RAJI awoke on the cold beige carpeting with her arms and legs wrapped around Peyton. Warmth rolled off his flesh and thick muscles, the only warm thing near her. She huddled closer to him, but her back and legs were so cold that she was shivering. He was still breathing the deep, slow breaths of the sleeping or the heavily anesthetized.
Considering the vodka shots they had both been doing last night before collapsing on the living room floor, maybe both.
The other members of Killer Valentine spilled limply over the couches and chairs, snoring.
The television was silently playing some morning news show, and sunlight beams shot flat from the window and drew long shadows of the furniture on the beige carpet.
Wait, sunbeams?
Oh, shit. It was morning.
And the sun was up.
Raji grabbed her phone out of her jeans’ hip pocket.
The screen read 6:19 AM. The battery icon was a thin, red line.
“Fuck!” She pushed off of Peyton and leaped to her feet.
The other guys stirred. Xan Valentine rolled to sitting and shoved Georgie down on the couch behind him. From behind Xan, Raji heard Georgie holler, “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
Panic shot up Raji’s back and pushed alcoholic sweat out of her skin. “Oh, my God. My plane leaves in an hour and a half, and my stuff is all at my hotel. Shit. I’ll never make it in time. I’m calling a ride right now. I have to go.” She tapped the ride-calling icon on the phone screen, and her phone instantly died. “Fuck!”
Peyton stumbled to his feet. “My car’s outside. I can drive you. It’s faster.”
“I’ll never make it. Shit. I have rounds at the hospital tonight.”
“Let’s go.” Peyton was already walking toward the car.
“I can’t. My teeth. My breath. I need a toothbrush.”
Peyton already had the front door open. “Cadell, open the front gate for us. Raji, I have gum in the car. Come on.”
Raji grabbed her purse that had been lying on the table and sprinted after him.
He had his key fob out and was thumbing it as they stumbled down the inclined lawn toward the driveway packed with cars. The dark gray sedan parked in the last slot flashed its lights as he reached it. Peyton jerked open the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel.
Raji noted the car as she ran around the hood: a newish top-of-the-line Mercedes S-Class, a six-figure car.
If she hadn’t quite believed Peyton when he’d said he was loaded last night, she did now. Not only was the car expensive as all heck, something a cardiothoracic surgeon wouldn’t be able to buy until they’d practiced for at least a decade, but it was also refined and understated, a quietly ostentatious, Old Money car. New money bought BMWs and flashy sports cars. The hospital parking structure was full of them.
She grabbed the freezing door handle and yanked. As she tumbled into the seat, she told him the name of the hotel where she was staying.
“I know where that is,” Peyton said, cranking around in the seat to watch out the rear window.
Raji wrapped her seat belt around herself as the car reversed out of the parking spot, and then Peyton jammed the car into gear and took off down the long and winding driveway. “Gum in the glove compartment. Hand me a slice?”
She found it, gave him a stick, and crammed one piece into her own mouth, too. Spearmint filled her sinuses, much better than the burp-up of last night’s booze.
The gate at the end of the long driveway slid aside as they neared it.
“Cadell came through,” Peyton said. “Even though I grew up with gates like this, they give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“And why is that?” Raji hung on to the handle on the door and the soft leather of the seat as the car careened around a corner. The wan November sunrise filtered through gauzy clouds, turning them pale salmon and gold.
Peyton said, “Had some problems last summer.”
“What, stuck inside your Old Money compound and the foie gras delivery guy couldn’t get in?”
Peyton laughed. “No, some weird stuff went down.”
“Like what?” She was in that kind of mood.
“I shouldn’t say.”
“You brought it up, buddy.”
Peyton zipped the car around another tight corner. The turn’s force shoved Raji against the door.
He said, “That was the time when Xan and I rescued Georgie from the Russian Mafia who had taken her hostage.”
Raji laughed and held on more tightly as Peyton sped out into the city streets. “Fine, don’t tell me then.”
Peyton yanked the car steering wheel sideways and sped up the on-ramp to the Garden State Parkway. Even at that time in the early morning, other cars raced around them. “That’s pretty much what happened.”
“The Russian mafia.”
“Yep.”
If the Russian mafia didn’t like Peyton, maybe Raji shouldn’t hang around him anymore.
She wasn’t planning to hang around him anymore, anyway, but she asked, “Are you somehow involved with the Russian mafia?”
