Insatiable (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 3)

by Michelle Hazen

  She blows her nose. “Don’t.” She sighs raggedly. “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t hold it in anymore and no one else knows. But don’t come home. Danny won’t let me call off the tour yet, so we’ll be together in a few days anyway. If you come back here right now, you’re both so upset you’ll just end up beating the hell out of each other. I know how you guys are.”

  “But... I mean, shit, Kate, what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” She starts to cry again. “I don’t know, Jax, I don’t—”

  The line goes dead. I’m not sure if she hung up on me on accident or on purpose, but what else is there to say?

  I take a step. I can’t feel any part of my body, like my mind is just hanging in space. Somewhere. I take another step until I spot Ava through the window. The second level of the patio holds an infinity pool with a round platform hovering above its far edge, water flowing under it and then dropping to the stream circling the terrace below. Ava sits cross-legged on the platform, the sound of falling water all around her. Her hands aren’t in any of those contrived positions you see on Buddha statues, but something in her utter stillness tells me she’s meditating.

  She looks peaceful. I can’t remember a single time in my life when I felt like that. When my mind was ever quiet instead of questioning itself, running through two dozen checklists and four dozen potential problems and shit I said the day before that I shouldn’t have, and interview clips where I could have been funnier. Wanting, wanting, wanting everything all the fucking time and trying to convince myself I can do without.

  What’s the point? Thousands of people know my name and I’m lonelier than ever. I’m always struggling to be better. Kinder, wittier, calmer. Less manic, more in control. And I’m not.

  I’ve been on a stage every night for weeks and yet the applause never sticks in my ears. I thought if I could make it this far, I would be somebody, but I’m still just faking it and I’m so goddamn hollow. Filled with need and failure and nothing.

  Outside, Ava sits cleanly alone. The picture of serenity in leather and rivets, free in a way I’ve never been.

  No, that’s not quite true, is it? My heart rate kicks up with the edge of the forbidden, because I’m not supposed to think about it. The tiny sting when the needle goes in. The lightheaded whirl when the weight leaves your body and you just...drift away.

  When you cease to be who you are.

  I blast across Ava’s living room. A wicker chair goes flying when it gets in my way, the cushion bouncing across the polished wooden floor. I start in the kitchen, slamming through cupboards, shoving plates and glasses aside to see into the corners. She hardly drinks, but I bet she’s had parties here. There will be something.

  In any other rock star’s house, there would be drugs somewhere, and in that second, I hate her as blackly as I’ve ever hated another person. Booze won’t be enough. I know it even as the glass front of a cabinet shatters, raining glass over me as I reach for the next knob.

  “Jax! Oh my God, what are you doing?”

  I don’t have time for her, for the inevitable argument and the screaming and the judgment. What the hell does she know when she can make her brain quiet whenever she wants? When she’s filled with courage and hope and laughter and a million things other than this sick, sucking want to feel something other than the shit that is my life?

  When I see the scrambled stack of bowls inside the next cupboard, I know I’ve already searched this far, and I’m repeating myself. There’s no liquor, nothing to dull this scream before I go barking fucking mad.

  Drugs. Every country has an outlet, even if you don’t know a single dealer. It’s called a hospital. All you need to get in is an injury.

  The fridge looks too soft so I drop to my knees and batter my fist into the floor.

  “Jax!”

  Lightning detonates, streaking up my arm into my elbow. I didn’t know I could still feel so much pain, and it terrifies me. How much more is there to feel?

  Her arms wrap around me from behind and something in me staggers even though I’m already on the ground. I cough on a sound that scrapes coming out.

  “Your hands, stop it God, you need your hands.” She half-falls off my crouched back and crawls in front of me, grabbing both my fists and hugging them into her chest as if she can protect them from me. Blood from my knuckles smears her collarbone and the color shocks me. I blink and meet her eyes by accident. They’re wide, deep brown and scared as hell.

  I made her afraid of me.

