Let Me Be the One (18 page)

“Mr. Fitzpatrick? Dr. Kennedy will see you now.”

Logan stared at her for a second before he stood up. Was that a smirk she was hiding? Was she going to be on the phone the second he walked through the door to tell all her girlfriends about the screwed-up celebrity who was in with the doc right now? Maybe they’d make a date to meet for drinks after work so they could talk over Cosmos, or whatever the hot chic drink was at the moment, about what he’d worn and what a jerk he must be to have lost Suzi. They’d probably pull the video up on their phones so they could watch her run out on him again. He swaggered through the door. Never let ‘em see you sweat.

Dr. Kennedy stood up. And up. She had to be over six-foot. Her brown hair was short and threaded with gray, and she had biceps like a quarterback. At least he didn’t have to worry about hitting on her. “Hello, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Or would you rather I called you Logan?”

“Logan’s fine.” He shook her hand and sat down in the big brown leather wing chair across from the one she stood in front of.

“Would you like something to drink?”

Was this a test? Did his choice mean something? Did it mean something if he said no? “No, thanks.”

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Logan frowned. “I sent in all the paperwork.”

“I know. I just want to hear it from you.”

Logan shifted. The paperwork had been a pain in the ass. He didn’t want to go over all that crap again. “I’m Logan Fitzpatrick. I play guitar in Savitar. I’m thirty. Thirty-one.” Dr. Kennedy had a calendar over her desk. He squinted at it. “I missed my own birthday because I was hammered. I missed hers, too.”

“Whose?”

“Suzi’s. The reason I’m here. The reason I keep breathing. It was her birthday, and I was too drunk to notice. Jesus, I’m an idiot.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because isn’t that like a woman’s biggest pet peeve? Their guy forgets their birthday. I always remembered hers. It’s ten days before mine. I always did something big. This year was supposed to be a haunted castle tour thing in Spain and Portugal. We wouldn’t have even been home yet.” Logan lolled his head against the back of the chair. “I didn’t even remember to say happy birthday when I saw her.”

“Because you were hammered.”

“Yeah. When I came home after the party, the house was just too empty, so I started drinking. I didn’t stop until she came back to get her stuff.”

Dr Kennedy leaned forward. “Why do you say ‘The Party’ like that?”

“Because it was The Party where she caught that groupie sucking on my fingers and took off with that fucker Cherney.”

She nodded.

“It wasn’t my fault. She didn’t let me explain. I went to the bar to get Suzi a Coke. She doesn’t drink. Well, not often. The results are usually pretty bad when she does. Gillian went with me because she’s a groupie and there’s no getting rid of her. When we were walking back, somebody bumped me and some of Suzi’s Coke spilled on my hand. Gillian said she’d take care of it, took the Coke, grabbed my hand, and stuck my fingers in her mouth. It was an accident.” He jumped up and started pacing the room. “I knew I shouldn’t have been anywhere near Gillian. I knew Suzi wasn’t feeling good that day. That’s why I got her the drink. I thought it would make her happy. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. I was trying to do the right thing, and it just got all screwed up.”

“You sound very defensive.”

“Of course, I’m defensive. Every fucking person in the world has decided I’m the biggest jerk in the universe. Have you read the comments on the YouTube video? There’s pages and pages of people talking about what a dick I am. They’re even trying to pin that sex video on me again. I had nothing to do with that. Why would I risk it? Especially when we could have just set up a camera in the bedroom.”

“Did you ever ask her to?”

“What?”

“Put a camera in the bedroom.”

“No. That shit’s for amateurs. It’s too dangerous, too. Computers get hacked, and the videos end up online. I wouldn’t risk that with Suzi.”

Dr. Kennedy folded her hands on her notepad. “How did you meet Suzi?”

“I emailed her. She wrote this story about a three-hundred-year-old vigilante witch who goes after this guy. He’s a high school basketball coach, and he’s screwing all the little girls. These girls hire Desdemona to take him out, and she tears him up. It was the hottest, scariest thing I ever read. She wrote a whole bunch of Desdemona stories, but that was the first one, and after I read it, I emailed her. We emailed back and forth for a while, and when my tour went near her town, I put her on the list, and the minute I met her I never wanted to be away from her.” Logan dropped back into the chair.

