Burning Tracks (Book Two: Spotlight Series) Page 2

  “You could ask her.” Flora settles into her pillow, rests a hand on the nape of Gwen’s neck, and strokes Gwen’s buzzed short hair there with the pads of her fingers.

  “I have. She just says something like, ‘Sugar, I’m married to music.’ Or: ‘I got bigger fish to batter and fry, hon.’” Gwen’s twangy, Southern-belle Clementine accent is spot-on, she’s sure.

  Flora’s face is patient. “Well, maybe she doesn’t need to have a deal. Maybe she really does want to focus on her career.”

  Again, the myth of having it all. It’s not unreasonable for Clementine to drop out of the relationship race entirely. “Okay,” Gwen says. “But why not be up-front about it? Why let people think she’s dating this singer or that actor or this athlete… or Grady. People would be less curious if she was like: ‘Banged him, not her. Had three crummy dates with her; oh god, no, not him.’”

  Flora’s fingers scrape higher up Gwen’s scalp, where the hair is longer and flopping over to the side. “Her life seems complicated,” Flora points out. “Perhaps it’s easier to just go with it. At any rate, G, it doesn’t really involve you, hmm? I mean, your relationship with Clementine is strictly professional.”

  “Yes. Blah.” Gwen pokes her tongue out between her teeth. “Fine. I know. Why are you so practical and smart?”

  “One of us has to be,” Flora teases. “Now are you gonna finally make a move or can I go to sleep?”

  Gwen hums and drops a kiss on Flora’s lips and on the side of her neck, gets her fingers under the hem of Flora’s nightgown where it’s bunched up on her thigh, and—

  Flora lets out a huge yawn, then throws an arm over her eyes.

  “Flor—” Gwen says, with a laugh-groan. “Am I boring you?”

  “Mmm, no. I’m in the mood, I swear.”

  Gwen leans over Flora’s covered face, her lax body, and deadpans, “Really.”

  Hovered over her with Flora quickly losing the battle to stay awake and Gwen hesitant, she wonders, have they hit that point? Where watching a depressing documentary on TV or finishing a chapter in a book or sleeping is more appealing than sex or going out? Is this what they have to look forward to till death do them part? Half-assed attempts to get off before one of them starts snoring?

  Flora breaks her from despair, and the thought that she should have gone out with Grady and Nico and Clementine after all. “Hey.” Flora lifts the arm flung over her face, presses her thumb to Gwen’s pout and pouts back at her. “Really. I want to.”

  “You can sleep. It’s okay,” Gwen reassures her. It’s not Flora’s fault, Gwen’s recent discontent and itchy need to do something, be somewhere else. She hates when she gets like this, with her own clashing desires for stability and commitment, excitement and freedom, at war.

  Gwen blinks down at Flora: her partner, her wife, her best friend. The person she’s inexorably twined her life around, like restless climbing ivy to a sturdy, sure oak. The girl she saw across a dorm room that teemed with bodies and alcohol and smoke. She had felt a tug, a physical pull, toward her, shy and quiet and beautiful. It’s you.

  Flora’s soft lips quirk up, her hand reaches down, and she guides Gwen’s hand up her thigh, over her hip, and down into the front of her panties. “Hey,” she says again.

  Gwen hears without words: I’m here. I’m with you. Always. Flora kisses Gwen with a kiss that starts like smoldering tinder, then burns to life when Gwen strokes the slick heat of her, and Flora gasps.

  “Oh.” Gwen breathes the surprise into her sternum, moves out of the way so Flora can shimmy her nightgown off. She’s wet and warm and swollen; she really was in the mood. Gwen cranes down, circles a perked nipple with her tongue, then sucks and bites and hums while she strokes the protruding nub of Flora’s clit.

  “I—” Flora breathes in, sharply. Spreads her legs and arches up. “I was thinking about you.”

  Gwen has no need to coax an orgasm out of Flora tonight, no long lead-up with her mouth or a toy; she just pushes two fingers inside and moves them with the cant of Flora’s hips, back out to the spot that makes Flora moan and scramble to grip the pillow behind her. Close.

  “Yeah?” Gwen is always happy to hear that she turns Flora on. She hardly believed it the first time it happened, and still hasn’t quite recovered from disbelief that it has happened at all.

