Page 28 of Saving Graces
“Savannah!” Rosalie’s voice got sharp. She felt panicked, and very fucking angry. “Don’t do this.”
“I’m doing it. I’m going to call the board and put arrangements in place, effective immediately. Oh my god, sit down, what are you going to do? Tackle me? I have kids, Rosalie.”
And that was how, to her horror, twenty-four hours later, Rosalie found herself on a private jet to Vermont.
Chapter Ten
Kinsey had never been so exhausted in all her life. She was in bed by 8PM every night, after doing a careful salt-water gargle for her throat and taking two tylenol for her pounding headache and stiff, aching shoulders. She slept like the dead. Then at seven in the morning she reported for duty at the studio all over again, rubbing Cassidy’s back briefly with sympathy as she walked by.
Greta was a monster.
Cassidy had warned her and yet even she seemed taken aback by the reality of the process. She took the worst of it, as lead singer, after all.
“It was this kind of thing I was thinking of when I said I was happy for you to be the star,” Kinsey told her on the third day, over lunch and Cassidy groaned. She looked ragged, something Kinsey had never imagined possible. But that was before she’d sung their song Green Light Go eleven billion times in a row, Greta snapping at her from the sound room, until at one point Cassidy had literally sung it lying on her back on the floor. Oddly, that seemed to be the take that satisfied Greta the most.
“She’s a sadist.” Cassidy swallowed a mouthful of the hot water and lemon, her one life line this last week and moaned. “I’m so sick of the sound of my own voice.”
Finally, late on the Friday evening after a week of gruelling repetition and hard feedback, Greta called them all into the sound room.
“You guys are great,” she said. Kinsey’s jaw unhinged. Nothing Greta had said all week had indicated she thought they were anything other than desperately rank amateurs. “I’ll get these tracks to you in a month.”
Then they were dismissed.
Back out in the street, the four of them breathed in the cool evening air and tried to rebuild their shattered egos.
“I gotta go and die somewhere,” Franklin announced.
“Being that I’m already dead,” Eliza groaned, “can you give me a ride home?”
The two of them left and Kinsey’s eyes drifted to Cassidy.
“Want to get a drink to celebrate?”
Cassidy shuffled her feet on the sidewalk.
“I’d like to,” she said, “but I really want to spend time with Lane tonight.”
“Oh,” said Kinsey. She swallowed. “Sure.”
They nodded at each other for a moment, though Kinsey wasn’t sure what, precisely they were agreeing.
“Well,” said Cassidy to a neighboring streetlight. “We made it.”
“We did.”
“Goodnight then.” She hesitated, then pulled Kinsey into a hug. Kinsey hugged her back. Cassidy felt good to hug. Really good.
“Goodnight,” Kinsey said quickly, pulling back, and off they walked in opposite directions.
Damnit. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. Cassidy was so unavailable she might as well be on the moon. Lane was also her friend, while Cassidy was her bandmate; she knew she needed to shove down the slight kick of desire she still felt around her sometimes. They just spent so much time together and the song-writing felt so intimate and intense. Kinsey wasn’t entirely sure how to separate it all out.
And just like that, she thought of Rosalie. It had been a couple of months since their encounter but the stab of desire she felt was as potent as if it had been yesterday. The memory of Rosalie’s body, those eyes, the sound she made as Kinsey pushed her fingers inside her for the first time… that was enough for her to know that the real deal was out there. It wasn’t a gentle nagging crush like the feeling she had around Cassidy; it was a full blown roar in her blood. From the first moment Kinsey set eyes on Rosalie, every single part of her had stood at attention, and by the time they were standing in the crowd together, their bodies close, she knew how hot they’d be together. Every second behind that curtain had only confirmed it.
She wondered if Rosalie ever had second thoughts about the way she’d ended things. Kinsey would never know it if she did; Rosalie had no way to contact her. She had considered, more than once, dropping by the center - just in case - but her pride was too strong and she knew to respect a boundary when it was drawn. God, what a waste of epic chemistry though.
It was, she knew unfortunately, far more than just that. Everything about Rosalie had compelled her. The physical attraction had pulled her in, but even from the beginning it was the whole package that had made Kinsey want her. Her activism, her success, the way the kids at the center adored her, the delicious balance of her strength and vulnerability, her strong will struggling against her obvious desires… Kinsey could have been hooked. So hooked. It burned, still, that she couldn’t have her.
Kinsey sighed as she wandered towards home. There was a dating app burning a hole in her phone too. She could swipe profiles and find a girl tonight, she knew it. But while Cassidy made her way to Lane’s arms and Rosalie was out there somewhere, breathing, thinking, walking around being beautiful, Kinsey could not bring herself to want anything less.
