She dropped her belongings to the floor in front of her. “That won’t bother you, will it?” Her thick, Eliza Doolittle-esque British accent forced a slight smile to my face.
“It’s fine.”
“Oh. American, aye?”
I nodded.
“Traveling for work?”
“Not exactly. You?”
She huffed before gathering her chestnut brown hair in her fist and tying it back. “Nope. I made the wonderful, three-hour journey just to catch my scaggey, now ex-boyfriend, in the sack with my former best friend.”
I know my eyebrows must have shot up. “Oh.”
“Yep. Bellends. The lot of ‘em.” She held out her hand. “I’m Lottie Bookham.”
“Georgia. . .” I hesitated. Spencer legally changed his last name to Hailstorm when he turned seventeen. It wasn’t even a real last name, but he said Hailstorm screamed rocker. That it did, and chances were, Lottie may know who he was. I wanted anonymity. Swallowing, I chose to use my maiden name. “Georgia Wright.”
We shook before the announcer came over the intercom, the only words I noticed: London Victoria and the doors closed. The departing alarms chimed.
Lottie wriggled in the seat as she settled in. “So, vacation?”
“Um, I’ve been calling it a self-discovery journey.”
She gave a curt nod. “I like that. Maybe I should go on one of those. Figure out why guys are all arseholes. I’ve dated three cheaters and one self-absorbed knob that was more concerned about how much kale he could suck down than whether I ever orgasmed.”
I had never been the type of person that took to new people, but there was something about Lottie that was infectious, even though she was pissed.
Mumbling swear words to herself, she bent over the arm of the chair and dug through her bag, pulling out a thick hardback. She pulled down the desk tray, dropped the book onto it, and flicked through the pages. “You ever take physics?”
“No.”
“It’s a load of shit. I’m going to fail it. With that said, I don’t recommend it.” She shook her head, thumbed through a few more pages, then huffed before slamming the book closed and tossing it to the floor. “I’m going to change my major.” Then she kicked the book before looking back at me. “Here I am moaning like a cow about my life, while you look like you have it all together. I promise, I’m only half the mess I appear to be right now.”
I had to laugh at that. “I don’t know many people who decide to go on a six-month journey of self-discovery that have their lives together.”
“True.” Her gaze narrowed. “But at least you’re on step one.”
Step one of many. . .
6
Spencer
“You okay?” There was a deep echo to Leo’s voice that made it sound like he was shouting from the other end of a cave.
I laughed at the thought of him wearing one of those spelunker helmets with the headlamp. My eyes blinked open long enough to catch a glimpse of the fan blades circling around.
Leo’s gaunt face came into view. “Spencer!”
My eyelids seemed to weigh a ton, so I shut them. Something clapped. My head snapped to the side before I fell back onto the sofa. I didn’t feel Leo’s hand connect with my face, and the only reason I was even aware that one of my best friends had just backhanded me like Pete Sampras was that Nash shouted at him.
“Dude! Don’t hit him! You’ll mess up his face.”
“He’s outta of his mind. Look at him.”
“Fuk-aw,” I mumbled.
“He can’t even talk,” Leo said. “We’ve gotta do something. We can’t just. . .” His voice faded into oblivion, mixing with the hum of unconsciousness.
Ah! That was the feeling I’d been chasing—nothingness.
Their voices bounced around the inside of my head, eventually turning into the theme song to Super Mario Brothers. That was the thing about mixing a shit-ton of drugs and alcohol, I never knew what the result would be. This concoction. . .hallucinations. I was in the middle of a jungle with monkeys whose leader tried, unsuccessfully, to shove a banana in my mouth. That angered them, and my body went weightless when the little fuckers hiked me onto their shoulders and carted me off.
And then it was ripped right away. The splash woke me before the stinging cold—at least, I think it did. Gasping for air, I grabbed the sides of the tub and shot up, swearing. For the most part, I was still out of it, but that shock of frigid water somewhat snapped me back to lucidity.
