PEYTON leaned back in his chair, pulling grapes off of stems and eating the sweet fruits one by one. “I appreciate it, but you didn’t have to cook breakfast. I know of a great little cafe that’s even near the hospital.”
Raji said, “I don’t mind.”
She was sitting across the small kitchen table from him, leaning her head on her elbow. Peyton tucked his feet under his chair so he wouldn’t kick her under the cafe-sized table.
Her eyes, usually dark and yet luminous, were half-closed, and her cheek was sliding from her hand down her wrist. Dark circles smudged under her eyes, and she kept blinking those long, slow blinks where she appeared to fall asleep for a few seconds.
It was rude to tell somebody that they looked tired, so Peyton refrained.
He assumed that his sparkling repartee was putting Raji to sleep. He resolved to do better. “Look this is the twenty-first century. You don’t have to cook breakfast for a guy. If you are not on call, and if we make this a regular thing—”
Raji covered another yawn with her hand. “Yeah, about this becoming a regular thing, Peyton—”
He backpedaled. “Hey, I’m casual. Whatever else you’ve got going on, I’m fine with it. I would have been fine if we’d had breakfast and hung out over coffee, just friends. Although I’m not sorry about, you know.” He gestured toward the bedroom, where her rumpled bed probably still smelled like sex.
She said, “We need to talk about some rules.”
“Rules? I thought that was why you wanted to fuck a rock star to begin with, because there are no rules.” He grinned, trying to look rakish to distract her.
“The rock star thing is the problem, Peys.”
“I thought you liked that I’m a musician,” he said, confused.
“It’s not that I think it’s a problem. It’s what other people will think if they see me, a cardiac surgeon, hanging out with a rock star.”
“I don’t like that rock star thing. I’m a classically trained musician.”
“Peys, I can’t be seen with you. No pictures. No tabloids. No gossip websites. The attending physicians, who are my bosses, and all of them are my bosses, like a dozen of them, all of them would freak if they saw a picture of me on some website, hanging out with a guy in Killer Valentine. I mean, Killer Valentine, of all bands, the band that loses musicians to heroin and rehab and infighting and the gods only know what else. They would just assume that I was stealing controlled substances from the pharmacy stocks. Cardiac surgeons don’t date rock stars.”
Peyton frowned. “I would have assumed that cardiac surgeons didn’t have a lip piercing or the Chinese symbol for energy tattooed on one of their hands, but those seem to be working for you.”
“These make me look edgy and hip.”
“Dating a musician would do that.” Peyton gestured to his khaki pants and pressed, white shirt. “And it’s not like I’m a long-haired stoner slacker with a needle hanging out of my arm. I have a Master’s degree from Juilliard.”
“But everyone knows Killer Valentine has a drug culture problem. When Rade died and Grayson went to rehab, the news was all over the place. Half the band was suddenly missing, and everybody had an opinion on it. And then your backup singer walked off like there was a reason to get the hell out. Your reputation isn’t as bad as Nirvana or Motley Crue or anything, but you guys are not a squeaky-clean boy band.”
“But the band is squeaky clean now. Killer Valentine has a strict anti-substance-abuse policy written into the contracts. After all that drama, they almost had to cancel the European tour. That would have been disastrous, and it’s why I was hired within hours.”
“But it’s a rock band. There are always drug problems, right? How about the other guys?”
Peyton admitted, “Tryp used to use with Rade and Grayson, but then he got married. His wife would never put up with that. She’s a technician, and if she saw him with any blow, she would probably put a bomb in his drum kit and blow him sky-high, if you know what I mean.”
Raji laughed at his stupid joke. That was a good sign.
He continued, “And Cadell, the lead guitarist, he used to have a serious heroin problem, but he’s been clean, probably, for almost a year now. He found out he had a daughter from a groupie hook-up—”
“I thought you guys didn’t hook up with the groupies,” she said, but her dark eyes were lively again.
