Down to My Soul (Soul Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Yeah. There is one thing.” I pause for effect, leaning forward like I’m about to share a secret. Anticipation lights their faces, and they lean forward to catch the inside information I’m about to drop. “He
loves
hummus.”

APPARENTLY A SQUIRREL HAS TAKEN UP
residence in my mouth. That thick, furry thing moving around in there can’t be my tongue. In my current state—stretched out under my piano with a bean bag for a pillow, sledgehammer going in my head, and my eyes blearily barely cracked open against the morning light—I can’t come up with a better explanation.

Something pointy nudges between my ribs. What the hell?

“Rhys, get up.” Jimmi, one of my best friends since high school and one of the few people who can get into my house, stands over me, hands on her hips and frown firmly on her face. Her boot connects with my stomach again, and I grab her foot.

“You got one more time to jab me with that knife-shoe thing you’re wearing.” The words scratch in my throat, and I drag myself into a sitting position, bumping my head against the piano.

“Careful,” Jimmi says, wincing on my behalf.

Now she tells me.

“What’s up, Jim?” I rub at the sore spot on my forehead. “Did you . . . wait, if this is about that song, I’m almost done. I promise it’ll be ready by Thursday.”

“And what do you think today is?”

“Tuesday?” I ask cautiously, looking around my music room for clues among the instruments shelved and displayed on the walls.

“Gah!
Today
is Thursday.” Jimmi cocks one hip, resting her hand there. “And I’ve been calling you to check on your progress with the song.”

She holds up my phone, her expression exasperated.

“This was upstairs on the kitchen counter. Dead.”

“I wondered where that was.” I run a hand through the hair hanging past my ears and around my neck. God, I need a haircut. And a shave. And a shower. A toothbrush wouldn’t hurt.

“Not doing you much good dead.” Jimmi tosses the phone to me.

“My charger’s here somewhere.” I sift through the blanket of music sheets beneath me until I find the small wire. “Here we go.”

I drag myself to my feet and plug the phone into the wall, leaving it to charge on top of the piano.

“What’s all this?” Jimmi bends, picking up several composition sheets, narrowing her eyes over the notes I barely remember chicken scratching out. “You wrote all these?”

Her eyes wander around the room, taking in the composition paper, napkins, and receipts littering every surface, all covered with music I vaguely remember writing over the last two weeks since I got off tour.

“This is some
Beautiful Mind
shit.” Jimmi holds up a napkin to the light to read the song I scrawled there. “Have you been in here drunk? High?”

“Something like that.” I squeeze a spot at the back of my neck tight from sleeping on the floor. “Great movie, by the way. Some of Russell Crowe’s finest work.”

It only took one stint in rehab for me to understand what an addictive personality I have. My gift comes at a price, near obsession. Unchecked, I’m nothing but a wave of extremes. I barely drink alcohol and I never do drugs, so music is my drug of choice. And I’ve been on a bender ever since I got off tour. Since I came home to this empty house and faced the fact that Kai isn’t coming back any time soon.

If ever.

“Is this symphony orchestra stuff?” Jimmi peels at the edges of the music sheet plastered to the wall, a frown puckering her brows. “It won’t come off.”

“Here, lemme see.” I lean forward to rub at the edges, finally barking out a harsh laugh. “Great. It won’t come off because I wrote it
on
the wall. Sarita’s gonna kill me.”

“I’m gonna kill you myself unless one of these songs is mine.” Jimmi leans against the piano.

“I got your song, Jim.” I kick a few music sheets out of the way, squinting at the floor to see where the hell her song could be. “It’s here somewhere.”

“Also,” Jimmi says, holding one finger under her nose. “You reek.”

“You’re saying I stink?” I lift my arm to take an investigative sniff. “Hmmm. So
that’s
where the smell is coming from.”

I take a step in her direction, thrusting a handful of my two-day-old t-shirt into her nose.

“Rhys, stop it!” Jimmi laughs, backing up, stumbling and slipping on the papers under our feet.

“Couldn’t resist.” I grin, feeling less like microwaved shit than when I woke up. Jimmi and I used to play pranks on each other in high school. She was always good for a laugh. I feared that misbegotten one-night stand on the road had ruined our friendship. I’m glad we still have this.

“Gimme ten.” I back out of the room, gesturing to a stack of papers on the piano. “I’m seventy-five percent sure your song is in that pile right there. Look while I take a shower, and then we can head to the studio.”

I’m actually more like forty-five percent sure, but that’ll keep her busy while I scrub the grunge away. I’m looking and feeling pretty nineties Seattle right now. I rush up the steps and to my bedroom, pausing when I cross the threshold.

That bed.

That cold, empty bed is the reason I’ve spent the last week of nights under my piano. The sheets, void of Kai’s warmth, of the small curvy shape of her body, hold no appeal. The loneliness of that bed chases me into my dreams, and not even in sleep can I escape the fact that she’s not here. Kai was in my house just a few weeks, but it only took one night for me to crave her beside me every morning when I wake up.

I leave a trail of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor on my way to the jets of life coming from the showerhead. Rivulets rush over my head and down my body, washing away all my defenses and all my distractions, leaving me nothing to keep my mind off how royally I fucked things up. Nothing to hide this deep, raw, self-inflicted wound that’s been bleeding out ever since Kai left LA without a word.

I rest my forehead against the water-slick tile and bang one fist into the wall. All I want is Kai. I miss the way we laughed together and talked so easily the hours felt like minutes. God, I miss her hot-honey voice and the sweet taste of her. Feeling her moving under me, our bodies in perfect synch. I miss being inside of her, feeling the desperate grip of her body around me.

