“Call me a perpetual student,” he said lightly, using a spatula to move the grits around in the pan as they heated. “Anyway, if it was just to see you sing your dad’s songs, why wouldn’t you want your mom here?”
“It’s not a matter of not wanting her,” Sky said. “I just don’t want her feeling that she has to leave a trip she’s wanted to do to come back for what she’s already done.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” he asked her.
“Why would I be lying?”
“Because you don’t want me to know the truth,” he said quietly.
Again, she felt as if her heart skipped a beat, froze in her chest.
He did know her too well.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sky lied.
He turned off the stove and lifted the frying pan, setting it on a cold burner. He turned to her, his hands on his hips, and she knew why he had come.
Of course.
“Sky,” he said flatly, “you think that someone deliberately killed your father. And you think that somehow, doing this show, you’re going to figure out how and why. But that’s crazy. Don’t you see that it’s crazy? It’s been years now. Even if we were all forensic scientists, it would be too late. No clues would have survived this amount of time, this amount of people in and out—”
She didn’t realize that she’d walked over to him until she set her hand on his arm, shaking her head in protest and interrupting. “You’ve taken too many classes! It’s just New Orleans. Hometown. I said that I’d do my dad’s songs, that I’d be him for this.”
He looked at her a long moment. She realized she had come too close. She still remembered far too much about him, the scent of him, the feel of him, and in that moment, she wanted to forget all her misery, to lay her head against his shoulder and let him hold her and tell her that everything would be all right and then...
And then touch her and let the touch become something deeper and more intimate and then, in his very special way, make her forget for a while that anything in the universe could be wrong, that there was light and beauty and incredible wonder in the place that he could take her to...a place that they never really left because they remained curled together, legs draped over legs, flesh still damp and hot and touching...
“Sorry!” she murmured. “I just—”
“You never need to be sorry with me,” he said softly.
She had to step farther back, make a much lighter situation out of it.
“Oh, thought you came here tonight so that I could give you a massive apology!” she teased.
He smiled. “Oh, trust me, I haven’t expected that for years.” His expression grew serious again. “I meant that you never needed to apologize for touching me.”
“Your grits!”
He turned to look at the pan. “Yeah. They’re still there.”
“Getting cold. I’ll get you a dish,” she said.
“Get yourself one, too.”
“I’m not hungry—”
“You’re never hungry until I’m eating and then you’re hungry. Get two dishes.”
She hadn’t realized it, but he’d made her smile again.
She got two plates.
He spooned the shrimp and cheese grits onto both of them, and they sat at the kitchen table.
“I wasn’t expecting dinner—”
“I already tried to tell you,” Sky said. “Dinner was hours ago.”
“I wasn’t planning on a meal—”
“You asked for one.”
“You might have refused. So this is nice. And still...”
“You came to warn me that I shouldn’t mess with the past, that doing so would be worthless,” Sky said. “I’m just singing.”
“Stop lying.”
“Just singing and playing the guitar.”
“Sky.” He looked at her while chewing and swallowing. He set his fork down and took a sip of his coffee.
She realized she had frozen, watching him.
He reached over and took her hand.
“You know, I love you. From the minute I first saw you, I think even as kids, I was in awe of you and in love with you. But that’s really neither here nor there as far as this all goes. Sky. Listen to me. Leave it alone. Sing, play, have a good time, honor your father. He wrote great songs. He reigned with the hottest band over several decades. But don’t do anything else. Don’t question people. Don’t interrogate the roadies. Leave it.”
