Free Beautiful Musician by Sheri Whitefeather

funny. “I just
wasn’t expecting someone like you.”
    “ It’s okay. I’m
flattered.” He shot me a boyish smile. “And as long as we’re on the
subject, I think you’re hot, too.” His smile turned devilish. “If
we got together, we’d make cute babies.”
    I knew he was kidding, but I couldn’t
find it within myself to appreciate his humor. “I’m sorry, but I’m
having an off day. And I wasn’t trying to start a flirtation
between us.” That was the last thing I could cope with.
    “ I wasn’t trying to start
anything, either.” He went serious. “I know this isn’t an online
date, certainly not with what we came here to discuss. Are you
still up for that talk?”
    “ Yes.” I definitely wanted
to find out more about him and who he was.
    He guided me to the booth, where he’d
left his coffee. We sat across from each other, and I did my best
to relax.
    I even started the conversion. “Where
are you from?”
    “ I have a loft
downtown.”
    I relaxed a bit more. If he would have
said that he was from Room 105 I would’ve covered my face and
cried.
    He reached for his cup. “What about
you?”
    “ I live in
Riverside.”
    “ That’s off the 91,
right?”
    “ Yes, in the Inland
Empire.”
    “ I read in one of your
posts that your sister is ill.”
    “ Her name is Abby. She’s
the schizophrenic in my family. Our parents died in a car crash
when she was seven and I was eight. Our aunt Carol raised us after
that. Losing our parents was traumatic for both of us, but it was
worse for Abby. She was already a troubled child. For now, she’s
living at a therapy center that’s designed to treat people with
mental illnesses and help mainstream them. But her progress has
been slow.”
    “ Are you
close?”
    “ Extremely. As kids, we
were inseparable. We were homeschooled together because my sister
wasn’t able to handle regular school.”
    “ Did you want to go to
regular school?”
    “ Sometimes. But it was
easier for Carol to have me there. Abby has always been paranoid of
my aunt.”
    “ But she never gets
paranoid of you?”
    “ No. I’m like her other
half, I guess.” Which made my fear of becoming like Abby worse.
“She always wanted to wear the same outfits as me when we were
little. She tried to mimic everything I did.”
    “ That sounds
sweet.”
    Disturbingly sweet, I thought. “There
used to be tons of pictures of us as kids, looking like twins,
until Abby went ballistic and destroyed every single photograph
that she was in. I don’t even have a recent picture of her. She
refuses to let anyone get near her with a camera. It freaks her
out.”
    “ I don’t have a picture of
Jack, either. He was the schizophrenic man who raised me, but he’s
dead now. It’s a complicated story. That’s why I didn’t post it
online.”
    “ Will you tell me about
it?” I was desperate to know what made him tick, to learn what
separated him from the warrior, to keep reassuring myself that they
weren’t one and the same.
    “ It might make me sound
strange.”
    Nothing could be as strange as what
I’d been going through. “I’m not going to judge you,
Duncan.”
    “ Most of my childhood is a
complete blank. Jack was a homeless man who found me wandering
around by myself when I was thirteen.”
    A shiver ran through my blood. I was
thirteen when I’d created the warrior, and he was supposed to be
the same age as I was, maturing as I matured. “How old are you
now?”
    “ Twenty.”
    I forced myself to breathe. “So am
I.”
    “ But you know who you are.
My identity is made-up. Jack gave me the name Duncan.”
    God help me. I was sitting across from
a man who had a fabricated identity. What were the chances of that?
“Why did he pick that name?”
    “ It was in honor of Duncan
MacLeod.”
    “ I don’t know who that
is.”
    “ He’s a fictional
character from the old Highlander TV show and spin-off movies. One of the movies
was a theatrical release that Jack scrounged up enough