“Yeah, well, people do stupid things when they’re stoned. Anyway, Cadell’s daughter had a liver problem and needed a transplant. That’s how he met Andy. He had to get off the heroin and be clean for months before Andy would use him as a donor and save his daughter’s life.”
“So you’re telling me that four guys out of the original five in the band have had major substance abuse problems. How about the lead singer, Xan Valentine? All lead singers are drug addicts, right? He’s the songwriter, too. Double whammy.”
“Not heroin. Steroid injections for his throat for a while because he can’t take a break. He has real problems with vocal nodes and inflammation because he’s obsessed.”
“But he does drugs, doesn’t he? I mean, the singer-songwriter isn’t going to be the lone holdout in a band full of drug addicts.”
“He’s some kind of crazy, all right, but I don’t think it has anything to do with drugs.”
“Oh?”
Peyton knew better than to spill Killer Valentine’s sordid secrets to anyone outside the band, but this wasn’t some random groupie who had managed to get backstage by blowing a roadie. This was Raji, his friend, maybe his only real friend in the world.
Of course, the guys in the band were his friends, too. The music bound them together as tightly as family, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.
Peyton didn’t like where the family analogy was heading. He and Georgie had had a pretty serious relationship a few years before. Seemed weird.
But needing someone outside the band to talk to wasn’t weird. Everybody had people outside the band.
He had his old friends from Juilliard, of course, but most of them had stayed in classical music. They didn’t understand his choice to sign with Killer Valentine. No one knew about Georgie and him, so everyone thought that he had just abandoned serious music and run off with a rock band.
And his family, well, they were New Englanders. Nobody talked about anything. Ever.
So maybe it wasn’t wise to spill his guts to Raji, but Peyton needed to talk to somebody.
He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Xan Valentine is a scary guy. There’s something deeply broken about him, something from his childhood. Sometimes, I’m afraid for Georgie, except that when he looks at her, his whole body changes, like the crazy drains out of him. It’s like she’s his sanity. If I thought Georgie was in any danger from him, I would do anything I could, everything I could, to get her away from him, but I don’t think she is. I think if she left him, he would be a danger to himself.”
Raji asked, “Do you think he’d hurt you?”
“No, because I think if anything happened to me, Georgie wouldn’t like it. We have managed to become friends, even after everything.”
“So, she forgave you for all that stuff in high school?” Raji’s eyes were wide open now.
“I begged her to, and she says she did. She wouldn’t hold a grudge. I’ve done everything I can to make it easier for her to be around me, and I think we’ve worked it out.”
“I’m sorry you lost her,” Raji said to him.
He poked the remnants of the rubbery egg white omelet with his fork. “I’m not sorry. She’s better off with Xan. I couldn’t even stand up to my friends when they talked shit about her. Xan and Georgie stood up for each other, and Xan gave up everything for her.”
“Everything? He’s the lead singer in a rock band. He’s famous and probably getting rich as shit. He doesn’t seem to be too badly off,” Raji scoffed. “What the hell did he give up?”
Peyton struggled with himself for a minute before he said, “Xan used to be a famous, child prodigy violinist. His name was Alexandre Grimaldi back then. I never heard him play in person, but I’ve heard recordings of him when he was a teenager. He was brilliant. He was brilliant like once-in-a-century brilliant. He was a genius like Mozart was a genius. When Xan and I went after Georgie after she had been kidnapped by the Russian mafia—”
Raji frowned. “I assumed you were kidding about that.”
“—to get out of the zip ties that were tying his wrists, Xan shattered his left hand. He destroyed it. Now, it’s held together with steel pins, wires, and scar tissue. He’ll never play any instrument again. He gave up the violin to save her.”
Raji was staring at her own hands, caramel-brown starfish splayed on the pale wood of her breakfast table. They were slim and as strong as a pianist’s fingers, probably from all the surgery she did. “I wondered why he stopped playing the guitar.”
