Time Out of Mind (Suncoast Society #43)(20)

“Why?”

“When I said ‘f*ck you’ to you. Your response.”

“Ah. Understandable.”

“No offense.”

“None taken. I’m actually bi, but no worries.”

Mevi froze, stunned.

Had he thought he was out of the woods?

Oh, shit.

“Is that a problem?” Doyle asked.

Mevi realized he was staring, so he shook it off and started digging into his food. “No, man. Sorry. Not a problem at all. I’m cool.”

“How about you?”

His face heated. “How about me what?”

“I’ve never heard of you having kids.”

“Oh. No, not as far as I know. I don’t want any, either. Not after what I went through.”

“The theft and trial?”

“No.” He crammed a forkful of food into his mouth. “My father,” he muttered around it.

Maybe this was his out. Let Doyle talk to him about that kind of stuff and divert the subject.

Because if he let himself focus for too long on the fact that this hottie he’d be spending the next ten weeks with was not only single, but bi?

I’m doomed.





Doyle wasn’t sure how hard to push him. I’ll lead by example. “My dad died when I was young. My mom died right after I graduated high school. She’d never remarried. After what I went through, I decided I didn’t want to be a parent and possibly put a kid through what I went through.”

Mevi stared at him for a moment as he chewed. “Mine didn’t die soon enough,” he muttered in that same, low voice. Once again, the other man’s gaze focused on his food. “Very closed-minded. That’s why I ditched Wyoming as soon as I was old enough.”

“Is that when you moved to California?”

“Yeah. Me and a buddy used to play stuff locally. Instead of wanting to be actors we moved out there to make music. Dad used to yell at me for taking time out to write music instead of doing stuff like football in high school. Just wasn’t my thing, you know? Wanted me to go into the military like he had. Again, not my thing. I respect our military, don’t get me wrong. We do several charity shows a year with the USO. But I hate guns. He thought it’d toughen me up. So…I left.”

“Do you have contact with your mother?”

“Yeah. We’re not real close, though. She imagined a house full of grandkids. Again, not me.”

Doyle suspected there was more, maybe even a lot more, that Mevi wasn’t admitting yet. So Doyle verbally stepped back a hair, to give him some breathing room.

“How’d you get the name Mevi?”

“My buddy got drunk and couldn’t say ‘Malcolm Levi Maynard.’ Slurred the f*ck out of it. I liked the sound of Mevi. It stuck.” He poked at his food. “You probably think I’m a horrible son, huh?”

Mevi had brought it back around, meaning he wanted to talk. Doyle decided to let him. “No. I think you have strong feelings. Feelings aren’t right or wrong, they just are. What you do with them is what counts in the long run. I spent a lot of time as a kid mad at my father for something he had no control over. He died. He didn’t want to, it just happened.”

“My father had full control over what he did.” Mevi forked more food into his mouth. “Told me not to come crawling back there, looking for help. So I didn’t go back until it was time to bury him. And I paid for every cent of it.”

Doyle wasn’t sure if he meant literally, metaphorically, or both. “When was that?”

“Two weeks after I turned thirty. Our fourth album had gone gold the week before and looked like it was heading to platinum.”

“Do you have any regrets?”





Yeah, Mevi had a metric f*ck-ton of regrets.

The most current one being that there was no way in hell he’d ever be able to have a real-life indulgence in some of the fantasies rolling through his brain about Doyle.

“Only that I didn’t tell my father to f*ck himself earlier. Even when I left, I really didn’t say it. Just said I was leaving, and I left. I owned my truck. Me and my buddy packed our shit and left. He ended up going back to Wyoming four months later because he couldn’t handle the grind. I ended up famous.”

That was another regret. Because Bob had died in a car wreck three years earlier, a drunk crossing the line one night and hitting him head-on.

Mevi had paid for Bob’s funeral, too, when he’d heard about the accident, although he hadn’t gone to the funeral. He’d never met Bob’s wife and kids, and didn’t want to be a distraction to them by showing up and getting mobbed. He’d called the funeral home and paid for everything with a credit card and told them to refund the fees to the widow.

“Did you have a problem with drinking back then?”

“No. I mean, sure, I drank occasionally, but I was focused, you know? Working three shitty-assed jobs to afford a third of a really crappy one-bedroom apartment. I couldn’t afford to drink, much less do drugs. Didn’t have time to party. One good thing I learned from my old man was a work ethic. Just not the kind of one he thought I should have. I’ll give him credit for that, I guess.”

“And you’ve never tried drugs?”