No Strings Attached Read online

  It hadn’t changed Lee’s attitude toward him. Still, she ran hot and cold, overly solicitous one minute, the next, pushing him away. He hadn’t told any of the house share people about his Lee issues. Which made it all the weirder that Harper kept obliquely referring to it, slipping in snide comments like, “Have you ever considered you’d be better off without Leonora? Maybe you should rethink this. Relationships all go sour.”

  Inserting herself in his love life was so inappropriate, Mitch reminded her, sometimes really angrily. For a microsecond he wondered if she was into him, and therefore jealous? But any nincompoop could see how she looked at Joss. Nah, not jealousy. Then what? From what he’d gathered, Harper’s meltdown at the party had something to do with a cutting remark from Katie. About a boy who’d obviously broken Harper’s heart. So maybe that was it.

  What ate at him wasn’t Harper, though. It was just now, the look in Mandy’s eye when she told him to take care. Was there something she intuited he should be mindful of?

  Mitch finished shaving, put on a clean shirt, khakis, and Docksiders, and banished Mandy from his mind. He checked beneath his mattress for the envelope and carefully counted. The engagement ring fund was now just past the $5,000 mark. Just another few weeks, that was all he needed. Once she saw that sparkler, dude, he was there. Reassured, Mitch locked up. He resolved to redouble his efforts with Lee, no matter what it took.

  Harper and Joss: Treble in Paradise

  “Rockin’ night!” Joss exclaimed, looking up at the sky. He breathed in deeply: The stars winked at him, the salt air filled with heady promise. And all he wanted was for the night not to end. He’d just treated Harper to her first authentic Cape Cod experience: oysters, onion rings, and beer, sucking in the sea breeze, gazing out at the ocean. It’d been awesome. Once they got past her stammering apologies-slash-gratitude about the party; once he finally told her, yeah, he grew up in New York, too, they grooved. Just as he knew they would.

  She’d lived downtown, in TriBeCa, she told him, had gone to the Little Red Schoolhouse on Bleecker Street, and had grown up an independent, strong little kid raised by an extremely cool single mom. While Joss stopped short of telling her he’d grown up on the Upper East Side, attended pricey private schools, and grown up a sheltered little rich kid, with a Donald Trump–like, only-worse, father, there was enough of a common vibe to keep them laughing, reminiscing, connecting. And for the first time in eighteen months? Damn, he missed the city!

  When they reached the car, he asked, “So, where to now? Dancing? Movies? Sports bar? Minigolf? Night court?”

  “Don’t quit your day job,” she quipped. “You are so not the last comic standing. You know where we both want to go.”

  She wasn’t suggesting—?

  Harper crossed her arms, amused. “While slurping down oysters, have we not been ogling the most amazing beach ever?”

  Joss grinned. “That was my next idea.” Dude, it’d been his only idea, from the moment he’d found a hapless Harper in the kitchen, distracted by her woes, almost burning the place down. He wanted to rescue her, wanted to take her here, cradle her on the warm sands of the beach.

  “So, there’s a path down there,” she said. “Obviously you’ve been here before. Which qualifies you to lead us.”

  Girl was right. Joss knew where they would go, how to get there, and what he needed to bring. He flipped open the trunk of the car, retrieved his black Taylor acoustic. He’d taken this guitar down to the beach multiple times, and let the songs find him. Cheesy much? But who was he to question a creative rush, where it had begun—or why?

  Harper arched her eyebrows when she saw the guitar. “A beach concert?”

  Joss motioned for her to follow him. He led her down a wooded path that began at the back of the Beachcomber. It sloped downward, looped around, straightened out for a stretch, only to curve again. Without warning, Harper broke into a run, shooting down the dunes as fast she could. Joss didn’t need an invite to join her, nor did he ask permission to grab her hand as they ran in step. The wind flew in their faces, Harper’s hair fanned out, wild and free and untamed as the girl herself. The path became steep as it neared the beach, but no way would Harper slow the pace. They hit the sand hard, winded and laughing at their childish silliness.

  At the shoreline, Harper panted and bent over, hands cupping her knees. “Dumb fun. Bummer you had to do it dragging your strings.” She dug into her pocket for a scrunchie and tied her hair back.

