The Prince of Punk Rock

by Jenna Galicki

  “Stop it,” Tommy interrupted. “Angel’s telling the truth. I orchestrated everything in the video. It was my idea.”

  He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it off. “Don’t touch me! My heart is broken because you cut me out and because you took part in something so heinous. I don’t fit in with that lifestyle. I don’t know who either of you are anymore. Do you know how betrayed I feel? You and Angel have a life that doesn’t include me. And it’s disgusting! Is our marriage a pretense?”

  “No! Why would you think that?”

  “Because I didn’t’ know anything about this side of you.” She paced the room. Her mind was jumbled. Her heart was reeling. Her stomach lurched. She took a deep breath. She needed to get it together. She still had to finish negotiating with Kendall. “I can’t deal with this right now. We have to go through with the plan. Kendall’s expecting us in a few hours.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “She hates me, now.”

  “Jessi doesn’t hate you, Angel.”

  “Didn’t you see it in her eyes? She blames me. She thinks I hurt you, mi amor. Did I?”

  Tommy placed a soothing hand on Angel’s chest and tried to relieve some of his concern. “You didn’t hurt me. Not once. Jessi’s sensitive, that’s all. She doesn’t understand that we were having fun.”

  Angel tried to explain it to her. Even Tommy tried to explain, but Jessi wouldn’t listen to either one of them and the loathing in her eyes made Angel feel abysmal. He questioned if she could forgive him and what would happen if she didn’t. Too many thoughts were reeling inside his head and they still had to see Kendall. First, he needed to enlighten Damien and Jimmy about the DVD, just in case things backfired.

  As soon as Angel saw the hardened look in Damien’s eyes, he wished he never said anything about the DVD.

  “You two again? How many times do you think Ableman’s gonna deal with your shit? You’re gonna get us thrown off the label. And I don’t care how many other labels want to pick us up. Anywhere besides Falcon is a step down. Get your fuckin’ lives together. Stop tryin’ to ruin it for everybody else.”

  Damien was telling him to get his life together? When did their lives take a 360 degree turn?

  Tommy was seething, staring at Jimmy like a wolf ready to devour its prey. “This is your fault. You brought Kendall to our house. Do you have any idea how pissed off Jessi is about the DVD?”

  “I told you, man. I didn’t know they didn’t like each other.”

  “Everybody fuckin’ knows they hate each other! If you weren’t so busy getting your dick sucked in the bathroom or getting laid in the back room every ten minutes, maybe you would’ve noticed and my wife wouldn’t be crying in the bathroom right now.”

  “That’s not my fault. You’re the one who made that fuckin’ DVD.”

  Tommy puffed out his chest and eradicated the space between him and Jimmy with one quick stride, so they were ribcage to ribcage. “Pay more attention to what’s going on around us. Since we got the record deal, all you’re interested in is bangin’ every piece of ass that crosses your path.”

  “That’s my business. And get outta my face.” Jimmy shoved Tommy, but he didn’t budge. He had the rigid stance of a football player.

  Palms facing outward, Tommy’s hands landed on Jimmy’s chest and sent him reeling backwards. Jimmy charged at him and the two grappled, pushing each other against the wall.

  “Stop it!” Angel yelled.

  Damien forced his way between them and grabbed each of them by the front of their shirts and pulled them apart. “Knock it the fuck off! We got enough problems.”

  Angel was rattled. Everything was a mess. His personal life and his band were falling apart right in front of him. He pulled at his hair. “I can’t take this. Everything’s a fuckin’ disaster.”

  Tommy’s arm was across his back, in the comforting embrace that always brought his anxiety under control.

  “What’s done is done. Let’s just hope Jessi’s plan works.” Tommy shot Jimmy a menacing stare. “Otherwise me and you are gonna finish this shit.”

  “Take it easy,” Damien said. “We’re gonna settle this shit with Kendall. Today. I’m coming with you. So’s Jimmy. We’re in this together. We rise to the top together. We take the fall together. Shit happens. We deal with it. Together.”

  Jessi stopped in front of the door to Kendall’s hotel room. “Do you want to do the honors?”

