately tagged Sorority Sam and she was talking to a guy he’d never seen before. Flirting with him, one hand on his bare arm fingering the band around his bicep.

Sorority Sam saw him and knew he saw Rayne. She looked like she felt embarrassed or sorry for him, hands clasped behind her back and a funny expression on her face. It was bad enough to stand there and watch the girl he was having trouble getting over coming on to another man, but getting the pity look from her damned friend made it a hell of a lot worse.

Cruz swallowed hard, watching them. He’d spent most of the week trying to figure out what had happened with Rayne, why she’d walked out on him, whether the sex was bad, if he’d done something, if she was playing some kind of game and wanted him to chase her. He thought he knew her and she wasn’t a game sort of girl. After half a dozen phone calls, most of which she wouldn’t even answer, he decided if it was a game, he didn’t want to play. And he didn’t want her to think he was following her around, which meant he wasn’t taking one more damned step. He’d find another club.

Discouraged, trying not to look at her, he turned to leave, taking one final look back. Rayne was following Sam inside into a blast of flickering light and heavy metal music, but the guy paused outside the door and looked down at him. He didn’t say anything or act like he intended to do anything, just stood there in that outfit with the gloves, tall and lean, maybe somebody in the band. Cruz set his hands on his hips and met his gaze.

Any other time he’d be all over somebody like that, but not this time. Cruz heard Rayne calling him, using the name Colin, but the guy still stood there, watching him, more like he was curious than anything else. Kind of strange…whoever he was, he almost looked like he could be his own brother or cousin.

Fuck it, he didn’t have a brother or a cousin and he was out of here. He turned his back to the door and to the guy and to Rayne when he heard a woman shouting from the other side of the parking lot.

“Gabe?”

Cruz stopped and looked through the pool of parking lot light at a tall, striking woman striding purposely toward him, her voice loud, urgent.

“Gabe is that you?! Wait a minute! Don’t you walk away from me!” She used a voice that stopped a couple of pedestrians and sure got his attention, assuming she was talking to him.

He glanced around, didn’t see anybody else she could be yelling at, wondering if this was some kind of pickup, a whore, or a setup, but she was alone and didn’t seem like she was in a good mood. Had he bumped her car? “You got the wrong guy.”

She crossed her arms. She was breathing hard, an impressive rack moving up and down with each agitated breath, and she was staring at him like she definitely recognized him and wasn’t particularly happy about it. Whoever the guy was, he must be on her major shit list. “Who are you?” she demanded.

This was the second time that week that someone came at him with that question, and he had no more idea what she was talking about than he had when Rayne said it. At least Rayne hadn’t confused him with some other guy. Cruz lowered his voice and responded, “Look lady, I don’t know who you think I am, but I don’t know you, and I’m leaving.”

Instead of apologizing for the mistake like a normal person, she reached out, grabbed his chin and turned his face into the light, what light there was, pink and purple neon and a couple of spotlights on the ground. Her long red nails scratched his skin as she murmured, “It can’t be but you look so much like him…”

Stunned, Cruz hesitated a second before striking her hand away and growling at her, “Hey bitch, keep your hands off me!”

“Who are you?” she insisted, her whole face tight and intent and close to scary like some kind of crazy stalker chick. “Who’s your father? What’s your name?”

His father? Completely taken aback, faced with a question that seemed insane, a question he couldn’t answer, he gaped at her, momentarily speechless. If this crazy bitch thought she recognized him, and, for all he knew, he might look like his father, whoever he was, and he was supposed to be dead, that’s what they’d told him, his real parents were dead, well it was her problem. He had enough weird shit in his life right now.

She had green eyes. She was so close he could see her pupils contract and expand in the flashing lights, camera shutters opening and closing, capturing him inside whatever lunatic brain she had. “I’m Camilla Lombardo and we need to talk.”

Cruz drew a deep breath. The name didn’t mean a thing to him. Wary, off balance, wanting nothing more than to get out of this place and away from her, but unnerved, he filed the name away. Maybe somebody at work had heard of her. “No we don’t. And you need to get the hell out of my way.”

Moving carefully, putting distance and his bike between them, Cruz started reaching for his keys, but she didn’t move out of his way. There was a strange sad look on her face now, dark, quiet, searching. Searching for what, his father? Why? The man was dead.

