Jet: A Marked Men Novel

by Jay Crownover

  “I think that’s the most you’ve ever said to me about your past, ever.”

  I closed my eyes and blew out a breath.

  “That’s because it’s not a pretty tale and I spend a lot of time pretending it never happened. Only now, it’s right in my face and it caused me to push the only guy I’ve ever loved away. I thought Jet wasn’t right because he made all the old parts of me want to break free and take control of this wonderful life I have here. I think I’ve been punishing myself for things I’ve done in the past. Jet would have been a reward, and I refused to take it, because I didn’t think I deserved him.”

  She moved so that she was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me. I couldn’t look away from those odd-colored eyes. The blue on one side was intense and sad, and the brown was dark and filled with sympathy.

  “Ayd, I don’t know who you think comes from some kind of Leave It to Beaver background. Rule barely talks to his folks, Shaw’s mom is the Wicked Witch of the West, and Nash hates his mom’s husband so much he moved out when he was just a little boy. Rowdy doesn’t even know who his folks are, my mom took off before I could walk and left me with a dad that conveniently forgot I was a girl every chance he got, and we all know how bad Jet’s dad treats his mom. None of us is shooting sunshine out of our asses, girl, so I don’t know why you think you should suffer alone.”

  I wrapped my arms around her neck, and let her hug me back. It was so nice just to appreciate my friend, to know that she was simply there for me. Everything else that was facing me back home didn’t seem nearly as daunting.

  “Thanks, Cora.”

  “You’re a great person, Ayden, and you deserve the best.”

  I pushed my hands through my hair and let her pull me up off the floor.

  “I had it. I let it go.”

  “He didn’t go far. Just call him.”

  “Maybe after I figure out what’s going on with my brother, I can tackle that issue. Asa really might not make it.” I was surprised that the thought choked me up.

  “Let me come with you, or call Shaw. You know she’ll drop everything and probably even charter a private jet or something.”

  I shook my head and headed toward my room.

  “No. I need to do this alone.”

  “But Ayd, if something really bad happens, you shouldn’t have to deal with it alone.”

  “If something really bad happens, I promise I’ll call in the troops, okay?”

  She just watched me for a second, then squeezed my arm. “Promise?”

  I hugged her again. “I promise.”

  “All right, well, while you pack I’ll call and make you a reservation, and get you going, okay?”

  “I adore you, Cora.”

  “Well, I am adorable, so that is totally understandable.”

  She scampered toward the phone, and I started throwing together everything I could think of into an overnight bag. I called work and told them I was going to miss a few days and called Shaw to give her a quick update. That took longer than anticipated, because she demanded to come with me and it wasn’t until Rule wrestled the phone away from her and told me that he would sit on her until I landed, that I managed to get out the door. Cora took me to the airport, since I was lucky to get a flight out right away, and it only took a few hours until I landed in Louisville.

  Being back in Kentucky was like a smack in the face. Everyone moved a little slower and talked a little sweeter, and by the time I was in the rental car on the way to the hospital, I was starting to feel like I’d never left. It was a quick drive into the heart of Louisville, because Woodward was too small to handle Asa in the condition he was in. All the while, all I could think was that Asa had to at least make it until I got there. It didn’t matter what kind of selfish prick my brother tended to be, no one deserved to die alone and scared. I called ahead and found out he was still in the trauma unit and that he was unconscious. It made my skin pebble up when I heard the sadness in the nurse’s voice. Clearly he wasn’t in good shape, and I hated that he was that way because of me.

  I didn’t even have to ask where he was when I got there. The admitting nurse was obviously waiting to see if anyone was going to come for the pretty broken boy. Even on the brink of death Asa still had that effect on women. They led me back to a tiny little room and I almost fell over when I finally laid eyes on my big brother.

  My larger-than-life brother looked like a broken marionette. There were tubes and wires coming out of him everywhere. I couldn’t see his face because of the gauze wrapped around him. He had a ventilator in his mouth and I could see the unnatural rise and fall of his chest, indicating he wasn’t breathing on his own. Both arms were in heavy casts and his leg had something that looked like a medieval torture device on it. Bad shape didn’t even begin to cover it. He didn’t look human or alive.

  I gulped and walked to the bedside. I put a hand over the plaster, on one of his. A doctor came in with a chart and looked slightly startled to see me.

  “Are you family? We’ve tried to get ahold of his mother but she said she was in Illinois and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “I’m his sister.”

  The doctor looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You might want to impress upon your mother that the situation is very serious. She might want to get here in case his condition deteriorates further. His brain was bleeding. We put him in a medically induced coma to help with the swelling and to see if we could get it to stop. It’s very touch-and-go.”

  I wrapped my hands around the rails of the hospital bed.

  “I’ll stay with him. She won’t come back.”

  “It doesn’t look good. Even if he wakes up, there is no guarantee he’ll be the way he was before. Frankly, it’s a miracle he survived this long. I’ve never seen a beating like this. He must have made some very bad people pretty angry.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “He has a particular talent for that.”

  “The police are doing a comprehensive investigation. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something.”