Peyton said, “Nope. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”
“So, Georgie seems okay now.”
“Yep, we saved her.”
“Is that why you and Xan Valentine have that alpha-male pissing-contest thing going on?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Raji laughed. “Every time you say something, Xan Valentine has to assert his dominant-male, bull-elephant status, like last night, when you said that you would hire Andy to be your doctor. Xan Valentine jumped in and announced that he was hiring Andy, that she was his.”
“Shingles hurt. If she could stop that from happening to me again, I’d gladly pay her salary.”
“But then he snagged her, and you didn’t do anything.”
“Oh, Raji. I come from a wealthy family. We didn’t keep our wealth for centuries by leaping to pay the bill when someone else is perfectly willing to do it. And really, she should be the doctor for the whole band, not my private physician on tour. It sounds like she’s going to give me a shot, slap me on the ass, and that’s it.”
Raji wasn’t sure how she felt about her friend Andy slapping Peyton’s ass.
She shook her head. Andy wouldn’t slap his ass, anyway. She was far too reserved.
And yet, Andy had eloped with a rock star. Raji would have to keep an eye on that little pindi.
She said to Peyton, “And you swell up but you don’t challenge him, even though I think you could.”
Peyton shrugged, a quick movement of his burly shoulder while he changed lanes to dodge a slower car. “It’s Xan’s band. He started the band with Cadell when they were at Juilliard, and he hunted down the other founding members and lured them away from college.”
Raji laughed and hung on for dear life as he rounded another corner. Peyton’s car might look like a sedate Old Money sedan, but some serious horses lurked under that hood. He was racing through traffic. “So why did you join Killer Valentine and become a rock star?”
“I’m not a rock star.”
“You keep saying that, but being in a rock band kind of means that you are. I’ve watched videos of you playing the demos in those clubs, you know. You’re hot.”
“You’ve watched videos of me playing on the demos? When did you do that?”
“When we met last night, I might have already known who you were. I might have watched that demo of ‘Breaking Out’ that you guys performed at the Travelers Bar a couple dozen times.” Or a couple hundred times. Or thousands. In only three weeks.
Now that she thought about it, that song was ostensibly about breaking out of fear to find love, but it took on a whole lot of other meanings if Peyton and Xan had rescued Georgie from the Russian mafia. “The way you were prancing around and leering at the front row, it sure looked like you wanted to be in a rock band.”
“This feels weird. I hadn’t told anyone that before last night.”
“Yeah, it was probably the vodka talking. Vodka always tells me, ‘People love it when you dance. Dance some more. Dance in the middle. Trust me.’”
Peyton laughed as he drove.
She continued, “But the real question is, why do you keep telling me this?”
“Like I said, I keep liking you better and better.”
“Oh, bullshit. You’re never going to see me again after today.”
“You never know.”
“I think I do.” She hadn’t given him her number on purpose. “So the reason you joined Killer Valentine has something to do with the keyboard player, Georgie Johnson. Right?”
Peyton whipped through traffic to take an exit off the freeway. “When did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Oh, God. I wasn’t looking at her with stupid googly eyes or something, was I? Xan accuses me of that all the time, but I swear to God that I’m not. I think I must have naturally googly eyes.”
Raji laughed. “You do not have googly eyes. You have the most gorgeous eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“I do?”
“Um, yeah.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Too much like she was looking at him or something.
He smirked as he turned the corner toward the hotel where Raji had her stuff.
Raji said, “And you know you do.”
Peyton laughed. “I know they’re a weird shade of green.” He turned the car into the hotel parking lot. The Mercedes screeched to a stop under the covered entrance area, and he jammed it into park.
He turned to her—his eyes darkening to teal in the morning sunlight—and he said, “Go.”
Raji ran to the stairwell and sprinted upstairs, which was faster than waiting for an elevator.
In her room, she grabbed the heap of laundry off of her bed—a pile of vibrant emerald silk woven with gold thread and encrusted with rhinestones, her bridesmaid lehenga choli dress—and stuffed it all in her suitcase. She grabbed her toothbrush and make-up bag but abandoned the rest of her toiletries. She would just buy new shampoo when she got back to Los Angeles. No time. No time.
When she got back to the car, her rollie bag bouncing over the sidewalk behind her, she found that Peyton had bought two large cappuccinos and had a bunch of pastries in a paper bag. The roasted smell of coffee and browned pastry filled his car.
