He was silent a long time. “Fuck, man.” He kicked at the sand. “You’re pointing a finger right at me, you know. I was that rock star, in those hotel rooms all over Europe, at those parties, with the girls just like you, and I took what was offered and never thought twice about it, as long as they could tell me they were willing.”
“We may have even been at some of the same parties,” I pointed out. “God knows neither of us would likely remember it if we’d met at one.”
“No shit,” he murmured. “I was blasted off my rocker for pretty much all of my twenties and thirties, up until…you know. My shit came crashing down.” He finally looked at me. “So, what changed you?”
I laughed. “Zurich, Switzerland, 2001. October tenth, just past three a.m.”
“You know the exact time and date.”
“Not the kind of thing you forget.” I glanced at him. “It’s heavy. Like, heavy as fuck.”
“I know about that shit, trust me.”
“I’m sure you do.” I sighed, closing my eyes. “I was invited to a party. A ritzy, swanky sort of one. Started out as a black-tie sort of thing, fancy hors d'oeuvres brought by servers in tuxedos, a string quartet, dancing, all that. Then, as the night wore on, the party moved up to the penthouse suite of the hotel where the event had taken place. It went from a swanky, classy, stuffy event to a real party. The expensive wine went away and out came the bottles of booze and the bags of coke. It was mostly upper management for financial institutions, you know, the places that deal with money but aren’t banks, and stocks guys and such. A real good ol’ boys club, just the European version.”
I had to pause again.
“I’ve never talked about this. Ever. With anyone.”
“Understood.”
“The party dwindled as the night went on, people leaving here and there, and somehow I just never managed to be one of them. There was always one more conversation, one more shot, one more line. And then, suddenly, it was just me and four or five guys.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, oh shit. You can probably guess where this is going. I don’t really remember much. I’d had so much to drink, snorted so many lines it’s honestly a wonder I survived that night at all. I remember being sort of herded into a bedroom. It was dark. I was confused. I remember my clothes, such as I was wearing at least, being pulled off. Being touched. Saying no. Trying to fight. I was just so fucked-up, and there were four of them, or five, maybe even six, I don’t remember. It goes kind of fuzzy after that, for which I’m honestly kind of glad.” I swallowed hard, and again, but the hot lump wouldn’t go away. “I remember bits and pieces. A face above me, and then a different one, and a different one, and so on. I remember it hurting. I was far from being a virgin, obviously, but they weren’t, you know…nice about it. I remember it going on for a long, long time.”
“Fucking hell, Laurel.”
I knew he simply didn’t know what else to say. But shit, what was there to say? Not a damn thing that meant anything. “When they were done, they left. Just left me there, a hundred different kinds of fucked and fucked-up.” I blinked away a tear, savagely shoving it all back down. “I never told anyone. I went home, took a bath, and spent the next couple months getting even more fucked-up, just never alone with men. Eventually, I just sort of decided I was over it. I never went back to parties, though. I did my partying alone. At first, I would have flashbacks, during sex. But up to then, I’d honestly enjoyed sex. I’d been a kid, right? Thirteen and unsupervised in Europe, what else was going to happen? That party in Zurich marked my coming of age, I guess, in my mind. I was no longer a teenager, no longer a girl. I was a woman. And I was going to own my body. I wasn’t going to let being gang-raped stop me from enjoying my body, my sexuality, and my life. So, I forced myself to get over it. Such as one can, I suppose.”
“How the hell do you even…” He shook his head. “How do you force yourself to heal from that?”
I cackled bitterly. “I said I forced myself over it, I didn’t say I healed myself of it. Oh no. There has been no healing, sir. Just a lot of forgetting and suppressing and ignoring.”
“And you never talked about it with anyone? Never pressed charges?”
