I avoided it. “We can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Hook up.”
His belt notched, Tyler narrowed his gaze on mine. “It’s more than that, and you know it.”
“I told you up front.”
“You did. You were honest, but how can it be just a hookup when every time is better than the last?”
I shook my head. For me, each time was a good-bye, a painful one I couldn’t do anymore.
He frowned. “I came here. I told you what I want, what I need.”
“I told you I can’t,” I said, trying to look away.
“Why not?” He firmly grasped my chin. His gaze held treasures that would be wonderful for someone else. They just weren’t right for me.
“You’re a temporary high that won’t last for me, but I do it anyway. Because for a short while,” I said honestly, “you make me forget everything but you.”
His gaze turned pleading. “We can extend that short while to longer if you’d only open yourself up to the possibility.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. I know you can.”
“You don’t know me. You don’t know what I can or can’t do.”
Tyler sighed. “You’re lost, and you need to be found like me. Maybe we can find our way together.”
“I’m just an idea in your head, but a daydream with two people too full of night won’t work.”
“That’s not true.” His brow creased. “What’s holding you back? Is it the RFC?”
I nodded. It was that, but it was the rest too, even if he didn’t believe me.
“You’ll be thinking of me,” he said his voice tight. “My cock and how it is between us, when you’re with the others.”
“I might.”
“Fuck me, then stick a knife in my back afterward and twist the blade. Is that it?”
“It’s better you know now that we’re done than later.” I lifted my chin, blinking back the sting. Hurting him hurt me too.
“You act all tough, Jo, but you’re a fraud. Mistaking affection for weakness. Accepting fucking when you could have love.”
Lowering my head, I said, “I’m not mistaking anything. We’re not right for each other. That’s the truth. I hope in time you’ll realize it, and maybe then you won’t be so mad at me anymore.”
Tyler didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. His eyes said everything. They sliced and they cut.
Watching him get on his motorcycle and roar away, I knew it was well and truly over. There wouldn’t be another time. He wouldn’t be waiting around for me after the RFC was over.
Empty and way too sad, I dropped to the ground and lay down on the asphalt. My gaze lifting, I searched the sky for stars but saw only the darkness of the night. Maybe the problem wasn’t the city light pollution. Maybe the flaw lay inside me.
“Josephine, it’s time to go.” Carla reached out a hand to help me up. “All the equipment’s packed up. You ready?”
No. Yes.
“Okay.” I let her help me to my feet, remembering another critical time when someone else had been kind to me.
“Thank you.” I squeezed her fingers before I released her hand. “Can I ride back to the hotel with you guys?”
“Of course you can.”
She walked beside me to the SUV. I folded myself into the far back seat and opened up the notepad on my phone. On the drive back to the hotel, the crew murmured softly to each other while I typed.
The words came, jumbled at first, phrases then sentences, then rhymes that flowed fast, sweeping me up and carrying me away.
Rearranging the stream of them, I didn’t notice we’d arrived at the hotel. At Carla’s urging, I got out of the SUV with the crew. We exited the parking garage and walked through the lobby together, but then I said good night to them at the elevator and turned around to return to the lobby bar.
It was deserted. The chairs were turned upside down on the tables. The staff had long ago gone home, but my kit remained on the stage, and my sticks were in a safe place behind the bar.
Once I’d retrieved them, I climbed on the stage riser. Thinking of what I’d typed into my phone, I sat on the stool and began to play. Softly, tentatively at first. That was how I’d restarted living again without Joey. I’d convinced myself to do one worthwhile thing each day. Then I made myself repeat that thing again the next day. A couple of steps forward. A lot of steps back.
When you’d lost everything, including faith in yourself, the hardest thing was finding a reason—any reason—to go on.
Music was my reason. Music and the words that went with it were my saving grace.
“Hey.”
Gale seemed to appear out of nowhere, like he’d done earlier at the rooftop bar. Or maybe he’d been sitting on the edge of the stage, watching me all along. I’d been pretty absorbed in the rhythm and the rhyme. When he rose from his vantage point only a couple of feet away from me, I caught a hint of his familiar scent as he sauntered toward me.
“What are you doing, Josephine?” he asked softly.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Sticks in one hand, I quickly swiped the back of the other across my tearstained cheeks.
“Avoiding sleeping.” He held my gaze, but he didn’t comment on the wetness I’d wiped away.
“Seems I’m not the only one avoiding sleep.”
I lifted a brow, appreciating his discretion and his choosing to lighten the heavy moment rather than feed into it. He made me feel like I might be nearer to normal, instead of way the hell fucked up.
Something important inside me shifted toward him in that moment, or maybe it only continued seismically shifting.
“I went for a ride, came back, and then slipped in here when I saw you.” His brown hair falling into his silver eyes, Gale hooked a thumb over his wide shoulder. “I also thought you ought to know the night manager is fielding a lot of complaints from first-floor hotel guests about the noise.”
“Guess I’d better stop.”
“Might be wise.” Nodding, he closed the remaining distance between us. He stood over me and gestured to my phone that lay display-side up on the seat of a chair beside me. “Working on new material?”