  Angel nodded. “But you do the talking.”

  Kendall answered right away. She was probably waiting at the door. “You didn’t have to bring the whole band. Come in.”

  “We wanted to be here,” Damien said, harshly brandishing his ice cold eyes at her.

  It made Angel uneasy. He didn’t want any trouble. He wanted things to go as smoothly as possible.

  “Is that my money?” Kendall eyed the duffle bag in Tommy’s hand and stepped toward him.

  Jessi blocked her path and scowled at her. “I told you once to stay the fuck away from my husband. Don’t let me have to repeat myself, because I won’t be so nice this time.”

  Angel held his breath. It wasn’t Damien who was going to be a problem. It was Jessi.

  Kendall took two DVDs off the end table and handed them to Angel. As soon as they were in his hands, a sense of relief washed over him. His erratic heartbeat settled, and it resumed a normal, steady rhythm. He put the DVDs inside the pocket of his jacket, and pressed them close to his chest. He guarded them with his hand. Someone would have to kill him to get them away from him.

  “That’s it?” Jessi asked. “You only made two copies?”

  “Yeah. These two and the one I gave you this morning.”

  Jessi walked over to the desk against the wall. “Why is your laptop here?”

  “I can’t bring my laptop on vacation with me?”

  “Is that what this is? Vacation?” She pointed to the laptop. “Open it.”

  Even if Angel noticed the laptop in the room, he wouldn’t have thought to check the hard drive. He closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. Thank God Jessi was handling the situation.

  While Jessi was engrossed in the computer, hunched over, nose poised inches from the computer screen, fingers tapping away on the keys like mad, Kendall strolled up to Angel and broke out into a smile. He didn’t want to have a conversation with her. He wanted to leave as quickly as possible. He wished Jessi was there to shoo Kendall away, but she was frantically searching the computer.

  He wouldn’t look at Kendall. He looked past her, at the ceiling, across the room, anywhere, except directly at her. And he wasn’t taking his hand off the DVDs in his breast pocket.

  Alyssa came to his side. “Leave him alone, Kendall. Haven’t you done enough?”

  Kendall snarled at her. “It doesn’t concern you, so stay out of it. Mind your own business.” Then, she smiled back at Angel. It was like someone flipped a switch. Kendall growled at Alyssa, and then turned back to Angel with a provocative smile.

  “What do you want?” Angel finally asked.

  “I can’t get these images out of my head.” Kendall laughed a little. “Dark, sadistic, images.”

  She saw the video. Angel’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. He fidgeted in place and looked away, but she remained steadfast in front of him, with that same wicked smile.

  “I keep thinking about black leather and hand cuffs.” Kendall leaned toward him and lowered her voice to a whisper. “If you wanted to play rough, why didn’t you invite me?”

  Alyssa stepped closer. “You need to back the fuck off.”

  Kendall ignored her. “You could have done all that stuff to me. Or you could have watched while I let your lover–”

  Jessi slammed her hands down on the desk so hard that Angel felt the floor shake beneath his feet.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she screamed.

  “I’m nowhere near you husband,” Kendall sneered back at her. “Take it easy.”

  �
�They’re both my husbands!” Jessi ran toward Kendall, kicking the chair to the floor behind her.

  Tommy caught her around the waist. “Let’s just finish what we came here to do. Please, honey, let’s not make this any worse than it already is.”

  It took Jessi a minute to calm down, and Tommy wouldn’t let her go until she did. “The computer’s clean.” She shot an evil look at Kendall. “You better not be hiding any copies anywhere else.”

  Kendall put her hands on her hips. She was full of satisfaction, claiming a false victory. “Now, can I have my money?”

  Jessi’s face contorted into a mask of disgust and loathing. “Stupid, stupid girl. Did you think I would let you blackmail Angel? Did you think I would let you fuck with my family?”

  “We had a deal! I can still tell everybody what was on that DVD! I’ll tell the record label the sick disgusting things that were in that video!”