“Hell no. Those guys would have just bought me off. Paid whatever it took to silence me, one way or another. I was voiceless, I didn’t matter. I was theirs to take and use as they wish. And what would talking about it have done? Opened up the wounds I was working so hard to ignore. So no, I haven’t. You just…deal with it. Fake being fine until eventually you just sort of reach some semblance of actual fineness.”
He gazed steadily at me, no pity, just sadness, sorrow, commiseration. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“Me too. And thanks.” I smiled at him. “So. Tell me something funny.”
“Something funny?” He regarded the waves, the afternoon sunlight glinting yellow orange off the green-lead-blue sea. “Okay, I got one. But this is one you can’t repeat.”
“I’d never repeat anything you tell me.”
“Except to your girlfriends?”
“Well, maybe. Depending on the story. But we’re tight, and things between the six of stay between the six of us.”
“Figured as much.” He chuckled. “So, we—being Bright Bones, me, Tommy, Rick the Dick, and Froot Loop.”
I cackled. “Rick the Dick and Froot Loop?”
“Rick Maroni, bassist, and Zander Smith, rhythm guitar—he pretty much lived off of Froot Loops cereal, like he ate that shit for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack. I swear to fuck he kept a little pouch of them in his goddamn pocket and he’d eat them on stage. It turned into his thing, at the end of our sets and encores, he’d pull that bag of Froot Loops out and toss them at the crowd. Eventually, he used the cereal tossing as his way of indicating which girl he wanted. He’d toss them the red Froot Loop. If you got a red Froot Loop from Zander, you were his pick for the night.”
“That’s kinda…”
He laughed. “Kind of a dick move? No kidding. That’s not the story, though.”
“Wait, hold on. Why Rick the Dick?”
“Because it rhymed, and because he’s a dick. Hell of a bassist, which is why any of us put up with his ass. Man could shred that bass like literally no one I’ve ever met in my life. But he was a colossal dick. I don’t even want to repeat some of the shenanigans he pulled. We actually kicked him off the tour on two different occasions because of the shit he pulled. Had to get his guitar tech to fill in. But we always brought him back because the fans just went bananas for his bass solos.”
“If you don’t want to repeat it, then I think I’m fine not knowing.”
“Yeah, you are. Trust me.” He took my hand and walked with me along the sand. “So, it was after a show in Dallas. Usual postshow nonsense. We had three dates in Dallas, so we’d booked suites, right, and we partied it up. Girls, drugs, booze, the usual bullshit. Well, we all passed out. This was after the last show which meant we were leaving the next day for a pair of dates in…Albuquerque? Flagstaff? Don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. I woke up in my suite, and I was buck-ass naked. Not too weird considering the kind of nonsense we got up to that night, but what was weird was I couldn’t find any of my clothes. And my phone was gone. And it was, like, two in the afternoon and we had been scheduled to leave at eleven. So I called the other guys’ rooms…no answer. Called the front desk and they told me we’d been checked out hours ago.”
“Oh my god.”
“The fuckers stole my clothes, took my phone, checked out, and left me in Dallas, bare-ass naked and without so much as a red cent on me. Took my wallet, my cards, everything.”
I was laughing, now. “That’s brutal.”
“No kidding.”
“What’d you do?”
“Fortunately, I’d memorized my agent’s number. I called him and he handled it. Got clothing sent to me, got a car for me, and I made it to the show on time.”
“D
id you get them back?”
“Fuck yeah, I did. Now, don’t judge me—I was a prick back then, all right?” He chuckled. “I laced their drinks a few weeks later with knock-out drugs. Like, they were out for the count. I stripped them all naked, and me and a bunch of the roadies brought ’em to a park in the middle of the city—St. Louis? No, it was…Des Moines, maybe. Shit, it’s hard to remember—all the cities blur together after a while. Midwest somewhere’s all I know. We dumped them naked in the park, and we drew mustaches and glasses on them with Sharpies. And we fuckin’ left ’em there. Ohhhh man, were they mad. It was all over the place, photos of ’em, videos, everything. Someone got a recording of them waking up—being woken up by police, actually. God, were they confused. They didn’t speak to me for a week, and our shows were shit because we were all out of synch and pissed off at each other. Rick would mess up his solos on purpose, and then I’d do something, and then Tommy would intentionally change the beat count, and we’d all get messed up. Eventually we got over it. It was Tommy, of course, who was like, ya’ll, we gotta snap out of it or we’re gonna break up, or worse, get canceled because our shows are going to absolute shit. So I told ’em, you prank me, I prank you. And we agreed from then on, no pranks.”
