Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  Poodle Skirt tilts her head to one side. She smiles, and then I realize something I’ve also not realized in a long, long time: I could have this girl if I wanted.

  I could have them both, fucking undoubtedly.

  Wouldn’t that be a way to forget about Frankie, forget her stupid freckles and her stupid wiggle and the stupid way her warm skin felt against mine? I could go to Gavin’s wedding this weekend with the memory of someone else’s lips on mine for the first time in nearly two months, the sound of someone else’s voice ringing in my ears.

  “It’s not far,” Poodle Skirt says. “Just a couple of blocks, and they’d love to have you, I’m sure.”

  Just once, I think. Get properly wasted and balls-deep in some other girl, that’s how you sort yourself out. How you always have done.

  “You don’t mind bringing some washed-up drummer with you?” I ask.

  Torn Jeans shoves her hands into her pocket, looks at me through her eyeliner.

  “You don’t look washed-up.”

  “You’d be quite surprised.”

  “Then you look good for being washed-up.”

  “Now you’re just flattering me.”

  Torn Jeans smiles and shrugs, and I look from her to Poodle Skirt and back, arms still folded in front of me.

  No reason to say no. Have fun for once, you’re living like a bloody monk. Let loose. You’re not going to find Frankie, no sense wanking about it until your bollocks fall off.

  “All right then,” I say.

  As we walk along the street the sky is just beginning to spit snow, the air dry and bone-chilling. I get the feeling that Poodle Skirt and Torn Jeans are expecting me to pay for a cab or something, but joke’s on them because cabs aren’t in my shit budget.

  They don’t know that. They probably think I’ve got a mansion somewhere in Los Angeles and a Manhattan penthouse a few miles away.

  “So what’s it like being a rock star?” Poodle Skirt asks, walking next to me.

  Since coming outside into the cold, I’ve realized she’s not wearing a bra, her nipples practically poking through her thin t-shirt, totally visible since she refuses to close her coat despite the cold.

  “Sometimes it’s lovely and sometimes it’s terrible,” I say. “There’s nothing quite like being on stage in front of a few thousand people who are all screaming for you and there’s also nothing quite like being faced with barrage of cameras and brightly flashing lights every time you drunkenly stumble over a curb.”

  I look down at her. I try to imagine her naked, helped by the way her breasts bounce against her shirt. I try to imagine them both wriggling out of their coats, one of either side of me.

  That first drink in ages, the first hit from a joint and then that lovely sensation that I’m moving slowly through the air, both girls a whirlpool. One of them, wearing just her knickers, leading me into a back room, the other following.

  I try. It’s not fucking working.

  We get to an apartment building finally, several stories tall and brick, and Torn Jeans has to call whoever lives there to come down and get us. I can’t even hear the party from the street, I can’t even get hard thinking about them naked, I can’t even excited for the thought of a shot.

  Then the door opens, and a mane of curly brown hair pops out.

  My heart fucking stops, I swear it.

  “Hey! Come on in,” she says, and it’s not Frankie.

  She turns and looks at me, a long discerning glance, and it’s still not Frankie, it’s some other girl.

  And I can’t. The door opens and I can’t go in, because I can’t fucking shake it. I glance down the street and imagine that Frankie’s walking toward me, yelling to hold the door.

  “Come on!” calls Torn Jeans from inside. “The super always gets annoyed if we hold the door open too long.”

  I swallow. I do my fucking best to summon the old Liam, the Liam who didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything including himself, the Liam who’d already be upstairs with a bottle in his hand and something up his nose. Probably a half-dressed girl on his lap as well, but he’s fucking gone. Not a trace.

  “Actually, I just remembered,” I start, sounding lame even to myself. “I’ve got to catch a flight early tomorrow morning, so I’d better get back, pack up my things, get some rest...”

  I sound like an old man. Get some rest, who the fucking Christ am I?

  “You don’t have to stay long,” the girl says. “It’s only one-fifteen right now.”

  I don’t answer her. I just let the door swing closed on the three of them, standing in the dirty lobby of the apartment complex where none of them is her, and I walk away down the New York street as the snow starts to fall faster and faster.

  I didn’t find her. I think that means I might not ever find her and I might have to move on with my life at some point.

  But not now. Not yet.

  I look up at an orange streetlight, walking as fast as I can, snow swirling above me. I think about how I just turned down two girls and probably a boatload of chemicals, and for the first time in ages, I feel good about something I’ve done.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Frankie

  “Okay,” Elena says. “We need one more case of champagne and two of San Pellegrino up at the bar by the flower arch, and then you can finally go ahead and start setting up.”

  “And, let me guess, Roderick hasn’t shown up yet,” Jenny says, her hands on her hips.

  Elena gestures around herself, indicating a mansion and grounds utterly free of Roderick.

  “Do you see him? No? He’s not here. Just carry the cases, weightlifting is good for your bone density when you get older. You can thank me when you don’t have osteoporosis,” Elena says, looking back down at her clipboard.

  Jenny rolls her eyes dramatically, probably a little too dramatically, then bends to pick up a case of bottled water.

  “He’s an hour late. You’re going to at least write him up, right? Give him a red flag or whatever?”