He didn’t understand it, and, for the first time in his life, Cruz wondered about his parents. He’d never wasted any time thinking about it, but he did now, looking at this woman who was so bent on knowing who he was, who his father was, he finally wondered. Who the hell was his father?

-----------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 19

Passages 5

2009-10-27T23:15:00.003-04:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 6 AM

She’d left her house keys in the car, right there above the visor where anyone could get them, while the car had been parked in an alley for hours. And that, Rayne thought as she grabbed the metal ring, was a truly idiotic lapse of judgment. Take the key and go inside. Nobody stole the fucking car or the fucking keys. You think too much.

She slid out of the car, slammed the door, punched the alarm, pocketed the keys, where was her purse? She hadn’t brought it, why would she need a damned purse, she hadn’t needed a damned purse, she needed to get inside her place and sit down and stop thinking. It was almost dawn. Sky fading from purple to blue. The paper girl/boy/person had already thrown a newspaper onto the driveway, or maybe that was from yesterday. Rayne stepped over it. She never read them. She quit reading them. She wondered if she was paying for them and if it mattered if she wasn't.

Rayne left the lights off, sat in the dark in the hard chair with the iron back at the table with the iron legs. She could still smell Cruz on her skin. It was a good smell, musky and smoky and warm, and she should go right now and shower and get it out of her head, along with everything else in her head about him. But she was kind of tired, very tired, and didn’t want to do that. Not yet. She would just wait.

The phone she had left on the table rang, and rang, loud and sharp in the 6 AM silence. Rayne glanced at the caller ID although she knew it could be only one person. Don’t answer it, she told herself sternly. Cut it off now. He’s not the right one. You know it. Cut it off.

She couldn’t force herself to do that, and that was a weakness she was going to have to overcome, worrying about how he felt. She’d gotten too close to him; she liked him. Steadying herself, Rayne reached for the phone, picked it up and found her voice somewhere under the table. It sounded, to her own ears, like something she really had tossed under the table, something she’d stepped on, flat and torn and full of holes.

“Hi,” she said, liking the sound of his voice, deep with that edge, he could probably sing no he wouldn’t do that, “No everything’s good, I left because I have an early class…it really is fine, Cruz it’s ok. I should have gotten you up, but I thought, I thought you had to go to work or something. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

The handset felt slick, cold sweat slick. Rayne switched it to her left hand and listened to him continue to talk, quietly, but she could hear the confusion. The BIG night and she’d walked out on him, and he didn’t understand. He was being cool about it. It wasn’t like she was his first. Still, she felt, she felt, she felt something she didn’t want to feel, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. That wasn’t her plan.

“I don’t know,” she hedged, finally finding her voice, “maybe we can get together later. Maybe tonight. I’ll call you…yeah I will. Later. Bye.”

Rayne got up, shoved the phone aside and looked around the dark and empty room. The refrigerator hummed into life, the life of a refrigerator, mechanical, making ice, making cold, making things cold and dry. Her inspiration. A refrigerator. How sad was that?

I need a drink…I need a thousand drinks.

---------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Sessions Chapter 17

Passages 4

2009-10-20T09:35:00.004-04:00

Metro South - Chinatown: 11 AM

Ryan turned his back to her, breathing so hard she could see his shoulders shake. She expected that to last about ten seconds before he wheeled around and let her have it. So ok, she had five seconds to think about what she should have planned before she hit him with this. She could have a thousand seconds and she couldn’t come up with anything. As it was, she didn’t even have five.

Scene 1

Ryan grabbed her arm, his grasp tight, tight enough to hurt, tight enough to leave a bruise. “Why?” he demanded. “Did I ever give you one damned reason to think I wanted to take you to bed? Why would you do that? Goddamn it Rainie! Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?”

If he had been anyone else, Rayne would have ripped right out of that grip. She knew how to do that; she knew how because he’d taught her how. She stood there, letting him crush her arm, looking up at him, searching for clarity or light or a word, one word, any word. There was only one. “Yes,” she said clearly, quietly.

He backed off, dropping the grip as fast as he had taken it, as if the contact with her bare skin stung, as if it was corrosive. “Why.” He repeated it in a low and rough and terrible voice. “Explain. Now.”

Oh yeah, like she could ‘explain’ about a dream and someone she thought he might be but wasn’t. It no longer made sense even to her; it was crazy; it was drearily juvenile. She looked past him through the avenue of delicate scarlet leaves, red lace on the wind. The leaves rattled, autumn in the leaves, dry and cold.

