A Cruel Kind of Beautiful (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Series Book 1) Read online

  I stare past Dr. Marcus’s podium to the wall of windows beyond him. Today sucks.

  Outside the glass, the October sun sends glowing fingers through the morning fog as a girl darts after a Frisbee. I wish I were playing Frisbee. Or my guitar, or Jax’s PlayStation. Anything but trying to figure out if insurance covers newspaper-related window fatalities, and what I’m going to do with the set of dude’s shoes my vandal left behind.

  Frisbee Girl hurls her disc, taunting me with her freedom. Except she flubs the release so it wings a sharp curve backward and catches in the branches of the tree outside Dr. Marcus’s windows. The professor doesn’t seem to notice, clearing his throat before he calls the class to order. Which is when I see him.

  My walking sex dream has changed out of his newspaper delivering clothes, but I'd recognize those biceps anywhere. He jogs to the rescue, jumping to grab the lowest branch and chinning himself. He holds his weight with one arm as he nabs the Frisbee, then drops back to the ground and hands it back to its owner.

  It has been—I check my phone—an hour and eighteen minutes since he took off from my house, barefoot. That shoots to shit any notion I had that he left due to an emergency rather than a sudden attack of do-not-want-to-pay-for-window-itis.

  “Yikes, you too, huh?” the girl next to me murmurs.

  Outside the glass, Walking Sex Dream gives a distracted smile to Frisbee Girl and hurries off in the other direction. I stop scowling at him, and glance over at my classmate. She has reddish hair in one of those ponytails with a smooth bump in the front, and as weird as that would look on me, she’s kind of pulling it off. Her eyes sparkle as she gives me a knowing smile.

  I shake my head as I try to catch up. “Sorry, what?”

  Bumpy Ponytail Barbie leans back in her seat. “No need to be embarrassed. Jake Tate’s body leaves a trail of broken hearts everywhere he goes, and it’s even worse for the few of us who’ve actually managed to talk to the guy.”

  I snort a laugh through my nose and throw her a sidelong glance. “I take it you know him, then?”

  “I can’t believe you don’t, considering everything. I’m Cleo, by the way. It’s Clementine but that’s too long, and Clem?” She shudders. “Not so much.”

  Dr. Marcus has already started into his lecture, but with a couple of hundred bodies in the room, he doesn’t even notice our whispering.

  “Jera. Nice to meet you.” It comes out as automatically as a sneeze, my Granna-honed manners covering my innate lack of tact. “But what do you mean, ‘considering everything’?”

  She tilts her head toward me and says in an undertone, “During freshman year, Jake was the big man on the baseball team. Starting pitcher by his second semester, their number one recruit, cushiest scholarship and living stipend, all the extras. I heard they were going to buy him a freaking car.”

  My eyebrow lifts, and I wrestle it back down. I am not interested. Unless of course he wants to use that cushy living stipend to buy me a new window.

  Cleo darts a glance toward the professor before she continues in a whisper, “Then, end of spring term comes, and rumor has it there was some crazy drama with his family. Suddenly he’s not at any of the parties, somebody else was pitching all the games, and the search committee was pulling every kind of string to tempt a new pitcher to transfer to PU mid-year.”

  Big deal. He played baseball and now he doesn’t. I’m a little curious what kind of family problems make you quit a Division I baseball scholarship, but it’s not like we’re buddies, so what do I care? Though now I understand how he put so much velocity behind a simple newspaper.

  “What was the drama all about?” I hear myself ask.

  I am excellent at minding my own business.

  Cleo purses her lips. “I don’t really remember. Too bad though—the baseball boys are a blast, and he was some lovely eye candy at the parties.” She smiles. “Plus, nice hands. He caught me once, when I was doing a kegstand and dipshit Eric stumbled and dropped me.”

  “That’s cool,” I mumble.

  So he’s a jock. My ex-boyfriend, Andy, was on the lacrosse team, so I know the stereotypes about jocks are mostly bullshit. It’s not that they’re all self-centered. It’s just that with one to three practices a day, they’re busy as hell.

