"Your brother seems great. How old is he?"
"Fifteen," I sit on the hard concrete next to him. "He's really into music. He idolizes you."
A gentle smile floats over his lips. "You don't know how much I needed to hear that today. Not the idol part, but that he's into music. I loved it too when I was his age."
He was Eli's age a little more than a decade ago. I silently wonder if he was as awkward as my brother is. I can't help but try to picture Asher as a teenager. I chase the thought away with a shake of my head.
"It was generous of you to offer to sign his guitar." My eyes squeeze shut in an effort to ward off the emotion I'm still feeling from seeing my brother let go of his security blanket of silence to talk to Asher. "I'm taking him back to Brooklyn tomorrow night. I can bring the guitar back with me. If you have time to drop by my studio, you can sign it then."
"I meant what I said to him." He shifts slightly, his jean covered knee brushing against mine. "We'll figure out a time for you to bring him down to studio when I'm recording. He can hang out for a few hours. I'll sign whatever he brings with him, guitar included."
There's no way he can know what that means to not only, Eli, but me. "You don't have to do that, but thank you. Meeting you today made his night. It might have even made his year."
"I know that feeling. Meeting you has made my year."
CHAPTER 16
Asher
It's hard to tell under the soft light outside of her building, but I swear she blushes. She brushes her hair behind her ear, the movement sheltering her face from my view long enough for the rosiness to fade.
"Why did he call you Seven? Is it for the reason I think?"
Her fingers curl into her right palm, cupping her keys. "Yes. I'm the seventh child."
There's no emotion in her words at all. She doesn't think the name is cute or endearing. She wouldn't have her keys in a death grip if that was the case. "I take it you don't like it?"
"Elijah's the third youngest. There were ten of us born before him." Her eyes follow the path of a car as it hurries past us on the almost deserted street. "He couldn't remember all of our names, so my mom decided that numbers would be better. To her it was a no brainer. He would learn how to count and he had a system for identifying us individually."
"He's fifteen now." I point out the obvious. "The number thing never changed to actual names?"
"It changed. He picked up names one-by-one until he was calling everyone by their given name but me."
I meet her gaze. "It bothers you, doesn't it?"
She purses her lips as she moves the keys in her hand. "Only if anyone else calls me that. I'm Seven to Eli. I prefer to be Falon to everyone else."
"Falon, it is." I bump my knee against hers. "Do you have to go up or can you stay for a few minutes so I can explain something?"
She turns then so she's facing me directly, her hands quieting in her lap. "I'm not going anywhere. You have my full attention, Asher. The floor, or I guess the stoop, is all yours."
She's right. There's no one else in sight. No one is going to come walking into the middle of this and save me from having to explain myself. I have to own up to what happened in her studio. I want her to understand that I pulled back because my head was in the wrong space. It had nothing to do with her.
"I should start by apologizing for answering that call on Friday when you were taking my picture."
It's overdue and something I should have done at the coffee shop right after our shoot. I saw how seriously she takes her work. I know that it pissed her off that I ignored her request to hand my phone to her assistant.
"The call seemed important." Her voice is quiet and understanding. "I sensed that it was really bad news."
No one else noticed that, not even the people who hang around me all day, doing very little to earn a paycheck. Falon picked up on it. She was the only one in the entire room.
Maybe I gave something away in my expression when Daniel told me he was with Caterina and had looked over the emails and listened to the voicemail she saved. It could have been the way my hand fisted around the phone when he told me that my suspicions about my paternity were dead-on. My dad told his fiancée, a woman he'd known just months at the time, the truth about me, yet he never bothered once to clue me in. I've asked both him and my mom at least a dozen times over the past decade whether I'm the product of one of the affairs she had that have been well publicized since I hit it big. Every single fucking time they've laughed and told me it was all nonsense, fabricated to hurt our family by random jealous assholes or vultures trying to sell a story.
"I was half-expectin
g it," I admit. "It was brutal hearing it though."
She eyes me carefully, her hand reaching up to scratch the tip of her nose. "That's why you wanted me to take your picture. You wanted that moment captured. Something changed and you wanted me to document it, right?"