  They wouldn’t. Woodward was a small town and things didn’t work that way out here. This was just good old-fashioned justice, an eye for an eye, and Asa would be lucky if he survived it. I bent down and kissed him on his thickly bandaged head. I still had all my stuff in the car. There was no way in hell I was going back to that trailer, and it looked like I was going to be here awhile, so I needed to find a hotel close to the hospital.

  “I didn’t think we had anything in common anymore, Asa, but it looks like protecting the people we love, even if it nearly kills us, is a Cross trait. We really gotta be smarter than that, big brother.”

  Chapter 16

  Jet

  There was a naked blonde in the bed, across from where I was sitting at the little dinette in the hotel room. It was a sad testament to the state of affairs that I was far more interested in the bottle of whiskey in front of me, than I was in her. She hardly spoke any English and had come along with one of the guys in Artifice after the set, but for whatever reason she had been all over me all night, even though I wasn’t remotely interested. Maybe it was the language barrier. I didn’t understand German, and all she seemed to understand was that the more booze I tossed back, the more appealing she became, so there had been an endless supply since coming back to my room.

  She was good-looking, tall with a great rack, and had miles of blond hair and pretty, big blue peepers. The problem was, she had all of those things and was in my bed where there should have been an amber-eyed brunette. Part of me was dying to climb in beside her and let the whiskey and a soft girl eliminate the ghost of Ayden for just a minute. Unfortunately, a bigger part of me knew that was only a temporary fix, a fix that would make me feel like shit in the morning, and make the guys in the band worry about me more than they already were.

  Being on this tour was wearing on me and I don’t think I was hiding it well. The girls, the part
ies, the booze and the drugs—it was all a lot to process while I was trying to deal with a broken heart, and no matter what my own guys threw at me or what Dario and his boys tried to tempt me with, it held no appeal. I missed Colorado. I missed the boys at the shop, I missed Cora, and despite everything, I was worried about my mom. There was no hiding the hole in the center of my very being where Ayden should be and it went without saying I missed her most of all.

  However, the real reason, the real issue that was keeping me from climbing all over the naked blonde and letting her teach me the German word for Jet, was Ayden. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and couldn’t stop seeing all the things I was feeling reflected back at me in her honey-tinted eyes. I felt so alone without her, and I didn’t for a second think she was going to be waiting around for me when I got back, not even after that kiss good-bye.

  So far, the best thing about Europe was the opportunity to see a bunch of really great bands. In every country we stopped in, in every bar we pulled up to, there were underground bands playing. Amazing groups made up of kids often years younger than me, and it made me happy every time we got to hear them play. It reminded me just how much I loved listening to other bands play, loved discovering new talent and getting them exposure, far more than I liked being the one adored and fawned over while onstage. Sure I loved to play, loved to write songs and perform, but I absolutely didn’t want to do this for a living.

  Being on tour, no matter where in the world it was, got to be a drag after a while. I wanted my own bed, preferably with a pretty Southern girl already in it, and I wanted a night not spent in a bar, fending off groupies and metal heads. I wasn’t cut out to be a rock star, but I was a perfect fit to make others into one. When I got home, I was going to rebuild the studio and look into starting up my own record label. The idea had me excited in a way the naked blonde could only dream of doing. Luckily for me, the rest of the guys in the band seemed as burned-out as I was.

  Von missed his girlfriend and his kid, and spent more time on Skype than he did in the bar. Catcher spent most of his time with the guys in Artifice, but really was just happy to be along for the ride, and Boone we all watched every day, to see if he was struggling at all with his long stretch of sobriety. Being on the road was hard, and for this long and this far from home, we all worried he might slip. I don’t think anyone was thinking about signing with the label and I was glad. The band was solid and I would have hated for us to break up because we wanted different things. That thought just hit a little too close to home right now for me.

  Dario insisted we were the better band, that we could go places and do things Artifice had only come close to, and while I took it as a compliment, they were things I just didn’t want. The only thing I wanted, the only thing that mattered, didn’t think we were right for each other and that’s where I seemed to be stuck.

  I lumbered to my feet, drunk but not drunk enough, and eyeballed the girl. I needed to get her under me or out the door, and my tired brain wasn’t sure which option it was going to go with, when my phone trilled the very screamy Jucifer from my back pocket. The time changes across the ocean still weirded me out and the fact that Shaw was the one calling me made my blood go cold. It didn’t even register to me that the girl in the bed was swearing at me in a foreign language, or that she hurled the remote at my head as I went into the bathroom to take the call. She was going to be a pain to get rid of, but I didn’t deserve anything less for some seriously piss-poor judgment.

  “Hey, Shaw is everything all right? Is Rule okay?”

  Worst-case scenarios were running through my head at a rapid pace and I couldn’t slow them down. Angry German was rumbling though the closed door along with hammering fists. If I had been just a shade more intoxicated, this entire situation would have been so ridiculously hilarious there was a chance I would have killed myself laughing over it.

  “Hey, sorry to interrupt you, but I needed to call you even though Rule threatened to hide my phone if I did.”

  “What’s up?” She sounded nervous, which made me nervous and mad that Colorado was an entire ocean away. Something really heavy hit the door, and I absently wondered if the girl had bothered to put on clothes before throwing her tantrum. It struck me as funny that no matter where I was in the world, a pissed-off groupie was still just a pissed-off groupie.

