by Shari Copell
Chelsea remembered the first time Nicks had kicked her high school’s collective ass, playing an assembly at age fourteen. She’d met Pip and Charm by then, forming Wild Angel, Chelsea’s pet name for her beloved daughter. They’d pulled three or four songs together in the Sorenson garage for the assembly. The first few practices were noisy and frustrating as the girls struggled to find their groove. None of them gave up though. They kept at it until they made the dream a reality.
She’d gone to the school, slipping into the auditorium in time to hear her daughter belt out a version of Pat Benatar’s All Fired Up, with vocals to rival Pat herself. She’d laughed out loud as she watched the whippet-thin teen hold the whole school in the palm of her hand. The precious gift from Asher had finally found her voice.
The bullying came to a halt after that. The phone rang constantly when Nicks got home from school. The same girls who had called her a stuttering retard, Porky Pig, and dumbass the day before were now sucking up to her. It was too little, too late though. The damage had been done. Nicks was icy and aloof with everyone but her family and friends in Wild Angel.
Tage shook her. “You didn’t fall asleep, did you?”
“Nah, just thinking about what you said. You’re probably right.”
“You look tired, Chels. We can leave the cleanup for tomorrow morning if you want.”
She nodded against Tage’s chest. “Not a bad idea, my love.”
Nicks slipped onto a stool at the bar in front of Marybeth Catalino, Tapestries’ head bartender. “Jesus, men are stupid. One of those guys asked me to autograph his ball sack with the Sharpie he had in his pocket. I think I’ve heard everything now.”
“Don’t let your father hear you say that. He’ll throw their asses out for sure.” Marybeth set a glass of water with lemon in front of her. “And you can’t paint all men with the same brush, Nickles. That’s not fair.”
Marybeth had been the head bartender at Tapestries for a hundred years or more. Her long hair had gone pewter, the color of a Pennsylvania winter sky. She resembled a weathered old sea captain, but there was a lot going on in Marybeth’s head. She kept the bar organized and spotless and didn’t take shit from anyone. Nicks thought of her as an extra grandmother.
Pip, dressed head-to-toe in black leather, draped herself across the stool next to Nicks. Marybeth set another glass of water up on the bar for her.
“Aren’t you hot in all that leather?” Marybeth asked.
“No, not really. I like the way it feels when I play.” Pip pushed at the lemon floating at the top. “How do we sound?”
“Loud. I think I might be too old for this shit.” Marybeth moved to the end of the bar to deal with someone waving money at her.
Pip leaned over to whisper in Nicks’s ear. “Did you see Stone Jensen out there? He gives me the creeps the way he looks at you.”
Suddenly feeling vulnerable, Nicks used the mirror behind the bar to search the crowd at her back. ”I wish I could think of a reason to have my dad throw his ass out of here, but he never does anything wrong. All he does is stand and stare.”
“I saw you give him the finger. Bet that felt awesome.”
“Not really. I wish he’d just go away.”
Stone was proving to be a pain in her ass. He was in her space, disturbing the peace. He showed up everywhere they played, those large, dark eyes watching from the shadows. Just as often, he stood up front where she could see him. Smug and dark and beautiful.
It pissed Nicks off royally that she found herself looking for him in the crowd. Was that messed up or what? Especially after the things that dickhead had said about her. Guitar-playing pussy. Ha! Really? She snorted and shook her head, staring down at the wet circle spreading across the cocktail napkin in front of her. Screw him and the horse he rode in on.
“Where’s Charm?” Nicks asked Pip.
Pip turned and scanned the crowd. “Who knows? She must be out in the lobby cooling off. I don’t see her.” The wiry drummer turned back with a smile. “You’ve got quite the fan club standing behind you, Nicks.”
“They’re not my fan club. We’re a team, remember?”
“No one has ever asked me to sign their scrotum.” Pip snickered. “There are about seven guys standing directly behind you, boring a hole in your back with their eyes. Maybe if you talked to some of them once in a while? They do the craziest shit to get your attention.”
