Havoc: Mayhem Series #4

by Jamie Shaw

  When he left, I had asked him not to send flowers to my apartment or anything. If Danica calls you, I’d told him, don’t mention me, okay? I don’t want to rub our new relationship in her face. She needs time.

  It wasn’t a total lie, but really, I’m the one who needs time. I need two more years of it, until I no longer have to depend on Danica’s family to get me through school.

  “I can’t wait to take you out,” Mike says, and a heaviness settles over me. I know he’s not going to be okay with never being able to pick me up from my apartment. I know he’s not going to be okay with never being able to be seen with me in public. I know he’s not going to be okay with being my secret, and I know he deserves better than what I can give him. He deserves a beautiful, smart, wonderful girl who doesn’t have to choose between him and everything else she’s ever wanted.

  “Did Danica send you her video yet?” I find myself asking, and I listen to Mike settling into his new room as he answers me.

  “Yeah. A few days ago. Why?”

  My brows knit, and I pick at a tiny hole in the knee of my jeans. “You didn’t mention it.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Mike says. “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

  I had told Mike about the video, and that Danica changed her number. But I couldn’t give him her new number to block, since then she’d know I was still talking to him.

  “What did you think of her gray and blue dress?” I ask, remembering the mist-colored dress I had tried on in the fancy fitting room, and how gorgeous the blue wildflowers printed on the fabric had been. I had felt beautiful in that dress until I walked out to see Danica wearing the same one.

  “I didn’t watch the video,” he says. “I just deleted the message and blocked her new number.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you really think I’d bother watching it?”

  “Aren’t you at least curious about what she has to say?”

  There’s a long moment of silence, and then Mike asks, “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about Danica since leaving?” I brace myself for the answer, and he says, “None. Not one. Do you know how many times I’ve thought about you?”

  I barely have time to wonder before he answers, “I think about you all the time, Hailey. Do you know what I do before bed each night? I pull up this picture I took of you the morning I left. You were sleeping, and I know that makes me a creep, but I don’t care. You were so damn beautiful, I just wanted to stare at you forever. So I took a picture, and every night, I look at it to remind myself that you’re what I’m coming home to. That I’ll get to see you like that again because I’m the luckiest fucking guy alive to have you at home waiting for me.”

  I’m speechless when he emphasizes, “I don’t think about Danica, Hailey. I never think about her. She doesn’t even cross my mind. If I’m thinking about a girl, it’s you, because you’re the only girl for me.”

  I’m silent for a long time while I try to calm my cartwheeling heart. And when I speak, I take the easy way out and crack a joke. “You took a picture of me sleeping?” I say with mock offense.

  Mike chuckles. “You were covered up by the sheet, I promise.”

  “Creep.”

  “Worth it.”

  I smile at the way my heart flutters, and Phoenix jumps up on the couch beside me as I listen to what sounds like Mike fluffing a pillow on his end of the line. “Are you allergic to dogs?” I ask as I debate making Phoenix jump down. She lays her front paws on my lap, and I scratch her behind her ear.

  “Why?” Mike asks.

  “Just wondering . . .”

  “That’s pretty random.”

  “I like random.”

  “Hailey, if I was allergic to dogs, I don’t think I could date you.”

  I bark out a laugh, knowing damn well I smell like dog ninety percent of the time, and Mike snickers against my ear. “You’re such a jerk!”

  “You set ’em up, I knock ’em down.”

  I’m still laughing when he says, “I love you, Hailey.”

  “I love you too,” I say with a pink-tinted smile on my cheeks.

  “Sixteen days.”

  “Sixteen days,” I agree, petting a dog that shouldn’t be here and carrying a decision I can’t make

  Sixteen days until I have no choice.

  Chapter 44

  I thought it was lonely inside Phoenix’s cage at the back of the shelter . . . but in Mike’s house, with his big couch and his big bed and all of his very-Mike things, it’s so much lonelier. He’s everywhere—in his soft bedsheets, in his oversized TV, in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine he has sitting on his mantel (Michelangelo, of course). He’s everywhere except really here.