Peyton nodded. “Because the bones in two of his fingers and half his hand had been crushed to pebbles.”
She shuddered, still staring at her hands. “I wouldn’t be able to do surgery anymore.”
He nodded.
“You were there,” Raji said. “You saved her, too, right?”
Peyton shook his head. “I had the same type of zip ties tying my hands behind my back. It didn’t occur to me to break my hand to get out of them. It didn’t occur to me to give up everything to save her. But Xan thought of it, and he did it. He didn’t hesitate. He gave up his music for her.”
Raji’s eyes were wide on her elfin face. “Wow.”
Peyton nodded. “Yeah. Wow.”
“Would you have done that if you had thought of it?”
A question that had haunted him for months. “I didn’t think of it, not even to save my own life. I thought we were all going to die, quite honestly. The kidnappers didn’t care about what we saw, who we might be able to identify, or what we might be able to testify to later. Therefore, they were planning on making sure we didn’t get out alive. That’s probably my answer, right there. Music is more important to me than my own life.”
“You’re still tied up in knots about her, though.”
Peyton shook his head. “We’re friends. I wish her every happiness in the world, but I know her happiness isn’t with me. Maybe just this once, I can learn not to be such a selfish bastard, huh?”
“I don’t think you’re a selfish bastard.” She walked around the table and straddled his legs, and she twined her arms behind his neck. “I’ve seen you two together, like at Andy’s wedding reception. Considering the way she linked her arm through yours while we were standing around talking, and just the easy way she talked to you, I think she has forgiven you and thinks of you as a friend.”
Peyton nodded, adjusting how she sat on his thighs. When her jeans rubbed across his leg, she bit her lip.
He said, “Okay, let’s see if I am such a selfish bastard. Tell me your rules.”
“When we’re together,” Raji said, staring at him with her dark, gorgeous eyes, “no going out in public. We hole up in a hotel room or my apartment, order room service or delivery, and stay in there. No mentioning me to the press. No telling anyone that you’re seeing anyone at all.”
He slid his hands up her thighs and cupped the slim curves of her ass. “Are we seeing each other?”
“In private. I mean, if you want to.”
“A secret affair,” Peyton said. “Yeah, I want to.”
“Okay, then,” Raji said, “for us, we’re seeing each other.”
“The other people in the band know I’m here,” he said. “Andy knows something is going on with you.”
“Tell them we broke it off.”
“But I like you,” he said. “If we broke it off, I’d mope around for days. Weeks, maybe.”
“So mope around for a while.”
“All right, I will. What else?”
“When I was in junior high, I studied and prepared hard for high school so that I could get flat straight-A’s the whole way through.”
“You’ve always seemed industrious to me,” he said.
Raji adjusted her legs on his thighs again, rubbing her jeans right across Peyton’s dick. He might agree to anything at the moment.
She said, “Medicine is my whole life, Peys. For me, my career is more important than my life, so no falling in love, okay? No sentimental stuff. No love, no relationship, no girlfriend-boyfriend stuff, no anniversaries. We are cold-blooded lizard people. This is not going anywhere, Peyton. We’re just seeing each other. It’s just a fuck buddy-type of thing. Strict boundaries. No messing up my career or yours. No sacrificing your music or my residency for fucking.”
Peyton was grinning at her. “But we’re friends, right?”
“Well, yeah. We’re friends with fucking benefits, but we are friends.”
“Then I’m good with that. Fuck buddies, we are. Very, very good fuck buddies.”
“Seriously, Peyton. I’ve been working my whole life to be a surgeon. Don’t fuck it up for me.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “I’ll keep your secrets. You can trust me.”
Raji cocked her head slightly. “I believe you.”
Peyton leaned back in his chair, a small movement, but he was blown backward. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
She shook her head, her short hair feathering around her face. “I think I can trust you. How long have you been with KV now?”
