Color Me Crazy (4 page)

Addie fanned her face with a piece of paper. “How are you feeling?”

“Just swell.”

Julian glanced down at her and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Cleo asked with a frown.

“I use that towel to check my oil.”

“So?”

“So look at my arm.”

She looked at his grease-streaked arm.

“You should see your face,” he said. Then he laughed some more.

“Stop it. I’m trying to be sorry for throwing up on you.”

He was still laughing as they pulled into the parking lot of the Cove. “You know, I knew it from the moment I first saw you.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were eventually going to vomit on me. You just had that look about you.”

“Happens a lot, does it? You must attract a classy crowd.”

“Says the girl with vomit breath.”

She lifted her head off his shoulder, not really enthused with the idea of lunch. Julian exited the car and held out his hand. She took in the tattoos on his forearm, following to where they disappeared into his shirt. Detailed and morbid—flames and skulls with ghostly, frightening faces.

“Is this Hell?” she asked, longing to trace the inked images with her fingertips.

“No, Big Red, it’s just a hangover,” he answered. “Come on, now. Go wash your face.”

Lunch was miserable, and Cleo sat through it with a simmering tummy and a boiling head. But the view was nice. Julian sat across from her, eating a juicy portobello mushroom sandwich.

“Are you going to eat your fries?” he asked.

Normally, she loved the sweet potato fries at the Cove, but her stomach turned at the mere thought. She was about to offer them to him when a burly Hispanic guy walked up to their table. Julian pushed his chair back and stood.

“Rooster!” he said. “How have you been, brother?” The two men clasped hands, then launched into a grizzly bear hug. Rooster had an impressive braid hanging down his back. It stopped just above his leather belt, which was tooled with the words “El Gallo.”

“When are you gonna come jam with us?” Rooster asked, releasing Julian. “We’ve been missing you and that skanky guitar.”

Wonderful. Julian was a guitarist. Cleo mentally hit the panic button. The words “musician” and “guitarist” were screaming red flags. She’d vowed to stay away from musicians, and she intended to run like hell at the first available opportunity, no matter how good this one smelled.

After a minute or two, Rooster went on his way, and Julian sat back down, casually tossing the hair out of his eyes.
Red flag.
He leaned back in his chair, balancing it on the back legs, and stretched. The stupid shirt rode up to reveal a taut, ripped stomach.
Red flag.
He caught her looking and grinned.

“You play guitar?” she asked. It was a casual question, not a curious one. Just making conversation.

“A little. And I write songs.”

Of course he did. Her heart fluttered slightly, but she got a grip before it started full-blown hammering. There were lots of horrible songs floating around. Julian probably wrote that kind. Nothing to get excited about.

Addie cleared her throat and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “Cleo, how is Josh?”

Whew. Hearing Josh’s name was like an ice-cold bucket of water hitting a sizzling fire. “He’s fine. I’m seeing him tonight.”

Josh was part of the Pinocchio Plan, a quest to find Cleo a real boy. Sherry’s voice filled her head: “
You’ll never have an adult relationship as long as you’re stuck with puppy-love crushes on musicians, Cleo.
”

Sherry was right. Since her preteen years spent pining away for
Rock ’n’ Spin
centerfolds, Cleo had been a sucker for musicians. But no more. Her days of chasing idiots with guitars were behind her. Josh had no musical talent that she knew of, no tattoos, no pierced nipples, and no red flags.

“What’s that face for?” Julian asked.

“What face?” She hadn’t made a face.

“You grimaced.”

“I did not.” Had she? Because Josh was a delightful person. A great guy. Awesome, actually. And he did not play guitar—he played golf—which was possibly way cooler. Cleo took a huge gulp of iced tea. “Josh is a lawyer at my dad’s firm. We’ve gone out three times.”

“Three times?” Julian let out a low whistle. “That’s perseverance. He’s either in love or a total masochist.”

“Julian,” Addie scolded. “Behave.”

“He’s not bothering me, Addie,” Cleo said. He was infuriating her. And turning her on.
Musicians are bad, musicians are bad, musicians are bad…

“What are you doing now?” Julian asked.

“Huh?”

“Your lips were moving.”

Addie cleared her throat again. “So, Josh is going to meet your mum tonight, right?”

