Always You (Dirtshine Book 2)

by Roxie Noir

  The right side of my mom’s face so black and blue I barely recognized her? Also check.

  Like I said, Darcy’s burn is mildly unpleasant to look at. Like taking a shower after everyone else in your family, so the water only heats up to lukewarm.

  “She’s doing well enough that we’re giving her a new type of dressing,” the nurse says, handing me latex gloves. I pull them on and they stretch like balloons on my hands.

  “We’ll get you some extra-large ones,” the nurse says, adjusting hers. “First, we spray the wound with this anti-bacterial spray. Very important that you don’t let anything touch the wound, since at this point our number one concern is infection...”

  The whole process is pretty simple: take a bandage off, put new stuff on Darcy’s back, put a new bandage on, tape it to her skin. The hardest part is the end, when we have to wrap her in bandages again, and she sits up, topless, with only a hospital gown hanging loosely around her neck as I hand her the roll, she wraps it around herself, and hands it back to me from the other side.

  She’s hurt, I keep telling myself. She’s hurt and you’re helping, you goddamn pervert.

  “Very nice,” the nurse says when we’re finished, checking out my work. “Make sure you don’t put these on too tightly, or they might irritate the wound. Now, you remember the first rule of burn care?”

  Darcy and I look at each other.

  “Don’t... fuck it up?” she asks.

  “Right, don’t let anything that isn’t sterile touch the burn,” the nurse says, even though Darcy got it pretty wrong. “Let me get your vitals one more time, you can fill out some paperwork, and you’re ready to go home.”

  A couple hours later, they let Darcy leave, or at least to the Snokamie River Inn where we’re staying. She doesn’t say anything the whole ride until I shut off the car and reach for the door handle.

  Then: “Hey, Trent?”

  She’s staring straight ahead, like she’s nervous about something. She’s wearing a t-shirt of mine that I brought her along with a pair of workout shorts, the only thing I had that would even come close to fitting her, so she wouldn’t have to wear a hospital gown out of the hospital.

  The outfit she was wearing last night is... crispy.

  “Yes, Darcy?” I answer, hand still on the door handle.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she says, twirling one finger in the hem of the shirt she’s wearing, eyes still dead ahead through the windshield. “I really don’t mind going back in so they can change the bandages at the hospital, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. Just in case you’ve had second thoughts or something, I mean, I know back at the hospital you didn’t want to look like you were a bad friend or whatever in front of the nurses, but I can tell them that something came up in Los Angeles and you had to—”

  I open the car door, cutting her off.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I say mildly, and get out of the car. Darcy shoots me a frown as I leave, then slowly unbuckles herself as I walk around the car. I open her door before she finishes, offering her my hand.

  She sighs, makes a face at it, but she takes it and I pull her up.

  “Bring it up again and I’ll carry you into the woods so you’re eaten by bears,” I tell her.

  “That seems kind of extreme,” she says, taking a deep breath, her face pale. I can tell that everything hurts, especially since the hospital didn’t want her taking anything more serious than ibuprofen once she left. I grab a plastic bag with her stuff and shut the car door.

  “Also, I can walk,” she points out. “And I can walk away from bears just as well as you can, so your plan is dumb.”

  “Grizzly bears can sprint at up to forty miles per hour,” I say.

  “There aren’t grizzly bears here, just the little kind.”

  “They’ve been reintroduced to the Pacific Northwest, and the little kind of bear can still fuck you up, so quit asking whether I really want to stay here and care for your disgusting back or not, because it’s happening.”

  We walk through the lobby of the Snokamie River Lodge, which looks exactly like a lodge in Washington State should: made of enormous logs, supple leather furniture, vast stone fireplace with a mounted buffalo head on one side and an elk on the other.

  “Thanks,” she finally says when we reach the other side of the lobby, and I look down at her.

  Darcy breaks my fucking heart sometimes, because as much as she acts like she’s made of broken glass wrapped in barbed wire, I know her more than well enough to know better. And I hate that deep down, she thinks I only volunteered to help her so I’d look good to the nurses, or that I don’t really want to be here with her.