  Of course Jake Tate would have somewhere more important to be this morning. On the other hand, what could have been so urgent that he couldn’t wait for me to get back so he could make an excuse and reclaim his shoes?

  “So...” Cleo’s expression is halfway between sly and curious. “Did he ask you out or something? How do you know him?”

  “I don’t.” Decisively, I flip to the next page of my notebook. “I don’t know him at all.”

  Chapter 3: Negative Image

  I swing a leg off my bike, balancing on one pedal as I glide toward my garage. My fingers tap against the handlebars, the underlying beat to my new song already as solid as the concrete of my driveway. I drop my bike and step up to key in the door-opening code when my hand freezes halfway there.

  When I left, there was a gaping hole in my house, the rising sun glinting off the lines in the shattered glass. Now, there’s a piece of plywood nailed neatly across it.

  Dry grass crunches under my Chucks as I cross the lawn. I can’t believe Danny fixed my window. The last time I saw him drive a nail, it was just to hold some cables out of the way in our practice space, and it was so crooked it didn’t even manage to do that for long.

  I lift one hand and touch the head of one of the nails. They are big but each one’s sunk deep and true, with no dents in the wood from missed hits. A professional job. Did Danny hire someone to fix it? If so, it seems like he would have called, because no way would he have the cash to cover it. He doesn’t get paid until Thursday, and money is one of the many things that escapes Danny’s notice. Which is why he rarely has any.

  I pull my phone out and check the voicemail to see if I missed a message when I was in class.

  The only voicemail on the list is Andy’s, nearly twelve months old. A pang drops emptily down through me and I click off the screen. No answers there.

  Retrieving my bike, I let myself into the garage, then the house. “D?” I call out.

  The plucked bassline from a Red Hot Chili Peppers song is my only answer. I follow it to the living room, frowning at the ground when I get there. The glass is gone, and the normally mashed shag carpet displays the electro-shocked buoyancy of having been vacuumed by all four horsepower of Bessie’s oversized engine.

  Danny coaxes another note out of his bass, tipping his head back to look at me. Without the window, the living room is dark as a cave, lit by a single lamp glowing in the corner.

  “You didn’t call Dad to board up the window, did you?” My tone is tight, but I can’t really help it. I may not have paid for this house, but it’s mine now. I can take care of it without my daddy’s help.

  “Nah,” Danny says. “Guy showed up with a sheet of wood. Put it on the window, asked where the vacuum was. I told him, and he vacuumed.”

  “What guy?” I dump my messenger bag onto the floor. “Was it someone we know?”

  “Nope.” He looks back to his bass and plays a quick little flurry I’ve never heard before. It tickles at my ears, but I refuse to be distracted.

  “Seriously? You let a stranger with a hammer into the house?”

  “I got him your hammer out of the garage. But he brought his own nails.”

  I exhale a curse that imaginatively connects the anatomy of three different animals. “What did he look like?”

  “Like a dude.”

  I prop my hands on my hips. “Are you even human, Daniel? You weren’t curious? You don’t even want to know why my window is broken and strange men are wandering in with nails and no hammer?”

  Danny shrugs. “Hey, I forgot to say earlier: if you want to get that tattoo you’ve been talking about, I have a shift at Negative Image in two hours and we got in some Tahitian black ink this week
that would be perfect.”

  I groan through my teeth, but it doesn’t matter that Danny doesn’t remember a single identifying characteristic. It had to be Jake Tate. And he was in here while I was stuck in another class and then an interminable meeting with a professor about my project for Music Composition II. It sends an uncomfortable little thrill through me to think of a guy that hot moving through the private spaces of my house.

  “He left that.” Danny points to the coffee table with the toe of his boot, his untied laces swinging.

  I snatch up the plain envelope, thick with several sheets of paper inside. Is it a note? An apology, or an explanation of his bizarre disappearance?

  “How’s the song you were working on earlier?”

  “Finished most of it in class.” I flip the envelope over to find it sealed.