She grabbed one and stuffed it into her mouth, the pastry turning to buttery flakes on her tongue. “Oh my God, the raspberry ones are my favorite. And coffee. Dear gods. You saved me. Thank you.”
Peyton chewed and swallowed some sort of doughnut with sliced almonds layered on the top. “There’s some yogurt in there if you want that.”
“So about the band, Georgie the keyboard player, Xan Valentine, and the Russian mafia—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Peyton crammed the transmission into gear. The tires screeched as the car roared out of the parking lot.
“Does this have something to do with why you became an accidental rock star?”
Peyton floored it, racing toward the parkway.
“Go ahead. Spill it. I assume that you were in love with Xan Valentine and stalking him, so that’s how you ended up in the band.” Or maybe Raji was projecting.
Peyton laughed. “Close. I was in love with Georgiana Johnson.”
“All right, let’s change that story around a little. You were a fan of the band, and you saw Georgie on the stage. She saw you, your eyes met, and she called you out of the audience to come up on the stage because she instantly fell in love with you, too.”
Peyton was laughing harder as he wheeled the car onto the entrance ramp headed for the Newark Airport. The sun, near the flat horizon and freeway overpasses, glared like a bomb blast over the front windshield.
He said, “Again, close. We grew up together, and she was my first real girlfriend.”
That’s right. Georgie had known about Peyton’s shingles outbreaks and his crunchy, anti-vaxx mom. “So you’re her stalker from childhood?”
“No. We competed against each other in piano competitions from the time we were kids. At Tanglewood, which is a highly competitive music program we both attended when we were sixteen, we fell in love, and we were each other’s first lovers.”
“How precious. I think I might barf. So did you guys live happily, all lovey-dovey for these years, until the big, bad, broody, glowery Xan Valentine took her away from you?”
“No, I fucked it up. I am the villain in this love story.”
“Oh. That’s sad.” She stuffed more pastry into her mouth.
“I would feel sorry for myself, but it’s entirely my fault,” Peyton said. “I did it all. I made every wrong decision at every opportunity. I was an evil asshole, and I hurt her a lot.”
“Did you cheat on her?” Raji sounded more aghast than she had meant to. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t ever going to see Peyton Cabot again. If he was a cheating asshole, it wasn’t her problem unless she was the woman he had just cheated with.
Ew.
Maybe Raji did need a shower.
Peyton said, “Everything but cheating, I think. But no, I don’t think I’m the cheating type.”
“Did you hit her?” Raji asked, trying to figure out what was so bad.
“Of course not. All right, everything except cheating and physical abuse.”
“Addiction?”
“Not that, either. Wow, you have some terrible ideas about men in relationships.”
Yeah, she did.
So that left— “Emotional abuse?”
Peyton sighed as he drove. “Yeah, you could put it like that. I am the biggest asshole in the world, and I fucked her over. I ruined her life.”
Raji squinted at the car’s gray ceiling to think about that one. “Georgie Johnson is the keyboard player for a major rock band, probably earning millions of dollars, and married to the lead singer in what appears to be an exceedingly happy marriage, if you can judge by the way those two were wrapped around each other like blood vessels around a tumor all night. If you were trying to ruin her life, you suck at it.”
“If there is any good that came out of it, it’s that she got rid of me and found Xan. Those two are soulmates. They have sacrificed impossible things to be together.”
“So it all worked out for the best,” Raji said brightly, looking at the other cars on the parkway as they raced through the traffic.
“I cannot think of it that way, ever. What I did was reprehensible. There is no silver lining or meant-to-be or any of that shit. I own it. I am the evil asshole who fucked up the life of the woman I loved until there was no going back. If she turned it around, it was no thanks to me.”
Raji had flinched the whole way through his speech. “That’s pretty harsh, Peys. If a friend of mine said that about themselves, I’d try to talk them down.”
“It’s better that I remember. I try to make up for it every day, to do anything I can to make her happy, to try to make the world a better place, and to never, ever treat anyone like that again. If that’s my natural personality, I need to not be that person.”
“Well, I don’t know what you did, but it sounds like you’re making up for it. I mean, we are our choices, right? Maybe you screwed up, but now you’ve chosen a different path.”
“You don’t know what I did.”
“And I’m not sure I want to,” Raji mumbled.
Peyton said, “You need to know.”
“I don’t think I do.” But she looked over at him and waited.