  I spend most of my time at his place, since I still haven’t found anyone else to take Phoenix in (and if I’m being honest with myself, I haven’t looked very hard), and every minute I spend in his house, with him on the other side of the world, makes the hole in my heart grow and grow and grow. After he leaves Malaysia, his schedule gets as hectic as he warned me it would. The texts become fewer and the calls grow further apart.

  It’s a mid-November Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving, when my brother says, “I miss Mike.”

  It’s been over two days since I last spoke to him myself. We’ve tried, of course—with him calling me, or me calling him—but after forty-eight hours of phone tag, I’m beginning to feel less like I’m missing him and more like I’m mourning him. For the past five weeks, I’ve felt like the calls and the texts weren’t enough—like I needed more, always more—but now that I’m not getting them, they feel like everything. Which leaves me with nothing.

  “I finally find some time to play Deadzone with you,” I admonish Luke as I sit on Mike’s couch with a game controller in my hands, “and all you’re going to do is complain about missing Mike?”

  “You suck tonight,” Luke counters, and as if on cue, my player gets shot in the head for the umpteenth time.

  “Sorry,” I sigh, knowing he’s right. I’m distracted.

  Mike will be home in eight days, and even though I miss him more than I’ve ever missed anything in my life—even though all I want in this world is to hug him and kiss him and feel his arms around me—it feels like too soon. I still haven’t figured out a way to continue dating him without having school pulled out from under me, and the thought of losing either one of those things has kept me up at night. It’s given me nightmares I can’t remember when I wake up near tears in the morning. But I can feel it—the stress that roots in my muscles and sits there like a toxin as I sleep.

  “Do you miss him too?” Luke asks, and I know he’s still sneakily trying to push me into the relationship he has no idea I’m already in.

  “Yes,” I admit.

  “Because you have a crush on him?”

  “Because he doesn’t talk as much when we play Deadzone,” I quip, my player re-spawning as Luke laughs.

  “Do you think he has groupies?” my little brother asks, and my throat dries.

  “Yeah.”

  “Even in Asia and Australia?”

  “Everywhere,” I say, unable to deny how big the band is getting. Their new record label is promoting the hell out of them—I’ve heard them on the radio, I’ve overheard classmates talking about them at school, I’ve seen ads with the guys’ faces on them posted in the campus coffee shop. Rowan has even complained about all of the people coming out of the woodwork, trying to be her friends simply because she’s Adam Everest’s girlfriend.

  “That’s so cool,” Luke says as he dominates the game. He’s racked up so many headshots, Mike would be proud. “I should get him to teach me to play the drums.”

  I smile sadly, remembering what a good teacher Mike was when he taught me in his garage. “Why, you want to be a rock star?”

  “Hell yeah,” Luke says as Phoenix makes herself comfortable on my bare toes. She’s been doing really well since I brought her to Mike’s house, eating plenty and making hersel
f at home. She hasn’t chewed or peed on any of his things—thank God—but I still have no idea what I’m going to do with her when he comes home next Sunday. “Who wouldn’t want to have girls begging to be with them?”

  “I thought you didn’t like girls?” I ask, and my brother’s tone makes it clear he thinks I’m an idiot.

  “I’m twelve,” he informs me with his signature preteen snark. “Someday I’ll be Mike’s age, and then all I’ll want is to get laid.”

  I don’t know which is worse—imagining my brother as a typical twenty-five-year-old male, or imagining my boyfriend as a typical twenty-five-year-old male. I make a face.

  “I don’t think Mike’s like that . . .”

  “Well, he should be,” Luke argues, oblivious to the way he’s making the stress under my skin thicken. “What’s the point of being a rock star if you’re not going to act like one?”

  “I thought you wanted him to date me?”