  Shame whirls like black nausea inside the cacophony that is my mind. I can’t be like this, not in front of her, but I can’t stop. I have tried to be someone who wouldn’t hurt the people I love. And on my best day, my own mother won’t be seen with me.

  Another sound rips out of me. It’s like a dry heave, senseless and involuntary. Am I sick? Am I going insane? I have to get out of this feeling, escape from the phone I dropped somewhere along the way. As long as I have that phone, the news can get worse. It can find me anywhere.

  Ava cradles my face in her hands. Her mouth moves, but I don’t hear anything until her fingers tighten, crushing my jaw muscles, grinding into pressure points I didn’t know I had. I blink and try to pull away from her, but she’s strong and she won’t let me.

  “Jax,” she says, and a tiny bit of my fear washes away, because I can hear her. At least one part of me still works. “Tell me what happened.”

  The order is so sharp I don’t even think about lying. “Danny’s sick. He has cancer and it’s getting worse and he’s going to—”

  “No,” Ava whispers. She cradles my head into her chest, her breathing erratic. “Jax, no.” She knows us, knows what this will do to me, and to Jera. Ava’s hands clutch my back, holding on to me. I shake my head, so hard it probably bruises her. I pull away so I won’t hurt her.

  “I can’t do this, can’t feel like this.” I start to skitter back from her on my hands and knees and she comes with me, gripping my shoulders.

  “Listen to me, Jax. You’re not alone. I’m with you, and God, this is...but we’ll get through this, okay? I’m here. I’m here for you.”

  Her voice is beautiful and raw. I stop moving just to listen and she kisses me. She’s crying, and her lips are salty and too urgent to be soft as they move against mine. It claws at me; I know she’s suffering because of me. My pain leaks out through her eyes and her fingers and her kiss that doesn’t quite know how to comfort me but wants to try.

  I pull her to me, tipping us both full-length onto the floor so I can hold her. “Ava.” Her name sounds sacred because I have nothing else left to pray to.

  “I’m here. I’m here.”

  I think we start to strip just to be closer, to feel that most basic comfort of skin against skin. But as soon as her breasts press to my chest, my body comes to life with a roar.

  I kiss Ava, tears and teeth clashing because I can’t plan right now. I have no idea how to be sweet or good or decent. I just need to be near her, to feel her kiss me the way she did in that alley, so I can believe there’s someone left in this world who can love me. That if my best friend disappears and all the others are lost to grief along with me, there will be one person who believes I’m worth the air I breathe.

  She jerks the button on my pants open, and she’s careful with my zipper when I wouldn’t have been. I rip her pants down her legs, breaking the heel off one of her shoes when I try to get it off. It was probably beautiful, probably expensive, but I don’t have the heart left to care. I push my jeans down and I’m inside her before I’m even naked.

  Ava wraps me in her arms and her legs, holding me so tight it hurts. I still feel lightheaded, lost. Like I used to in the mornings when I didn’t know how I had ended up somewhere that didn’t smell like our tour bus.

  Even when our rhythm is too rough for me to hold her mouth anymore, she kisses me. On the cheeks, the ears. My neck, my forehead slick with sweat. My straining shoulders as I hammer both of us down into the
unyielding floor. My kneecaps grind into hardwood, and I can’t suck enough air and it isn’t enough.

  I don’t know if she comes. I wouldn’t be sure I did, except for the rush of wetness and warmth at the end. It’s a quick glitter of pleasure that it winks out like it’s never been. The black of the abyss beyond drags at me like a current.

  I can’t swim.

  I thrust one more time. Desperately, pointlessly. My eyes move so fast I can’t focus on anything, Ava’s skin a dark shadow against pale wood floors. “I can’t...” I half-groan. “Please. I can’t feel like this.”

  I slam both hands to the floor to either side of her, the shock of the solid surface not enough to ground me. I slip out of her, but she keeps her legs wrapped around my hips and she catches my face again, gripping me until I can focus on her eyes.

  They’re steady.