  “Was, um—” Flora starts, losing focus when Gwen lavishes attention on her other nipple. She whines, and her thighs start to tremble and splay. “Thinking about—making a baby—”

  Gwen looks up and pauses, hand stilling. Making a baby? “Honey, I have some difficult news for you.”

  Flora smacks at her arm. “Hush. You know what I mean. Ungh.” She gasps and rocks her hips. “Being together. Planning... God. You know I like that stuff.”

  “Yeah.” Gwen redoubles her efforts, pressing in and in and out, circling and stroking with tight flicks of her wrist, swiping her tongue flat, then in pointed flicks. Flora grabs her wrist and the back of her head and comes with string of gasps and shivering snaps of her hips.

  Gwen watches Flora’s chest rise and fall, rapid and heaving at first, then slowing, even and measured. Her arm is flung over her face again.

  Lips bitten and brow furrowed, Gwen shoves her hand into her own underwear. She gets to stare at Flora while she’s still coming down and out of it. She’s trying to hurry; Flora still makes her ache and flush and yearn with every luscious bared bit of her. The tension builds and builds. Gwen rocks into her own fingers, pinches her nipple under her shirt, until Flora peeks out from under her elbow and asks, “What are you doing?”

  Gwen grunts. “Getting off so you can sleep.”

  “No need to martyr yourself, G.” Flora pushes up and crawls over Gwen’s body on all fours. Flora’s fingers replace Gwen’s, and her breasts hang heavy, brushing Gwen’s. “I’m here,” she says, and thoroughly takes Gwen apart, like someone who knows exactly how.

  3

  Gwen wakes the next morning to two texts from Nico and an empty space beside her in the bed. She stretches and untwists her T-shirt from around her waist, then grabs her phone and heads downstairs.

  Nico: Have I mentioned lately how great you are? I’d be lost without you.

  Nico: Unrelated... Can you come in for a few? Need help shipping.

  “Morning. I made muffins.” Flora is in her Sunday gardening clothes: a floppy straw hat, old cargo shorts, a yellow T-shirt with holes and patches of discoloration, and polka-dot rain boots that go up to her knees. The outfit is horrible and yet very cute.

  “We could go full-on English countryside garden chic,” Gwen tried to tell her when they were first digging up corners of their yard for garden patches and raised flower beds. “Like the Duchess of Cambridge.”

  “Buy four hundred-dollar boots to spread manure?” Flora said, wiping sweat from her brow with her arm and smearing dirt across her face.

  Gwen conceded the point and went back to hoeing and making jokes about hoeing.

  “Muffins from my muffin,” Gwen says, this late, lazy morning, and takes a blueberry poppyseed from the basket on the kitchen table.

  Flora gives her a fond shake of the head before going to the backyard.

  It’s sunny and not too hot. Gwen can eat her muffin and sip her strong Irish breakfast tea and watch Flora pull weeds and dig trenches and tenderly place plants with newly budding flowers and delicate roots.

  “Hey, Flor?” Gwen calls through the window when Flora comes closer to fill her tin watering can. “Nico wants me to come in for a few hours, is that okay?”

  Water spurts from the spout next to their deck, mostly getting into the watering can but also dripping onto Flora’s boots and puddling in the thick grass. “Okay. Just not too long? I wanted to look at donor bank options.”

  Picking a donor; are they that far along in the process? But that’s the next step. That
’s the plan. What Flora wants. What she...

  That’s the plan. She finishes her muffin; it feels like a rock in her stomach. “Sure. Shouldn’t take too long. I don’t know why he needs me to ship things back anyway. We’ve been making Spencer do that.”

  Flora turns off the water, and the pipes make an ungodly screeching noise. She hauls the can up and stumbles and sloshes her way back to the new row of flowers; water splashes everywhere as she goes.

  “You need help?”

  “I got it,” Flora answers, even as she nearly loses her grip on the can. She’s soaked with patches of wet from the waist down; her shorts cling to her legs.

  “If you say so.” Gwen tips back the last syrupy dregs of her tea and calls out before she goes off to shower, “By the way, those galoshes are super sexy. Wear them for me tonight?”

