Far Too Tempting (13 page)

I yank the earbuds from my ears, turn off the music, wishing I didn’t feel so many damn mixed emotions at once—the start of something with Matthew, and the aftereffects of the end of Aidan. The trouble is, only one of those feelings comes with music. I’ve finally managed a decent song, but it came from Aidan, from the scab of my marriage that I keep picking. Not a single, solitary note has come from pleasure. Even the one song I wrote about Matthew wasn’t about happiness—it stemmed from confusion.

I want to move on musically, and I want to be happy personally. But those good, floaty, buzzy feelings for Matthew don’t come with any notes; they aren’t paired with music; they don’t elicit melodies. Maybe it’s only the broken part of my heart that can produce a song, not the part that might be finally healing.

And if that’s true, I’m pretty much screwed.

Chapter Fifteen

I call Matthew in the morning when I wake up. I’m still in bed, my voice a little froggy from sleep.

“Are you back in town?”

“Indeed I am.”

“I wrote a song this weekend,” I tell him.

“Excellent. When do I get a sneak preview?”

“You don’t really beat around the bush, do you?”

“How about tomorrow morning in Central Park?”

“What’s going on in Central Park tomorrow morning?”

“Goos Mom,” he declares, referring to the caretaker of the Central Park geese.

“Is she back? I love Goos Mom! I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Word is she was in California for a while, but she’s back and she’s has her wagon. Meet me on the corner of Seventy-Ninth and Central Park West at eight thirty. I’ll be there with my dog.”

“I get to meet The Doctor. So exciting. I’ll be there.”

“And Jane,” he says, and then pauses. “I can’t wait to see you.”

“Same here,” I say, then fumble into the kitchen to make tea, wishing this wanting, this longing, would lead to a song.

…

I scan up and down Central Park West for Matthew. But he’s not here. I park my butt on the closest bench and listen to Arcade Fire on my iPod. I close my eyes during the slow part of one of the songs, then feel the unmistakable sensation of dog breath on my legs. I open my eyes and pull the earphones out of my ears.

Matthew’s in front of me, and I grin instantly at the sight of him. It’s been a week since I’ve seen him, and he’s so damn handsome, those blue eyes drawing me back to him with the way they sparkle playfully. “Matthew Harrigan is late. Or so Jane Black thinks. But what she doesn’t know is the clever Mr. Harrigan told Jane to be here at eight thirty to ensure she’d be here at the proper time. Nine.”

I can’t help but let a small smile form across my mouth. “You tricked me.”

He reaches out a hand to me and I willingly accept, standing up from the bench. “I had no choice. Goos Mom excels in punctuality and I needed you here on time.”

I gesture to the big blond dog. “I like your dog.”

“I’ve told her all about you.”

That makes me smile and want to smother him in kisses too. Instead, I bend down to pet his dog on the head. She’s a big dog, probably eighty pounds or so, and appears as if a little bit of hound, a little bit of husky, and a little bit of Labrador were dropped in the mixing bowl to make her. She has a thick husky coat, hound haunches, soft ears, and the proverbial big brown eyes. “She’s adorable,” I say.

“Thank you. Shall we?” He gestures to the park. We walk across to Turtle Pond, tucked just north of Seventy-Ninth Street. He guides me to a bench not too far from the pond.

I’ve seen Goos Mom before. She’s a Central Park institution, but she went west for a spell, and now, evidently, she is back. At nine o’clock, she heads down the walking path, her short, gray hair peeking out from under her signature Yankees cap, her olive-green rain boots on. She pulls her fire-engine red Radio Flyer wagon with the New York State license plate with GOOSMOM on it. Her pet goose, with the black head and white stripe, sits inside the basket, guarding over the goose food next to him. When they reach the pond, the ritual unfolds. Geese fly in and wait patiently by the water as she retrieves bins from a shed. She fills each one with goose food, places them symmetrically around the pond, and then claps three times. Then the geese race over to the food and chow down.

“I wish I knew who she was. Have you ever talked to her?”

He shakes his head. “No, but sometimes I make up stories in my head about who she is and why she takes care of the Central Park geese.”

“You do like stories, don’t you?”

“Well, so do you. You tell stories in your music. I do it in my writing.”