  “You write the bassline?”

  I glance up, surprised he would even ask. “No. Of course not.” I can write for bass, but I can’t write for his bass, any more than I could reproduce the tattoo designs that bleed from his fingers: so beautiful people beg him to transcribe them permanently onto their skin.

  The front door swings open, the creak of its ancient hinges the only warning I get before my dad strolls in. “What happened to the front window? Wild band party?”

  “Orgy,” Danny says.

  “You don’t have the square footage for a decent orgy. It’s no wonder you guys ended up breaking shit.”

  I roll my eyes and stuff my mystery envelope into the back pocket of my jeans. “Jesus, Dad, could you be more embarrassing and inappropriate?”

  “Answer: yes. Don’t tempt me.” Dad glances over at the window again, his eyes narrowing on the hole in the center of the shattered glass. “Danny,” he says. “I have a sudden and intense need for coffee. Consider it this month’s management fee.”

  I grimace. What was I thinking letting my dad manage our band? Not that he isn’t a brilliant manager. He’s the best, way too good for a local group. But he’s my dad, and how teenybopper is that? Besides, every time he uses his connections to get us a new gig, I feel like we’re wringing the last drop of currency out of his band’s old glory days. I don’t want my name to be a prefix for “the daughter of Hank McKnight.”

  “Yes, sir.” Danny sets aside his bass and swipes his keys off the coffee table. “You want anything from Starbucks, Jera?”

  My father shakes his head. “You know, more of—”

  “More of your dollar stays in the community if you buy local,” I finish. “We know, Dad. Though I did happen to notice that your real estate company is part of a national—”

  “Brewed Awakenings it is,” Danny interrupts before we can really get going. “Coffee or tea?”

  “Latte. Thanks, D. You can take my car if yours is low on gas.”

  He nods and digs in my messenger bag, standing with a faint snap of keys against his palm.

  Dad doesn’t reach for my guitar in its stand, the way he usually does after two minutes in my house. Instead, he waits for the door to close behind Danny, then drags the piano bench out and sits across from me. “Jera, was it Andy who broke the window? You can tell me the truth.”

  “No, Dad, jeez!” I haven’t seen Andy in over a year. I never told my family he moved away after our breakup, because saying it out loud makes my stomach churn.

  Dad hmphs, and I can’t tell if he believes me. He knows I’ve got a checkered history with the opposite sex, but I didn’t bother to inform him of my new motto: look but don’t touch. Because once I touch, sooner or later we’ll make it to bed, where neither one of us ends up happy.

  “Andy’s not violent. What you saw of him, at the end, that wasn’t him.” It was what our relationship turned him into. I look away. “The paperboy broke the window. It was just an accident.”

  Dad frowns, following my gaze to the fat newspaper on the side table. “You get the paper delivered? Why would you waste trees on a newspaper I’ve never seen you read?”

  I pick at a loose thread on the piping of the loveseat. “Granna paid for a bunch in advance and they don’t give refunds.” And I might have re-upped. Once. Maybe twice. It’s always been a constant at her house: the newspaper on the front porch, smelling of fresh ink and new paper, wilted a little at the edges from a smattering of rain. So much has changed since she died but not that. “Hey, what are you doing here in the middle of the day? Shouldn’t you be selling houses or something?”

  He ignores my question. “You ought to get serious about Danny,” he says. “He would never pull the kind of crap Andy did after you two broke up.”

  “Andy had every right to be upset. And stop holding your breath on the Danny thing. I’ve told you a hundred times: we’re not having sex, we’re not together, and we’re not going to be together.”

  “Jera, you’re with the guy every day of the week, and I know how often he sleeps over here. Are you just worried if you call it dating, it might affect the band?” Dad lifts an eyebrow. “As far as I can tell, Jax is too busy with his own love life to get jealous about yours.”

  I curl my knees up onto the couch, finger-combing my hair moodily. Dad is about two miles down the wrong track, but it’s not like I can explain to him about the far more complicated reality of why I stopped dating. Since I’m stuck with platonic anyway, why wouldn’t I spend my time with Danny? He’s got his quirks, but he accepts everything exactly how it is. Even me.