  My life was pretty fucked up for a pretty long time, but at least I know what being loved feels like. Sometimes it was toxic and sometimes it fucking hurt, but my mom really did love me. My little brother Eli really did love me, even if they were awful at showing it.

  But Darcy? There’s a reason she’s got spikes a mile long.

  “You’re welcome,” I finally say, even though it isn’t one hundredth of what I want to say to her. We reach our rooms in more silence, then say goodnight to each other.

  When I’m inside I don’t turn the lights on, just toss my keycard onto a table and slump onto a couch, my face in my hands. I accidentally bump my split lip and remember again that I’ve got it.

  That black hole deep inside me is still there. Punching the guy who fucked up the fireworks didn’t make it go away. Knowing that Darcy is gonna be fine a couple of weeks didn’t make it go away.

  It’s still there, small but heavy and sharp, gnawing at me. Saying things like maybe he should get lit on fire, see how he likes it, and I know better than to listen to it but times like this, when I’m tired and it’s dark and I can’t stop thinking about the way Darcy clenches her jaw in pain every time she moves the wrong way, that it’s the most tempting.

  I take a deep breath. I clench my hands, unclench them, and don’t punch anything, not even a pillow. I just go to bed.

  Chapter Ten

  Darcy

  Twelve hours. I brush my teeth, fall into bed, and sleep for twelve damn hours.

  When I wake up I’m on my stomach, diagonal across the giant king-sized bed, light filtering in from the curtain-covered window.

  My first thought is, I’m not at the hospital!

  My second thought is, Are these curtains bear-patterned?

  I look around my room. Several things seem to be covered in bear-patterned fabric. When in Rome, I guess.

  I get up. I pop a couple of ibuprofen, pull on shorts and a t-shirt, and find the coffee maker in my suite’s tiny kitchenette and poke it a couple times.

  That doesn’t produce any damn coffee, so I slide my feet into flip-flops and head down to the lobby. The halls of this hotel, like pretty much every hotel in the world, have several huge mirrors in them. As I walk coffee-ward I can see my reflection even though I try not to look.

  My hair’s an unholy fucking mess. My face is still banged up, my black eye starting to turn from purple to yellow, though it’s less swollen now. At least I can see out of it better.

  God, even my boobs look weird, squashed beneath an ace bandage. I have no idea when I’ll be able to wear a bra again, but thank Christ my tits are insignificant enough that I can get away without one for a while.

  I can’t fucking believe this. Two nights on tour, and I get lit on goddamn fire by accident. Now I’m out of commission for a couple of weeks. Everything’s on hold again. I swear to God, Dirtshine is cursed.

  But I round the corner into the lobby of the hotel, and once I’m in there I can’t help but smile. One, there are three large tankards of coffee, ready and waiting for me.

  Two, the whole place is straight out of Rustic Grandeur monthly. There’s even chandeliers made of antlers. Who does that?

  I grab a mug of coffee, drain it in short order, refill it, and wander outside. I’m pretty much done with sitting around.


  The lodge is beautiful, by the way. Tallwood, Washington is a pretty small town and the lodge is a couple miles outside of it, tucked away in the forest and surrounded by massive evergreen trees and miles of hiking trails.

  It’s lovely. It’s peaceful and nature-filled, and I’m pretty sure Gavin picked it on purpose because no one else from Grizzly Fest is staying here. I know he’s nervous about staying clean on tour, because it would be easy to fall back into old patterns.

  That, and I think he still hates doing this without Liam. Despite everything, Gavin still misses him. Fuck, we all miss him, but some messes are just too out of control to deal with.

  I reach the woods and start down a wide, well-maintained path. I drink coffee, stroll slowly, and try not to think.

  Because something’s been nagging at me for the past day, something that sends a bolt of anxiety straight through my core despite the gorgeous, peaceful setting. And thinking about Liam just makes it worse.