Peyton sucked in a deep, fortifying breath. “When we were sixteen, it was revealed that her father swindled a lot of people, including my parents and a lot of our friends’ parents, out of a great deal of money. We had plenty. We weren’t poor afterward, by any means. Indeed, we were still one of the wealthiest families in the country. But it was a lot of money. At school and in our community, a dark energy swept through everyone—an anger, a livid rage at our own willing ignorance that had led to our parents being swindled. Her father was arrested and whisked away to prison, where he killed himself within a week. Her mother hid in their compound and then ran to a house they had in a remote area of France. Her older brother was under investigation but hadn’t been charged yet, but he was staying in the city under their lawyers’ lock and key. Georgie was the only one available to attack. Georgie was at school the next day and every day. A housekeeper was staying with her because she hadn’t wanted to go to France, or maybe she couldn’t, legally. I don’t know. All that self-hating rage turned on her, and everyone attacked her.”
“Oh, no.” Raji could figure this out.
“Including me,” Peyton said. “It was vicious because everyone, absolutely everyone, should have known better, years before. They should have known that her father was swindling them, but they hadn’t wanted to know.”
“It sounds like a bad situation,” Raji said, trying not to agree with him too much.
“I listened to what everyone else was saying, what my parents were saying, what all of my friends and their parents’ were sniping about behind her back. Everyone thought she was in on it. They thought she had known that he was a con artist, but she hadn’t. She was as ignorant and shocked and innocent as the rest of us. He left her with nothing, too. No college fund. No inheritance. No graduation money to buy a plane ticket to get to a university.”
Raji’s father had paid what the divorce court had mandated he had to: private school until Raji was eighteen years old. Her mother hadn’t had a spare penny, though during Raji’s undergrad, she had managed to send Raji twenty bucks every month despite that. The rest of it—college tuition, dorm fees, food, books, and absolutely every cent for living expenses for her bachelor’s degree and through medical school—Raji had taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to cover. She was almost half a million dollars in debt, but at least she’d had a plane ticket to get to college. “That poor girl.”
“I blamed her. We all blamed her. They were all rude to her, shut her out, wouldn’t talk to her, basically destroyed her life by bullying. Everyone did it, but that’s no excuse.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
He shrugged. “Her father took about thirty million from my father and around twenty million from my trust funds.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Peyton! I’d be pissed, too!”
He shook his head. “It was a small percentage of the holdings. We made it up within a few years. Most importantly, it wasn’t Georgie’s fault.”
Raji wanted to stop him from saying any more, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the lines of pain around his eyes or block out the choke in his voice.
“I shouldn’t have listened to them. I should have stood up for her. When she told me that she didn’t know what her father was doing, I should have believed her. I should have believed her above all the others. I should have defended her. I should have been her knight in shining armor, but instead, I was the guy at the head of the mob, wielding the biggest pitchfork. Metaphorical pitchforks, you understand.”
“Yeah. I got that.” Raji’s heart clenched. She couldn’t imagine everyone turning against her like that.
“Georgie ran away. Understandably, she ran away. She ran away from Connecticut and ended up in the Southwest, going to college to be a lawyer so she could pay all of us back, so she could pay me back. Me, like I need the money.”
Raji held onto the smooth, titanium door handle of the Mercedes S-Class, a car that even her father, who had been a highly successful psychiatrist for many years, would have thought extravagant. With that big of an engine, she bet that it didn’t even get very good gas mileage, and the insurance must be exorbitant.
He said, “Because I am also an idiot, after she was gone, I figured out that I should have stood up for her. So I tried to find her. I looked for years. I went to college, to Juilliard for classical piano, like she and I had always dreamed of doing together, hoping she would be there.”
“But she wasn’t there,” Raji said. “You said she was going to go to law school.”
“I didn’t know that because I never asked her. One day after I had finished my Master’s, I was walking down the hallway in Juilliard, and there she was, lying on the floor with a guy standing over her. I didn’t recognize her at first. I thought a guy had hit a woman, and I was ready to intervene. When I finally recognized her, I was ready to do the right thing and be there for her. Instead, she was with Xan Valentine, and she was already in love with him.”
“Yeah, well, she had to go on with her life,” Raji pointed out.
“I deserve every moment of heartache. I have never denied that.”
“Okay. Good,” she said, still wondering where she should come down on this.
“I figured out that they were at Juilliard to find a new keyboard player for Killer Valentine. I had already signed a contract as a soloist with the LA Philharmonic—”
“The LA Phil? I love them!”