  “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Dad says. “A healthy sex life is a big part of a successful relationship, and if the sleepovers are any indication, you and Danny already have that.”

  I can’t stand the worry in Dad’s voice. It’s only one shade off from disappointment, which folds me like a house of cards. I hold up a finger. “You have one second to change the subject to something utterly unrelated to Danny’s penis, or I’m going to kick you out before he gets back with your coffee.”

  “Fine, be grouchy. But Mom’s been wondering why you don’t bring your boyfriends over to meet her anymore.” He stands up. “Anyway, I got distracted by the window, but that’s not why I’m here. I have news.”

  Chapter 4: The Mystery of Thirty-Seven

  The quick bleat of my VW Bug’s pitiful horn sounds as Danny pulls in.

  “One sec. I gotta go out and give Danny a hand,” I tell my dad, grateful for the interruption. I need an extra second to brace myself for whatever he has to say, especially since it’s almost certainly news about my band. It’s the most important thing left in my life, and after losing Andy, and then Granna, I’m full up on bad news for the year.

  I swing through the door and jog down the sidewalk toward the driveway. Danny grins up at me, sun glinting off his retro sunglasses, and his black hair in nearly atomic disarray from the wind. I laugh when I realize he took the top down on my convertible for the five-minute drive to the coffee shop.

  “Apparently, my father’s dirty mind never quits,” I say when I get close enough. “I had to set him straight about us. Again.”

  “Ah, really? I kind of love freaking him out with the idea of my dirty, tattooed hands all over his precious only daughter.” Danny passes me the two coffees from the cup holders, retrieving the last cup from where it was propped between his thighs.

  “He’s more hopeful than freaked out. He’s worshipped you since the day you outplayed Bear.”

  “Hank likes me. But I only outplayed his band’s old bassist.” Danny bumps the car door closed with his ass. “If I could show him up on the guitar, he’d hand over his wife with full blessings. When we auditioned Jax and he opened with that crazy fast solo, I swear I caught Hank drafting your betrothal contract on the back of a Safeway receipt.”

  “Still, I’m fairly sure chlamydia is not in the future he envisions for me, so Jax is out.”

  Danny takes a sip of his tea and gives me an uninflected look that somehow manages to make me feel catty as hell. “Jax always flies safe.”

  I turn back to the house. “Please do
n’t enlighten me as to how you know that.” If Danny’s decided to tag along during our lead singer’s legendary sexcapades, I’d rather not hear about it.

  I try to juggle the cups and turn the doorknob at the same time, and Danny takes one from me just as it begins to spill. “Jax is a good guy,” he insists.

  “I know that.” I duck inside. “I spend more time with him than most wives spend with their husbands.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you—”

  “Large latte!” I put on a smile to smooth my interruption as I nod to Danny to pass over the drink. Whatever he was about to say about Jax, it is almost certainly not something I want to discuss in front of Dad.

  Danny swipes his face against his shoulder to push his sunglasses up onto the top of his head, then passes a cup to Dad.

  I reach over to straighten the sunglasses on Danny’s head, mouthing, “Later,” so he knows I’m not just being an asshole and cutting him off from whatever he wanted to tell me about Jax. He shrugs and takes a seat on the couch.

  “So, is the news a gig?” I ask, trying to be positive. “Is it at The Basement again?”

  I can’t quite meet my dad’s eyes, because I don’t want to look ungrateful, but The Red Letters have been playing the same three crappy dive bars forever. At some point you cross the line between working your way up, and realizing for you, there is no up because you’re only Dive Bar Good. My band is getting perilously close to that line.

  “I mean, it’s a decent-sized venue. It’s just...”

  “That every breath you take for the next three weeks tastes like stale Keystone Ice?” Dad pops the top off his coffee to blow across its surface. “Trust me, I know. Their ventilation system probably hasn’t been updated in twenty years.”