  “Would you?” Luke asks as we meet up in the map and begin scouting an enemy base. “If he asked you, would you go out with him?”

  “He’s Danica’s ex . . .” I say, wishing I had never brought this up.

  Luke sighs. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “I do know the difference between right and wrong, Hailey,” Luke complains. “I know that would be a messed-up thing to do.”

  My heart plummets to the floor, and my character dies five more stupid deaths before Luke and I finally call it quits. His words play over and over again in my head, and I have a sinking feeling he’s right. About everything.

  Mike should be enjoying his new fame, not spending all of his free time calling a hand-me-down farm girl back home, one who can’t even afford pretty dresses or new boots. He could date singers or supermodels or actresses. He could date singers and supermodels and actresses.

  And as for Danica . . . I know that me being with Mike is messed up. From the moment I saw him the night we waited outside his tour bus, I told myself to stay out of it. Out of her business. Away from her boyfriend. I know I’m the worst kind of person for letting myself fall for him, when he wasn’t mine to fall for.

  He was hers. He was my cousin’s boyfriend.

  And over the past five weeks, she’s made it perfectly clear: she wants him back.

  “Do you think she’s prettier than me?” Danica asks the following afternoon while I try to help her study for a history exam she has coming up. It’s necessary I keep up appearances at our apartment, but for the past hour, I’ve been the only person looking at her textbook since she’s been too busy looking at her phone.

  “Who?” I ask without glancing up, and Danica thrusts her screen in my face.

  “Her.”

  My eyes refocus to see a picture of Mike, his hair a little longer than the last time I saw him in person. He’s continued sending me a picture a day, but it’s always a little shocking to see how much he’s changing on tour—how his hair is getting messier and his face is becoming more chiseled. He has his arm around a pretty Asian girl with long black hair and rose-pink lips, and she’s kissing his cheek as he smiles.

  “Who is that?” I ask, my brows furrowed at Danica’s screen.

  “Some girl following Mike around the world,” she says. “She’s posted tons of pictures. Do you think she’s pretty?”

  “She’s following him around the world?” I ask, bitterness stirring in the pit of my stomach as I notice how tightly she’s pressed up against my boyfriend. Her lips are on his cheek, his hand is on her bare shoulder, and I’m sitting countless time zones away.

  “Hailey,” Danica snaps. “God, can you answer me? Do you think she’s prettier than me or not?”

  I stare up at my cousin, at the look of impatient concern on her face, and try to rein in my emotions. “I don’t know. No?”

  Danica huffs and pulls her phone away. “These girls are way too pretty,” she complains, showing me another picture. This time Mike has his big arms stretched way out, and there are like five girls squeezed up close to him. They’re all absolutely gorgeous, and if Danica told me they were all her best friends from high school cheer camp, I would believe her, if not for the look of supreme annoyance on her face.

  She swipes to the right, and there’s another girl with Mike, and another.

  I feel like I’m swallowing rocks as I sit there trying not to let my emotions play out on my face. Sharp stones sink down my throat and sit heavy on my heart.

  Danica sighs heavily as she pulls her phone back in front of her to continue swiping through pictures, and I gnaw on the inside of my lip as I turn my attention back to her textbook.

  I knew there would be girls at the band’s shows, but it was this abstract thing I could force myself not to think about. I didn’t picture their perfect hair, or their perfect lips, or their perfect curves. Now I can see their faces—their ridiculously gorgeous faces—and my stomach roils in protest.

  “I wonder if he’s slept with any of them,” Danica says, and the nerves in my lip scream in pain when I clamp down on them.

  Danica places her phone facedown on the table and turns a thoughtful gaze on me. I forget about her exam as I stare back at her, wondering what she’s thinking.

  “He’s getting really famous,” she says. “There are going to be more girls and more girls, and they’re only going to get prettier and prettier.”

  Those rocks sitting on my heart grow heavier, until they’re stabbing me with every heartbeat.