“Jesus Christ.” Sometimes the attention bordered on stalking. Nicks wondered if she should quit playing and get a normal job somewhere. She totally thought she’d make awesome donuts or be a great waitress. Not here though. “Do you see Stone anywhere? I gotta pee.”
Pip did a stealth half-turn. “Looks like it’s all clear. Maybe he left.”
“We can only hope.” Nicks slid off the stool, acknowledging the crowd of men at her back with a nod. They parted to allow her through then trailed along behind her.
This was ridiculous. She turned, crossing her arms in front of her. “On my way to the ladies’ room, guys. Don’t think you’re allowed in there.”
“Let me help you, honey.” The guy who’d said it was tall, covered with tattoos, and pissing-down-his-leg drunk.
Nicks shook her head like a dog expelling water from its fur. “No thanks.” She ran into the lobby and through the door of the restroom.
It was only after she’d locked herself in that she felt like she could breathe. She leaned back against the door and slid to the floor, running a hand through her hair.
Why do men always have to disassemble a woman into her respective body parts? Especially if they were smart or talented. She wanted them to appreciate her for being an excellent guitar player, not because she was fuckable.
You’re too jaded, Nicks. You’ve been playing in this bar too long.
You can’t paint them all with the same brush, Marybeth had said. Didn’t seem like it. Or was she just seeing the worst Pittsburgh had to offer when they played at Tapestries?
It didn’t matter. Her guitar was her life. She lived to be onstage. She didn’t feel stupid or awkward when she was up there. If it meant staring down at two dozen men with their tongues hanging out, so be it. If it meant staring into Stone Jensen’s freaking arrogant eyes, that was the price she’d pay. She’d never stop rockin’.
Someone pounded on the door, pulling her from her thoughts. “Nicks, you in there?” It was Charm.
“Yeah.” And I don’t want to come out.
“Hurry the hell up. We need to get back onstage.”
“Yeah. Let me pee, and I’ll be right there.”
She got to her feet and went into a stall, though she sat down on the commode fully clothed and dropped her face into her hands.
God, am I burnt out at eighteen? Maybe I need a break from all this.
Force of habit caused Nicks to stick her head out of the restroom door before she emerged. There was no one in the lobby that she could see. She took a deep breath and headed toward the archway into the dining room and stage area.
He stepped in front of her so abruptly that she collided with him. Shocked, she looked up into Stone Jensen’s face.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“To talk. Please.”
“Oh, really? Did you think I’d roll out the red carpet for you just because you said please? If so, you’re a bigger douchebag than I thought.” She planted her hands on her hips. “You’ve said enough, asshole. Enough that I have no desire to talk to you at all. Ever.” She started to go around him. He gently took ahold of her upper left arm.
Unbelievable! He was touching her! “Get your fucking hands off me, or I’ll put a shoe in your nuts.”
“Please... listen to me. I’m sorry for what I said...really sorry...”
“You’re sorry, all right. You’re exactly like all the other dickheads out there. You only see these,” Nicks gripped a full breast in each hand, “but I want you to hear what I do with these.” She held her hands up in front his face. “Come
and talk to me when you can respect me as an equal.”
Nicks stalked back to the stage, so mad she could barely breathe. It felt good to get in his face like that. She grinned to herself. She did her best playing when she was pissed.
Stone couldn’t stop shaking as he turned to watch Nicks storm away. Jesus Christ, she was even more beautiful up close than she was on the stage.
He threw back the shot of whiskey he’d been holding. It burnt the whole way down to his stomach.
I do respect you as an equal. More than an equal. I was an idiot to say those things about you.
Her anger excited him. God, she was breathtaking. A little freaking hurricane in spandex.
And Stone Jensen liked a challenge.
CHAPTER THREE
Nicks hit the hardwood landing at the foot of the stairs and came to a halt. Mornings were always a special hell. All four of her siblings were at the Sorenson breakfast table, babbling like a bunch of drunken monkeys.
Reese, nearly fifteen, was holding them all in thrall with his computer hacking skills.