  “Jax, your friend is dying,” she says.

  I push away, trying to get up, but she snaps her legs tight so fast it unbalances me so I fall back onto her. She doesn’t let go of my face, my gaze.

  “It hurts,” she hisses, and air whooshes out of my useless chest. “You can’t make it better, and it won’t stop. It will get worse than this.” Tears glitter in her eyes, every word falling like a verdict because I know, know she’s right and I can’t take it. But her slender body is shaking right along with mine and she won’t let me go.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I want to tear this house to splinters around us but I don’t want to hurt her. I can’t reach Danny, or Kate. And I don’t know shit about curing cancer. “Just tell me what I should do.”

  “Breathe,” Ava says. She hides my face into her neck. Pain floods down my throat, rips at the roots of my teeth, rattles every cell and bone and thought I’ve ever had. The first breath hurts more than suffocating. “Nothing is okay,” she says. “You’re not okay. But you can take one more breath.”

  Chapter 20: Cardinal Sin

  I hate it. The air bruises my clamped-down throat, kicks at my collapsing ribs. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to know what I know, I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want this fucking life. My lungs fill, and I hate that, too.

  Ava smells like cucumbers and sweat and salt. I don’t know how long we’ve been lying here when I start to register what scent is again. Her arms are steel and gravity, quivering with exertion as she holds me. Breathing doesn’t hurt anymore, but everything else does.

  This is what waited behind the drugs, beneath the orgasms and the heat of the lights, all trained on me. This endless, scabby shit of a feeling. I close my eyes.

  Darkness doesn’t fool the pain, and I still smell cucumbers.

  When I lift my lids, sunlight spears into me. The cold floor bruises me, holds me up. It takes an incredible effort, but I roll so Ava is on top of me, my spine grinding our weight into the wood instead of hers. She shifts her shaking arms up around my neck. I close my eyes again.

  She never speaks. It’s hours on that fucking floor, listening to her breathe, listening to the ocean I hate because it never pauses. It doesn’t give us the slightest hint of respect, not even a second of silence. Eventually, I sit up. Our skin sticks to each other and the floor and it makes a sucking sound as we peel free. I roll my stiff shoulders, and as soon as I’m done, they sag. My body sits heavy and ugly and I’m glad as hell I don’t have to play a show tonight. My fingers can’t remember their own prints, much less the chords of my band’s music.

  Ava doesn’t stand until I do. I stare at her feet, bare against the floor. I want to tell her I’m sorry but I’m one giant apology and I don’t see the point. She goes to the sink and fills a glass with water, takes a sip. Brings it back to me. It tastes better than I expected, and I drain the glass before I know it.

  I lower the cup and look at her for the first time. Her dark eyes have no hint of disgust, or fear. Any of the things I would expect since she watched me come apart into all the worst dregs of myself.

  “You did it,” she says.

  I just stare at her.

  “You couldn’t stand it, but you did. Without covering it up, or running from it. You’re strong enough,” she says simply.

  That doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be right, but I can’t figure out how to argue with her. She shifts, something a little stiff in the movement, and I reach out. “Did I hurt you?”

  A laugh coughs out of her. “You hurt the shit out of me.” She presses a hand to her chest. “Right about the time you told me you were losing your best friend.” Tears jump to her eyes. “There has to be something we can do, Jax. Whatever the cancer is, there are specialists, experimental treatments. Even if you have to cancel the tour, I have money, okay? If it would help...”

  I set down the glass and lean heavily back against the counter, shaking my head. “You don’t know Danny. If he decides it’s his time to die, he’ll die. Without blinking.”

  She hugs me around the waist, laying her head against my chest even though she’s shaking it back and forth, just a little bit, like she might not even know what she’s doing. I hold her gently this time, running a hand down her back to check for scrapes, or any place I might have bruised her. She pulls back, looking up at me as she scrubs a tear off her cheek.

