They promise to be in touch when, if, they need anything else from me. Then Keith and I leave. It feels strangely too simple given the conversation we just had.
The weight of a thousand suns is suddenly off my shoulders. I already told Keith I don’t want to see the trailer I grew up in. The place where my father was murdered. It’s a crime scene anyway, but even if there was something that survived the fire, it doesn’t belong to me.
The FBI still has my father’s body as they’re conducting an autopsy. I was told once they release it, I can make final arrangements. But for now, I don’t have to think about it. I’m still not sure how to process everything that happened.
How my father died. The things he was doing.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been an orphan for a very long time. I just want to get the hell out of here. Keith does too, I think. It’s been a very long couple of days.
And even though I’m with Keith, I still feel lost. Disorganized. Like I don’t have a place I truly belong and it’s unsettling. Do I go home with him? Just like that? Is that even the right move for me to make? I don’t know.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t have to.”
I shake my head no, because he’s wrong on that. I do have to know. I need certainty. I need tangible hard facts. I need reality, not the fairy tale where I fall in love with a rich rock star. It feels real and it doesn’t and I…
“I love you, Maia. I can tell you don’t have faith in much right now, but I hope you have faith in that. In us.”
I glance over to him, staring contemplatively at his profile as he drives us the hell out of here. “I love you too.” I guess that’s something to build on.
“Move in with me,” he asks, reaching over and toying with my fingers. “Or better yet, just don’t move out.”
I pivot to face him.
“What?” he asks, fighting the grin curling up his lips and failing. “Why is your face scrunched up in disgust like that?”
“Now?” I bark incredulously. “You ask me this now? After I left a jail and just spent two hours speaking to the damn FBI about a mob boss I was entangled with and my father’s murder?”
“Right. Bad timing?”
I snort out a laugh. “Ya think?”
He shakes his head, undeterred. “You’re stalling. It has nothing to do with the timing.”
I bluster out a breath. “We just got together. Don’t you think that’s moving a bit fast?”
“No. We’ve been living together for six weeks already.”
“Keith.”
“Maia,” he parrots, mocking my tone. “I don’t want you to come over to my place and I go over to yours. I don’t want to lug shit back and forth. I want to wake up with you in the morning and make you breakfast. I want you to come with me when I go to the studio and I want to be able to go to my music room and play while you’re doing your work in the office next door. Then, when we’re done with our work, I want dinner in front of a crappy old movie—”
“A what?” I interrupt sharply.
He smirks. “An epic cinematic classic. Isn’t that what I said?”
“Um. No.”
His fingers caress the bones of my hand, his eyes on the road when I know they want to be on mine. Still, his smile is spreading by the minute. His conviction making me love him that much more.
“I want you to beat me at chess, even when I cheat. I want to kiss you whenever I feel like it. Whenever I walk into a room and see you there. I want your girly crap all over our bathroom and your sexy panties in our dryer. Every time we go out, I want you on my arm while I tell the world you’re mine because you can never ever be anyone else’s. I want to buy you a million things you’ll yell at me for because you don’t like me makin’ a fuss over you when that’s all I want to do. And then, after I’ve done all those things—all those things that you secretly love though you’re outwardly yelling at me for—then I want to spend the whole night, every night, making love to you. I don’t want to date you, Maia. I want a life with you. What do you say?”
36
Maia
Four months later
* * *
“I’m going to be honest with you, I’m totally freaking out right now.”
My eyes are glued to the front of the room where Blind Tears, where freaking Gabriel Rose, is singing a special song he wrote just for Gus and Naomi. I mean, what the fuck? How is this reality? How am I here, watching Blind Tears play at a wedding?
“Naomi’s dad before he died was very close with Gabriel. Lyric and Naomi practically grew up together.”
All I can do is shake my head in disbelief.
“Why do you react like this for every other musician you meet, but you never did with me?”
I grin as I let Keith start to lead me again on the dance floor of the huge mansion Gus rented out for his wedding. “Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Maia—”
“What can I say? You’re just not as cool as Gabriel Rose is. You’re all, I bang sticks on a drum and think I’m hot shit,” I say, trying to imitate his caveman voice.
I get a smack on the ass for that and it makes me laugh.
He wouldn’t continuously ask that question if he didn’t like punishing me for my answers. And I wouldn’t continue to indulge him if I didn’t like his punishments. It’s what you call a win-win in the relationship world.
A world I’m learning all about.
I told Keith no to moving in with him for real. Of course, I did. Because that’s how Keith and I work. I tell him no and he fights me and eventually I relent because I don’t really want to say no. I always want to say yes to him.
We returned to California and I never left. I moved into his room and took over the empty closet in there since he had two walk-in closets and that was that.
Well, sort of.
I was actually more shaken up than I thought I would be over what went down with my father and Carvalo and the FBI. Giovanni Carvalo took a plea deal. He was looking at life in prison with some pretty strong evidence against him. He settled for twenty-five to life, but only after he gave the FBI what they were looking for.
I don’t have to testify. I don’t have to see him again.
He’s in prison. That’s all I care about.
My debt with him is done.
I had my father buried beside my mother and anything that was left of the trailer, taken care of. I didn’t have a funeral for him. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand there and think of anything good to say about him. I couldn’t mourn his loss and part of me is troubled by that.
But the other part of me accepts that sometimes the family you’re born into isn’t the family you’re meant to end up with.
The family you find, the family you create for yourself, is where you’ll find a love that never ends.
And for the first time in my life, I feel like I’ve done exactly that.
With a little something extra.
Which brings me back to Keith and this wedding reception.
Keith continues to sway us on the dance floor as he holds me close, his hands pressed into my back, his face stuck in my neck where he continues to breathe me in like I am his air and suffuse him with life. “I love you,” he whispers.