“Eight months,” he admitted.
“So, the time you’ve spent with Killer Valentine trying to apologize to Georgie is now about half of the time you actually dropped the ball for her,” Raji said.
“Yeah, close to it. But it’s not like that. It’s not just the time.”
“Well, you risked your life to save hers after she had been kidnapped by the Russian mob. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Life and limb, literally,” she said.
“But I didn’t destroy my hand to do it.”
“Did anyone order you to go after her? Was that your job, running into hostage situations to rescue people? Especially ex-girlfriends?”
“Of course not. I’m a musician, not security. I practically clawed my way onto the plane to go after her. I think Xan would rather that I hadn’t gone, but he realized that more muscle was better.”
“Was your presence important?” Raji asked. “What was your contribution?”
Peyton considered. “I kicked the shit out of some guys while we were getting out of there. I took a lot of Tae Kwon Do as a teenager. I’m pretty good at kicking people in the head when the situation calls for it.”
“Ah, so you were the Chuck Norris of the group,” Raji said, pretending to admire him.
He laughed. Chuck Norris. Sure he was. “I kicked a gun away from a guy, too. God, this sounds meager.”
“So even though your hands were tied behind your back, you didn’t need to break your hand to fight. You did your part without sacrificing your hand.”
Peyton hadn’t considered that. “I suppose.”
“How many people did you kick?”
“It all happened so fast. Bullets were whizzing all over the place, and the chandelier had shattered and was raining glass shards down on us. I was just kicking guns away and kicking people in the head, trying to survive and get us out.”
“Estimate,” Raji told him.
“More than five. Ten, probably. Not twenty.”
“You fought off at least ten people during your getaway. That sounds like a sizable contribution.”
“Okay,” Peyton said, unwilling to argue it further and distracted by her lithe body in his hands.
“So you saved Georgie’s life and Xan’s by kicking people in the head and physically fighting the Russian mafia, and you’ve given her back half of the time that you were mean to her in high school.”
“But that’s an oversimplification, or you’re making it sound like a month with KV equals a month that I bullied her. I don’t think it balances out like that. I feel like I haven’t paid back the debt.”
“Guilt is tough, Peys. You could give her your whole life and not stop feeling guilty about it. The guilt means that you regret it. It means that you’ve changed, not that some magical guilt-scale isn’t balanced yet.”
“It changed the course of her life.”
“Her father’s crimes changed her life. That’s why she didn’t have money for school and why she thinks she needs to pay people back. Joining Killer Valentine changed the course of your life. You gave up a soloist gig with the L.A. Phil and a classical career to be in a rock band, and I don’t think you even like being in it. You should get the fuck out of KV before this guilt eats you alive.”
“I signed a contract for a year,” Peyton said.
“Then we should start planning what you’re going to do when your contract is up in four months.”
Peyton ran his hands down her arms. “I could move to L.A. and fuck you every day.”
“Nah, you don’t want to do that. Let me get my laptop.” Her eyes gleamed, and a hungry grin spread her lips. “We can start a spreadsheet for you.”
He laughed. “My contract isn’t up until late summer, anyway. It’s snowing in other parts of the country, still. Next time we see each other, I’ll let you open a spreadsheet on me.”
Raji kissed him, and her soft lips on his filled him with desire again. God, she was one sexy little woman.
She whispered near his ear, and her warm breath puffed down his collar, “Promise me. Promise me that you’ll let me open a spreadsheet and type in ultimate outcomes and interim goals and metrics. I adore metrics.”
He chuckled. “I promise.”
She cuddled closer to his chest. “I’ll hold you to that one.”
Peyton wrapped his arms around her and stroked her back until he realized that she had fallen asleep in his arms.
He carried her limp body into her bedroom and covered her up before he grabbed his bag and caught a ride to the airport for his afternoon flight. The sound check for that night’s concert in Reno was scheduled to begin in four hours.