Page 68 of Someone To Claim
I rub the spot where his palm connected and lead us toward a table in the back. Nobody pays us much attention. Cody’s wearing a baseball hat pulled low and, for once in his life, isn’t making eye contact with every woman in the room, which feels like a Christmas miracle in August.
“I’m not avoiding anything,” I say.
“Then it’s time to tell her you’re stupid in love with her,” Cody says, as if those words don’t carry enough force to collapse a building.
I pull out a chair and sit, heat burning under the collar of my flannel shirt. “I haven’t known her long enough to be in love.”
My heart calls me out on the lie as it hammers inside my chest. It’s a protest that no amount of logic has been able to quiet. Not since the morning I woke up with her plastered to me in that tent and thought,I am so far gone.
“The song you wrote after knowing her for two nights tells a different story.” Cody drops into the chair across from me. “I mean, I’m sure she has a clue with those sappy-ass lyrics.”
“She still doesn’t know I wrote it,” I say quietly.
Cody recoils like I just bragged about kicking puppies. “Are you joking? We need to tell her. Because sap aside, that’s a mic drop song, you silver fox.”
“I have a few gray hairs, asshole,” I mutter. “But there’s another reason this can’t work out.”
“Because you’re ancient?” Cody scoffs. “Age is just a number.”
“Yeah, and the number is too old for her.”
“Okay, let me get this straight.” He leans forward on his elbows and taps a finger against his scruffy chin. “You’re not too old to fuck her, but you are too old to admit your feelings for her.”
My jaw tightens, and I seriously consider breaking his finger, except the powers that be at the record label might actually kill me. “Don’t use that word when you’re talking about Sloane. It’s disrespectful.”
“Call itmaking love,” Cody says in a singsong voice, “but there we are, right back to the problem of you being a chicken shit.”
I want to argue. To tell him he’s a twenty-two-year-old kid who doesn’t know the first thing about what love can cost you. But the truth is, he’s dropping dimes with more clarity about thesituation than I’ve managed in weeks. The fact that a kid who still puts ketchup on his eggs can see it makes me feel like an idiot.
A snowball’s chance I’m admitting that now. “Don’t you have some unsuspecting superfans to seduce?”
He leans in again. “Is this because of your mom?”
My mouth falls open. “Ex-fucking-scuse me?”
“I mean—” He has the decency to look like he knows he’s overstepped, but not enough to stop. “You took care of her when she had cancer, and Sloane has?—”
“I don’t have mommy issues,” I say on a growl.
“Okay, then.” He holds up his hands. “Stop being a pussy.”
I’d laugh if it wouldn’t encourage him to keep going, but there’s no denying the kid has a talent for driving a blade straight through the bullshit and into the nerve underneath. I’ve made peace with my mother’s death, but Cody isn’t wrong either. I’ve spent the two decades since we lost her building my identity around being useful. By offering up whatever I had. My guitar, my connections, my time… My back when heavy things needed lifting.
And Sloane scares me because she doesn’t need or want any of that. She made it clear from the first time I met her that she isn’t looking for a fixer.
If she doesn’t need what I have to give her, then she’d have to want me for—what? Just me? The forty-year-old one-hit wonder with too much gray in his hair and a lifetime of taking care of other people because it was the role that made the most sense?
I can’t wrap my head around that part. It isn’t about loving her. I’ve been crystal damn clear on that since Montana. But what if who I am, stripped of everything I do for people, isn’t enough?
“Gotcha.” Cody grins and smacks his palm on the table as Sloane slides into the chair beside me. Between us, technically, but she angles her body toward mine, and the heat of her shoulder brushing my arm sends a jolt of need straight through me.
“What did I miss?” she asks.
“Nothing,” we say in unison.
She narrows her eyes. “That’s convincing.”
A waitress appears at our table. She’s in her mid-thirties with bright red hair pulled into a high ponytail and a pen tucked behind one ear.