The mention of Tommy sapped the humor from his face, as it always seemed to do.
“Just wondering, here, but where’d you get the date rape drugs?”
He shot me a sardonic look. “I’m Titus Bright.” A shrug. “I told my buddy Hank, the lead roadie, that I wanted to prank them and what I was thinking, and he handled it. So I guess the answer is, I don’t know, I just trusted Hank to handle it. And to answer the question you’re not asking—no, that was never, ever our MO with women. We didn’t need to. They wanted us, and they came willingly to the slaughter, so to speak. The reason we kicked Rick off both times was he had violated that code, that we could take what girls offered, but were cool about it. We didn’t leave ’em out in the cold when we were done with ’em, and we didn’t treat ’em like objects. Rick would say or do shit that made Tommy and me especially super angry and we’d give him the boot. We threatened to permanently replace him if he pulled that shit again, after the second time we had to kick him off. But we never allowed anything…sick, I guess. Rick’s whole deal was feeling entitled. Pressuring girls into shit and then being a dick to them after he’d gotten what he wanted.” A shrug, a sigh. “But, looking back, the fact that it was so easy to procure something as nasty fuckin’ evil as that…I’m not proud of it, even if I just used it as a prank on my buddies.”
I patted his arm. “I honestly didn’t consider the idea that you’d ever do something like that.” I glanced at him. “Actually, Autumn was slipped a mickey or whatever you want to call—just after she’d met Seven. She went on a date with another guy who’d responded to The Ad, and he gave her something, or had something put into her drink somehow—we’re still not sure how. But any man who could and would do shit like that?” I shook my head. “He can die in a hole.”
“And I’ll put him there,” Titus growled. “If you can’t get ass for yourself the honest time-honored way of hitting on girls and getting shot down until one feels sorry enough for your stupid ugly face to pity-fuck you, then at least have the goddamn dignity to pay for it, which is the other time-honored tradition. And by that I mean, someone who’s in that line of work voluntarily.” He huffed. “That shit pisses me off.”
“I can tell.”
He rolled a shoulder. “There was this girl who followed us around. Shannon. Sweet, beautiful girl. She was connected to one of our crew, somehow, none of us were ever quite sure who or how. She was just always around, at every show, and she’d just make herself useful. She wasn’t some desperate groupie, you know? Like she loved us, loved our music, but never was like, please please one of you any of you please fuck me. She just…followed us. She’d help set up and tear down, she’d help out with catering, make sure we had water bottles in the green room for after the show, she’d roll joints for us, help make sure that once playtime was over, the girls who’d partied with us got where they needed to go safely. Honestly, Shannon was a godsend and an angel, and we eventually took notice and started paying her to just be who she was, to do what she was doing. We just got used to Shannon being around.”
He sighed heavily, bitterly.
“Then, at a festival in Idaho, she was hanging out and partying after our set with us and some other boys from various bands. I saw some guy messing around with her, but she was an adult, you know, so I just kept an eye on her. We all got pretty protective of Shannon. And she could party, okay? She could take care of herself. But something was off that day. She knew how to pace herself, and she never got wack, like so bombed she was falling over herself. I mean, we all got that way once in a while, and we’d take care of each other if it happened. And I figured maybe I’d missed her take some shots or something, or maybe she’d smoked something while we were on. I wasn’t sure, but she was just acting…off. I don’t know. Too out of control for how Shannon got even wasted. I didn’t like it. So I kept an eye on her. And sure enough, she wandered off and some dickhead from a new band playing their first festival was following her. I caught up right as he was trying to drag her behind a gear trailer, yanking at her clothes and muffling her mouth. I beat the unholy fuck out of that guy. I mean, it was bad.” He shook his head. “But she was, like, our sister, you know? You just didn’t fuck with Shannon.”