Rayne looked back up at him, probably looking at him for the last time, taking the autumn into her heart, using it, and it hurt.

Direct and clear eyed, she told him, “I can’t explain. It wasn’t your fault, and I’m sorry, but I can’t explain. You need to forget about her and forget about me. Goodbye, Ryan.”

Between Scenes...

Her mother stood by the balustrade outside the beach house looking out at the rocks and the ocean. It was the beach house, wasn’t it? But what was that THING down at the end of the patio? Was it a mountain? The gigantic looming face of a glacier?

"Mom? He's in love with you. Do you know that?" If her mother heard her, she didn't respond, still looking down and away into the dark as if she were watching something or someone, or watching the wall of rock ice grind slowly and inevitably toward them.

It was cold. It was bitterly cold. Rayne began to shiver and to try to find a way out of here, this place that should not be cold but was so so cold.

“You should leave it alone. You really have done enough.”

She looked at herself standing way down at the end of the patio in the dark, light behind her, light that came from nowhere, condemnation in her face.

There didn’t seem to be any way to respond to that because, for one thing, she wasn’t sure she had done enough. She was scared; her mother still didn’t look at her or help her. She might be frozen; she hadn’t moved at all. Rayne whimpered, “He's never going to speak to me again.”

The other Rayne spat at her. “The question is, how are you going to speak to him again? At least what they feel is real. This happened because you keep chasing something that's not real. You did this to Ryan for nothing. There’s nothing there. A whole lot of nothing. You’re so stupid! You’ll freeze in hell before you ever find him!”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Nothing...falling and falling...Rayne went down on her knees, wanting to vomit, to vanish, to lie very quiet and never move again. It was warm here though, the light hot and heavy and golden. A small hand, a child’s hand, touched her on the shoulder. "You know it's not nothing. Don’t you remember? You still have the sword."

Rayne put out one hand to steady herself, clawing, reaching uselessly for the child with the other hand. "What?" she cried. "That thing? That's a piece of junk!"

The little girl shook her head and pointed down the beach, past the drifting sand, the drifting water. "No, it's not. See? It's real. You can't forget. You promised."

He stood out there in the water, glimmering, a smile like the bolt from a crossbow, slicing right through flesh and bone and lodging deep and painful in her heart...

“See?” the child whispered again. “You remember now. You can’t ever forget.”

Scene 4

Whoever you are, I hate you for this. And I am going to find you.

If you wear a different face, a different body, I’ll know you. You can’t hide. I will track you down.

Scene 5

Cruz cracked open the door and peered out, his face creased with sleep. “Rainie? What’re you doing here? What time is it?”

She pushed him aside, slammed the door behind her and reached for him, circling his bare waist with her arms. His skin was warm, under the blankets warm. Obviously surprised, half awake, uncertain, he looked down at her but didn’t ask anything more. Rayne expected to feel something, to feel aroused. She didn’t. “I’m going to find out who you are,” she told him, still, cold, and inert, her body like granite locked in ice.

“What’re you talking about?” He was waking up, searching her face, confused. “What’s going on?”

Rayne murmured hush shhh against his mouth, slid her lips to his neck, felt his pulse quicken, beating hard. She slipped her right hand down into his sweats, and Cruz was definitely neither cold nor inert.

Ryan had been a mistake. Ryan got hurt. This time there was no pain. There was nothing but the test, the one way she would know what was real and what was not real. If she had to go through a hundred men, five hundred, to find him, the only price, the only disappointment, the only pain would be her own, and his, once she found him. But it had to be worth it.

Nothing, nothing else in her life had ever been as real.

----------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 5

Passages 3

2009-10-08T17:46:00.008-04:00

Metro South - Chinatown: 10:30 AM

She paced down the length of courtyard, under the lanterns, dark now even in the shadow, walked up to him, and stopped, and waited. He did not speak first. Match point one for him. “You know,” Rayne told him, trying to meet Ryan’s smile, “you called me at a really bad time. I was kind of busy.”

The mid morning sunlight was warm, streaming over his face and shoulders. He laughed and shook his head. “You could have called me back later, you know that.”

Relieved, this didn’t feel like anything terrible, starting to finally feel warmer, sun chasing the chill, Rayne breathed a little easier. However, it had been so long since she’d heard from him, the call still seemed odd, out of place; it was hard to understand why he would suddenly just call like that. “I thought it might be urgent or something.”

