Distracted No More

by Thia Finn

  “Yeah, I’m willing to try if you’re sincere about it.” Thank God. The tour would be a much easier road to go if we could be in the same room without snipping at each other.

  “That’s awesome. So tell me everything. Start at the beginning of your senior year. How did you hone your skills on the guitar? How come you never sang when I was around?”

  “Okay, stop with the twenty damn questions, please. My senior year flew by. After you left,” she looked at me hard and exhaled a deep breath. “After you left, I had time on my hands so I continued practicing on my own. You’d taught me the basics and I took lessons, but I needed to find my own style, not play yours. I found a few other people in my class who played, and we all met up at different places a couple of times a week. We learned songs from each other and some of them were pretty good at singing. They encouraged me to backup some of the others since my self-consciousness kept me from going it alone. I practiced at home and finally decided to try it out with that group, and wa-la, here I am, singer extraordinaire.” She ended with a smile. God, she was beautiful. Damn my stupidity for leaving her.

  “You should take pride in what you’ve done. Cash says you and Hayden were made for each other. Own that shit, Halo. I believe you can do it.” I stuck my fist out for a bump and she looked at it for a second. I thought she was going to leave me hanging, but she finally connected her small fist with mine.

  “I guess I know all about your time since it’s all over the media.” This might go badly so I took a minute before I answered. I leaned back against the bench where I’d sat back down.

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear in the media, Halo. You know that, right? Those fucking vultures follow us around incessantly and become a damn nuisance. They destroy lives sometimes with their make-believe venom they spew.” I stood and dumped my bowl in the sink.

  “But some of it’s bound to be true. How can they publish total lies?”

  “I don’t know, but believe me, they do. I’ve seen lots of couples, married and unmarried, split from it only to find out it was pure bullshit. Look how many celebrities have sued their asses and won.”

  “Then tell me some truths so I know the real stories about you and the band.” She truly looked like she wanted to understand.

  “We’ve had an incredible run with our music. We’re the luckiest sons of bitches out there. With Chandler reconnecting with her dad, our road to fame became lined with yellow bricks overnight. Ryder helped us at every turn. That man is a god among men in the rock world, but I guess you knew this already.” She nodded her head. I knew this wasn’t the info she wondered about. The rumors of my sexcapades with the others found their way into print from the time we started getting a following. Gunner and I had all the women we could handle and then some.

  I decided to rip off the Band-Aid and go for the truth. “Once we started touring with Steele, new opportunities came our way at every venue.”

  She laughed so hard at my statement I carefully concocted to gloss over the truth. When she finally caught her breath, she looked me in the eye.

  “I’m assuming by that statement that ‘opportunities’ is a euphemism for women, right? That’s such a farce you’re spinning there, Carter.”

  I smirked at her. “Yeah, I figured you’d call bullshit. The women were crazy after we started touring with them. He would invite us to Steele’s after parties at these clubs and in his suite. KeeMac and Chan were together already, and Ryan had the bitch in the beginning.”

  “The bitch?” Guess this story escaped her need to know portal.

  “Krissy. We rarely ever call her by name since all that shit went down. We just use ‘the bitch’. Anyway, Krissy tried to catch Ryan up in a pregnancy scheme, but it blew up in her face when the timing didn’t work out. The sad part, though, was Hayden finding himself a dad at eighteen. I can’t tell you how fast we watched that kid become a man.”

  “Wait, so Ryan’s girlfriend and Hayden had a baby together?” Her face told me she and Hayden hadn’t discussed it.

  “Well hell, maybe Hayden should tell you this fucked-up story. I assumed since y’all travel together, he’d told you this already.” I stepped into this shit with both feet.

  “No, I didn’t know how he ended up with a five-year-old. I mean, I knew how, but I didn’t know the details. I’d never pry like that. We talked and practiced and wrote together, but he never said much about life outside the band.”