“But you were on tour.”

“We emailed for a couple more weeks, and the next time I had a break, I went to her place, and we packed her shit into a U-Haul and moved her in with me. She tried to finish her college, but between my schedule and her publishing schedule, it was impossible, so she dropped out before she graduated.”

“How did her family feel about this?”

“They went ballistic. She’s an only child, and her dad never wanted her to leave home. She hasn’t spoken to them since.”

“Did that put a strain on your relationship?”

“Shit, yeah. I mean, it could have been worse. I was living in LA at the time so I wasn’t near my family, and none of my friends were near their families, so it wasn’t like she was the only one. And then the next summer we went to record with Jason Callisto. His wife is from this little town so they sort of adopted Suzi. Everybody who meets Suzi loves her.” Logan smirked. “She was always way too good for me. I knew I was going to lose her someday.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she’s really nice and smart and so fucking talented and really…good. Suzi is just a good person. And I’m not.”

“Do you think she loved you?”

“Yeah. I know she did. I just couldn’t figure out how to hang onto her.”

“It sounds like you were trying.”

“I was. I really was.” Logan clenched his hands. At least the therapist was on his side. “But she never wanted much. Suzi isn’t a material girl. Expensive jewelry made her nervous that she’d lose it. She was always afraid she’d spill something on designer clothes. The only thing she let me get her was a Tesla car, and she left that behind. It’s sitting in the garage. All I could do was…drug her with sex.”

Dr Kennedy’s eyebrows went up. “Drug her with sex?”

Logan swallowed. “It was stupid. I knew it was stupid.”

“No, please explain.”

“I just thought…if we had sex enough, she wouldn’t ever leave me.” A boulder started to grow in his throat. “She was a virgin when we met, and up until The Party, I would have sworn to you that I was the only man she’d ever been with. She loved sex. Loved it. Anytime, anywhere. She was always willing to experiment, and she’s so creative. And flexible.” Logan licked his lips. Thinking about it was making him hard.

“And she wasn’t doing it to please you.”

“Hell no. She wore me out sometimes. But I knew great sex was something I could always give her, and I thought if I gave her enough, she’d stay.”

“You know a relationship can’t survive on just physical attraction.”

“I know, but it was the only thing I had to offer.”

* * * *

“What is your plan?” Trisha asked. “You have to have a plan.”

Suzi gritted her teeth and changed the channel.

“Suzi?” Trisha lifted the remote out of her hand. “Susan.”

“Don’t call me Susan.”

Trisha smoothed her neat blue skirt and sat on the coffee table. “Suz, you can’t sit around my apartment watching TV forever. Have you even written anything in the last month? In college, you never stopped.”

“I’m grieving.” Suzi estimated her chances of getting the remote back to be slim to none. Trisha had a good grip on it, and her mood wasn’t advantageous.

“You’re sitting on the couch doing nothing. You won’t even go to the gym.”

According to Trisha, that was her biggest sin. The not writing. The hiding from all her other friends. The sitting on the couch watching TV all day. The not eating. None of that trumped not going to the gym. “Trisha—”

“I’m not listening.” Trisha stood up. “I understand you were madly in love with Logan, and you just broke up with him—”

“Publicly.”

“Yes.” Trisha groaned. She tossed the remote onto the table. “Suzi, you’ve been sitting on that couch for a month. You need to do something.”

Suzi sat up. “I will. I swear.” She checked her watch. It was a gift from Logan. For two months now, she’d been taking it off every night and putting it on every morning without thinking. Unbuckling it, she tossed it on the table. “You’re going to be late for work. Why don’t you go, and I’ll figure something out. I promise, by the time you come home, I’ll have a plan.”

Trisha narrowed her gaze at Suzi before grabbing her purse and walking out.

“Not all of us started kindergarten with a detailed life plan to become a marketing genius,” Suzi muttered as she opened up her email.

A plan.

Her email was full again. She hadn’t checked it since she got here. Wally wanted to know what to do with her stuff. He’d stashed it in his garage where it was safe, and it was no problem, but… Okay, what he wanted to know was where was she, and was she all right? Fair enough. So did everyone else who had emailed. If she sorted the email alphabetically by subject, the list wouldn’t change—almost every one of them started with the word
where
. Except for Brian’s. His first one read
*tap, tap* Is this thing on?
The one after that read
Nature Girl! Come out, come out wherever you are!
She opened that one.