“With all due respect,” Ryan grinned, “if I need backup, you’re not going to be the one I call.”

That explained exactly nothing. She let it go for now as they laughed together easily and started down the stairs toward the park squeezed between the bus station, the overpass, and the bars and restaurants of Chinatown. “I got your card,” he was saying as he walked beside her. “Thanks, Rainie. It was good to hear from you.”

He sent her a birthday card, he always did. Not Christmas cards or anything, but then she didn’t send those either. She’d found one of those ‘hey I moved’ cards when she was shopping for presents for the twins and decided to send it to him, but that was months ago. Smiling at him, Rayne said warmly, “Well sure, I don’t forget. How’s Riley?”

“You wouldn’t recognize him. Or maybe you would, he’s got the red hair.”

They paused at the fountain. Rayne glanced down into it – the water was dark with grime. She was tired and despite feeling better about this, didn’t know what else to say. Was this really it? He just wanted to talk? He’d called her out of nowhere to chat?

“How’s your mother?” Ryan asked quietly, rubbing his arm where the water splashed up against his skin. “I saw the latest about the Holloway woman; it made two or three tabloid covers.”

Rayne walked away from the fountain and sat gingerly on a dirty bench and avoided looking at him for a few moments. Now she understood why he’d called. It wasn’t about her; it was about her mother. She slid her hand through her hair and kept on ignoring him. He was sitting just a few inches away from her and waiting. Waiting and waiting while the bus belched exhaust and the chess people argued and the sun would set and rise again and he would still be waiting.

She remembered the anxiety, the fear that had driven her the morning after she’d gone to Ryan’s house and spent the night with him. She’d been afraid she was going to get caught, get in trouble; that he would find out it was her; that he would go to jail; but it had been about her, not really about him. What she had not understood was how he would feel. He thought the woman he loved had finally come to him. He still believed it. She had not done that, and, as far as Rayne could tell, she never would.

The dream snagged at her thoughts, catching and ripping them. She yanked away but felt the pain, the hole of absence and useless hope. She was waiting too. If someone had done that to her and left her believing a lie, waiting and waiting and hoping…it made her sick, gasping sick.

“I haven’t talked to her in a while,” she told him carefully, pulling herself together with an effort since she didn’t know what to do about any of this. She didn’t see it, not yet. “I guess she’s hoping it just goes away.”

He leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head and came out with a deep, rough sigh. “For her sake, I wish I could say I thought it would. It’s not going to change. She needs to quit waiting for it to happen, make her own move, force her own change.”

Agitated, Rayne stood back up again and yanked restlessly at the leaves on the Japanese maple. “She’s not going to leave him, Ryan. Even with Stevie and my dad – and I’ve seen them - and Stevie saying stupid shit about her, and my dad hasn’t done a thing to shut her up, my mom isn’t leaving. I don’t think she’s ever even considered leaving my dad.”

Ryan turned sideways on the bench and gazed up at her. “You do her an injustice,” he responded, his voice deep and quiet. “She’s considered it. She came damn close." He broke off and stood up.

No, she hadn’t. She had not come close. And it was her fault he thought she had. Rayne bit her lip, clenched her hands together so tight that her nails dug into the flesh of her palms. If she did this, he was going to be as puke horrified as Miranda had said he would be. She was going to lose him. If she didn’t do it, he would keep waiting and believing a complete fantasy. He didn’t deserve that.

Now she did see it. Wait until you see it. She saw it.

Rayne crossed her arms, drew a deep breath, looked at him directly and said, “No she didn’t, Ryan. She never did – she – you see that wasn’t her. The woman who came to you that night and slept with you and said she loved you…”

His face changed. He stared down at her. He set his massive hands on his hips, pulled back his shoulders, probably already knowing what was coming, preparing for it. She’d never seen that look in his eyes on any other person in her life.

“Go on,” Ryan ordered in a flat, hard voice.

This was going to crush him, take everything away from him, shred every single little hope into pieces and leave him with nothing. Did she see it? Did she really see it? Was that better than leaving him with empty hope? One last time, she tried to turn it in her mind, looking for any way out for him. She saw none.

“That woman,” Rayne finished, forcing herself, finishing everything, no way to back out now, going flat out for it no matter what, no more waiting, not for him, “that woman was me.”