  “Well, it won’t do you any good.” Jessi pulled a tiny tape recorder from her pocket and pressed the button. Kendall’s voice filled the room. “I won’t need to extort any more money from you. As long as you pay me $1,000,000, I won’t broadcast Angel and Tommy’s sex tape all over the internet. I’m not going to blackmail Angel with anything else. You give me $1,000,000, I give you the DVD. It’s that simple.”

  “Last I remember,” Jessi said, “extortion’s a felony. Say one word to the press, or anyone else, or if another copy of that DVD mysteriously surfaces, I swear Kendall, I’ll have you fuckin’ arrested.”

  Kendall lunged at Jessi and they fell to the floor. Tommy and Damien tried to pull them apart, but they were hard to control. Jessi and Kendall rolled on the floor like two wild cats, arms and legs flying everywhere. Tables got knocked over. Lamps fell and shattered. Anything within reach was hurled through the air. Jimmy and Alyssa had to intercede before they were able to restrain Jessi and Kendall and keep the two of them apart. It was like a scene out of a college girl fight. At one point Angel caught Damien and Jimmy exchange a smile, obviously amused by this girl on girl action, but Angel didn’t find it amusing at all. He was frazzled and upset.

  Damien held onto Kendall, so she didn’t get into another altercation with Jessi, while the rest of them searched the hotel room for any hidden copies of the DVD. Angel felt bad for her. Even though Kendall wanted to ruin his life, he didn’t want to ruin hers. He threw $2,000 on the table. “Take this, and go somewhere and start over. Make something of yourself, and don’t’ burn everyone along the way.”

  Everyone thought everything was OK now. It was far from OK. Tommy and Angel’s secret sex life gnawed at Jessi. It wasn’t the secrecy, everyone was entitled to a certain level of intimacy, it was the content that disturbed her. She questioned whether or not they would have told her about their little trysts if Kendall hadn’t exposed it. Of all people, Kendall had to be the one to enlighten her about Tommy and Angel’s sadistic bedroom antics. It was difficult to be in the same room with them, even in the grand hotel suite.

  Tommy and Angel walked into the bedroom just as she finished packing a duffle bag. It was the same duffle bag that housed the fake blackmail money. She slung it over her shoulder and met Tommy and Angel’s stare with resilience.

  “Where are you going, hon?” Tommy was blocking the door.

  “I can’t sleep in this room with the two of you after what I saw on that DVD.”

  “I told you I was sorry. We weren’t deliberately hiding anything from you. I know you’re not into anything like that. Why shouldn’t we play? That’s not fair either.”

  “You made a sex tape without me. Don’t you see how unimportant it makes me feel? If you wanted to make a sex tape, I should have been part of it. You made me feel left out.”

  “Jessi, sweetheart, please listen to me,” Angel said. “It was unintentional. I swear. Tommy found this old flogger I had. We started playing around with it, as a joke, then it got sexual, and we thought it would be fun to record it. We didn’t intentionally plan on excluding you from the DVD. We made it for fun. We only watched it a couple of times and then forgot about it. We didn’t even know Kendall had it.”

  “Really? Or was it your plan all along? Were you trying to get me out of the way so you could have Tommy all to yourself?”

  “No!”

  “Was this your idea? Were you trying to entice him with something that you knew I wasn’t into so he’d rather have sex with you instead of me?”

  “Don’t talk to Angel like that.”

  Tommy was defending Angel, when it was obvious that she was threatened by him. “I should have expected some kind of ruse from Angel, but from you, Tommy?” She threw the duffle bag on the floor. “I feel like he’s more important!”

  Tommy tried to put his arms around her, but she backed up beyond his reach. She didn’t want him to touch her.

  “I love you, Jessi. I don’t care more about Angel. I love you both the same.”

  “The same? Even though I don’t fulfill your fantasies?”

  “Don’t say that. You’ve been fulfilling my fantasies every day since the day I met you. I’m the luckiest man in the world to have you for a wife. I’m nothing without you. You forget that this relationship isn’t so easy for me either. I’m stuck in the middle, trying to please the both of you. I struggle to maintain balance so something like this doesn’t happen. I’m sorry if I screwed up. I’m sorry if you thought we were deliberately trying to hide anything from you. We weren’t. I know how much rough play upsets you. So we just did it when you weren’t home.”