“—and so I broke the contract—”
“Oh, my God.” Even Raji knew what that must mean. One does not casually break contracts with major orchestras or surgical residency programs. Peyton was probably blackballed from the classical music world.
“—to go on tour with Killer Valentine.”
“Because you still love her.”
“Loved. I think I should say ‘I loved her,’ not that I still love her. She and Xan are soulmates, if such a thing exists. I gave up a soloist spot for her, but Xan has given up more. Far, far more.” Peyton swallowed hard, like he had almost been sick. “But the thing is, if she’s his soulmate, then she’s not my soulmate, and so I must not be hers. I shouldn’t love her. I don’t have that right.”
“You don’t just stop loving someone,” Raji said. Not that she had ever loved someone. Cold-blooded, lizard-like, cardiothoracic surgeons didn’t fall in love.
“After Georgie disappeared, I didn’t see her for—five years, I think? That’s a lot of time. When I found her again, she wasn’t the same person. She’d changed. She’d grown. She was stronger and deeper and warmer and more beautiful, but she wasn’t my Georgie anymore. I was in love with the girl I’d known when we were sixteen, and she didn’t want to be that person. It was right to let her go. We’re friends, now. I’ll do just about anything for her, including let her go so she can be with a man who’s better for her than I ever was.”
“That’s actually kind of beautiful,” Raji said.
“It’s not. Remember that it all started with me not believing her and not standing up for her when I should have. It all started because I’m an asshole.”
“How long were you an asshole, though? How many years?”
“About a year and half, from when we got back from Tanglewood until she finished her credits and walked away.”
“So, eighteen months? You gave up your whole life plan because you gave someone the silent treatment for eighteen months?”
“Eighteen months is a long time to make a mistake and double down on it every day, over five hundred days.” Peyton pulled the car under the wide, cement awning of the kiss and fly. “Here we are. You should run to catch your flight.”
This guy had just poured his heart out to her in a high-speed car ride that had turned into a therapy session. “Yeah,” Raji said. “I should run.”
“You should,” he said.
He stared at her, leaning over the console between their seats. The morning sunlight shone in his eyes, turning them sea green, and glanced off the hard planes of his cheekbones and jaw. Blond stubble on his cheeks glinted in the sunlight.
She asked him, “How long have you been with Killer Valentine?”
“Four months.”
Four long months. “You’ve been trying to make it up to her all that time,” Raji said.
“Every day, I try never to be that guy again.”
“Then you’re not.” Her heart hurt for him. “Then you’re not that guy any more. We are the sum of our choices. You’re choosing to be someone else.”
“I’m still the same guy.”
“Not if you are choosing to do differently and following through on it. If you’re choosing to be different, then you are different. You’ve changed.”
“I don’t feel like I’ve changed,” he said.
“You can’t do penance for the rest of your life because you were an ass to an ex for eighteen months when you were a teenager.”
“This feels like the right thing to do,” he said.
“It’s been four months. You broke a contract with the L.A. Phil for her. You’ve paid your debt. You shouldn’t be your ex-girlfriend’s caddy for the rest of your life. Is that what you plan to do, give up the rest of your life because you fucked up for a year and a half when you were in high school?”
“No.” He frowned, a line drawing between his light brown eyebrows. “Not the rest of my life.”
“So what is your plan?”
“Not to fuck up again, I guess.”
“That’s not a plan.” She grabbed him around the back of his neck and pulled him to her mouth for one last, hot kiss. She pressed her lips to his, opening her mouth. He tasted like mint gum and almonds.
His warm hand touched her waist, and he kissed her back.
She broke it off, breathless. “It was wonderful to meet you, Peyton-Cabot. I like you, and I think you’re a good man. I think it takes a good man to realize that he’s not one and to change. I think that we are the sum of our choices. Thank you for getting me to the airport in time, too. I would have been up shit creek if I’d have missed this flight. Good-bye, Peys.”
Raji jumped out of the car, yanked her rollie bag from the back seat, and sprinted for the ticket counter.
She made her plane with seconds to spare before they closed the door, and then she realized that she hadn’t given Peyton her phone number.
That was for the best, really. A guy who was trying to become a good man shouldn’t hang out with a soulless, heartless, reptilian psychopath such as herself, someone who harvested hearts from one dying person and sewed them into another, wrist-deep in chest meat and blood.
He needed someone better than Raji.