  “It’s Ayden.”

  And just like that the world stopped. There was no angry blonde in the next room. There was no band. There was no anything but Ayden, and the fact she was too far away. I stopped breathing long enough that the room got a little hazy and it took Shaw snapping my name to get me back in focus.

  “What’s up with Ayden?”

  I tried to sound casual, but knew I failed miserably when Shaw just swore softly.

  “Look, there is a bunch of stuff she needs to tell you, that you need to make her tell you. I understand why she pushed you away and you just have to believe me that she really did it because she thought she was protecting you, but right now, she’s alone and she needs you. She wouldn’t let me go with her and she refused to let Cora go with her, but she needs someone, and honestly that someone is you.”

  “Shaw, you realize I’m in Hamburg right now and I’m supposed to be in Berlin tomorrow afternoon, right?”

  She sighed and what sounded like her head thunking against something hard came across the line.

  “I know. But she needs you.”

  “I think she made it pretty clear I’m the last thing she needs in her life, Shaw.” Something on the other side of the door shattered and I cringed. It looked like the cost of my room just went up exponentially.

  “Her brother is in the hospital, Jet. He got beaten within an inch of his life and no one knows if he’s going to make it. Ayden’s mom is a flake, Ayden’s sitting in a hospital in Louisville all by herself, waiting to see if her only sibling is going to die. Come on, I know you don’t fully understand why she pushed you away and left you hanging but the reality is she just wanted to keep you at arm’s length so that you didn’t get hurt. She was trying to protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “Another situation that was ugly and full of really awful things. She’s in love with you.”

  I ground my teeth together and absently kicked at the bathroom door.

  “I didn’t even know she had a brother. If she loved me, don’t you think that would have come up before now? Shaw, I know you’re just trying to help, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”

  Now she swore loudly, and I heard all kinds of Rule in her attitude when she snapped back at me.

  “Stop being such a stupid guy! You don’t need to give her anything, all you need to do is show up. She just needs you to show up, Jet. It’s not that hard.” I didn’t get a chance to respond before she went on. “I know you’re hurting, but so is she, and the only thing that will make either of you stop is for one of you to realize that you just need to be together. Plain and simple. If you can’t see that, then you didn’t deserve her in the first place. I’ll talk to you later, Jet.”

  She hung up on me, leaving me stunned and reeling in a bathroom, a million miles from home. My instinct was to throw everything in a bag and run off to the rescue, only the last time I had tried that, I had ended up in jail. I was so tired of trying to save people, women in particular, who ultimately didn’t want me to be their hero at all. The idea of Ayden suffering alone, the idea of her trying to handle something like that by herself, turned me inside out, but she didn’t want me. If she didn’t want me, there was nothing I could do for her that her girlfriends or Sweater Vest couldn’t do. Besides, I had a naked and very angry German girl I had to wrangle, and that was at least a tangible problem I could fix.

  We were on the train to Berlin the next day and I felt awful. I hadn’t slept at all the night before and getting rid of the St. Pauli girl on steroids had proven more difficult than I anticipated. I couldn’t get my mind off Shaw’s phone call, and being cooped up on the train with
a bunch of hungover metal dudes and loud German families was enough to make me want to pull every last hair out of my head and run screaming for the hills. Von was sitting across from me, alternately napping and messing around on his phone, seemingly oblivious to the noise around us and I envied him the peace he seemed to just naturally have.

  “You all right, man? You’ve looked ready to bail out the window all day.”

  I shifted restlessly in the seat.

  “I’m straight.”

  “Really? I call bullshit. You haven’t been straight since things went south with you and Ayden. Your body might be here, but your head has been back in Denver since we picked you up.”

  “I’m cool. Just takes time to get over someone like her, is all. I keep thinking maybe I should call her.”

  “Dude, who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve know you since you were a punk-ass little kid. Girls were just girls, until Ayden. She’s different, we all saw it. Fuck, you sang oldies on Valentine’s Day, Jet. Do you think we’re all stupid? We knew who you were singing to.”

  “She just got to me, is all.”

  “Good. She’s smart, she’s a knockout, she has enough attitude to put up with all your moods, and I bet she isn’t scared of all the Keller family skeletons. Goddamn Jet, you write better music than anyone else in the world, you’re a better front man than pretty much anyone else who has ever stepped on a stage, and you’re an all-around really fucking good dude. You should have someone like Ayden in your life. Stop thinking you need to do some kind of crazy penance because your dad is a douche rocket and your mom refuses to see it.”

  “Whoa, where did all that come from?”

  “Coming on this tour was a great opportunity. We all needed to do it to see where we stood with the band. It isn’t what I want and it’s easy to see it’s not what you want, either. I love playing music and doing a festival here or there and playing at Cerberus is just fine for me, but it’s fine for me because I go home to Blain and the baby. They’re what I want, they’re where I want to be, and I see that in you now. Before, it was fear. You were scared for your mom, scared of what would happen if you just let go and did you, but now it’s different. You want to be where that girl is, even if she told you that it was over.”