  “Yup,” Elena says, glancing into the back of our white catering van and checking something off on her clipboard.

  I grab the case of champagne. Jenny and I follow the path from the mansion’s service entrance to the landscaped front yard, where the bar is already set up and festooned with white flowers. A hundred feet away, up on a terrace and past some rose bushes, I can see the other guys setting up the last of the white chairs, tying ribbons along them.

  “He’s probably still surfing or something,” Jenny grumps, still complaining about Roderick. “And then he’s just going to waltz in here, two hours late, and smile his stupid smile at Elena and bat his eyelashes, and she’s just going to let it slide because Roderick is the golden boy around here.”

  She stops to look around her box and navigate a few steps.

  “Roderick, can you lift this heavy box?” she says in a high-pitched, mocking voice that I guess is supposed to be Elena. “Roderick, thank God for your big muscles! Roderick, some female guests are upset, can you go talk to them?”

  I don’t answer Jenny. We’ve only been working this weekend catering gig together for two weeks now, but I already know to just let her rants run their course. I also know that she’s got a huge crush on Roderick, so I just let her keep talking as we cross the lawn and deposit our boxes under the bar.

  “Who’s getting married, do you think?” she asks, changing the subject suddenly.

  I look up at the house, around at the gardens.

  “I did find the price to rent this place,” I admit. “Five hundred grand.”

  Jenny gasps.

  “No, it’s not,” she exclaims. “Just to rent it! Not even for tables and chairs and meals?!”

  “I think so,” I say, though I didn’t really investigate further.

  “Brad and Angelina,” she guesses. “George Clooney. No, he already got married to a lawyer. Jennifer Aniston? What about her?”

  Jenny goes on, and I chime in sometimes. Even if I can’
t keep up with the speed or volume of her conversation, I do like her. She’s friendly, easy to talk to, and she’s been working for Platinum Catering for six months already while she tries to get her acting career started.

  I’m not sure that’s going to work out for her. She’s shown me a few of her audition tapes, and for all her in-person charm and verve, I think she may have picked the wrong career.

  “Oh!” she exclaims, cutting herself off mid-sentence. “Here, I brought you a wedding ring. I had an extra because a few months ago I lost the one that I usually wear, so I got this one for cheap from a secondhand store near my house, but then I found the one I like again. That one does kinda turn your finger green, though, watch out.”

  “Thanks,” I say, as she drops it into my hand. “Is this really gonna keep the creepy old dudes away?”

  She just laughs.

  “You’d be surprised,” she says. “I can turn down some self-important asshole twenty times and he’ll come right back, like what I need is convincing, but the second I say I’m married? Whoosh, gone.”

  I roll my eyes and slide the plain gold band onto my ring finger. It’s maybe half a size too big, but it’s good enough.

  For just a moment, I stare at it, thinking. It’s the first time I’ve worn a ring on that finger since I broke up with Alistair, and even though it doesn’t look a thing like the wedding bands we’d picked out — those were way gaudier — I still feel a pang of I-don’t-know-what in my chest.

  It’s not regret. It’s not longing.

  Nostalgia, maybe? Wondering whether I should have chosen the sure thing, the steady future, instead of the one I did take?

  He did finally stop calling. It only took about fifty tries, but at last he seems to have gotten the message that it’s over, finished, and I’m not interested in trying any more.

  And of course, Liam didn’t call. To be honest, I still think about him more than Alistair, still wish that I’d done that morning differently. Said goodbye, at least; gotten his phone number as well so at least I could call.

  What if I wrote my number down wrong?

  What if he thought it was junk mail and threw it away without seeing my note?

  What if...

  “Or maybe it’s some studio bigwig, you know?” Jenny’s now saying as she jams champagne bottles into a giant bucket of ice. “I feel like those guys always go in for lots of secrecy, acting like they’re famous and shit, but then when you find out that you’re catering the top-secret wedding of Gary Shinington, and you’re like, who?”

  “Maybe,” I agree, and grab a champagne bottle.

  I shove it into my own ice bucket, and try to chase visions of Liam’s stupid face from my brain.

  Just forget him, I tell myself. Find some hot surfer bro, have a fling, and forget about Liam.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Liam

  “And do you, Gavin Lockwood, take Marisol Gomez to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live?” the officiant asks.

  “I do,” Gavin says, eyes locked on Marisol. The white netting veil attached to her hair floats gently in the breeze, and somewhere behind me, I can hear the photographer clicking away.

  Doubtless she’s not the only photographer. I’ll be shocked if I’m not standing in a convenience store tomorrow and see shitty, blurry photos of Gavin and Marisol, taken with telephoto lenses from half a mile away.

  “And do you, Marisol Gomez take Gavin Lockwood to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live?”

  Marisol answers too quietly for me to hear her, although I’m in the second row, but I’m fairly certain she says I do. Next to me, Darcy clears her throat very quietly, and I look over.

  She’s dabbing at her eyes, pretending as if she’s not crying, jaw set. Trent’s holding her other hand, and when she sees me looking at her, she shoots me a glare.