  “Dammit, I should have known better.” I felt like I betrayed Hayden. If they’d been traveling this amount of time together and he hadn’t told her, maybe he didn’t want her to know.

  “I promise not to say anything. For one thing, I don’t want to jeopardize our relationship. We’re a helluva team now, and I need for it to stay that way, so don’t worry. If he ever decides to tell me on his own, I swear, I’ll act surprised.”

  “Swear, huh? Is this like a pinkie promise thing?” I smiled at her and got one in return for a change. God, this girl still had the ability to bring me to my knees with a simple gesture.

  “You know what I mean, asshat. I won’t spill.”

  “I know. I just like giving you shit.” We both began to relax into an easy conversation. I skirted around the wild parties as much as I could, but I knew she could probably fill in the stories. She knew me. Sex with her as teenagers had been incredible, and I wanted it a lot like any other horn dog in high school but once I left, the women were freaks. Gunner and I learned to be freaks right along with them. No matter how I painted the picture, it sounded wrong. Before I could get on to other topics, she nailed me with the exact topic I avoided in my history.

  “So, tell me the truth, Carter. Are the wild stories we’ve all read about you and Gunner real? You know the ones I mean, the wild orgies, the red light districts in Europe, the freakish parties that happened on the bus?”

  Damn, she aimed straight for the gut. “Well, I don’t want to lie about it. Gunner and I did find ourselves in a few wild-ass situations we didn’t know how to get out of. We hung out with the crazies that accompany Steele everywhere they go. Those groupie whores would do anything to us if they thought they had a chance to get to sleep with someone in that damn band. They used us like fucking stepping stones, and we were definitely down for helping them out, however we could. I mean since we were gentlemen and all.” The sheepish grin I gave her looked more like the bad wolf instead.

  “Sounds like every twenty something’s ideal life to me.”

  “You don’t know how many mornings Gunner and I woke up in a bed full of naked bodies. Women we damn sure didn’t even remember meeting found their way into our fucking hotel rooms. Of course, we weren’t going to complain since we’d found our way into the women.” Shit, that sounded bad. I wasn’t talking to some roadie wanting the deets. This was Halo. We needed to move on to another topic.

  “That sounds scary to me.”

  “Some mornings it did scare the shit out of me. Waking up to strangers isn’t the rush guys make it out to be. After a few years, we started being a little more discriminating. We found our own women or they found us. We laid off the damn booze on those nights, too. Had to make the fucking security tighter, too. Then Peri stepped in and made anyone who got inside our inner circle sign NDAs.”

  “Good to know. So you and Gunner got the pick of the litter?”

  “That’s one way to see it, yeah. Then Hayden came along. Now it’s the two of us skimming off the cream.” She took all this information in without making a judgment. I knew this shit portrayed us as the biggest man-whores on the planet.

  “Hayden’s choices haven’t always been the best on this trip. Guess he needed his wingman to help him out. He never invited me to go out with him, but he did tell me I could bring friends back with me.”

  “Hell yeah, you could have. He’d damn sure never be one to tell you not to. What’s good for one’s good for all around here.” Another statement I chose to make that was probably gonna bite me in t
he ass.

  “So, you’d be okay with me bringing guys back to the bus to spend the evening or night?” She looked directly in my eyes and waited for a response. Shit, this had ‘mistake’ stamped all over it. My mouth said sure, but my mind said hell no to this idea but what could I say? Who was I to stop her from having guests back on the bus? Shit, this was bad, and it hadn’t even happened yet.

  “You know, Halo, I won’t lie. It’s probably going to fucking bother me, but we’re not each other’s keepers. You have to do what’s right for you. All I ask is for you to be careful, dammit. There’s so many fucked-up pervs and freaks out there.

  “Then there’s the scumbags who are looking to catch you up in some kind of chicken-shit scandal. They’ll take pics when you’re sleeping. They’ll slip fucking drugs to you to set you up. Be careful’s all I’m saying, especially finding yourself alone. You’d be better off bringing them back here or in a suite with the rest of us. At least someone in the band would be around.” My face must have sent a lot more of my feelings than what my speech said.