---------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Rising Above Chapter 10

Passages 2

2009-09-30T22:47:00.009-04:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 2 AM

The wind sighed, lifting the silk, weighing it, dropping it. He was kneeling on the end of the bed, looking down at her, framed in silk.

Scene 1

Rayne breathed, soft and careful, in case, just in case she was not dreaming. "You're not real."

He shifted, drawing up one long leg, heavy boots, biker’s boots, leather and denim and light in his blue eyes. The bed did not move the way it would, the way it should, if he were real. He wasn’t really there. He said, "I'm not a dream."

It was a dream though. She was circling the blurry event horizon between dream and reality but she could see down into it and it was, it was a dream. Her dream self sat up and tried to reach out to him with dream arms that did not respond, broken wooden things hanging from her shoulders. “You've been there so long. Why can't I find you? I keep looking but I can't find you. What are you? Who are you?"

"You named me, Rainie."

The bottom fell out of it, cold wind in the candle flame. She was awake. Of course it hadn’t been real.

She had not named him...if she had, if she could name him, maybe she could find him. She was drifting in the dark with no name. She couldn’t even hold onto the dream much less the man. Awake in this silent place, she wasn't used to so much silence, very much alone and no closer than she had ever been to understanding anything.

Rayne tucked her head under her arm, slid her cheek against the cool cotton pillowcase, feeling it against her skin, feeling the loss. She was cold. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be five years old again tucked in her own bed. She clenched her hands in the sheet and cried.

9 AM

"Ryan called? Right in the middle of everything like that?"

Rayne cradled the cup of coffee, savoring the warmth in her hands as well as her mouth. She was still chilled, could not seem to get warm. She poked at the cold iron chair leg with her toe. "Yeah he did. He wants to talk."

The sunlight never quite reached the balcony on the north side of the rental; it felt filtered, light brewed through a coffee filter. Rayne had discovered moss on the floor, discovered it after she slipped and fell. The dream hung over her. She couldn't shake it, and she shivered again.

"Why did you even answer the phone?” Miranda demanded. “ Wasn't Cruz pissed?"

"I don't know why I answered, it surprised me, and yeah he was pissed. Major pissed. He asked a lot of questions. It'll be ok, I'll make it up to him."

They sat there for a while in the deep early morning quiet. "You look kind of ragged," Miranda commented. "Actually you look like shit. Are you ok?"

She was anything but ok, not after dreaming about HIM again, not with some kind of thing with Ryan looming out there, what she'd done to Ryan. Never, never had she said anything to anyone about that dream man, and she never would, but at least she could talk to Randi about Ryan. Shaking herself, Rayne tried to focus. "I can't sleep here, that's all. It's too quiet. There's no way Ryan knows, is there? You didn't tell anyone, did you?"

"Of course I didn't. My dad didn't tell anyone but your mom. I'm positive he didn't. And you know she’s never going to breathe a word about it. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe he just wants to say hi."

She doubted that. Rayne stood up, watching her own feet carefully, avoiding the freaking moss. "Be careful, it's slick out here. I fell on my ass the other day. I need to talk to my dad about fixing it somehow.”

Rayne turned in the landing above the stairs, deeply uneasy, reluctant to let Randi go yet. “Do you really think he just wanted to say ‘hi’?”

They looked at each other. If he had wanted to say ‘hi’, he would have done that over the phone. Rayne knew it. She could tell Randi knew it too. "I don't know," Randi told her quietly. "All you can do is keep saying nothing happened. If that’s what you want to do."

Of course that’s what she wanted to do. Rayne followed her back downstairs. The world outside was waking up, trash can rattling, somebody across the street yelling about something. It might have been Wyatt, it sounded like him. Maybe the garbage truck was in his way.

At the front door, Randi paused. “You know I wish we’d been able to share a place like we planned. It wouldn’t have been so quiet.”

Rayne finally squeezed out a smile. “Yeah, but your dad stopped that. Mine would have been good with it. He actually knows who you are and I think he likes you.”

Miranda laughed as she walked out. “He doesn’t know me that well then. Call me as soon as you get back from Ryan, k?”

She wandered back upstairs and stood there for a while, trying to ignore the ache in her back. She’d slept wrong. She'd dreamed wrong. She had to get dressed. Maybe she was going about this the wrong way. Maybe she should just come right out and tell him. That’s probably what he would do. No, she couldn’t do that, it would kill him to know. That would be sacrificing him for her own peace of mind, to get it over with. He didn't deserve that pain; let him keep dreaming. Let it go and give him something even if it wasn't real.