  They don’t need me. I’m just the bass player, and we’re just on tour. Anyone could learn to play these songs, and then they wouldn’t have to cut a couple of weeks from the tour and do all this rescheduling.

  Honestly, it’s kind of a good idea.

  And I fucking hate it. I hate everything about it. The thought of Dirtshine playing shows without me makes my stomach feel like I’ve got poisonous snakes nesting there.

  What if they realize that the new bass player is a better musician than me? What if they just like the new guy better, so once I’m recuperated, they tell me not to come back?

  We replaced Liam, didn’t we? And he was there from the very beginning. He and Gavin were practically brothers, and we still booted him. I know it’s a completely different situation, but that doesn’t really make me feel better.

  I breathe and stare at the bark on a pine tree, counting my breaths. In is one and out is two, three and four, until I’m a little calmer. It’s a meditation thing. Yeah, I fucking meditate, what about it?

  You have to stop doing this, I tell myself. Freaking yourself out about something that you invented is totally worthless.

  I started doing it as a kid. I don’t think I’m like this by nature, though fuck knows I’ve got nothing to compare myself to. But for as long as I can remember, shitty things have happened to me, again and again. My earliest memory is of a woman whose name I don’t remember packing my things into a black garbage bag and then driving me for ages across the snow-covered expanse of Wisconsin. It was probably a twenty-minute drive, but I remember it seeming endless.

  I was freezing, so cold my fingers hurt, and I clenched them into fists. I didn’t tell her I was cold or ask her to turn the heat up. In my memory, I already knew better. I think I was three.

  But I developed this habit, expecting the worst. Because when you expect the worst you can plan for it. It can’t take you by surprise. So when shit kept happening, my things shoved into garbage bags again and again for transport, kids at school surrounding me on the playground and giving me a bloody nose, or finally the sound of my foster father sneaking into our bedroom and whispering don’t be scared to my foster sister, the girl who had the bad luck to be on the bottom bunk, I had a fucking plan.

  It wasn’t usually a good plan, but it was always a plan.

  But I don’t need that now. It’s been fucking ages since the worst happened. For fuck’s sake, Gavin told me that they were putting the tour on hold. He and Trent — and Liam, it used to be, too — are my new family, and even if I haven’t got the firmest grasp on that concept, they deserve better than dumb suspicion from me.

  Also Eddie. We like Eddie.

  My coffee mug’s empty, so I turn around and stroll back down the path toward the lodge, wondering what time it is. I didn’t even check. Maybe I should text Trent and see where he is so he can change my damn bandages.

  And my stomach ties itself into a knot right as I emerge from the woods, thinking about Trent in rubber gloves, applying bandages and ointment to my fucking gross burn wound. If I were looking for evidence that he’s not interested, there it is, because who volunteers to look repeatedly at weeping sores on someone they wanna fuck?

  Christ, it’s not even noon yet — at least, I don’t think it’s noon, it’s still cool and foggy out — and I’d already like a drink. I cut by the pool on the way to the lobby, and there’s no one swimming, but there’s someone stretched out on a lounge chair, talking on the phone.

  Wearing cargo shorts and flip flops. I wave, but Eddie’s not looking at me, totally absorbed in his phone conversation as I walk toward him.

  “I dunno, man,” he’s saying. “There’s just like, so much punching? Like, come on, dude.”

  I wonder if he finally saw Fight Club or something. Eddie’s a good drummer, but he’s also the kind of guy who’d watch a movie called Fight Club and complain about the punching.

  “Yeah,” he says, as I pass behind his lounge chair on the way to the lobby. “I mean, I get it, I just feel really bad? But like, I can’t just...”

  His voice fades as I walk past, back into the lobby, where I refill my mug again and sit on a huge, plush, overstuffed leather chair and pick up a copy of Modern Rustic Architecture, because it’s not like I’ve got somewhere to be right now.

  And hot damn, this is the most soothing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly pictures of sharply angled, sparsely-furnished wooden houses built atop mountains emerging from the fog.