  “I’m a big girl now, Carter. I’ve experienced a lot of things and know the rules of being with strangers. You don’t have to worry. I’m not much of a party girl anymore like when we were together. Actually, I turned into more of a music geek.”

  “And as good as that sounds, I gotta say it worries me even more. You can’t take risks out here. It’s fucking dangerous. There are bodyguards. Take advantage of it.” I knew she heard the anger in my voice. How could she miss it? “Please.”

  “Considering you gave up the right to tell me how to live my life about eight years ago, I’m afraid you’re overprotective act isn’t going to go far with me.” She stood up and threw her dishes in the sink with a loud crash.

  This conversation turned into a shit show so fast, I didn’t know how it happened. “I’m not trying to tell you how to live, Halo. I want you to be safe, is all.”

  “Safe? You want me to be safe? How safe was I when I was with you? You were my everything and you walked off and left me like I was worth nothing to you. You broke me, Carter. Totally broke me to the point I didn’t know how to exist when you left me alone. I wanted to do bad things to myself when you left me. How safe was I then, Carter?

  “Let me tell you how safe. I spent my senior year with a shrink, Carter, a damn shrink to get my head back on straight. The music I learned, it started out as therapy, Carter. Fucking therapy. How do you think I found the group of kids who played guitar in school? The counselor, that’s how. She helped me find them, and then I found my way. Alone. I found my way back to being me.” She whirled around and went back to her bunk and dug around coming out with tennis shoes, sliding them on as she hopped down the aisle.

  I stood behind her. “I didn’t know, Halo. I didn’t know.” I didn’t know what else to say. I watched her punch the door opener, and she disappeared down the steps.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I’m not much of a runner. Actually, I don’t run at all, but I ran from that bus like a fire tried to burn my ass. I couldn’t believe I told him all of that. I promised myself I wouldn’t go there with him. I never wanted him to know about my problems after he left, but when he started in on wanting me to be safe, I lost it. Damn him for getting to me that way.

  The loneliness I felt after he left devastated me to the point I didn’t want to live. I realized now how immature the thoughts of harming myself were. How could I believe it would help me cope with the situation I’d found myself in? He was my everything, and then I had nothing. Now I knew that my happiness came from within me, and not from the person I was when we were together. It took a lot of therapy to realize it. What hell I put my poor parents through to finally learn this knowledge.

  To survive, I had to learn to be happy with me. I didn’t need anyone else to provide me with happiness. I still wanted to be with other people and enjoy friends. I’d had a few boyfriends over those years apart but nothing serious. Maybe I feared getting serious again, but I didn’t think so.

  As I pounded the pavement in tennis shoes not really made for running, I came to a complete stop and put my hands on my knees trying to breathe. Why the hell was I running? I wouldn’t run from him. He couldn’t hurt me again. I wouldn’t allow it. I survived his betrayal once. I knew I could do anything now. I turned and made my way back toward the venue.

  I walked through the gate where I left from and waved to the guard.

  “Wear yourself out?” the young guard said to me as I passed through.

  “Yeah, something like that. Doesn’t take me too long.” Thankfully he didn’t see me huffing and puffing like I did when I turned around.

  “Gotta keep in shape to keep yourself looking good for those men on the buses, huh? You know, we could have some fun together, too. I’m as good in bed as those pretty boys. My package works as well as theirs.” He had the balls to say that to me now? Not a good idea.

  “Hell no, and just so you know, I stay in shape for me.” I kept walking toward the bus.

  “Yeah, but we all know the truth. Those guys always bring in the hot pussy. Makes all us working men jealous since you high-class hos won’t give us the time of day.” He stood up from his perch.

  I walked a little faster because I was two seconds from ripping him a new one.

  “See what I mean, you little cunt. You won’t even stop and talk to me now.” He yelled to me. “All high and mighty like you are someone important.”