Hey Suzi, here’s another bottle in the ocean. I’m at Jason’s in WVA. If you want to fall down that waterfall again, give me a call, and I’ll pick you up. You can talk. You cannot talk. You can lie in the hammock and watch the trees grow. I don’t give a shit. I’ll even run interference for you for free. That’s got to be the best deal going because quality interference-running is hard to find, and I’m the best in the field. I’m your oxygen.

She clicked open a couple of his other emails. They ranged from silly to frustrated. He’d heard she’d seen Logan, and it hadn’t gone well. Brian said he remembered what it was like to be where she was, and back then she’d been there for him so he thought he owed her one. Remember? England? When Brian smashed that bottle on the wall fighting with her, and she ended up playing Trivial Pursuit as a drinking game with Marc and Ty and getting so wasted that he had to carry her to bed where absolutely nothing whatsoever happened? Remember?

Most of it, she didn’t remember, and what she did, she’d been trying to forget. Ever since she woke up fully dressed and alone that morning, she had known he was trustworthy, too.

And since he was offering to let her lie in a hammock and watch the trees grow to her heart’s content, she decided that sounded like a great plan.

Three years ago

Suzi swallowed and braced herself. Brian was wallowing, and she couldn’t take it. His eyes hadn’t been this dim since the first time she met him when he was still married to Bonnie. Did he still love her somehow? “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend every day sitting on the veranda drinking.”

Brian sneered and bobbed his head, continuing to stare across the lawn.

“You wanted to come to England to write the new album.” Suzi hooked a lock of hair behind her ear. Feet together and back straight, she felt like she was trying to give a speech to her whole university. “We could take a break and go sightseeing. Just to get out.”

“I don’t want to go look at a bunch of fucking castles. I’m perfectly happy where I am.”

Suzi clasped her hands together. She should never have mentioned castles last time. Those she could do alone. All she was doing here was hanging out, waiting for the Savitar tour to swing past and pick her up for a couple of weeks. Supposedly, she was also helping Brian with his depression, but he wouldn’t let her. “I wasn’t thinking of castles. There’s a nice Beatles tour in Liverpool. That wouldn’t be a bad day trip.”

“I don’t want to go to Liverpool.” He took another swig from the bottle. He’d given up glasses, too, but she figured that was to annoy her.

If the Beatles didn’t work, she wasn’t sure what to try. He’d already nixed Sheffield, and nothing on Earth was getting him over to Dublin. Jason had asked her to come stay with them for a while because Brian had become unbearable as his divorce progressed. They thought she could cheer him up or at least distract him. So far, no good. All she seemed able to do was irritate him more. “I was planning on making cookies. You in?”

He rolled his eyes toward her, took another ostentatious drink, and went back to glaring into the distance.

“Brian, this is ridiculous. You’re just being childish.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I can’t leave you sitting here sulking and drinking. It’s unhealthy.”

“When did you become my mother?” Brian snapped.

Suzi drew a quick breath to bolster her confidence. His mother? Is that what she sounded like? “I just don’t like to see you like this.”

“Then go away!” Brian threw the bottle onto the flagstones on the other side of his chair.

Suzi recoiled. None of the glass came anywhere near her, but the violence in his voice stung. Brian had never yelled at her before. She blinked to keep her tears back. She ached to wrap her arms around him and soothe his hurt, but that was a bad idea. “Fine.” Snatching up the second bottle of whiskey from behind his chair, she tucked it under her arm. “But you’ve had enough.”

She made it to the kitchen before the trembling made her stop. Her whole body shook. She set the bottle on the counter before she dropped it. The huge manor house kitchen had delighted her when she arrived. Now, she couldn’t do much more than lean on the table and shiver. This was Brian. Sweet Brian. Yelling at her to go away.

Before she ended up blubbering, she started mixing the sugar cookies. Suzi had the recipe memorized, and the cook had made sure all the ingredients were handy before she left after supper. Brian hadn’t joined them for the meal. He’d already been out on the veranda.