“Getting stuff out. Processing. Editing as I go.”
“Can I have a look at what you have so far?”
“Sure.” I shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal.
Gale picked up my phone. He didn’t say anything, but I could see his eyes moving and his thumb swiping as he scrolled down.
“It’s just a bunch of scrambled words,” I said, making excuses.
“It’s not the words themselves; it’s how you link them together.” He lifted his head, his eyes filled with knowledge and understanding. “This is a song, Josephine. A really good one.”
“RECYCLED. NO LONGER MYSELF. Living a lie.” Gale shook his head. “Your just processing would take me hours of deliberation to dream up.”
“Why are you up so late?” I wanted to get off the very personal subject of me, my music, and my writing.
“A lot of different reasons,” he said, a very evasive response. It seemed Gale was avoiding subjects too. “I talked to Tyler.”
“When?” I asked, rolling my drumsticks between my hands while my stomach rolled nervously inside me.
“Before I came in here,” Gale said carefully, watching me. “He was upset.”
“Oh.” I stopped rolling the sticks and dropped my chin. My hair fell forward, shielding my face. “I didn’t want him to be upset.”
“You in here processing and banging the shit out of your drums and him being upset seem to correlate. Is that the case?”
“Yes, I imagine so.” Apparently, we weren’t getting off the subject of me after all.
“I don’t think it takes too much imagination to guess why. Tyler thinks there’s something going on between you and me that changed your relationship with him.”
“We didn’t have a relationship,” I said stubbornly, my
gaze on the floor.
“Look at me, Josephine,” Gale said in that low, soft voice that always turned me inside out.
I lifted my head, and the black curtain slid back. He gave me a steady look that I returned.
“I told him he’s right. There is something between me and you.”
At his words, I went completely still as everything seemed to drain out of me. I was glad to be sitting and not standing like him. The riser didn’t just tremble beneath me—it seemed the entire world caved inward around the two of us.
“We need to talk about it,” he said calmly, as if what he’d said didn’t change everything.
I shook my head.
“But you don’t deny it.”
I sighed, searched for the words I needed, and found them inside the wasteland that used to be my heart. “Sometimes the best response is no response. The best action, inaction. The best road to travel, the one you never take.”
“In the past, I might have agreed with you.” His gaze transformed to silver rain. “But normal left my life a year and a half ago. Yours did years before that.”
“Gale,” I said. Him putting himself and his emotions out in the open made it difficult for me to breathe. “I’m in the Rock Fuck Club. And the things I’ve done . . .”
There was no undoing them. I had no way forward but the very narrow path I’d chosen.
“Trust me,” I said, “I’m not for you. Not in any capacity whatsoever. It would be better for you to forget you ever knew me.”
“I can’t do that.” He shook his head. “I lost everything and clawed my way out of the pit. I’ve done a year and a half of solitude, observing but never interested in getting involved with anyone, until I met you. Not responding to you or these feelings isn’t an option for me. Don’t ask me to go back to the nothingness of before.”
“Okay.” I bobbed my head.
How could I refuse him being familiar with the pit of despair and the courage it took to crawl out of it? But I had no frame of reference for dealing with a guy like him who gave quick and sincere apologies, and dealt truths with such raw honesty.
Digging deep inside, I found a little piece of the woman I’d almost been before she made a terrible choice that destroyed everything, and extended a peace offering. “I can be your friend. I want to be your friend. I like you . . . like talking to you. But that’s it. That’s all it will ever be.”
“A start and an end?”
“If you want to think of friendship like that, then yes.”
“All right, Josephine.”
“Jo,” I said, correcting him again like I had before at the truck stop, ignoring the alarm bells going off inside me. “My friends call me Jo.”
“Okay, Jo.” Gale’s eyes lit up like the Fourth of July. “But Josephine suits you for a momentous occasion like this.”
“Being friends doesn’t seem to change your bossiness.”
“It doesn’t change a lot of things,” he said enigmatically. “Ready to call it a night?”
Exhaustion sneaking up on me, I yawned and nodded. “What time is it?”
“Time for girls wearing pigtails to get to bed.”
An image came to mind with me and Gale in a bed together, an image that wasn’t conducive to sleeping.
“These aren’t pigtails.” I set down my sticks and twirled the end of one of my braids.
“Don’t know what the hell they’re called, but you look like the right side of naughty in them.”
“Don’t.” I swallowed to moisten my throat. “No flirting.”
Gale shrugged. “I’m a guy. I’m going to be myself. But you can trust me not to cross any line unless you invite me over it.”
He offered me his hand. I placed mine in his immediately without question. Just as quickly, he closed his fingers to hold on to what I’d given him.
“I trust you, Gale,” I said, and it was the honest truth. It was me I was worried about. I licked my dry lips.
His gaze dipped and remained on them, even after he helped me stand. “You were trapped back there, like Noah with his drums.”
Gale kept my hand until I walked around my kit. Then he let it go after he helped me off the stage and we moved together to exit the bar. My hand felt strangely awkward at my side without his as an anchor.
“Noah has a few more drums than me.”
