Geoff looks off into the distance, like he’s fallen deep into thought. Now he wants to stop talking?
I let out an irritated huff when I have to ask, “What did she say?”
He glances over at me, like he went somewhere else and didn’t realize I was still there.
“She said she made you a promise, and once she makes a decision to do something, she never backs out.”
She’d said the same thing to me when she showed up on the porch of my cabin. The memory warms my heart at first. But then I remember waiting in the lobby. For hours beyond our meet-up time because I trusted those words.
She promised me, I kept telling myself over and over again, all the way up until it was time for me to deliver the worst performance of my life because I went in with zero rehearsal.
And it didn’t stop there. As soon as I finished taping my segment, instead of waiting until midnight to get one more piece of airtime, I rushed back to my place to ask the doorman if she’d come by.
“No. Sorry, Mr. Latham. But I promise, if she does, I’ll send her right on up,” the doorman answered with a look that was half-pity and half-confusion. Up until that point, he’d only had to deal with me telling him not to let girls I was done with know I was in the building if they came by.
She hadn’t kept her promise. And she wasn’t going to, I realized.
In the end, instead of going with Red to Colin Fairgood’s New Year’s Eve party, like I planned, I called in the Reapers and told them to bring over the only things that could numb the pain: girls, drugs, alcohol, and themselves for a party to end the year. I told Rowdy and Crash that only country music was allowed at the rager that night. Red hated country music.
Then I proceeded to get blitzed out of my mind. It hadn’t been a White Christmas, as they call spending the holiday with cocaine. But it was a White New Year, for sure. And when two sober cuties asked if they could come back with me to my bedroom, I was like, “Sure, why not?”
Red wasn’t the only one I could break the rules for, I told myself. Yes, she’d made me lose my mind temporarily, but I could get over her. Possibly tonight.
But even while being attended to by two dime pieces, I couldn’t forget her. I couldn’t come. No…not until I conjured up her image and imagined her watching me from the door.
“She also said I was a worse user than you if I was trying to kiss an almost-married woman just to get a CEO position,” Geoff says, cutting into my memory of that New Year’s Eve.
He chuffed. “I explained to her that it wasn’t just a position. That it was about my due. What I deserved, after all the work I put in—but she just cut me off and said, ‘He’s your brother. And family comes first, over everything. Try loyalty.’ Then she offered to make me her grandmother’s fried chicken. And O2 came down, and Bernice acted like I was just visiting and I never tried to kiss her. All she needed was a 'bless your heart' and I would have been right back in Tennessee, where people think food and family solve everything.”
“It doesn’t,” I agree, matching his cynical tone. “I don’t know why she tried to use that brother argument on you. You never gave a shit about me. Then or now.”
He looks over at me again, scrunching his forehead. “Is that what you think? That I don’t give a shit about you? Is that why you signed with Stone River? Why you joined that motorcycle gang? Because you thought they were better brothers than me?”
I shake my head. What else would he expect me to think? “Dad sent me away, and you said nothing. You didn’t call. You didn’t text. And why are you bringing up Stone River when you were the one who said I wasn’t good enough for a deal back then, just like you keep on saying I’m not good enough to be the AudioNation CEO?”
“I didn’t say you weren’t good enough,” he sputters. “I said you weren’t ready. I’d seen this industry eat people alive. And you were already messed up enough—not to mention running with the Reapers. I didn’t want you to end up another statistic. Dead at an early age because I didn’t pull the brakes. And as for abandoning you…”
He turns his head, as if he can’t look me in the eye and say his next thing: “I felt bad when Mom left Dad for Merri, but I got three parents out of that deal. What happened with your mom—that was on a whole different level. And you were so pissed. I didn’t know how to talk to you—how to help you. So I didn’t do anything. That’s the Dad in me, I guess. Business—I’m all over it. Relationships…I shut down.”