“Stop trying to kill yourself, and we won’t have to throw you in an ice bath, dipshit.” Leo leaned against the tiled bathroom wall, cupping a hand to his face when he lit a cigarette.
“Idiot. That’s a myth.” Water trickled into my eyes, and I wiped it away. “If I’m really ODing and you throw me into a tub of ice, you’re gonna kill me. So next time you think I’m near death, either let me fucking die or give me some Narcan. Christ!”
“Told you.” Nash shoved Leo’s shoulder, knocking Leo’s back against the wall before his gaze met mine. “I told him it was BS, dude.”
I shoved up from the bath and grabbed a towel from the back of the toilet. “I’m drunk, not high.”
Leo took a drag and narrowed his gaze on me while the smoke crept through his nostrils. “There’s coke all over the coffee table.”
I hitched up a shoulder. “Fine. I did some blow and drank some Jack.”
“We’ve got to be at Madison Square in two hours.” Puff. Puff.
“Yeah. Fucking. Yeah.”
“I told you he was fine,” Nash said. “You’re such a puss, Leo.”
My vision blurred. I stumbled out of the bathroom and into the hotel suite, kicking empty bottles of liquor out of my way. Seeing as how divorce papers had been delivered to my hotel suite that morning, I thought I was doing exceptionally well to still be breathing.
I changed out of my soaked clothes, pulled on a pair of painted-on-tight black jeans that pinned my nuts to my taint, then I crossed the room to the glass door that led onto the balcony.
The lights from Times Square cast an electronic glow over the side of the building while the aroma of exhaust and fried food wafted in on the warm, night breeze channeling through the corridor of buildings.
“New York City,” I shouted, circling my sopping jeans over my head like helicopter blades. “I freeballed in these all day until my jackass friends threw me in a tub of water.” Some of the crowd below stopped to stare up at our balcony. Several girls screamed when I chucked the wet jeans over the railing. I didn’t wait to see if anyone threw punches over who got to keep them.
I made it two steps inside before I rolled my eyes. Leo, being the hypocritical bastard that he was, leaned over the coffee table, snorting a line.
“Nash, go get the tub ready. . .” I laughed and flopped onto the couch next to Leo. When I reached for the bag, he snatched it away.
“You want a nose bleed on stage again?” He flung the bag back to the table, then froze. He bent forward a little more and squinted. “Shit.” Leo tapped a finger over the divorce papers I’d been cutting lines on. “That’s messed up.”
“What’s messed up?” Nash bumbled over. A cloud of cocaine lifted into the air when he snatched the papers. His brows pinched together with a shake of his head. “No way. She’s not for real.” Then he looked at me like I was going to tell him something different.
I took the documents from Nash’s hands and grabbed a liquor bottle from the floor on my way to the bathroom. I downed what little bourbon remained before I tossed the papers into the toilet, whipped out my dick, and pissed on them.
Like hell I would sign those.
Five hours later, I stood backstage, my shirt soaked with sweat and my high almost gone. Thank God for the bottle of water—vodka—kept to the side of the stage for me. The liquor burned its way down my throat while the chants from the arena echoed through the backstage area. They wanted more show, but I personally didn’t see the point of encores. I
guessed it was just something to stroke our egos. At every concert, the band tossed guitar picks and drum sticks to the crowd and strutted off stage, and then they just stood back there, guzzling booze and wiping off sweat while the fans outside begged for a little more. Everyone knew they’d get those last three songs from the album that hadn’t been performed.
I was desperate for this tour to be over. Performing, night after night, was nothing short of torture. Every track was written about her. “Dolled Up Princess,” brought the image of Georgia sprawled out naked on our bed to mind because that’s what it was about. “Van Nuys Clovers,” I wrote that the night I first saw her on her roof, staring at the stars, weeks before I ever spoke to her. “Velvet” was a full three minutes about her lips.
But the worst song was “Beauty in Ashes” because that song was everything I felt about her, and each drawn out note was a sharpened knife blade straight through my heart.
The stagehands counted down with silent fingers, and I guzzled the rest of the vodka.
