Westside Series Box Set

by Monica Alexander

  I’d even gotten halfway through a new song before realizing that I’d been thinking of him as I’d written it. I’d put my guitar away for the rest of the day after that and forced myself not to think about him. But that only worked until he smiled at me after the Westside show. He looked all sweaty and sexy and utterly delectable, and I ended up following him into his dressing room where we had sex in the shower. I was so weak where he was concerned, and I was slowly getting sucked in deeper than I knew I should go.

  Even as we lay in bed and I traced his forearm, drinking in the pattern of the light freckles on his tan arm, I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I knew his body so well, and I loved every inch of it – especially the tattoos he had on the insides of each wrist and the one on middle of his back. They were so incongruent to the rest of him, and I loved that underneath the preppy guy that the rest of the world saw, he was a little bit of a bad boy.

  “Oh yeah?” he said lazily in response to my comment about his tattoos.

  I nodded as he placed a kiss on my bare shoulder. It felt so intimate that I closed my eyes for a few seconds, soaking in the moment. Then I opened them and came back to reality.

  “You give off this completely preppy vibe with the way you dress and act,” I told him. “You don’t seem like someone who’d have tattoos.”

  “I guess I’m just mysterious that way,” he said, his voice sounding throaty and sexy.

  God, it was such a turn-on.

  “I like them,” I continued as I looked at the intricate pattern on the inside of his wrist. With his arm draped over my waist, I had a relatively clear view. “Especially the ones on your wrists. Do they mean anything?”

  I’d noticed the tattoos he had there looked similar from afar, but they were actually different designs that had similarities to them.

  “Nope.”

  “So you just like the designs?”

  “Something like that,” he said as he laced our fingers together, hiding his tattoo from my view. “Why did you get your tattoos?”

  I laughed non-humorously. “Some I just liked, some have meaning, and some I barely remember getting.”

  “How many do you have? I think I counted eight.”

  “I have ten.

  “Huh,” he said coyly. “Sounds like I might have a scavenger hunt on my hands to find the missing two.”

  I smiled and turned back to look at him. “They’re not hidden. The stars and the moon on my ankle are actually two separate tattoos, and the same with the lines of script on my rib cage. They’re from two different songs. I got one first and the other a year later, since I liked the way they flowed.”

  “Oh yeah? What songs are they from?”

  I smiled at him. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

  “But I didn't even get a good look at them,” he said with a coy smile.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to take a better look next time.”

  “Next time,” he murmured as he leaned forward to kiss me. “Why not now?”

  “Good question,” I said against his lips.

  As I got lost in the kiss, I let my thumb drift until it swept over the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. As soon as I did that, he tensed, but he didn't stop kissing me, almost like he didn't want me to know he’d reacted. But he had, and I knew instantly why.

  As I started to pull back to look at him, he pulled me closer, deepening the kiss in what I assumed was an effort to distract me. I wanted to let him, but the sick twisting in my stomach wouldn’t let me.

  “Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” I said softly when he let his lips trail from my mouth to my ear.

  He paused. “It’s not what you think it is.”

  I knew he was lying.

  “Phillip,” I said softly.

  Before I realized what was happening, he’d pulled away from me. He sat up and turned his back to me before I could say anything else. I reached for his wrist, but he shook me off.

  “Don’t,” he said sharply.

  “Phillip, talk to me,” I urged him.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this isn’t something I want to talk about,” he said as if it should have been obvious.

  I hated the curve of his back, the slump of his shoulders, his entire demeanor that told me he was closing in on himself. He was shutting down. I’d seen him do it before, and I knew there was a chance he’d push me away completely if I wasn’t careful.

  “I’m sure it’s not something you want to talk about,” I said gently.

  He turned and glared at me. “Then why push the issue? Why even go there?”

  I wanted to tell him that it was because I didn't like not knowing things about him. He had so many secrets and dark corners, and I wanted to shine a light on them all. I just wanted to know him better, and since we’d started spending all of our time together, and he’d started giving me more and more insight into who he was, the need to know him in every capacity had gotten so much worse. I knew as I looked up at the twisted expression on his face that I was in deeper with him than I’d ever planned. I wasn’t sure getting out was going to be an option anymore – or if I even wanted it to be.

  When I didn't say anything, Phillip scowled and turned away from me again. But he didn’t leave. He just sat with his back to me, defiantly not saying a word.

  “Did you really try to kill yourself?” I asked him after several seconds of staring at the intricate design on his back.

  He continued to look away, but I took it as a good sign that he wasn’t leaving.

  “What do you think?” he asked sarcastically.

  “I don’t want to think about you doing that.”

  “So don’t.”

  “Phillip, come on,” I pleaded with him.

  “What Sabrina?” he demanded, turning to glare at me. “What do you want me to say? It happened. I can’t undo it. You can think about it, or you can choose not to. It’s not going to change the fact that I did it.”

  “Why?” I asked, my throat thick with things I hadn’t wanted to think about.