“Only yours are true,” I point out.

“That might be the pot calling the kettle black.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your music, especially your last album, might just be true too. Like true to your feelings,” he says, petting his dog, who sits dutifully at his feet. “Your last album was straight from the heart. That’s why so many people connected with it.”

Straight from the heart. That’s precisely how I wrote
Crushed
. But I can’t write from the heart now. I can only write when it’s aching. Not when it’s reaching for this man by my side.

“You know that, right?” he continues. “Sometimes I think you don’t realize what your music has done for people.”

I give him a sideways glance, like he’s crazy.

“Do you have any idea how many people blasted your songs over and over?”

“Yeah, when they were hurting,” I add in a withered voice.

“So? What’s wrong with that? Music heals. You probably helped heal hearts.” He taps my hand again, and the slightest touch from him sends a spark through me. “Speaking of, how about that preview?” Matthew asks. He reaches into his backpack for the reporter’s notebook that’s become so familiar to me now.

“So this is gonna be rough, not to mention a cappella.”

“Duly noted.”

So there on the park bench, snug in my coat, at the top of a grassy hill, a hundred feet from Goos Mom, who’s now standing with her hands on her hips watching her flock, I sing, like he says I do, about what’s true—true to my feelings. I sing “Don’t Ask.” I sing about my frustrations, my pain, my lingering anger. When I’m done, I find myself more nervous than I expected for his opinion.

“It’s good. It reminds me of some of the songs on
Crushed.
”

“You didn’t like it.”

“I did like it. It’s good. Is it your best song? No. But it’s good. And it’ll be even better when you polish it up.” He pauses, pen racing across the lined paper to record his notes. “Anything else?”

“Not my best song?” I say, raising an eyebrow.

He puts the notebook down and smiles. “You know I like your work. You know I loved your last album. I just told you how much. But I’m a critic too. This is my job.”

“So,” I begin, reaching for his notebook and adopting my best
reportorial
pose. I flip it open to a blank page and take his pen out of his hand. “Tell me about the rock critic in you, Matthew Harrigan. How did you know you wanted to be a rock critic?”

“I will tell you, but this is almost like your Olivia Newton-John fetish.”

“Oooh, a fetish,” I whisper. “The rock critic has a fetish.”

“My parents were both BBC producers.”

“That’s the fetish?”

“No, that was their job.”

“That is
so
British.”

“Yes, I know. Funny thing—we
are
English. Anyway, that’s how they met, working at the BBC.”

“But I thought you were…” I let my voice trail off.

He raises an eyebrow, daring me to ask.

“Fine. I’ll just say it,” I spit out. “I thought you were a baron.”

His mouth curves in a grin. “Many of the titled still have jobs.”

I grin back, because that’s as much of an admission as I’m going to get.

“My dad had this absolutely insane record collection. He had bootlegs of all the big English rock bands. He was one of those guys who actually posted ads and responded to ads in collector magazines, you know, trading bootlegs with other collectors. We had Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Cream, you name it. And we listened to them over and over. So really, I had no choice.”

I write down in big block letters: NO CHOICE. Then I peer at him as if I were wearing horn-rimmed glass. “But where’s the leg warmer and leotard portion of this story?”

“Ah, so how does this all connect? Well, I became totally obsessed with music. And I started reading
Billboard
. And, because my parents worked at the BBC, they received the top 100 list a week or so before it was actually published. This was nothing special; all news outlets did. But I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So they used to bring these wretched black-and-white dot-matrix printouts of the top 100 list home every Sunday, which was nine days before it ran the following Tuesday. And I loved them. I plastered my walls with these printouts. So there I was, a ten-year-old boy in the mid-nineties living just outside of London and I didn’t have cars or sports or even music posters. I had these sort of ridiculous printouts of lists of songs instead. And then I would take a green highlighter and draw across week to week to chart the movement of the songs.”

“You were kind of a music geek it sounds like.”

“I was a total music geek,” he echoes.

The Doctor looks up as a fly buzzes past. In a flash of blond fur, she leaps and catches the fly in her mouth. “Have you got a frog there in your dog?” I ask.

“She’s a half-breed, what can I say? Apparently her dad was a fence-jumper. The frog dad, that is.”