Shit. Now I’m hard and my own hand’s the only thing gripping me. I tighten my fingers around my cock, ready to handle this the only way I know how until Kai comes back to me.

“Let me get that for you,” Jimmi says at my back, her hand reaching around to hold me tightly.

I jerk away, turning to face her. What the hell? She’s in my damn shower wearing nothing but lust and mischief.

“Jimmi, go.” I grit the words out, pointing to the opening leading out of the shower. “Now.”

“Come on, Rhys.”

She reaches for me again, this time stepping closer until our bodies are flush and her naked tits press into my chest. Celibacy isn’t exactly a habit for me, so of course my dick gets harder. It’s what it
does
. She feels me swelling in her hand and grins up at me.

“Somebody’s on my side. Maybe you don’t remember much about the night we had together, but your dick sure does.”

I don’t want her. I don’t want this. I’ve messed things up enough with Kai without adding this to the list of shit she might not forgive me for. I met Jimmi on my first day at the School of the Arts, and we’ve been through a lot, but she’s not worth losing Kai. Nothing is. I shove at her shoulder, maybe harder than I intended because she stumbles back against the wall, almost falling. I grab her arm to steady her, but she captures my hand and drags it to her breast, the nipple pressing into my palm.

“Nothing’s holding you back, Rhys,” she whispers so low I barely hear it over the water.

I jerk my hand away and step out of the shower. If she won’t go, I will. I grab a towel and tie it around my hips before turning to face her. She’s still standing under the spray of water darkening her hair. She runs her fingers over her breasts and slides them down her stomach to stroke between her legs.

“Rhyson, come on.” Jimmi drops her head back, heavily-lidded eyes snaring mine through the rising steam. “You want me to handle this myself?”

“That’s up to you.” I turn away from this scene before my body does something every other part of me will regret. “Be downstairs in five minutes ready to get outta here, or you get no song from me.”

I stalk off to my closet, quickly snagging briefs, jeans and a t-shirt. When I come back through to brush my teeth, Jimmi’s gone. A relieved breath pushes from my chest. This is beyond awkward. I feel sick, nauseated by the memory of her touching me, of her breast under my hand. I would never cheat on Kai, but do I tell her what just happened? Does it matter? Would she care? Is it cheating when she won’t even return my calls? I could even rationalize that technically Kai walked out on me and ended things, but there’s no rationalizing with my heart that insists she’s
it
, and no one else has the right to touch me. If she were in a shower naked with some other guy who touched her like that, I wouldn’t care if we’d been apart for two months or two years. I’d dice him into microscopic chunks, and fuck Kai blind until her body remembered nothing but me.

The closer I get to the music room, the slower my steps become. I don’t want to have this conversation with Jimmi. Actually, we’ve had this conversation before, but it didn’t take. I need it to take. I need for what just happened upstairs to never happen again, or I’ll have to cut her out of my life as ruthlessly as I cut out my parents.

Here’s the problem. And to say it aloud sounds dickish, so I’ll just say it to myself. Marlon’s Uncle Jamal put it best. I think he’s the one who got my best friend categorizing pussy in the first place. Uncle Jamal is the OG. Compton’s original arbiter of pussy. He said most girls think they have that magic pussy, but one day you meet that
one
girl who makes you realize just how basic everyone else has been. And that’s Kai. And it wasn’t even the pussy. It was a look. It was her laugh. It was the way she smells. The way she carries herself. The way she cares about people . . . about me. The way she works hard and expects only what she earns. It’s a dozen things about her that make her
not
basic. She was Taj Mahal before I even slept with her. I knew she wasn’t basic. I knew she would shatter my world and I’d never be the same. And that’s what happened. And maybe I fucked it up, but I’m gonna fix it.

And there’s no way I’m explaining that I slipped and fell into some basic pussy while she was on tour.

So how do you tell one of your best friends she’s just basic?

Jimmi looks up from the piano, elbows resting on the closed top, and holds a sheet of music up in the air.

“Found my song.” She glances away, chewing at her bottom lip, wet hair hanging around her shoulders and dampening her t-shirt. “Look about what happened up there, I—”

“Let’s just forget it, okay?” I grab the paper from her hands, giving it a quick once over. “Yeah, this is it. Let’s go.”

“I don’t want to forget it.” Jimmi plants her hands on the piano, meeting my eyes boldly. “I’ve told you that before. That night happened, and we can’t pretend it didn’t.”

“I didn’t say pretend.” I sit down on the piano bench, bracing myself for the conversation I was hoping to get out of one more time. “I said forget. There’s nothing there, Jimmi.”

“Your dick was hard.” Her smile holds some satisfaction. “I know when a guy wants me.”

“That’s right, I’m a guy.” I nod, a self-deprecating laugh escaping. “A swift wind gets me hard. It doesn’t mean anything. My heart’s nowhere near it.”

“Oh, and where is your heart?” She reaches in her jeans pocket and pulls out a small harmonica that she’s got no right touching. “Here?”

I stand, snatching the harmonica out of her hands, gripping it between my fingers.

“Keep your hands off my shit, Jim.”

“I read the inscription. I know it’s from Kai.”

“Oh, and she reads, too. Gold star for you.”

I glance at the harmonica Kai gave me for Christmas, just a few months ago. It feels like an eternity. I’d never even made love to her when she gave me this, but I was certain we’d be connected deeply and forever.