I bumped his shoulder. “You’re a truly decent person, Titus.”
He snorted. “Dunno if I’d go that far. Not tolerating rape doesn’t make me decent, it just makes me not a piece of shit.”
“I meant decent in the old version of the word, not as in, okay or merely acceptable. Like, good and decent. And I meant it.”
He laughed. “Thank you, Laurel.” He glanced at me. “Wanna head out?”
“Sure.”
He pulled up into my driveway—and seemed puzzled. “This is you, huh?”
“No, this is me,” I said, holding out my hands in a ta-da! gesture, then pointed at my house. “That’s my house.”
He snorted. “Smart-ass.”
“Better than being a dumbass,” I retorted.
“Har-har-har,” he deadpanned.
“Not what you expected, is it?”
He regarded my home, and shook his head. “Honestly, no. I figured you’d live in a fancy condo downtown, a penthouse maybe.”
My house was a two-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch, utterly unremarkable and in an utterly unremarkable neighborhood of suburban L.A. I owned it free and clear, had paid comically little for it and had—probably surprising to pretty much anyone who didn’t know me very well—done a lot of renovation to it myself. It was brick—once drab tan, now painted white—and I’d had the roof replaced with a green metal roof, and had added solar panels which killed that utility bill entirely. The front yard was small, small enough that I mowed it myself with one of those old-school manual push-reel mowers. There were box shrubs under the front picture window, and a large planter filled with daisies and irises and whatever else piqued my fancy each spring. The walkway from sidewalk to front door had once been cracked and crumbling cement, and I’d had it ripped up and replaced with flagstones. The front door was green to match the roof, and matching shutters.
The driveway was a project I’d meaning to get around to for a couple years, but never quite did—it was the last thing in the exterior that I hadn’t updated yet, and was old, cracked, and crappy. Detached garage, also updated to match the rest of the house, with a lovely new wooden fence and gate.
He huffed in amusement. “Yeah, no, this is not what I expected when I thought, I wonder where Laurel lives, you know?”
I laughed. “I know, nobody does. But I grew up in a huge fancy Bel-Air mansion with eight rooms and ten bathrooms and a pool house and just about everything you could imagine. And weird I know it may be, but I just was always curious about neighborhoods like this. I was al
ways drawn to cute little houses like this. And when I first started selling real estate with Lizzy and Kat, we were the new girls on the block with our own brand-new brokerage and we built our brand selling places just like this. Eventually we moved up in the world, started selling more and more expensive places, and for a long time I did live in a condo exactly like you’re probably imagining. But I found this place once—listed it, as a matter of fact because I just loved the bones of it, and felt like it was just so cute, had so much potential. And Lizzy was like, if you love it so much, buy it yourself. I’d been complaining about my condo, anyway. Like, no yard, no privacy, no solitude. City living was wearing on me. So I did. I bought it, and I fixed it up.” I hopped out of the car and headed for the side kitchen door that was my usual entrance, unlocked it, and led Titus inside. “And if you want to be really surprised, listen to this: I did probably eighty percent of the renovation in here myself. I myself knocked down the wall between kitchen and living room—upon the advice and guidance of a professional contractor, of course. And I myself demo’d the whole kitchen, all the floors, and both bathrooms. I myself combined the master bedroom with the formerly unattached bathroom to create an en suite master. I installed all the floors. I put up the drywall. I mudded and sanded and painted. I had the cabinets and counters installed because, frankly, I was simply not strong enough.”
Laurel's Bright Idea (Billionaire Baby Club Book 3) Page 11