“So, The Doctor. Sort of an odd name for a dog. I would have thought maybe Clash. Or Clapton. Or Maxwell Silver Hammer.”

“Ah, you must see me as so provincial. That I don’t venture beyond the world of music.”

“No. I don’t think that.”

“I like to read too. So perhaps I might be more imaginative than Clash or Clapton or Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, not that those aren’t clever names.”

“So then why isn’t she Hamlet, or Ophelia for that matter?”

“Or Cleopatra.”

“Or Shakespeare, since some say he was a woman.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t watch British TV, do you?”

“You’re right. I don’t watch British TV. So what’s the story?”

“We had this dog growing up. A sort of standard scrappy English mutt. We loved that dog, but we hated her name. Our mum had named her Bitsy. What an awful name for a dog, don’t you think?” he asks, looking at me.

“It’s not my favorite name,” I say diplomatically.

“So William and I made a pact. We were huge Doctor Who fans. And we always said the line—
I’m The Doctor
—together after we’d watch a show. So we decided that if one of us ever adopted a dog, we’ve give it a good name. Not Bitsy or Lady or anything like that. But The Doctor. And seeing as William is only in college, I beat him to the punch, so I had first dibs on the coolest dog name ever.”

“I like that. It’s a clever name for a dog.”

“Why thank you. I’ve always wanted to impress a woman with my dog-naming skills.”

“Well, you have then,” I said, and brush a hand against his hair for just a moment. The moment shifts from flirty to tender as he leans into my hand. The gesture seems so intimate, so like a boyfriend or girlfriend would do. On both our parts.

The Doctor glances back at us, peaceful and content. Then, she whips her head toward the pond. She emits a low growl as a dark gray standard poodle prances by wearing a red rhinestone-encrusted collar.

“The Doctor hates poodles,” Matthew says by way of explanation.

Apparently, The Doctor hates poodles a lot. Because she is off and running. She is galloping no less, hurtling across the grass to the canine she disdains, her leash trailing along behind her. “Bloody hell,” Matthew says with a groan and takes off to chase her. I watch him racing to catch up to his dog, grabbing her just as she’s about to clamp down on a mass of curly, kinky, practically permed, gray dog hair.

I glance down and realize I am still holding Matthew’s notebook in my hand. I see my own silly notes from my mock interview with Matthew. I flip back a few pages so I can try to find the spot where he left off before I grabbed it. I spot the note he wrote back at the kitchen:
Jane Black has one song for the new album. Everything is okay.
I smile a bit at the memory, at his facetiousness in writing that.

Then I notice there’s more underneath it, the notes he must have taken when I went to the bathroom. These notes aren’t in block letters. They’re in his choppy and slanted penmanship.
Jane Black is coming up dry for her new album. T-minus twelve days and she has nothing but a cover tune. She contends she can pen an entire album in twelve days. Note: research past albums written quickly. Twelve days seems insane. Follow-up: Ask again re her normal MO. Does she write all albums in this fashion? Can she make her deadline? If so, how does this impact article?

What the hell?

I raise my eyes from the notebook and see Matthew chatting amicably with the poodle’s owner. He grips his dog’s collar, but he seems to have charmed his way out of the dog kerfuffle.

I return to his notes.
Cover tune
. He writes it as if it’s a dirty word. It was his goddamn idea after all.

She contends.
Let him try writing an album when a rock critic is following him around.

Ask her again.
Yep, ask her again, indeed. Because that’s what this is all about. Asking me questions. Getting information. Writing a story. My God, I was so stupid to think his e-mails were true. That his kisses were real. All he wants is to ask me again about the deadline for the album. He wants to press me about what I’ve written so far. He wants to know if I can make my deadline so he can make his.

I slap Matthew’s notebook on the bench, cross my arms, clench my teeth, and wait for him to return. Soon, he’s walking right toward me, The Doctor at his side. He looks at me curiously.

“What’s wrong? You seem pissed.”

“Are there some things you wanted to ask me, Matthew?” I reach for the notebook and flip it open to the offending page. “Ask again regarding her normal MO,” I read to him. Then I wave the notebook and say, “So, go. Ask.”