“Okay,” she whispered aloud. “Let’s go do this.”

Scene 3

------------------------

NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 3

Passages 1

2009-09-27T18:59:00.011-04:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 2 PM

“I don’t get it, why do you keep putting off your dad? Isn’t this the third time he’s tried to come over?” It wasn't the third time. There was never a 'third time' with Cooper. Nor had Rayne really 'put him off'; he'd had conflicts, and she'd come up with 'conflicts' too. She thought she knew what he'd been doing. Her 'conflicts' were dry, papery, weighted not with sex, weighted with only her lame excuses, and he had, eventually, blown them away.

Scene 1

Rayne looked down at Samantha. She was curled up on the floor in her bedroom in the college rental, smiling, trying to be helpful. She wasn't helpful. She was actually kind of clueless.

The bedroom spanned the length and width of the second floor, view of the pool and a park and, directly to the northwest, Wyatt’s place. Her brother could lean over his deck and get a good clear look at anything and everything that was going on. Which was, of course, the whole point; that’s why she was in this place instead of the one she wanted on the other side of the campus.

Samantha was still talking. Sam’s family had money but it was old money, sit behind the mossy stone wall and contemplate the cognac money. Randi understood but she doubted Sam ever would, not about Wyatt, not about her father, certainly not about her mother. “He’ll get over it. He’ll go check out Stevie; she’ll make it all better.”

Sam shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t think that’s a load of crap?”

The doorbell rang, filling the place with the long and annoying first phrase from the theme from Mission Impossible. That was not something her mother had chosen, maybe Wyatt’s lame joke. She kept forgetting to change it. Rayne shrugged and started downstairs. “Just because it stinks doesn’t mean it’s not true. Give me about a minute and come on down. I want to find out if he even knows who you are since we've been friends since like first grade. He probably won't.”

“Sure,” Samantha said at her retreating back, sounding even more uncomfortable. Or something like sure. Rayne had quit listening to her.

"Hi Dad." She stepped aside. She had to step aside. He strode through the doorway, impatient. She'd put him off, deliberately put him off, and he definitely did not like being put off. "It's what you expected, isn't it? Wyatt's place is right next door. Right exactly across the street next door."

Cooper swept the place, taking it all in. One long, hard sweep and one long look right back at her, softened with a smile. She knew he was trying, working it. "I didn't want you in a place by yourself. Wyatt is close, yeah I know that, that's why I agreed to this. But it looks good, Rayne."

"Mom's good for something, isn't she?” She said it and waited, waited for him to hear it, waited until it hit him. It did. She saw it sink in. Then she continued, “No stage presence; she can’t play a guitar; she can’t play drums; but she can sure paint a wall. Just give her a brush and she can cover up just about anything."

He stopped looking at the furniture. He took a step closer, very much closer, staring her down. "Rayne.” It was one deep note, low and unyielding. "Back down now. That's way out of line."

No it wasn't. It had come out the wrong way. Eventually everything came out wrong.

Rayne thought of apologizing. She didn’t. The insult wasn't directed at him anyway.

Samantha edged quietly into the room. Cooper glanced at her, distracted, no recognition in his eyes at all. Surprise surprise…

Sam had been one of her best friends since kindergarten but he obviously didn’t know her. If she’d been one of Wyatt’s friends, or if she’d shown up backstage with her panties in her hand, he probably would have remembered her, no problem. He said he never forgot a face. Evidently that depended on where he’d seen that face, and it wasn’t in her company. She could understand that. She could try because at least he was trying.

“I have things to do. Thanks for stopping by, Dad. And tell Mom I hate the doorbell.”

Scene 2

"Do you like boats?"

Rayne looked out at the boat. "Not particularly; I get seasick." And that was something she had never admitted. Ryan would have been all over her if she had ever complained about getting seasick. Fuck that. That was done. She was going to keep looking. "Why, do you have one?"

Cruz tossed a pebble off the deck in the general direction of the boat. "No. And I don't want one."

She followed the path of the pebble. It hit the boat with a soft thunk, bounced off, fell into the oily black water under the prow. "So why did you ask?"

He smiled. "Something to say."