“He disappears behind them. I called his stage setup a coliseum once, and it stuck.”
“Noah’s insanely talented. I’m sure it’s not too difficult to put up with a few idiosyncrasies.”
“A few?” Gale laughed. “Wait until you get to know him.”
“I can’t meet him. What would I say to a drummer of his caliber?”
“How about just hello?”
“I can do that, I guess.” I yawned again.
“Think you’ll be able to sleep some tonight?” he asked, punching the call button as we arrived at the elevator.
“I hope so.”
“Do you have nightmares about the accident?” His eyes narrowed in concern.
“Who told you I have nightmares?” I gave him a sharp look as the elevator door opened.
“I guessed you did because you told me you try not to sleep at night, and because I certainly do.”
“I’m sorry, Gale.” I took his hand as we stepped into the elevator and squeezed his fingers.
“I expect them to come.” He glanced down to where we were joined. When he lifted his gaze, his eyes were a darker stormy gray. “Is that how it is for you too?”
I nodded. “When I don’t have them, it’s such a relief.”
“Do you have a remedy, besides staying up all night writing songs and drumming?”
I shook my head. “What do you do?”
“I read. I work out. Tonight, I’m talking to you.”
“If I’m tired enough, I can usually sleep a couple of hours.” I pressed the number for our floor.
“Exhaustion works for me too,” he said, and we exchanged a long, commiserating glance.
“You don’t have to walk me all the way to my room,” I said when the elevator opened and we stepped onto our floor.
“I want to.”
“Okay.”
When we reached my door, I went silent for a moment. This suddenly felt like the end of a date . . . not just friends saying good night.
“Here I am.” I slid my keycard out of my pocket.
“Yeah.” He searched my gaze. “I guess this is good night.”
He bridged the small gap between our bodies. Capturing the end of one of my braids, he flicked it with his thumb. “The strands are already unraveling.”
“Are they?” I glanced down. His hand hovered over my right breast, but the nipples on both drew achingly tight.
“I like your hair unbound.” He removed the elastic, undoing one woven section, then another while I held my breath. “Much better.”
His fingers skimming my skin, I shivered as he carefully spread out the hair he’d freed from one braid.
“I’m sure I look like a dork.”
His gaze scanned my features before settling on my eyes. “You look like an oasis to a man in the desert who never expected to see anything but more sand.”
“Gale,” I whispered.
His words stirred longing inside me. But I didn’t tell him that even as just a friend, he felt like a ray of hope to someone who’d grown accustomed to living in darkness.
“Can I undo the other side, so the oasis is symmetrical?” His silver eyes twinkling like starlight, his mouth lifted on one side.
“Yes, please.”
I would have agreed to anything at that point. Luckily, all he asked for was to let down my hair.
“YOU LOOK LIKE HELL,” Dolly said, giving me the once-over when I exited the bathroom of our side of the suite the next morning.
“Thanks,” I replied sarcastically, frowning.
She narrowed her eyes on me. “At least your hair’s in better shape now.”
�
��You think?” I’d shampooed and conditioned it, but I hadn’t had time to blow it dry. Water droplets from the saturated strands dripped between my shoulder blades, soaking my already wet shirt.
“Drowned beats the frizzed-out accordion look you had going on when I first woke you up.”
“Why’d you get me up so early?” I grumbled.
“You needed a shower. Your hair was crazy as shit, and you smelled like Tyler’s cheap cologne.”
I’d given her a quick rundown, just the highlights, of the events that had transpired after she’d passed out. Minus meeting Gale in the lobby. That felt too dreamlike to discuss. Almost as if it hadn’t been real.
Lark stuck her head into the bedroom. “Second call from the film crew. Everyone’s already waiting for us on the bus.” Her hair was styled. Her new clothes looked great. She even had makeup on.
I squinted at her. “Did Carla come help you get dressed?”
“Yeah.” Lark nodded. “Too bad you slept through it. She brought a ton of clothes and makeup for us to choose from. I could really get used to having a stylist traveling with us.”
“Stella’s the designer of our outfits today,” Linnet said as she appeared in the doorway beside her twin. She was dressed to match her in a tiny micro top in emerald green, white tapered pants that looked like they were splattered with colorful confetti, and some really cool navy-and-crimson platform high-tops.
“Who made the banging shoes?” I asked.
“Adidas,” Linnet replied.
“Carla said she can get us more of Stella’s last year’s samples from a discount supplier in New York,” Lark said.
Linnet’s eyes rounded. “Isn’t that sweet?”
“Walk and talk fashion.” Dolly offered me a to-go cup of coffee. “We all need to get going.”
“All right.” I accepted the coffee and took a careful sip, sighing when the blessed elixir slid down my throat.
Go, caffeine. Get into my bloodstream quick. With only a couple hours of sleep, I found it difficult to focus.
“C’mon.” Dolly took my free hand, leading me toward the door. “Jeez, Jo. Your skin’s all wet. Didn’t you use a towel?”
“I did.” I made a face at her. “But someone kept knocking on the door, rushing me.”
ROCK F*CK CLUB (Girls Ranking the Rock Stars Book 5) Page 11