  Joss flung the guitar over his shoulder. He wondered if, by the moonlight, she could see the decals on his guitar strap. Backstage passes of the groups he’d toured with in the past year and a half. Would she recognize the one that belonged to Jimi Jones? And if she did, would she react?

  Harper kicked her sandals off and declared, “I gotta feel the sand between the toes.”

  They meandered down the beach, following the shoreline as it curved westward, until they came to the cove that had been his destination all along. The dune scoop beneath an overhang formed by an outcropping of rock, a cozy shelter he’d discovered a few weeks ago that had become his songwriting haven.

  Joss and Harper sat in silence until he corralled his courage and began to strum the lustrous guitar. He played “Better Things,” an old chestnut written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies that this cover band, Babylon Sad—the one Joss had toured with just before his Jimi Jones gig—used to sing every night. It wasn’t a real mainstream song, but Joss had a hunch Harper knew the words.

  She chimed in: “Here’s wishing you the bluest sky …”

  Joss smiled. Not only did she indeed know all the words, she had a strong, sure voice as well. He could compare it with a Chryssie Hynde, or … to a female version of Harper’s father. But he didn’t. Instead, they harmonized and ended with: “I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things. …”

  Joss told her, “When I was on tour with that cover band, dude, they sang this every night. I should be sick of it. Only I’m not. It still gets to me.”

  “Well, sure,” Harper said. “It’s unselfish. It’s about what you want for someone else.”

  It didn’t escape Joss that Harper took him for an unselfish kinda guy. He kinda liked it.

  Harper continued. “Anyway, that’s what good music is all about. It’s more than happy-go-hooky lyrics and a count-to-four backbeat. There’s truth in them there words. When they hook up with soul-stirring music—that’s gonna haunt you.”

  Josh lit up. Bingo. He’d been right about her all along. Harper Jones had inherited way more than her famous father’s quirky half-smile, wiry build, sarcastic wit, and bedroom eyes. Whether she even knew it or not, she had his musical genius. It lay deep in the DNA, no escape, though Joss suspected she’d been trying, probably her whole life.

  Now. He might not get another moment like this. To tell her all, not just that he knew who she really was, but to come clean about himself. And knowing that, hope she could still be into him. He was just about to spill, when Harper interrupted.

  “Do you know ‘The Freshman’? By Verve Pipe?” she asked.

  He did, but would rather have played “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” by John Mayer. However, “The Freshman” it would be. “For the life of me I cannot believe we’d ever die for these sins, we were merely freshmen.”

  And so, they music-melded, Joss (née Joshua) Wanderman (née Sterling) and Harper Jones. An eavesdropper, someone crouched on the cliff above them, would have heard snippets of songs, attempts at harmony, convivial conversation that coiled and wound around itself like a helix, punctuated with lighthearted laughter and groans of “Eww … cheesy!”

  And Joss never got to say what he knew he ought to.

  But dude, it wasn’t just vocal cords and guitar chords at play here. His heart—if that didn’t deserve an “eww … cheesy!”—that’s what was singing.

  Joss didn’t dare play a Jimi Jones song. Instead, he went into a riff Harper couldn’t possibly know.

  Only she did. “That�
�s an original. You wrote it, didn’t you?”

  “What do you think?” He looked up hopefully.

  “I think”—she paused and drew a treble clef in the sand—“it’s amazing. Not that it doesn’t need work!”

  Joss crossed his arms over his guitar. Right—let her just try to keep lying to him.

  She gave it up, palms raised in an “I surrender” gesture. “So what, yeah, I’m somewhat musical. I have a feel for it. At least I know what’s good when I hear it, and what sucks.”

  “You know more than that. You also know how to fix what’s not working.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “It needs a full D with a seventh for accent. There, after the A minor. Build the chorus and finish with the power chord. Right now, you got it all in minors.”

  Whoa. She’d been schooled, and he was more impressed than he thought he’d be.

  Harper continued, “Anyway, what are the lyrics?”

  She’d opened the door, and Joss blasted through. “There aren’t any. I’m neither lyricist nor poet. But I know someone who is. Fortuitously, she’s right here.”

  Harper chuckled. “And so, ladies and gentlemen, we come to ‘the agenda’ portion of the program.”