  “He’s not ready to settle down yet,” Danica says. “I know he thinks he is, but he isn’t.”

  All I can do is sit there hoping my face betrays none of what I’m feeling.

  “That’s why he left me,” she explains. “He was telling the truth when he said it wasn’t about you. It was about him. He doesn’t know what he really wants yet.”

  “What does he really want?” I ask as my mess of a heart struggles to keep itself whole.

  “To be a rock star.” Danica taps her fingernail on her phone case, and then she shakes her head. “If you want to date a rock star, you have to be okay with it.”

  “Okay with what?”

  “The girls,” she says. “I mean, obviously I wouldn’t have been okay with you, because you’re my cousin, but, like, the girls on tour. He can have other girls, as long as I’m the one he comes home to.”

  “You mean you’d let him sleep with other people?” I ask, disgust warring with the disbelief on my face.

  “I love him,” Danica snaps, the look in her eyes leaving no room for argument. “So yes, Hailey, I would. Being with Mike isn’t like being with other guys. He’s a rock star.”

  “You think he’d do that?” I ask in a voice that continues getting smaller and smaller.

  Danica nods. “I think he just wants someone to tell him it’s okay. And I’m going to do that for him. If I don’t, we’ll never last—even if he resists years of temptation, he’ll always think about all those beautiful women he passed up, and he’ll end up resenting me for holding him back.”

  I feel like I’m suffocating as I sit there listening to her.

  “That girl with the long black hair?” she says. “The one kissing his cheek? He wants her, Hailey. There’s no way he doesn’t want her. I mean, did you see her? She’s hot as hell. And if he wants to know what it’s like to be inside her, who am I to deny him?”

  “I think Mike just wants to find the right woman,” I say, trying to reassure myself.

  Danica shakes her head. “He’s a twenty-five-year-old man, Hailey. With gorgeous women begging to do anything he wants them to. He could have his dick sucked every second he’s not performing, by any girl he wants. He’s not used to that, but eventually, he will be. And he’s going to fuck them one way or another. The only question is if he’s going to feel guilty about it afterward. If I love him through it and encourage him to experience those women and all the perks of being a rock star, he’ll love me for it, and he’ll be with me in the e
nd.”

  Acid pools at the back of my throat, and I try to keep from losing my lunch.

  “Not everyone can handle being with a rock star,” Danica says. “But I can. Because I love him that much, Hailey.”

  I stare down at Danica’s textbook, imagining him with that girl . . . I imagine him turning into her kiss, capturing her mouth, lying her down on a hotel bed in some distant country thousands of miles away.

  I tell myself Mike would never do that. I tell myself Mike would never want that.

  I know him better than Danica does . . . She’s wrong.

  She’s wrong.

  I tell myself that over and over and over again.

  Chapter 45

  Hey, baby. Sorry I missed your call. We were at sound check. The venue here is massive. I think Shawn said it holds like thirteen thousand people, and we’re almost completely sold out. If you’re not already in bed when you get this, call me back. I miss you.

  Hey, Mike. It’s Hailey. I was in the shower when you called. You’re seriously going to be playing for thirteen thousand people? That’s so insane . . . I’m going to try calling you again in the morning, but if I don’t get ahold of you, take a picture for me, okay? I miss you too.

  I was an idiot and forgot to turn my ringer back on after sound check. [sigh] I guess you’re already in bed. [pause] Seven days, Hailey. Have sweet dreams.

  Hey, Mike. It isss . . . 9 a.m. here. I guess you’re already onstage. I wish I could be there. I bet you’re killing it. Call me before you go to bed, if you get a chance.

  Hailey, where are you? I feel like I’m going through withdrawal . . . We just finished up the gig. I’m in a cab heading to the hotel. The guys are making fun of me for missing you so much . . . Call me back.

  Hey. Sorry, I was in class when you called. I have like fifteen minutes until my next one, so if you get this, call me. If you’re already sleeping . . . I love you. Have sweet dreams, Mike.