They stood there. Close. His bare arm slung over her shoulder. Heavy and hot. His thigh pressed against hers. Looking at the boats. It was dark. It was dirty. There was slime. Even the water smelled bad.

She liked it.

"You're not going to college, are you?"

"You and boats, that's me and school. I get schoolsick. Hurl right off the deck."

Rayne turned her back to the boat and looked up at him, amused. He'd brought here for a reason, and it had nothing to do with boats. And she hadn’t come with him because she wanted to do boats. She smiled to herself, thinking about her father’s reaction if he knew she was involved with this guy, whoever he was, whatever he was, maybe not the one she was looking for, but for now, he would do. He would definitely do. She wanted him. She was going to take what she wanted. "If it makes you that sick, why are you hanging around?"

"Maybe I like the weather." Cruz leaned back against a stack of crates, still smiling. They creaked under his weight but he didn't seem concerned. Murky strange boat light in his face and eyes. "Real good weather. Partly cloudy. And chance of rain."

They moved together, his skin warm, his mouth warm, open, taking her tongue, giving her his, a buoy clanging somewhere out in the mist and the dark, sea rhythm moving with them, maybe right here and right now. Right here in the dark between the boats and the dirty boxes.

Her cell rang. Rang again. And again. “Damn,” Cruz murmured, breath hot and uneven, “you always have that thing on?”

Rayne dragged it out, fumbling, trying to turn the freaking thing off, and focused briefly on the caller ID.

She inhaled hard, turned her back to Cruz, giving him no explanation, she owed him none, gripping the cell, and said, carefully, quietly, “Hi Ryan.”

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NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 2

Passages - First Day

2009-09-15T05:10:00.060-04:00

University - #212 Newberry Road: 9 PM

The male cricket scrapes his ribbed left wing against his right wing, raising it to a 45 degree angle, and plays, plays for love, plays to threaten, and plays a softer tune after cricket copulation. According to Dolbear's law, it is actually possible to know the outside temperature by counting the number of cricket's chirps in 14 seconds and adding 40 to that number.

Using the cricket thermometer, the temperature had dropped at least 15 degrees since sundown, and the breeze from the northwest was cool. Rayne stepped on crickets. It was supposed to be bad luck. She was long past caring about bad luck.

“Thanks for sticking around,” she said to Miranda, “and for bringing the pizza and beer.”

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else? You can spend the night at my place if you want – I’ll probably be up half the night unpacking, and there aren't any bugs.”

Over her shoulder, Miranda’s brother laughed. Nic had torn his shirt and bloodied his thumb moving furniture around the rental and hunting down and destroying crickets, a task he didn't enjoy or condone, but he'd done it. “I think I got all the bugs.”

"Bug Hero rescued half of them." Randi gave her friend a quick hug. "Call me if you need me ok?"

"I will," Rayne assured her, knowing she wouldn't, expecting Cruz would call, or come by, and he wouldn't be rescuing any insects.

Nic hung around, watching his sister slip through the park on her way back to her own place, then turned and grinned at Rayne again. "Crickets won't hurt you, Rainie; they don't bite. But I got all of them I could find."

Sweet funny Nic; she still remembered trying to flirt with him when they were about 12 years old, and how disappointed and insulted she'd been when he got distracted by some bug in the sand. Pulling him into a brief, warm hug, Rayne whispered against his cheek, "I know, Nicky. And I know you don't like killing them. Thank you for doing that."

He held on a couple of seconds longer, then stepped back, taking a quick breath, still smiling. "Ok, well, I guess I'll be going. I guess...uh I guess your Dad will be here tomorrow right?"

Her uneasy mood darkened further. One more damned cricket chirped off in the bushes toward the back, toward the pool, or maybe in the verge on the street facing her older brother Wyatt's place. Catching her expression, misinterpreting it, Nic took her hand and said quietly, "Come on, Rayne. You can't get rid of all the bugs in the world. Let them do what they're supposed to do, and you go in and do what you're supposed to do. I'll check on you tomorrow. All right?"

Rayne placed her hand on his arm, feeling the heat under his shirt. She didn't want him to check on her. Light flashed in the sky. It was that time of year, the season, the brief bright life of falling stars. It would get cold. The stars would fall and the crickets would die and she would go inside and shut the door. And wait.

"Yes," she told him. "It's always all right."

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NEXT CHAPTER: Passages 1

Bios: Rayne Stanfield
Miranda Taylor
Nicolas Taylor