“Don’t be so smug, Lindsay. I could know your email password in five seconds flat using the program I wrote.” She heard Reese snap his fingers.
“Oh, big deal, Einstein. Anybody that read my email would die of boredom,” Lindsay, age thirteen, retorted.
“Not a good idea, Reese. You’d probably puke for days if you saw all the Justin Bieber pictures Lindsay and her friends pass around.” T.J.—Tage John, Jr., age seven—made the appropriate choking noises to go along with his statement. “He looks like a girly man.”
Nicks snickered. The “Hans and Franz” impression was pretty damned good.
“Shut up, T.J.! You just don’t know talent when you see it,” said Aimee, age eleven.
“None of you little snotbuckets would know talent if it bit you in the ass,” Nicks muttered under her breath as she walked into the kitchen.
Her mother stood at the stove scrambling eggs, oblivious to the drama going on at the table. Nicks wished she could tune them out like that.
Her brothers and sisters were all blond-haired, blue-eyed overachievers. Every one of them was a contrast to her muted gold and brown tones and dubious academic history.
Reese was a computer genius, destined for great things. Or prison, depending on whether he chose to use his skills for good or evil. Lindsay was a perky snot of a cheerleader, which automatically made her the enemy. Aimee, with her tortoiseshell glasses sitting low on her nose, would surely discover a cure for cancer. Her grades were so spectacular she’d already been allowed to skip a grade ahead.
Her gaze fell on T.J. Yeah, she liked T.J. He had a wicked sense of humor and a rebellious streak. He showed promise.
Not a musician in the bunch.
“How the hell am I even related to any of you?” Nicks shook her head. They stopped squabbling and stared at her.
“Nicks! Watch your language!” Her mother half turned, brow furrowed.
“Good morning to you too, Mom. Didn’t you hear these little shits fighting? You approve of Reese writing programs to hack passwords?” Nicks slumped into a chair beside T.J. “I’ll have to work on my surprised face for when the FBI lands on our doorstep.” She looked at her youngest brother, crossed her eyes, and formed her mouth into a big, round O. T.J. laughed, spewing bits of egg out onto his lower lip.
Her mother turned, one hand on her hip holding the spatula in a death grip. It was the signal to shut up…or else.
Lindsay narrowed her eyes at Nicks. “Ooooh. Someone’s undies are in a bunch.”
Nicks turned a pointed gaze to Lindsay as she helped herself to several slices of bacon. “How’d you like to wake up some morning with your pom-poms glued over your eyes?”
T.J. howled with laughter. “That would be so awesome!” Nicks high-fived him.
Her mother cleared her throat. “Please be quiet. And finish up so you don’t miss the bus. I want to be alone when I have my nervous breakdown.” Her mother waved the spatula toward the archway. “Go!”
All four of them lit for the stairs like horses out of a starting gate.
Nicks laughed. The Sorenson house was chaos, but her mother always used humor to deal. You had to like that in a mom. So many of them drank or popped pills to stay sane.
“You shouldn’t pick at them like that.” Chelsea scooped the rest of the eggs onto a plate and set it in front of Nicks then took a seat at the table.
“I don’t understand where the gene pool went stagnant. You started out with me,” Nicks placed an index finger in the middle of her forehead, “and ended up with them. Fail, Mom. Epic fail.”
Something dark and raw rippled across the older woman’s face, so intense that Nicks missed her mouth with the forkful of eggs she’d lifted. Chelsea exhaled, a long, slow hiss of air, and stared at her hands. The air in the sunny kitchen suddenly seemed frosty.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t mean to be a bitch. I just don’t want to go to school today.” Nicks tried again with the eggs, finally getting some into her mouth.
“They look up to you, you know. They think a lot of their big sister.”
“I know. I’ll take them all out for ice cream this weekend. Okay?”
The kitchen seemed to warm up a bit. “Okay. If you don’t hurry, you’re going to miss the bus.”
Missing the bus was the whole point of getting up late this morning. “I’m not riding the bus. I’m taking my car.”
Her mother opened her mouth to speak. Nicks cut her off.