  Flora waters her flowers in the sun and says with a laugh, “Go to work, Gwen.”

  After a quick shower, Gwen stands in front of her closet in only her black boy shorts, considering her options. It’s Sunday, which means comfy casual. But she’s heading into the office downtown, which means on-trend professional. It’s the end of summer, not quite fall. She doesn’t like to browse; she likes to go with her gut. Her gut says: high-waisted black leather skater skirt; white T with Thanks for Nothing printed across it; heeled black ankle boots; thin silver choker. She grabs a lightweight red blazer as she darts out the door.

  Walking into their office in a restored brick building in a once-blighted, now historic and hip part of town, Gwen drops a cruller from the bakery downstairs on Nico’s desk and asks, “Why isn’t Spencer doing this?”

  Nico ignores the cruller. He probably had tofu-and-kale scramble for breakfast. Or two cups of coffee and nothing else. A man of extremes. “Spencer has flounced.”

  “Flounced?” Gwen scans the office. Moving their home base from L.A. to Nashville meant more than just packing up and carrying on as usual from a new city. The vibe is different here: downtown Nashville has a Southern-gothic-meets-art-deco style, so their studio changed accordingly. The L.A. office was cool and chic, but this one has a polished vintage feel, with its exposed brick walls and refurbished honey-colored floors. They did bring along their chrome desks and clothing racks, which complement the industrial wire lighting and exposed wood beams. Add the white leather couches, the new chrome ceiling fan, and they certainly look as if they fit right in.

  Gwen’s desk is across the main floor from Nico’s, separated only by wide open space. The racks of clothes and shelves of shoes and hooks with bags are organized in a loft above the reception desk, which is, indeed, abandoned. Flounced from.

  Nico goes on typing, his expression neutral. Gwen has known him long enough now to read the told you so implied in his breezy dismissal. “You missed all the excitement.”

  Gwen sits across from his desk, crosses her legs, and takes a bite of her cruller. “Well, don’t hold out on me.”

  Nico finally looks up, head titled and chin jutting. He’s in slim lightweight mustard yellow chinos, a thin blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and gray suede loafers. A perfect Sunday at the office look.

  Flora teased her about having a crush on him, too, when she and Nico worked together at the salon in Beverly Hills, before they made the leap to personal stylists working with D and C-list Hollywood celebrities, then climbed their way up to attending to the reigning princess of country music—but Gwen feels more admiration than crush. Nico is so confident, even when he’s not; he carries himself in an assured, effortlessly cool sort of way. Something about him makes people take notice.

  “I knew hiring Spencer was a bad idea.”

  “Oh, you’ve been a waiting a long time to say that, haven’t you?” Gwen licks sticky icing from her fingertips.

  Nico sighs and scratches a hand through his dark hair, which is still trimmed close on the sides, but has a new, meticulously messy sweeping part. “I didn’t want to be right about him.”

  “You sure?” She has to give him credit. He really did try to find ways to help Spencer learn the styling business, and if he came off as brusque and blunt, well, that’s just how Nico is. It’s how he got to be so successful in the first place: Diplomacy, politeness, and hesitance have no business in Hollywood. Or, mostly Nashville, these days.

  Nico’s face goes soft with that far-off, dreamy look he gets only when he’s thinking about one thing, one person. “Yes, because Grady cared about him. And I hate when Grady cares about people who aren’t worth his kindness.”

  Gwen props her chin on both hands, her elbows on the cold edge of Nico’s desk. “Aw, you guys are almost as a disgustingly sweet as me and Flora.”

  Nico smiles softly. “Almost.”

  Gwen flops back in her chair. “Okay, eat that doughnut and tell me about Spencer’s epic flouncing.” She pauses and cocks her head. “You know, I was right in the middle of teaching him the subtle yet important differences between shawls, capes, cloaks, and mantles, and how to achieve the perfect drape. Now he’ll never know.”

  “Tragic,” Nico says with a lift of one eyebrow. “It happened out of the blue. Maybe not for him, though. I called him early this morning. I was up because Grady was up and certainly he remembers how irritatingly early Grady gets up, he was his assistant for over a year. Anyway, the designer of Clementine’s album release party dress wants her to keep it, so I didn’t want it shipped off. And he said—”

  He squints as if trying to gather his thoughts, presses his hands flat together and rests them beneath his cleanly shaven chin, and breathes in slowly through his nose.

