“Yeap,” I reply flatly, making her laugh.
“Don’t sugarcoat your feelings, Charlie,” she replied as she finally looked at me.
“Never do, Princess.”
“Please don’t call me that. I hate this as much as you do.”
I winked. “I know. I can see that. Do me a favor, though. As I’ve stepped in to save you this week, you owe me.”
Worry flickered over her face. “Go on.”
“No more Stepford wife. The clothes, the make up, the shrinking to let the men around here steal all the space to make themselves look like the bigger people. I’ve been around this crap growing up and I hated it. I can’t watch you like this for a week. I don’t even know you that well and I can see you’re worth so much more.”
She shrugged. “You have no idea. I’m expected to be a certain way. It’s all I’ve ever been told.”
“But is this what you want… this life?”
“Hell no!” she cried, looking almost feral with anger. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to come back here ever again. I don’t want to play the part they molded me into my whole life.”
“So why do it? If you don’t care, why do it? The clothes, the make up, the different voice—”
“I don’t have a different voice,” she argued.
I did my best impression of her at dinner; quiet, softly spoken, simpering. She ripped a pillow from the bed, slamming it against my body. “I do not sound like that…” The pillow dropped from her hold. “Fuck. Did I sound like that?”
I nodded.
She fell back against the sheets, covering her face with her hands. “It’s a long and complicated story,” she mumbled against her palms. Trying to ease her obvious discomfort, I laid down next to her, staring up at the dated canopy of the four-poster bed. Relaxing slightly, she lowered her hands to her stomach. “Honestly, I’ve been so worried about coming home that I couldn’t think about anything else. My outfit today… it was easier to go with what I knew than cause a problem.”
I rolled on my side, pushing my hands under my cheek, my eyes fixed on her profile. “Trust me, it’s easier to fight your corner when you feel like yourself. What would the badass head of communications for the Gods of Melody label think about the Fern I escorted to dinner tonight?”
Fern shook her head. “She’d hate it. She’d pull me into the bathroom and give me a good talking to.”
“So why do it?” I asked, tugging gently on her elbow so she was forced to turn and look at me. I wondered if it should feel awkward to be lying so close together, but it felt weirdly easy. My usually coiled tight, full of energy body seemed to relax around her, but I tried not to think about what that meant because this was one week out of my life and nothing more.
Her eyes locked with mine as she mirrored my position. “I was always told I wouldn’t amount to much. If I was lucky, I’d be someone’s wife. That’s all I was good for. I guess being back here has just opened a whole heap of unresolved childhood trauma that a therapist would have a field day with.” She shook her head as if she’d just realized how fucked up her words sounded.
“Hey, I’m not one to blow smoke up your ass because I’m way too self-involved for that crap, but you are worth so much more. Look at what you’ve achieved. Look at how important you are to the label. Your family’s opinion of you is not the only thing you need to measure your worth. So, promise me—no more scary hair bun, no more middle aged lady clothes and no more make up thick enough that I can write my name in it. If you’re here, even though you don’t want to be, be here on your terms. Trust me, it makes it way more fun.”
She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth as she thought about my words.
“They’ll hate me for not conforming.”
“Do you care?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Well, then…”
“Well, then, I guess we’re going rogue together.”
Fern
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying on the bed talking to Charlie before I noticed what he was wearing. Or should I say, what he wasn’t. As he stood, I pushed myself up as well, gasping as I took him in.
Charlie was dressed in just some sweats, which gave me a chance to look at his famous tattoos. Famous because the women he’d slept with were obsessed with taking pictures and posting them all over social media.
A snake wrapped along his collarbone, making it look like it coiled through his skin. A huge sun covered his shoulder with rays that extended across his pec made up of hundreds of tiny symbols that must have taken days to ink. On his hand, between his thumb and index finger, was a series of notes that climbed to his wrist. But the one that pulled the gasp from my lips was the one I’d never seen.