  Joss feigned bewilderment, but couldn’t keep up the ruse. He didn’t want to. “Harper Jones, will you write something for this?”

  She pressed her lips together, dug up a stone, and tossed it toward the ocean. “Maybe I already have.”

  Silence.

  “But?”

  More silence.

  Joss put the guitar down. He got it. The poem she’d written, the one that would fit this song? She wasn’t sharing. “Not ready to trust me with it,” he speculated.

  “Not so much,” Harper conceded, now drawing a wavy musical staff in the sand with her forefinger. “But don’t take it personally. Trust is overrated.”

  “Like relationships?” he guessed.

  “Dude”—Harper threw another stone toward the water—“relationships are like cotton candy: all pretty and sparkly and sugary and tempting. But the minute you take a bite, what happens? They dissolve and leave you with tooth decay. Relationships that involve trust are bad for you.”

  “You can’t really believe that.” Joss bristled.

  “Can’t I? What more proof do you need than the saga of the lovebird living in the share house with us? Tell me that’s not fucked up.”

  Joss tensed. “You mean Mitch? He’s still crazy about Leonora. So what do you know that no one else does?”

  “You know it too. The difference is, you intuited it, and I saw it. I saw her.”

  Harper drew her knees into her chest. She spoke softly, recounting the scene she’d walked in on, Leonora and Grace Hannigan’s father under the sheets. Joss’s stomach sank lower with each word. He pounded the sand. “Oh, man! I knew somethin’ wasn’t cool the first time I met her. Shit, poor Mitch.”

  “Do we tell him?” Harper’s voice was barely above a whisper. “We can’t, right? I mean …”

  Joss shook his head sadly. “No choice. We have to. It sucks that he’s the one to get his heart carved up. Leonora is his dream girl. She represents everything he’s worked for. Everything she offers, it’s the life he wants.”

  “The trick,” Harper said, lifting her chin defiantly, “is not to want.”

  No! That’s not it at all! That can’t be it. Because right now, Joss wanted. Oh, how he wanted. Badly. Harper Jones was the most enchanting girl he’d ever seen. She was not just stirringly beautiful, but profound, and proud, and poetic, and … and … funny! God damn, she was funny.

  She was also closed for business—she’d just said as much. Once upon a time she’d wanted—the boy’s name was Luke—and look where it had gotten her. Once burned, forever scorched. This decision, irrefutable, made at age seventeen. Joss gazed into her astoundingly light blue-gray eyes. She was meltingly beautiful, this “sweet child o’ mine,” he thought lyrically. He loved the way the little tendrils of curls escaped her every effort to tie her hair back, how they brushed her temples, framed her cocoa face. Who could hurt a girl like this? Who could rip her heart apart, so she’d never give it away again? Joss couldn’t understand.

  Like the tide that can’t stop nature’s pull back out to sea, Joss could not help himself. He pulled her close, drew his arms around her, tipped her head up, and kissed her. He wanted to be gentle, tried to be, but God, she tasted sweet. And Joss had never been this hungry.

  She didn’t reject him. In spite of what she said, Harper parted her lips, and at first simply let him kiss her. When she tentatively began responding, her passion, her hunger did not match his. But it was enough. Enough to let him know he wasn’t stranded here in head-over-heels land, alone with these feelings.

  If she would ever acknowledge them, if they’d ever share another kiss like that, Joss could not predict. As soon as they pulled apart, they got up and retraced their footsteps back through the dunes, climbed uphill until they reached the restaurant and the car.

  Joss slipped a Death Cab for Cutie CD in to cover the strained silence between them. It wasn’t until they were turning onto Cranberry Lane that Joss found his voice. “Hey look, I didn’t plan for that to happen, but I’m not sorry it did. It was just a very cool evening, and I got caught up in the moment, in you.”

  Harper wasn’t even looking at him.

  “It won’t happen again, not if you don’t want it to,” he said, unconvincingly.

  Still no response. He leaned over and tenderly brushed her hair behind her ear. “Just don’t hate me, okay?”

  Harper pointed straight ahead, to the share house. “Something’s wrong,” was all she said.