  “He said: ‘Fuck you fuckers, I’m fucking out of here’?” Gwen guesses.

  “No.” Nico laughs. “I mean, essentially, but, oh, something about how he’s outgrown us, and he’s not going to lower himself to being our errand boy. He wants to make it on his own. I suggested he wasn’t ready. He suggested, well. Let’s just say he didn’t take my opinion under advisement.”

  Gwen pulls a face, annoyed. Spencer was an intern, and an intern only for a year and half or so at that. Everyone has to start with grunt work. It took her several years to make full partner, and that was with busting her ass to the point of nearly ruining her marriage. But clearly not everyone can hack it. “Can we get an errand-boy? That sounds nice.”

  “That does sound nice.” Nico stands, and she mirrors him. He’s almost a foot taller than she is, but he’s on the willowy side, slim-muscled and sharp-boned. “But until we find an errand-boy to do our bidding, we have clothes and jewelry and shoes to pack and send back to their designers.”

  Gwen fetches last night’s unused items from her car, Nico eats his cruller, and they go up to the loft.

  “So did he say where he was flouncing off to?” Gwen asks, putting a jewelry case in a box and dumping packing peanuts on top.

  Nico checks the inventory slip and marks off the item. “Hollywood.”

  “Ah, the seductive call of Hollywood.” She closes the flaps and holds them in place while Nico tapes the box closed. “Do you miss it?”

  “I do, yeah.” He examines a pair of shoes, then takes the protective tape off the sole and heel. “I miss the hustle, sometimes. It’s so sleepy and slow here in comparison.”

  “I miss In-N-Out Burger,” Gwen says, taking the shoes and finding their box.

  Nico groans. “Yes, oh god. A Double-Double at one a.m. after hitting the after parties in WeHo. No burger here can compare.”

  “The beaches.”

  “The mountains,” Nico counters. “California mountains are better.”

  “Outdoor concerts.”

  “The sun.”

  “A decent Asian market.” Nico sighs. “Or fresh seafood.”

  Gwen folds and tapes, marks off items, prints packing slips. “Decent produce, too. The avocados here are appalling.”

  They stack the boxes
by the front door, ready for delivery first thing in the morning. It’s not that she dislikes Nashville. It’s fine. Quirky and cute and pleasant, overall. Unlike Nico or Flora, however, she was born and raised in Los Angeles. She fits there. Here, she’s still waiting for the day when she pulls up to her house and it feels like home, instead of that place they bought recently.

  She misses L.A. as she would a missing limb, an essential part of her; she feels a constant phantom twinge. She’s not unhappy, but she aches with an emptiness she doesn’t know how to fill. And the thought of putting down roots here and not in L.A., raising her child here, being stuck, is a constant itch in the back of her mind, an agitated churn in her stomach, a restlessness under her skin.

  “When does Clementine have an event out there next?” Gwen wonders as they walk down the concrete stairs of the building. Spencer was keeping up with the scheduling, too.

  “I’m not sure. I’d have to double-check.”

  “Maybe...” Gwen pushes open the door to outside, where it’s still early afternoon, still mild and breezy. “Maybe I can take the lead on it, go with her.”

  Nico flashes her a quick smile. “Yeah. Maybe Grady can book something, too. We’ll all go out and visit.”

  “Sure, yeah.” Only, to Gwen, going back to L.A. doesn’t seem like a visit. It seems like going home.

  4

  “So, this is the bank we already looked at in California.” Flora tilts the desktop screen to look at yet another sperm bank; every free moment this week has been spent on baby planning. They are shoulder to shoulder at the desk in the office, soon-to-be office and playroom, if everything goes according to plan. Because a baby is the plan, the logical next step in their lives. And something Flora wants with her whole huge, kind, nurturing heart.

  A few days ago they’d looked at a local sperm bank, even stopped by for a quick tour, but it seemed to focus on infertility issues in straight couples. It was fine, but didn’t seem quite right. The California bank was recommended by friends who had used it successfully to have adorably rambunctious twin boys.