  Given that every house I lived in until a year and a half ago housed at least seven people and was a cramped hell-hole, this is a peek into heaven. I’m so absorbed in the empty hallways and big, light-filled windows that I don’t notice Eddie next to me until he says my name.

  “Darce?”

  I look up, blinking, because no one but Trent calls me that. Definitely not Eddie.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  He squirms a little in his overstuffed chair, looking at the buffalo head instead of me, and I feel bad. Eddie was just getting properly acquainted with the three of us last year when Gavin up and fucking punched the poor kid in the face.

  Eddie did give Marisol, Gavin’s girlfriend, pot-laced candy without telling her there was pot in it. And Marisol, who barely even drinks, did have a pretty awful time.

  Still, there are a million goddamn ways to solve a problem without resorting to violence.

  “You like,” he starts. He squirms. I watch his face patiently. “You like, know lots of drummers, right?”

  I get the weird feeling that he’s trying to ask me something really strange and awkward. Like a kid who wants to know where babies come from but can’t even formulate the right question.

  “I guess?” I say. “I probably know about as many as you do, maybe slightly less?”

  He nods, rubbing his hands on his cargo shorts.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Oh, just, nothing, just wondering,” he says, glancing nervously at the buffalo head. “I was thinking that I’m a drummer, and I know a lot of drummers, and then I was wondering if the rest of you also knew a lot of drummers, and...?”

  I take a long sip of coffee, glancing around the lobby and wondering what the fuck Eddie is getting at right now.

  Is he high? Is that why he wants to know how many drummers I know?

  “I know lots of drummers,” I confirm, hoping that my response soothes him.

  “Cool. Great. Okay, cool,” he says, standing. “Later?”

  “Later!” I say, and he walks out of the lobby.

  Musicians are a bunch of weirdo freaks, I think, and go back to looking at lovely, empty kitchens.

  A while later, someone walks up behind me and puts his hands on the back of my chair. I’m curled up, drinking my fourth cup of coffee, carefully leaning back in a way that doesn’t make my back hurt too much.

  “There you are,” Trent says.

  “Was I hiding?” I ask, tilting my head back and looking at him.

  Upside-down Trent lifts one eyebrow.

  “
Were you?” he asks. “You weren’t answering your phone, I thought maybe you’d gone back to the hospital to keep me from doing your bandages.”

  “It did cross my mind,” I admit.

  “You’re already an hour overdue.”

  I wrinkle my nose, but he is being very nice to me and he definitely doesn’t have to be. I flop my magazine of soothing, peaceful interiors shut and toss it back on a coffee table fashioned from several logs.

  “Your room or mine?” I ask.

  “Supplies are in mine,” he says.

  Back in Trent’s suite, I stand in the middle of his living room while he gathers the stuff he needs: size XL latex gloves, antiseptic burn spray, more giant bandages, tape, gauze, ointment, a whole medicine cabinet’s worth of stuff.

  He organizes it very neatly on his table, frowning. It’s the careful organization of someone who’s not totally comfortable with the task at hand, and who doesn’t want to fuck it up.

  “I don’t think the package of bandages is quite parallel with the box of gloves,” I point out.

  “So fix it.”

  “I wouldn’t wanna mess up your system.”

  “You mean the system of trying to make sure I don’t put toothpaste on your burn by accident? Shirt off,” he says, not waiting for an answer.

  “Close your eyes,” I say, looking over my shoulder at him. A slight smile lights up his face as he holds his hands away from his body, trying not to touch anything with the gloves on.

  “You know I’ve seen you naked.”

  “We were drunk.”

  “You were drunk.”

  I make a face, because he’s right. Trent doesn’t really drink, aside from a single beer now and then. I don’t blame him. If I’d grown up with his father I doubt I’d drink either.

  “And high,” I say. “Are you thinking of the time I tore off all my clothes because I thought they were turning into pancake batter, or the time I made you come skinny dipping because I was convinced that the ocean would give us super powers?”