  What he was saying felt too close for comfort, and I hated every single memory that was running through my mind. I didn’t know why, but something about Phillip reminded me of my brother. The pain I saw in his eyes, the effort it sometimes took for him to breathe, and the weight he carried on his shoulders were the same things I’d seen in my brother in the months leading up to when he’d taken his life. Everything about the moment we were in was too familiar.

  “Why does anyone do it?” Phillip said, sounding defeated. “I didn’t feel like I had another option.”

  My chest hurt for him as I sat up and move behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist, finding comfort in the warmth of his skin. He was very much alive, and I think I just needed to feel that. But I also wanted him to know I was there for him. He wasn’t alone either.

  “You don’t need to do that,” he grumbled. “It was a long time ago, and it didn’t even work. I obviously didn’t die.”

  “But you wanted to,” I said, pressing a kiss to the base of his neck.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “How old were you?”

  He hesitated before saying, “Fourteen.”

  As soon as he said it, tears filled my eyes and silently spilled down my cheeks. He’d been a year older than Dustin had been when he’d hung himself. My brother had only been thirteen. He was so young. So was Phillip. Why did that happen? Why was the world so cruel?

  I hadn't intended to say a word, but I suddenly found myself saying, “My brother was thirteen.”

  I felt Phillip still in my arms. “Your brother killed himself?”

  I let my forehead drop between his shoulder blades and nodded, my tears dripping onto his bare skin. “Yes.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” I said against his soft skin as I remembered the day my world fell apart.

  My family and been happy and loving before Dustin died. We wer
e close and supportive of each other, and things had been good – at least through my ten year-old eyes. That had all changed in an instant, and the life I’d once known was gone forever. I’d never get it back. My brother and my dad were gone, and my mom was so lost inside her own head that she didn’t even know who I was anymore. I’d lost everything that day.

  When Phillip didn’t move, didn’t comfort me like I needed, I let go of him. I felt like I might be sick as the memory of my father’s voice when he found Dustin in the basement made my stomach roil. I backed up against the headboard and folded my arms around myself, wishing like I did every time I thought about what happened that I could have saved him.

  But I knew that never could have happened. I’d been at school when Dustin had done it. No one had been home, and I had a feeling he’d planned it that way. He didn’t want to be saved. He’d wanted to die, and he’d gotten his wish.

  Suddenly, Phillip was next to me, and his arms were around me. He pulled me against his chest as fresh tears flooded my eyes, blurring my vision. I rarely let myself cry about anything anymore, but it was all too much, and I couldn’t hold back.

  Phillip didn’t say a word. He just let me cry, his arms around me, holding me and comforting me in exactly the way I needed.

  “Why did he do it?” he finally asked me.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked him, turning the tables on him as I looked up at him with tearstained cheeks and red eyes.

  He was looking at me with such concern that it felt out of character. I watched him swallow, and for a few seconds, I was afraid he wasn’t going to tell me.

  “My dad acted like I didn’t matter. He didn’t give a shit about me. I was lost and alone, and because he blamed me for my mother’s death and reminded me of it so often, I’d started to really think I was responsible. I just didn’t want to be sad anymore, so I decided to end things. It wasn’t dramatic or thought out. I didn’t even write a suicide note. I just did it one night when I was home alone.”

  “But it didn’t work?”

  He shook his head. “No. It was a complete fail. Our housekeeper found me before I could do any real damage. She’d left her cell phone at our house when she’d been cleaning earlier in the day, and she came back to get it. She found me and called 911.”

  “Could you have died if she hadn’t found you?” I asked, thinking how random and lucky he’d been.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I even cut deep enough, and I cut in the wrong direction. I lost blood but not enough for it to be significant.”

  “Phillip,” I said softly as I wrapped my arms tighter around him.

  “Not many people know that story,” he said softly. “Just Leah, Kelsey, and Van. Cam and Dillon don’t even know. I – I just couldn’t ever tell them, and it was so long ago that it doesn’t even matter now.”

  It does matter.

  “When did you get the tattoos?”

  “Right after I got into Westside. I didn’t want anyone to know my backstory, so I covered up the evidence. The scars had faded enough by that point, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I figured the media would have a field day if they knew, and from what we were told, Westside was going to be huge. I decided to make sure no one never found out.”

  “Dustin hung himself,” I said softly. “He was such a good brother. He was kind and smart, and I loved him so much. But he was always so lost. When I was older, I found out he suffered from social anxiety disorder and depression. He didn’t really have any friends, and what we didn’t know at the time was that he was being bullied at school, and he was being bullied online. I never saw any of it, but my parents read the pages and pages of hurtful things people said about him and to him. One day it just got to be too much, and he took his life.”

  Phillip nodded like he understood how that felt. I just couldn’t fathom it. I’d never considered suicide as a way out, even in my darkest days, but Phillip knew exactly what it was like to make that decision. He knew what it was like to feel like you didn’t have another way out.