Leo went first, wailing into a riff. Nash jogged out, the loud beat of his drum joining in with Leo’s rhythm. Then it was my turn to emerge from behind the curtain. The stadium screamed my name, the energy of it jolted through me like an 80-volt shock.
Smoke from the pyrotechnics swirled around my body in a vaporous cocoon while the green and blue lights beat down on me like an unforgiving sun. I should have been thinking about what a lucky son-of-a-bitch I was when I stared out at the sea of people clapping and holding up their phones, but I couldn’t appreciate the statistical improbability I was. Instead, I wondered what she was doing. I worried that, by now, there was another guy—why else would she want a divorce?
I missed my first cue. Wet my lips with my tongue. Then missed another. Three more bars passed before I belted out the first words to “The Beauty in Ashes.” By now, the lyrics were as second nature as breathing. Thank God because my mind was in no place for things that required thought.
Like I did during every show, I walked to the edge of the stage. The toe of my boots hung over the platform. People grabbed at my jeans, fingers brushed over my black and white checkered Vans. I locked eyes with a random girl in the crowd, and she went berserk, gripping her friend while shrieking. All these girls would throw punches for five minutes with me, and the one I care about just left me like I was nobody. . .
Last time I took a stage dive, I ended up mauled, my shirt torn off, and my lip busted from an accidental elbow I caught. Ricky chewed me out for that stunt. Told me the next time I took unauthorized leave from the stage, he’d fine me. But still, it was too tempting, because, what if they didn’t catch me? With a smile, I threw my head back, held out my arms like a thief on a cross, and then freefell forward. They could catch me or let me face plant into the concrete. I didn’t care.
But they caught me.
Fingers clawed at my legs, my arms. It reminded me of all the demons in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement trying to drag the souls to hell. And I was fine with that.
Sometimes I thought I was already there.
Midnite Kills had three days in New York before we headed out to Iceland. And while this was my fifth trip to the Big Apple, I hadn’t seen Lady Liberty or Rockefeller Center. All I knew of the city was the nightlife and hotels.
What people assumed was a life of travel and leisure was really nothing more than one long, drawn-out, massive hangover. For the past seventy-two hours, as per usual, we’d gone from one club to the next, then slept in until the sun went down. And for the first ten minutes after I woke, when my muscles were sore and my memory foggy, I felt like a loser and wondered how disappointed she’d be with me now. The hole inside me grew larger, decaying and rotting with each sunrise and sunset. And while I debated on getting sober, I didn’t see the point any longer. Which was why I sat, blitzed out of my mind, in Nash’s luxurious hotel suite. The Manhattan bridge glimmered through the window, but I chose to focus on the eerie shadows of the boats tugging along the Hudson while the girls Nash and Leo brought back from the Playboy Lounge shimmied to the bass pumping through the Bluetooth.
Leo slapped my shoulder and handed me a beer. “Come on, man. Fuck one of them.”
My jaw tensed. I nodded even though my instinct was to punch Leo in the face for talking like that about her.
“It sucks.” A half-naked brunette strutted up behind him before suction-cupping her lips to his neck and cupping his junk through his pants. “But really. . . ” He shrugged and jutted his chin toward the girl wrapped around him like a vine. “Being married must’ve sucked when you had all this.”
His attention went to the pair of tits smashed against his arm, and mine went back to the window. I pulled my phone from my pocket and shot Georgia a text. Don’t do this. I love you.
I stared at the screen, waiting on the little bubbles to tell me she still cared, but the message went unread.
Fed up, I pushed up from the chair. I made it two steps before some dolled-up chick blocked my path. Dark hair. Dark eyes. The neckline to the little black number she wore dipped to her cleavage. She could have easily graced the runways of Milan or New York, but instead of threading my fingers through hers the way Nash would, instead of trying to get into her pants, I went to brush past her. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to disappear to my room and sleep for days.
An exaggerated sigh, the kind begging to be noticed, rushed through her lips. “I’m just. How do you say it?” There was a slight roll to her words, but I couldn’t place her accent. Bulgarian? Russian? “A yuge, yuge fan. Can I take picture with you?”