  Violated

  “I’ve been violated!” Mandy shrieked, jerkily stomping around her room and clawing at her hair. Hysterical and hammered, she came off more comical than convincing. “The fuckers freakin’ stripped me!”

  Alefiya had come flying in. The scene mirrored the one in her own room. Drawers and closet doors yanked open, their contents rifled through and flung all over the floor—even the mattresses pulled off the beds, and turned over.

  Ali took a deep calming breath, as much for herself as for the drama queen. “You weren’t personally violated, Mandy. It’s bad karma to exaggerate.”

  Mandy fired bloodshot daggers at her. “They pawed through my personal belongings! Like”—she hiccuped—“animals! They took my stuff!”

  “Exactly,” Ali reasoned. “Your stuff. Not you.”

  Mandy ramped up her rage. “You don’t get it, do you? You … you … third-world freak! They raped my room. What would you call it?”

  A robbery. Because that’s exactly what it was.

  What it wasn’t, Alefiya deduced, as she tried calming the caterwauling girl, was random.

  It was rare that all six of them were out at the same time. Whoever was responsible for this home invasion either knew that, or had been watching the house. She shivered.

  By coincidence, Ali and Mandy had returned home roughly the same time, around 1:30 a.m. “Leaf,” as Jeremy liked to call her, had been out with him, plus Sharif and Lisa. After weeks of trying, the trio finally succeeded in cheering Alefiya up. She still felt guilty about the way the party had ended, but as her friends kept reminding her, she was starting to accept that her intentions had been pure and, in the end, that no one got seriously hurt, or sick, or actually arrested.

  “No harm, no foul”—an expression she’d learned over the summer—seemed to apply.

  More importantly, Jeremy pointed out, it was over. Time to let it go, cheer up, enjoy the rest of the summer.

  Still, Ali shied away from inviting them in that night. Her once carefree mi casa es su casa open-door policy didn’t feel right anymore. So Jeremy settled for walking her halfway up the gravel drive and leaving her with a sweet, lingering kiss. She responded in kind, draping her arms around his shoulders and holding him close. Ali knew this: Summer’s end would not mean the end of them. This
boy was a keeper. That’s when real problems would kick in. Ali shuddered, imagining her strict father going apoplectic at the sight of the very not Indian Jeremy LaSalle.

  It was the taste of Jeremy’s full lips on her own Ali was replaying when she turned the key in the front door. It didn’t click. Hmmm. Harper was the only one who’d said she’d be home tonight—so why wasn’t the door locked? Harper, being from New York City, was kind of paranoid about that.

  Nervous, Alefiya gently pushed the door open a few inches. Clarence streaked through her legs, and in a flash, was down the driveway and into the street.

  Ali dropped her purse and bolted after him. She didn’t see the car rounding the corner—only heard the sound of tires screeching to a sudden stop.

  “Clarence!” she screamed. No! No … please … don’t let him be hurt, she prayed, running into the street. Clarence was inches from the car, but thankfully, unharmed. Beyond grateful, she picked the errant ferret up, wondering how he’d gotten out of his cage.

  Tim Johnson, Mandy’s “live-in” boyfriend, was at the wheel. Mandy, in the passenger seat, leaned out the window. “Your pet rat wuz almos’ roadkill. We gotta try harder next time, don’ we, Timmy-cakes?”

  Mandy was drunk. Well, at least she wasn’t driving—that was something. Cradling Clarence, Ali turned away and strode back to the house. Behind her, the car door opened, Mandy toppled out, and Tim drove away. Before she could inquire why Tim wasn’t staying, Mandy snarled, “Wus this crap on the front lawn? Who left the upstairs windows open? What’d you do, dump your discards out the window?”

  Ali hadn’t even noticed the lawn, still scraggly despite her efforts to spruce it up. What was her tapestry beach blanket doing out there? And her embroidered peasant blouse? Whose sandal was that?

  “Pisshead!” Mandy drunkenly blasted. “What’d you do, throw my shoe out with your garbage? That’s ’n expensive shoe, you numbnut!”

  Ali was annoyed, borderline panicky now. The unlocked door, Clarence out of his cage, clothes hanging out the window and on the lawn. She grabbed Mandy by the elbow. “Sober up. We better see what’s going on.”