  “He wrote a letter to my parents,” I told him. “It was seven pages long, and every single page was the clearest depiction of his pain. I read it a few years ago when I was packing up my mother’s things so I could sell her house. I probably cried for three days after I read it. He was just so tortured, and I never even knew it. To me he was my awesome big brother who read me stories and watched the shows I wanted to watch on TV. He was the best. I never knew he was hurting.” I shook my head. “It sucks. I miss him so much. And I miss my dad and my mom and how we used to be as a family. I miss it every fucking day.”

  “What happened to your parents?” Phillip asked, and I realized he didn’t know that either.

  Everything I was telling him, minus a few personal details, had been spilled all over the Internet a few years earlier. People thought I was going crazy, just like the rest of my family. They chalked it up to the inevitable, and maybe I was crazy, but it didn’t mean they could talk about me like they had. It had infuriated me at the time and had only made me burrow deeper into my own despair.

  A part of me liked that Phillip didn’t know my story, that he was learning things about me from me, which was so rare. I liked having some sort of mystery where he was concerned. Too many people knew about my entire life – every painful part of it. But they only knew the facts and what they’d read. They had no idea how my past made me feel, how it had shaped me, and how it had almost destroyed me.

  “My dad was distraught after he found Dustin and read his suicide note,” I told Phillip. “He stayed up all night combing through the Internet, reading every single taunting thing anyone had ever said about my brother. When he saw that the bulk of the messages had been sent from two boys who Dustin had been friends with in elementary school, he went nuts. I guess they were using personal things they knew about him, like wetting the bed, having nightmares, and how he got a nervous twitch when he was uncomfortable, and they were torturing him with it. My dad couldn’t handle it, and he went after them. He found them on the basketball court at school, and he killed them both.”

  “Oh,” Phillip said, sounding stunned.

  I could tell that wasn’t what he’d expected me to say.

  “He shot them,” I continued. “Just like that. He was fully conscious of what he was doing, and witnesses said he was calm. He just walked up to them and said, ‘You killed my son.’ And then he shot them at point blank range. He got life in prison for it, but he hung himself less than a year later on the anniversary of Dustin’s death. It was like he couldn’t handle what had happened and what he’d done. It was just too much for him.”

  “Wow, Sabrina. I’m so sorry.”

  I gave him a small smile, because I knew he had no idea what to say. Most people didn’t, so I gave them a pass. I didn’t really know what to say most of the time either. My dad was selfish. I understood that he was angry about what had happened to Dustin, but he should have realized how much worse he made things when he took matters into his own hands. And then he’d taken his own life. I wasn’t sure I’d ever forgive him for being so reckless, for not thinking about what his actions would do to my mom and me, for any of it.

  “What about your mom?”

  I sighed, and I heard it come out in a shaky breath. “My mom isn’t well, and she hasn’t been since Dustin died. She’s – she’s just not well.”

  There was more. There was so much more, but I couldn’t talk anymore. I couldn’t relive the pain, and I couldn’t tell Phillip one more tragic thing about my past. There was too much, and I already felt raw and exposed. I hated talking about my family, because nothing about the way we’d all ended up was how it should have been. My family had been ripped apart the day Dustin died, and we hadn’t ever been able to put the pieces back together. I was the only one who’d made it out alive, and even that had taken a herculean effort. Sometimes I felt like it was a struggle for me to just stay sane.

  That was why I started doing
drugs in the first place. I’d needed to escape so badly, and I’d relished those moments when I forgot how shitty things really were. But reality always came back to haunt me. The pain and my past never truly went away. They were always there, in the back of my mind, ready at a moment’s notice to remind me that no matter what, the reality of what had happened was never going to go away.

  I didn’t want to forget Dustin. He was pure and good, and he’d been taken from me too soon. But I also didn’t want to remember everything else that had culminated after his death. It was agonizing to remember. There was so much pain everywhere I looked. It was too much. It was just too much.

  “I think I want to be alone,” I said softly as I looked away from Phillip.

  I was lying. The truth was that I wanted him close. I wanted him to hold me until I fell asleep and keep his arms around me all night so I felt safe, but I knew that wasn’t our arrangement. I’d fall asleep and he’d leave, and I’d wake up alone. I’d rather go to sleep alone than trick myself into a false sense of hope that we could be more than we were.

  It just wasn’t going to happen, and no matter how much I denied that I was falling for him, the truth was, it was happening. I was completely falling in love with him, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop it.

  “Are you sure?” Phillip asked, sounding like maybe he didn’t want to leave me.

  I waited for him to say that, to tell me that he’d stay, that he could tell I shouldn’t be alone. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t say anything else.

  I nodded as I pulled away him. Then I slid off the bed and went to retrieve something to sleep in. I felt too vulnerable around him without my clothes on, and I needed to erase that feeling.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told him when I didn’t hear him moving from the bed. If he didn’t want to stay, he needed to go.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and kept my back to him. I didn’t want him to see my face, and I couldn’t look at his. He’d know how I felt the second I met his gaze, and that was the last thing I wanted. Phillip Lawton didn’t fall in love, he didn’t have girlfriends, and he definitely wouldn’t want any of that with me. I was broken and damaged and a complete mess.