  Oh no, he did not go that far. I couldn’t take anymore. I whirled around to let him have it but before I could, Carter came around from the backside of our bus. He tore into the man with a death wish. Grabbing the guard by the collar, Carter swung him around, let go and gave him a good right hook to the side of his head.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are talking shit to any of the band members that way? She is part of our tour, dickwad, and even if she wasn’t, nothing gives you the right to speak to a woman that way.” Carter’s fist punched the guard’s stomach, and I almost cringed. Almost.

  “Don’t ever disrespect another woman like that again.” He kneed the man’s jewels and sent him to the pavement.

  Turning to me, he started to pull me to him for a hug, and then I guess thought better of it. He grabbed my hand, and we walked away from the bent-over security guard. I stopped him when we were a safe distance from the guard.

  I couldn’t let my crazy emotions get in the way. I wanted him to hold me. I grabbed him and hugged him. His big arms enfolded me in a tight embrace like he was genuinely worried for my safety. It felt like home, and I wondered if it felt the same to him.

  It took me a few minutes of enjoying the embrace before I finally let go of him and backed away a couple of steps. “Thank you. I would have gone for the balls first thing.”

  Carter laughed. “Yeah, no doubt in my mind you could have taken him down, but I heard most of the dumbass remarks when I came around the bus. The idea of any man standing by while a woman was being so disrespected with those douchebag remarks doesn’t ever sit well with me or any member of this band.”

  “Well, it’s all good now so not to worry.” We both stood looking at each other.

  He broke the silence. “Hey, about this morning, I’m sorry. For everything. I had no idea and the dumbass kid that I was, assumed everything would all be okay. For a while, I became number one in my book, and everyone else was a long way down my list of priorities. I know you probably don’t care about my excuses, but what I’m saying is the truth.” He took a step toward me and grabbed both of my hands holding them between us.

  “I was an overgrown prick to you, to the people around me. Hell, even to the other band members back then. I want to think I’ve outgrown all of that but honestly, it might be my imagination. The band may say differently still.”

  I didn’t have to initiate the embrace this time. He tugged me forward and wrapped me in his arms bringing his head down until our foreheads touched. I had a fierce need for him to kiss
me right then. It would’ve been a perfect time to do so, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it yet. The look he gave me said he wanted the same, but before anything happened, he pulled back.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get up in your space. I don’t want you to ever think I’m trying to take advantage of you. We’re all in this together now, and I’m not about to do something to make it all weird for both of us.” He let go on one side but kept his arm around me and lead me back to the bus.

  “Do you think we can do this Carter? Can we be friends on the bus for this length of time we’re stuck on it?” I looked up at him.

  “All I can tell you is we can try, but if I do something to make you uncomfortable, I need you to call my shit on it. Don’t hesitate. Damn, Chan and Peri don’t ever miss an opportunity to call me out on anything so I don’t want you to either.”

  We walked on the bus, and I turned and put my hand out to shake his. “That’s all we can ask of each other then, to try and make it work.” We flopped down on the couch and the door to the bus opened again with the band coming back from breakfast. This time, though, the entire AD entourage climbed on, kids and all.

  Peri led Tucker up the stairs. “Oh, hey guys. We missed you at breakfast. You should have gone. The waffles were to die for.” She cocked an eyebrow at Carter obviously trying to judge if something went on between us.

  “Well, if you must know, I’ve been craving my Cocoa Puffs, and it just so happens that our band has this wonderful lady manager who treats us like royalty by doing little things like stocking the pantry with a couple of boxes. I spotted them first thing when I went through looking for the goods.

  “Now, Halo here,” he pointed to me, “is a different story. She had horse feed or chicken feed or some kind of grain, and it pained me to watch her eat it. Then, she topped it off with a run. How crazy is that? Me, I’d rather take a beating than run. Give me the gym and weights any day.”

  “So you went and worked out while she ran?” Peri asked.