Cleo snapped out of it. Josh
was
going to meet her mother at the birthday dinner tonight, and she was going to love him. “That’s right.”

“I’m sure the lawyer’s quite smitten with Big Red here,” Julian said. “Who wouldn’t be? I just couldn’t handle another round of her myself. That could be the blood loss or the concussion talking, though.”

Cleo glanced at the time. She had at least another thirty minutes before her clothes were dry. “So,” she said, pushing her untouched plate out of the way, “are you in a band, or what?”

“Or what,” he replied.

“He used to be in a band,” Addie said. “But he’s not anymore.” She gave Cleo a stern look.

So this was why Addie hadn’t mentioned a brother. The Pinocchio Plan.

Julian stuffed a handful of sweet potato fries in his mouth and tossed out a mischievous grin. She closed her eyes.
He is not a real boy.

“He owns a recording studio,” Addie said. “It’s a small setup for local acts. Mostly, he gets high school kids with garage bands or small-time Tejano groups.”

“They’re not all small-timers,” he said, wiping his greasy fingers on a napkin. “But I like helping out the kids. It’s cool. And sometimes I get to sit in on sessions.”

“He’s a session musician,” Addie insisted. “Nothing more.”

“Wow, way to stroke my ego,” Julian said before turning his dreamy bedroom eyes back to Cleo. “But she’s right. Except I also play backup, so sometimes I’m out performing.”

Performing.
She imagined Julian on the stage, guitar hung low against his hips. A drop of condensation slid down the side of her iced tea glass.
Julian shirtless, drenched in sweat, wailing on a Fender…

“Anyway, it’s hard to balance running a studio with the demands of being available for backup,” Julian continued. “What about you?”

“Huh? Oh, I’m not in a band.”

He laughed. “What a surprise. So, what do you do?”

The question slammed her back to reality. “I’m currently between jobs.”

“But you’re going to start teaching English lit again, right?” Addie asked.

Cleo sighed and began shredding the napkin she’d balled up in her hand. This was not what she wanted to talk about. “I didn’t get my old job back,” she admitted. “I’m totally screwed.”

“I thought it was a sure thing,” Addie said. “What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea. I’ve pissed away all my savings waiting for the end of the semester and the contract reviews. I was sure they’d take me back.”

“Tell me,” Julian said. “Was it the drinking?”

“Shut up,” Addie snapped. “I’m sure it’s budget cuts or something like that. Right, Cleo?”

Or maybe it was because I left the tenure track to chase after some rocker like a teenage groupie.

“Probably,” she replied meekly. She took a sip of iced tea and forced it down past the lump in her throat.

Chapter Three

Julian stared at the shelves of bed linens. After dropping off Cleo and her mounds of laundry at home, Addie had dragged him around town on errands. He hoped this was the last one, as the fluorescent lighting of the home superstore was excruciating. The lights fluctuating at sixty hertz per second produced a disgusting vomit-green haze he couldn’t clear. His head, whether from the stubborn hangover or the injury he’d sustained when Calamity Cleo had thrown him down a flight of stairs before puking on him, was pounding.

He sighed as a happy young couple almost bowled him over with a squeaky cart full of kitchen gadgets and big, fluffy towels. If they were like most married couples he’d known, they’d be fighting over who got to keep the bloody blender in just a few years. They disappeared into the aisle with window shades and curtains, and an image of Cleo’s sparse, ugly flat popped into his head. It could use some curtains.

Oh, well. She wasn’t going to be in that flat much longer. Not with the eviction notice they’d discovered taped to her door upon returning from lunch.

“Julian,” Addie scolded. “Did you hear me?”

No, he hadn’t heard her. How could anybody hear anything over the buzzing of the fluorescent tubes?

“What?”

“I like that purple comforter on top. Can you reach it?”

Christ. Of course it would be the one on top. He sighed and pulled his hands out of his pockets, away from the guitar picks that had been calming his nerves. Reaching his arms up, he stood on his toes and stretched out his fingers. The tip of his right index finger brushed the corner of a plastic zippered bag. All he had to do was crook it and give it a yank…

“Not that one!”

He jerked, causing an avalanche of Bed-in-a-Bags to shower down upon him.