  “You’re amazing, you know that? Deciding to get clean when it would have been easier to keep using and just ditch your band and your friends. Then staying clean on tour and through all of this...” Another droplet streaks down her face. “I know—not as well as you do, but better than most, I know how hard it is. Not everyone is as strong as you, and almost no one tries as hard as you do.”

  I frame her face in my hands, thumbing the tears softly off her cheeks. Her hair is all a tumble from my fingers and the floor, and her makeup runs down her face. I never want to look at anything else.

  “I don’t know why you’re still here with me,” I murmur, “but I don’t want to leave you.” I’m still realizing it as I speak, but it’s true. She’s not a magic bullet, a medicine to drown the pain like I’ve used so many girls for. She’s not a needle in my arm delivering oh-so-fleeting oblivion.

  I can still feel pain when I’m with her. I’m scared as hell of that, of everything that’s coming for me, and the very real possibility it will break me. But even if I lose Danny, my band slips away, and everything in my life changes, I don’t want to disappear into a back alley drug deal because that will mean leaving her behind.

  I don’t know if I can be good for her, but I absolutely know she’s good for me.

  “Good,” Ava says, and squeezes me fiercely around the waist. “Because there’s no way I’m letting you get away. Besides, there’s someplace I want to take you. You think you’re up to coming along?”

  “Yeah,” I say, brushing her hair back so I can see her eyes. “With you? I’m up for anything.”

  FOREIGN COLORS AND shapes flash by the car windows, but Ava’s driving now instead of a cabbie. The words on the signs are English, not Brazilian Portuguese, and our long weekend is close to over now instead of just beginning.

  Charleston is a gorgeous city; one I’ve never been to before. Narrow streets and two-story covered porches lounge in the embrace of expansive live oak trees. Here and there, brick archways lead to pocket courtyards trickling with flowers and ivy. This place has a hundred little secret places to hide, the age of the place sinking into my bones along with the heat. I wonder if that’s why she brought me here, if she knew it would make me feel safe.

  I reach for Ava’s hand across the gearshift. “I’m pretty sure having a plane has warped you,” I say, keeping my voice light. “When you said you wanted to take me someplace, I thought it would be in Mata de São João, or at least still in Brazil. Not in South Carolina.”

  “Come on, Brazil’s amazing, but Charleston’s pretty too, right?”

  I watch her instead of the scenery. “Absolutely.”

  We took two days at her beach house before we came back to the States. Most of the first I spent slumpe
d in a lounge chair, staring out at the sea and trying to wrap my head around what my life is now. The second, we talked. About everything I haven’t wanted to think about: with myself, with Danny, with the band. I told her even after rehab, I never felt clean because every girl I met was a new fix, no matter how hard I fought to see them as more. I admitted until I met her, I didn’t know how much I wanted to be seen as more. She told me about meditation, and I fixed her cabinet door.

  I called Danny, too. He still refuses to see a doctor, or tell Jera he’s sick. We got into a shouting match over it that, oddly, left me feeling closer to normal than anything else has.

  Ava lets go of my hand to parallel park into a tight spot along the sunken, ancient curb. I lean across her seat a little to see the lemon yellow house we parked next to, the short side up against the street as if to fit in a long, narrow lot. The two stories of porches face sideways, into the shade of the garden tucked in behind a wrought-iron fence.

  I wait a beat, but she doesn’t get out of the car. Just smoothes her jeans, adjusts the ponytail that’s more casual than anything I’ve seen her wear in public, um, ever.

  “Don’t freak out, okay?” she says.

  My eyebrow lifts. “Not sure I have much more freak out left in me after this weekend. Why, is that house packed full of reporters or something?”

  Ava takes a breath. “This is my parents’ house.”

  “Your parents? Today?” I shake my head. “Ava, two days ago I tried to put my fist through your floor just to get a fix of morphine, which is about four notches down from my drug of choice. What about that told you it was an auspicious time for the boyfriend/Daddy handshake?” My eyes jump to check on the yellow house, just in case they come out and catch me sitting in a car with their daughter.