  As if I didn’t know that Darcy’s kitten fur on the inside and spiked armor on the outside. Of course she cries at weddings and gets angry if anyone sees her. Nothing’s ever been less surprising.

  “With the power vested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the officiant announces. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Gavin bends down, but before he kisses Marisol I have to look away. I’m fucking happy for them, I really am. They’re blissfully in love, no thanks to me, and they deserve to have this moment.

  But I still haven’t quite come to grips with it. I’m no longer smashing mirrors and trying to break them up, true, but it’s hard to accept that this Gavin is the same guy I snorted heroin with in Yorkshire at seventeen.

  We did some shit things. We lived some shit places, dated some shit women, woke up half-dead and went out to find more smack. How many times did we nod out together, sitting on the floor of some basement flat in East London talking big dreams and big sounds, Gavin describing the music like watercolors as I’d chime in every so often?

  It was the two of us for ages and ages, and even when we added Trent and Darcy it was the two of us. Until one night we plunged all the way to the bottom, together, and only one of us found his way back up.

  I think I’m still finding my way up. I feel like I might simply be swimming upward forever, lungs nearly bursting, yearning for the sunlight at the surface.

  I look back. The kiss is finished, but then Gavin bends down again. He whispers something in Marisol’s ear, and she smiles, almost laughing. Then he laughs, his face practically splitting open with happiness, and I can’t help but be jealous.

  Two useless months, trying to find this girl. Two useless weeks wandering the street of New York. And I know that there are other girls out there who are pretty and funny and might even take the piss out of me the way Frankie did, but I don’t want those girls. I want her.

  Gavin and Marisol head back down the aisle. Everyone else stands and applauds, so I follow suit. Darcy sniffles again, quietly, like she thinks no one will notice, so I lean over.

  “I always cry at weddings too,” I tease.

  Gavin and Marisol walk by, both just fucking glowing with happiness, and a tiny hole opens in my chest, pulled wider by jealousy.

  “Fuck off,” she hisses, glaring at my suspiciously dry face.

  “Really,” I go on. “I’m just a big, squishy, cotton-candy softie on the inside.”

  “Congrats on still being the actual fucking worst,” she says.

  I grin at her and wink.

  “As if you’d accept me any other way,” I tell her.

  “What makes you think I’m accepting you now?”

  “Guys, we’re at a wedding,” Trent intones, his deep voice cutting through the applause that’s still happening. “Be nice.”

  “She missed me,” I say.

  Gavin and Marisol are gone, disappeared into the mansion somewhere to take more pictures or congratulate each other or fuck or whatever it is that just-married people do. The guests begin drifting away from the ceremony, across the lawns, toward the area that’s been set up with cocktail tables tied with big fluffy ribbons.

  I have another flash of Gavin, years ago: driving a shit van we had when we’d just started leaving our hometown to play gigs, high as a kite on something that wasn’t smack, wild-eyed and ranting as he drove.

  “We’re gonna be Metallica!” I remember him saying. “We’re gonna be the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin—”

  That’s when he plowed straight into a ditch, near two in the morning, and when he realized what had happened he just started laughing like mad.

  And now here he is, surrounded by lovely floral arrangements on beautifully decorated tables. In a tuxedo. Getting married to a lawyer who’s certainly ten times as good as he deserves. I’m in a suit myself, for Christ’s sake.

  I guess life is strange sometimes. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be here, doing this.

  I wouldn’t have
thought I’d spend two weeks walking the length of New York city, sober as a nun, looking for some girl I can’t fucking forget.

  I mingle with the other guests. I know a good number of them, and even if I can tell some are apprehensive as fuck about my appearance here, I manage not to embarrass myself. It does help that I turn down champagne and stick to water, or that I mostly keep my asshole mouth shut and let others talk.

  I’m trying to listen to some of Marisol’s colleagues chat — it’s something about immigration law but I’m quite lost — when Darcy suddenly taps me on the shoulder.

  “Come to the bar with me,” she says.

  “What for?”

  “There’s a long line and you never finished apologizing,” she says, raising one eyebrow.

  “That’s because every time I tried you interrupted me with another thing I’d done wrong. Also, I’ve stopped drinking.”

  “You did a lot of things wrong, and I’m sure the bar has cranberry juice or some shit,” she says, already walking away.

  It’s not as if she leaves me with a choice, so I nod goodbye to the lawyers and follow Darcy across the lawn, catching up with her in a few strides. The line for the bar isn’t that long, and I’m sure she’d have survived it alone, but I don’t mind.

  “What am I apologizing for, now?” I ask.

  “Mostly just for being you,” she says, her eyes dancing.

  “I’m sorry for being me, then,” I say, laughing as well. “Did you want a more specific apology?”

  “Maybe for Eddie?”

  “Was Eddie that bad?”

  Eddie replaced me for a while as the drummer for Dirtshine, though that seems to have ended badly as well. As far as I’m aware, right now they haven’t got a permanent drummer again.

  I know better to hold out hope for that. Some bridges don’t un-burn.

  “He wore cargo shorts everywhere, Liam,” she says. “And flip-flops. And he left us mid-tour for his side-project, which is a jam band called Stingraze. With a Z.”