“Fuck!” he shouted, as bag after bag bounced off his head in a painful flurry of browns, blacks, and grays—his warning colors. As the last bag came careening down, he turned on his sister. “Goddammit, you sound like a cat when you screech at me like that.” He took a mighty kick at a paisley-print queen-size sheet set and missed. For the second time that day, he landed on his ass.

“Fucking hell!”

Two women poked their heads in the aisle, saw him sitting there, and scurried off in the opposite direction.

“Julian, calm down,” Addie pleaded.

“Hey,” a guy said from the end of the aisle. “You mind? I’ve got my kids in here.”

“Sorry,” Addie said.

Several people stood at the end of the aisle, staring at them. Julian supposed that seeing a grown man, fallen on his ass and cursing like Courtney Love at a custody hearing, was more entertainment than people were used to getting at Bed Bath & Beyond.

“Let’s leave before they kick us out,” Addie said. She turned for the exit and ran smack into a tall man with a big frown and a little security badge. “We were just leaving.”

“Good idea,” he responded.

“Um, shall we pick this up first?” Julian asked. The heat of the moment had passed, and as usual, he felt stupid and ashamed. He picked up the nearest bag and looked at it. “See here, Addie. This is the one you wanted, isn’t it?”

“We’ll get this cleaned up,” the security guard said, yanking the bag from Julian’s hands. “You folks can head on out the door.”

Addie didn’t need to be told twice and took off without offering to help him up. Well, fine. He hoisted himself to his feet and strolled after her, refusing to rush.

Addie didn’t stop until they reached the car. “Why do you always have to ruin everything?” she asked. “Why can’t we go to the store and buy a comforter like normal people? Why is everything such a ridiculously dramatic affair when you’re involved?”

“I told you hours ago I needed to go home. As usual, you ignored me. And now you have the nerve to be angry with me over something I have no control over.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t want control. You like playing with a different set of rules just because you’re—”

“Just because I’m what?”

Addie sighed, turned around, and yanked on the El Camino’s door handle. It was locked, and she smacked it in frustration. “Listen. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t realize you’d reached meltdown status.”

That was a stupid thing to say. Meltdown status was reached when it was fucking reached, and that was all there was to it. There’d been plenty of warnings, which he’d been giving since before she’d dragged him through the fabric store, the bookstore, the coffee shop, and the dry cleaner’s.

He balled his hands into fists and pressed them against his eyes. “I told you I needed to go home. I’m too tired to keep things where they belong.”

Although he was far from being the only person on the planet with synesthesia, he did seem to be the only one who needed to keep the colors separated. It was like trying to keep your peas from touching your carrots every waking moment of the day.

“I think you said earlier that you
wanted
to go home, which is different from
needing
to go home.”

“I’m sorry I embarrassed you, okay?” He kept his fists pressed against his eyes and watched the colors parade across the backs of his eyelids. “Let’s just get out of here.”

He’d been embarrassing his sister in one form or another since the day he was born. He’d ruined countless childhood holidays and had caused her to be the butt of jokes in school. He’d chased off numerous friends, boyfriends, and acquaintances. And yet, when she spoke next, her voice was full of tenderness.

He hated it.

“Juli, I’m sorry.”

She
was sorry? He pushed his clenched fists harder into his eyes. He shouldn’t do that. He should pull them away and open his eyes. But he wasn’t ready to let the world back in yet. In fact, some faint buzzing began. It might be a good idea to check out entirely. That was another weird thing other synesthetes didn’t seem to do.

Addie’s cool, slender fingers pried his fists away, and he forced himself to look at her. Her brows were drawn, weary with concern. She must be so tired of him.
He
was tired of him.

He put his arms around her. She was his half sister, but because their mother lacked every maternal instinct known to man, she’d acted as mum as well.

“Can you drive?” she asked.

He took a deep breath and gave her a squeeze. “Of course.” She’d kept him from sliding over the edge. Again.

He let her go and opened the door. The familiar click of the El Camino’s door handle and the squeak of the seat were welcome sounds. He sank into the car with a sigh and breathed in the familiar fusion of old, hot leather, Juicy Fruit gum, and man sweat. Once Addie climbed in, he turned the key, and the El Camino rumbled awake—the color of deep amber.