  She thought back to the memory of the one time they tried it with one of the men Tommy brought home. It was months before they met Angel. She literally tackled this guy who was walloping Tommy’s behind, while he was tied to the bed. She threatened to call 911 and aimed a canister of pepper spray directly at his face while she chased him out of the house. After that incident, she told Tommy she never wanted to see anyone do anything like that to him again. But someone did. And it was Angel.

  She wiped the hot tears from her face.

  “Seriously, Jessi, would you have let Angel tie me up and paddle me?”

  Paddle? Now there’s a paddle involved? They probably had an entire closet full of sex paraphernalia that they kept under lock and key. “Who are you two? What the fuck are you into?”

  “It was all in fun, sweetheart. It’s not as harsh it appeared on the DVD.” Angel was desperately trying to explain. “It was just a game.”

  “What about the games we played in bed? Was it only a game when we vied for Tommy’s attention, or were you seriously trying to get him to pay more attention to you?”

  “No! I love playing that game with you.”

  “All right, that’s enough.” Tommy said. “Stop yelling at Angel.”

  “Stop sticking up for him!”

  “It’s not his fault. It’s mine. You can be mad at me, but don’t take it out on Angel.”

  They were banded together. It was them against her. They were no longer a trio. They were divided. “I don’t believe this fuckin’ shit!” She grabbed her duffle bag. “I hate that you made that DVD and I hate what’s on it!”

  Tommy tried to take the bag from her shoulder but she pushed his hands away. “I need distance. I need to figure out if I still fit in this relationship.”

  Tommy’s eyes burned into her. “I love you, Jessi. Remember how much I love you. You’re everything to me. Without you, I’m dead. You take as much time as you need. I know you’re just upset and I know you’ll come back, but know that every second you’re gone, I’m gonna die a little more inside.”

  “Tommy, you can’t let her leave! Sweetheart, please don’t go!”

  She glared at him. “Get out of my way, Angel.” She brushed past him, but paused in the doorway and turned back around. “I’ll be at the show tomorrow night. I already have a dozen calls to make to the venue and I have to get wardrobe back from the cleaners. I still have a job to do. I just can’t be stuck in this room with you two and I
can’t sleep in the same bed with either one of you right now.” She saw Tommy deflate at her last remark and it hurt her, just as much as it did him.

  Jessi left Chateau Marmont, the historic hotel that saw the demise of the comedic talent of John Belushi, and where Jim Morrison swung from a drainpipe off the roof and into his room – incidents that Angel pointed out half a dozen times before they checked into the hotel. She took a room at The Standard, further down on Sunset. If she would have remembered that it was the hotel the tour manager booked for the band, she would have stayed elsewhere.

  “Go back to Chateau Marmont and talk to Angel and Tommy. It’s not like they were cheating on you,” Alyssa pointed out.

  “I know it’s not the same thing, but is it much different? They have a life that I’m not part of. I’ve sacrificed a lot so that Tommy and Angel could be together. I’m not complaining. I don’t have any regrets and I wouldn’t change anything, but they share a fetish that doesn’t include me.”

  Alyssa’s mouth softened under the harsh ruby red lipstick. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m angrier at Angel than I’ve ever been at anyone in my life. I resent him, Alyssa, for offering Tommy something I can’t.” She leaned forward for emphasis. “And if I can’t get past that, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

  “Don’t you still love him?”

  She covered her eyes with her hands. She had a pounding headache. Too many conflicting thoughts were hammering inside her head and ripping her heart apart. She let out a deep sigh. “Of course, I still love Angel, but I don’t like him very much right now. He made me feel threatened. And he hurt Tommy, physically. It was awful, and I don’t know if I can forgive him for that.”

  “Wait a minute.” Alyssa flipped her long black hair back. “Are they into BDSM? Is that what this is about?”

  Jessi half shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure what you call it.”

  “Pain can be very exciting. The rush of endorphins are a real turn on. What did he do?”