“Please, Mom. Don’t ask me to give those noise boxes a ride to school. I want to be by myself for the time it takes me to get to that shit hole.”
“I get it. I understand.” Her mother rose and walked to the sink. Nicks followed her with her gaze.
Chelsea seemed to be sniffling as she loaded the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher.
What the hell…? Alarm bells went off in Nicks’s head. Was she crying?
Her mother almost never cried.
Chelsea managed to keep it together until Nicks left. Holding the sheer curtain back from the window, she watched her daughter’s red Chevy Cobalt back down the driveway. When she saw her brake at the stop sign at the end of the street, she made a cup of tea and sat at the black granite island in the middle of the kitchen.
She wrapped both hands around the mug and, for the first time in a long time, let tears fall for Asher Pratt, the man she’d loved and lost.
He was a player and an asshole and the first guy to completely steal her heart. No, he was more than that. He’d been the one she judged all other men against for a long time—at least until she met Tage.
There were no superlatives in the English language to describe how much she’d loved Asher. He evoked thoughts of babies and picket fences and happy lives. Fool! She stared at the cream swirls in her tea, wondering how she could’ve ever been so dumb. She hadn’t even been on Asher’s top-ten to-do list.
She was willing to overlook that he was secretive, non-committal, and evasive. For a while, she’d chosen to ignore the signs of infidelity. It was only after one of his drunken backseat liaisons pulled a knife on her in the bathroom of a local bar that she realized loving him was dangerous.
Trying to talk to him about it had been pointless. They’d had one of their typical fights then, with her raging in his face, and he with arms crossed, avoiding her gaze, silent as stone.
Asher dumped her that very night and disappeared off the face of the earth. She gathered up what was left of her self-esteem and tried to move on. It was three steps forward, two steps back for the longest time, but with her best friend Willow’s help, she’d pulled through.
And then the unthinkable had happened. Hurricane Asher roared back into her life in the freakiest way possible. She’d nearly frozen to death one Saturday night at Tapestries when the handle on the freezer door broke, trapping her inside. Thankfully, he and his band had been playing there that night.
Marybeth told her later
they knew something was wrong when they couldn’t find her. The whole bar had searched frantically, even the patrons. Though she didn’t know whose idea it was to check the walk-in freezer, Asher had been the one who’d taken her to the hospital in his car, almost certainly saving her life.
That night served as the demarcation between a boring yet happy before and a confused, heartbroken after. Asher had begged her not to die as he ran to his car with her limp body in his arms. The panic in his voice had been real that night, one of the few times he’d actually shown emotion.
The dramatic rescue seemed to spark something inside him. He’d pulled out all the stops to rekindle their relationship, though she’d fought tooth and nail to resist him. It’d worked up to a point. She could get her mouth to say no, but the rest of her wanted to shout “Yes!” from the rooftops where he was concerned.
They’d been able to come to a truce of sorts, establishing a friendship that she valued. And then he’d disappeared again.
To say her life was chaos after Asher vanished was an understatement. She’d found out about Nicks then, a gift from the one and only time she’d given in and slept with him. Tage Sorenson had been the epitome of the knight in shining armor, swooping in to save the day with an offer of marriage, wanting to be a father to a child who wasn’t even his. It was an offer she would’ve accepted even if she hadn’t been pregnant. She loved her husband with all her heart.
Even now—nearly nineteen years later—the choices Asher made seemed pointless. He hadn’t mentioned he had a health issue. She had no idea he was that sick.
He never explained why he thought running away from everyone who loved him was a better option than fighting the type-one diabetes that finally killed him. They didn’t talk about it even as he lay dying. Her biggest regret was that she hadn’t tracked him down after he dangled a female co-worker under her nose and quit Tapestries. She might have saved him then.
There was no peace because there were no answers. He was one of those people you wouldn’t understand if you had the wisdom of the ages and a million years to ponder it. Willow said once he deserved what he got for being so dumb. Chelsea couldn’t find it in her heart to be that harsh with him. She knew he’d loved her in his own strange way.