“Since a couple days ago. She needed a place to stay while she’s working on a screenplay.”
I didn’t mention the hookup... or the threesome before the hookup. Or that sometimes I walked around the mansion hoping I’d see her. The real ghost of this mansion was Sunny Palmer, strewing hair ties and phone chargers and half-empty packs of gum all over the place like some kind of hot, ADHD poltergeist.
And I was kind of loving being haunted.
“...glad you have someone else creative there,” my mother was saying. “Nanny was just reading an article aloud to me about the benefits of mirror neurons. Speaking of Nanny, she wants to talk to you before you go. I love you.”
Relieved that the interrogation part of the call was over, I said a quicklove you tooand felt my blood pressure drop. Nanny ran a tight ship, but she never made me feel like I was blighting modern civilization by not writing three-and-a-half-minute songs.
The phone passed hands, and Nanny came on the screen. I could see my mother’s willowy silhouette leaving the room, probably to go read through a script or run lines, because she never stopped working, even at the lodge.
“Hey, ScootScoot,” Nanny said, giving me one of her gentle smiles. She had short gray hair, fair skin gone a little ruddy with a life spent in the sun, and a smile that made wrinkles fan out from her eyes and bracket her mouth. She was wearing a sweatshirt that looked like it was from an Aspen gift shop, but maybe an Aspen gift shop twenty years ago, and I knew the mug in her hand held nothing but straight black coffee—and thekind that came from a big metal can at that. She was the exact opposite of Carina Kelly in every way, which is probably why their relationship worked.
Nanny’s actual name was Donna, but she’d been Nanny to me since the day I was born. Carina Kelly had—scandalously for the time—decided to have a child on her own, via artificial insemination, and when a no-nonsense nurse was the only one who could get me to sleep in the hospital, Carina offered her quadruple her nurse’s salary to come be my live-in caretaker. Nanny had agreed, and she became the third member of our family, essentially my other parent.
And then when I’d flown the nest to doBoy Band Bootcampand INK, she’d just... never left.
Given that I was bisexual and had known it since the first time I saw Jeff Goldblum inJurassic Parkas a kid—and given that I was part of a famously nontraditional family anyway—it took an embarrassing amount of time before I figured out that Nanny and Carina weretogether. And had been for a really long time.
Anyway, Carina had come out several years ago, but she and Nanny had decided not to get married. Our unique family was already the perfect fit for them, they told me, and they didn’t need it validated externally. And also Nanny said there was too much patriarchy inherent in the construct of marriage to ever endear her to it.
Nanny was currently giving me an appraising look. “Your mother might be onto something about the mirror neurons, Scoot. Maybe you and your roommate can work on your projects together. You know, help inspire each other.”
With Nanny, I could be a bit more honest. She’d never made me feel bad about grief or depression or needing afallow period.
“The problem is that I can’t seem to get inspired at all,” I explained. “With Brooklyn, I justfeltthe music come to me.Words and chords and whole chunks of a song—and it would be because she was standing against a sunset or because we’d just had a fight or because I’d just watched her perform. But I don’t have her to inspire me anymore, and all of my ideas and even the tiny little sparks that eventually become ideas are just—gone.”
“I know you need a new muse, and getting out of Malibu was a good first step,” Nanny said soothingly. “And hey, maybe this new town of yours could be your muse! You are supposed to be working on a Christmas album after all, and where better than a town called Christmas Notch?”
Christmas Notch wasn’t inspiring me so far, but I didn’t say that, because then Nanny might suggest that I actually try goingintotown for more than just a wedding and an app hookup, and that sounded pointless and fatiguing.
But she wasn’t wrong that I needed a new muse. That was how my music had always worked, through the lenses of my obsessions, and while I couldn’t conjure up the hope that I’d ever feel for someone else what I’d felt for Brooklyn, surely there was someone who could at least light the spark. Someone who could make me feel anything other than so goddamn aimless. Just enough for six original songs and five half-assed covers, and then I could go back to being alone and my label would never bother me again.
Wait . . .
“Nanny, I think I need to go,” I said, standing up so fast that Mr.Tumnus lifted his head and hissed. Thoughts were crashing through my mind faster than I could keep track of them. “I love you and make sure Carina takes some time off while she’s at the lodge.”
“As if I could. Love you, ScootScoot.”
By the time we ended the call, I was already jogging down one of the marble-floored hallways to the library. Because Ididknow someone who could be a muse, kind of,kind of.
And she smelled like coconut and left gum wrappers all over my house.
Chapter Five
Sunny
My fingers hovered over my keyboard, searching for the perfect words to set the scene when Isaac burst into the library, shocking the hell out of me so much that I accidentally inhaled the piece of gum in my mouth.
I coughed into my fist as I pulled my headphones off my head.
“You okay, Palmer?” he asked as he paced in front of me.
“Gum.” I coughed again. “I accidentally swallowed it.”
He paused for a moment at the wordswallowed.
“Perv,” I said with a smirk.