She didn’t wait on a response, just placed her palms on my chest and pushed me down on the couch.
“What the. . .”
Her long, bare legs draped over my lap, and she draped an arm around my neck. This wasn’t new. Morals did not exist in my orbit—in any rocker’s orbit for that matter. Slap some eyeliner and a tortured expression on a guy’s face, hand him a guitar, a mic, and print his name on a ticket stub, and the best of girls could have the worst intentions. Pure, virginal Sally would end up bent over the stadium seating with her skirt hiked around her waist if the bragging rights were impressive enough. Catch a nun on the right day, and you could have her bent over a pulpit, singing Hallelujah. Hell, Nash had.
But I never got that mentality. Guys wanted girls they couldn’t have, and girls always wanted the fucker who plowed his way through women like a John Deer tractor.
A smile crept over the girl’s face while she fiddled with my fly.
I took a long swig of my drink and, for a second, I rolled the taste of her around in my mind. After all, Georgia wanted a divorce, and I wondered if maybe this girl could fill that gaping hole for a short time. We could spend an hour together naked and tangled up in sheets. An encounter that would be meaningless to me while somehow meaning everything to her.
She’d feel validated, and I’d still feel empty as fuck. And guilty. . .
One, two, three flashes from her camera.
Her head tilted right to left, trying to capture the perfect Instagram-worthy post, while I looked straight at the camera and didn’t smile.
Click. Click. Click. Her warm lips pressed to my neck. Nash glanced around the shoulder of a curvy blonde in a pink corset and bunny ears, squeezing her ass while he gave me an approving nod. But I had no interest.
Swiping below my nose, I shoved Little Black Dress off my lap, and she toppled over on the couch, whispering, “Yerk.”
“Look, my dick’s just worn out. Better luck next time,” I said, then strutted off to the balcony, whipping said tired dick out and pissing through the rails.
When I slipped back through the patio door, a handful of girls had stripped down to bare skin in the middle of the living room. Nash, of course, was their sole focus. I fought through the alcohol-induced haze, not exactly watching when Nash peeled his pants off but not oblivious either.
Some random girl was snorting lines off the table, and I joined
her, thinking: tomorrow I’d stay sober. But even as high as I was, I knew that wasn’t true.
“Wanna go screw?” she asked, rubbing a hand over my shoulder.
Nash’s thighs smacked against some girl’s backside. Their moans and grunts mixed with track eight on our second album, and a sick feeling formed in my gut.
I didn’t respond, just maneuvered away from her, fishing for my gum and the pen in my pocket.
The pack was empty, so I pulled one of the little white sleeves loose. My vision doubled when I leaned against the wall, and I closed one eye to focus on the pen in hand. I promised her I’d stay sober. I lied. The paper crumbled in my palm and then promptly sailed across the room, landing near a trashcan.
I stumbled out of the hotel room, a few girls trailing behind me. I flipped them the bird and told them I was married before I pressed the button to the elevator and stepped on. Seventeen floors down. I felt like I may vomit, but when the doors slid open to the bright lobby, I managed to zigzag my way out, past the concierge desk, and straight to the sidewalk.
A block down, I bummed a smoke from a homeless guy, after I’d handed him a wad of cash, and then I plopped down on a bench, and I thought about how fame was like The Nothing in The Neverending Story—a rolling, black cloud that kept growing, pummeling toward you until it sucked you in. BAM. You were standing in a void with the Childlike Empress and that tiny grain of glowing sand. Except, there were no wishes. No new worlds to build.
Fame had taken every last dream I had and swallowed it whole.
7
Spencer
One year after
The track finished playing. Unexpected silence filled the room, and my gaze drifted from the window with the Hollywood Hills sign looming in the distance to Ricky, our greedy fuck of a manager who sat behind his sleek, metal desk. He folded his hands over his gut before jutting his cleft chin toward the computer monitor. “Is that what every song is going to sound like?”
Over You Page 4
