Falling Into Us

by Selene Chardou

  Kaz couldn’t believe Talia was talking about his best friend but how would he know? He didn’t see him much anymore now that Syd had become his world. They spent most of their free time together because he knew once they got to Europe, he probably wouldn’t see much of her. She and the girls would be too excited and want to hang out again, reminiscing about their gap year at nineteen.

  Winter’s Regret had finally finished their first officially awful performance since they’d started the tour and what a disaster it’d been. While they walked dejectedly back stage to the large room filled with food and refreshments, Kaz sought Syd out as she and Damira walked in moments later.

  He embraced her and she in turn, held on to his waist and inhaled his masculine scent.

  “How was it?” he inquired, already knowing what her answer was going to be.

  “What do you want? The photo version or the rolling stream version Damira has?” she questioned rhetorically. “It was quite obvious Seth wasn’t sober and he stumbled around a lot and talked a lot and didn’t sing a third of the songs they normally sing. They are going to be shredded by the journalists. I can’t imagine their performance not being on the cover of the New York Post tomorrow morning. It was an unmitigated disaster.”

  “Yeah, we heard,” Grant murmured. “That puts even more pressure on us because if any of us fuck up then I don’t want to be around for tomorrow’s show.”

  Kaz kissed Syd’s forehead before he let her go and walked over to the Seth. The rock singer already looked depressed, bitter and angry.

  “What the hell do you want?” he inquired after he’d poured himself a hefty amount of Jack Daniels.

  “Just don’t get too far gone. After we finish our set, you and I have to talk.”

  Seth’s green-gray eyes glared icily at no one in particular. His pupils were huge and almost drowned out his irises. “Yeah, yeah. First you steal one of my band members and now I am supposed to be nice to you?”

  “Hey, I thought I was doing you a favor especially since you never viewed Talia as more than just a piece of ass so don’t go getting all high and mighty on me.”

  Will walked over and separated them. “Come on, Kaz, we have a concert to do. This can wait.”

  Kaz looked back at Seth before he left with the rest of his band members. The crowd at Madison Square Garden were going crazy. They shouted out for Scarlet Fever and Kaz was one of the first to enter the stage. The audience—especially the women—erupted in claps, screams and whistles.

  “New York City, are you ready to get your ass rocked after the performance you just witnessed? We promise not to disappoint!” Kaz exclaimed into the mic as Will, Grant and Jaden began to play the beginning of the “Black Hearted Bitch”.

  The ironic part of the situation was to Kaz, the concert turned out perfectly ordinary. It wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly wasn’t the best concert they’d performed on the tour.

  The crowd ceased to care and by the time they finished, they had the whole audience eating out of their hands. Talia joined them on the stage and they performed “Goodbye, Lover” before she embraced Kaz at the end of their duet.

  “I should tell y’all that Kaz spoils me because he always lets me perform a girlie song but he always helps me sing it. New York, how do you feel about a little Janis Joplin?”

  The crowd went wild and she smiled as Will, Grant and Jaden started the opening riffs for “Piece of My Heart”. Jaden had grown up listening to Hendrix, Joplin, Led Zeppelin, The Doors et al so he knew all the classics.

  Talia’s voice was strong and she encouraged Kaz to sing along with her. The crowd was ecstatic and Winter’s Regret’s performance was almost forgotten.

  “I have one more itty, bitty, tiny request, New York. As you know, I am a member of Winter’s Regret and one of my favorite songs by our group is ‘Drowning in Desire’. If you let me sing it to you, I promise I won’t fuck it up.”

  The audience went wild. “Drowning in Desire” had been a number one hit for Winter’s Regret. The guys knew it and this time, Kaz picked up his electric guitar as he let her have the floor.

  Not only did she do a terrific job of performing the song, the crowd was begging her to sing other botched Winter’s Regret tunes. She walked over to Kaz as the audience went wild.

  “What should I do? I mean, you and the guys are exhausted—hell, I should be exhausted but I am pumped up on adrenaline.”

  Kaz stared into her gorgeous pale green eyes. “Sing a few Winter’s Regret tunes. At least the hits and maybe the newspapers will go easy on the band tomorrow.”

  Talia bit her lower lip. “All right. Only four more songs then, okay?”

  Four songs turned into eight and Talia had redeemed Winter’s Regret awful performance yet the audience wasn’t done with her.

  “Fine!” she exclaimed playfully. “I’m gonna clear you all out like only a South Boston chick can. Y’all know who Katy Perry is, right? Well, my favorite song by her is ‘Wide Awake’ is and I’m gonna sing it Acapella because Scarlet Fever are exhausted and you all should be at home in bed!”

  Talia performed the song and the audience went silent at first but as she got to the chorus, the first lighters started to appear and before she could get to the chorus a second time, the whole auditorium was lit with Zippo lighters.

  On the last note, she dropped her arm and breathed deeply.

  The crowd clapped, cheered and whistled as she smiled and said “Thank you! New York, you are the most accepting and one of the coolest crowds we have performed for. Good night and we love you!”

  Kaz slid an arm around her waist and walked her off the stage. “I can’t believe you have been hiding a voice like that. No wonder Seth is seething. Do you have any idea how difficult that was and you did it like it was nothing.”

  “Hey, when Seth fucks up the way he did tonight, he risks not only Winter’s Regret reputation but mine too. It isn’t fair because Kris, Niko and Linx aren’t on drugs and neither am I. He stumbled around the stage like a fucking drunk while the rest of the band did their best to save face but it’s kind of hard to cover for a lead singer who is so coked out of his eyeballs, he can’t see straight.”

  They stopped walking and he faced her with sincere aquamarine eyes that were intense and focused. “Listen to me, I am gonna talk some sense into Seth even if I have to kick his ass and there will be no repeat performance of tonight. I promise you.”

  A lone tear fell from her left eye before she angrily wiped it away. “Okay. I’ll let you handle it because if I talk to him, I’ll murder him with my bare hands.”

  Kaz zeroed in on Seth the moment they arrived backstage. He was knee deep in two cheap, peroxide-blonde groupie skanks who wore only the skimpiest of clothing.

  “Seth, we need to talk right now.” He grabbed his pack of Marlboros since they were going outside and the lead singer disengaged himself from his down-trodden “eye-candy” and followed Kaz outside.

  They found themselves in an empty part of the parking lot where there wasn’t anyone loitering about to hear their conversation.

  “Listen, Kaz, I know I fucked up tonight and Talia ended up saving my ass but the coke I took had too much speed and then I snorted some Oxy to even out the high but it made me sluggish and forgetful—”

  “I don’t want to hear your excuses. You don’t think the executives at Introspect Records aren’t aware of your ‘little’ problem? They will not only terminate Winter’s Regret contract but Dominic Stenfeldt will personally end you himself and that is not a man you want to cross. He doesn’t like you very much anyway so he would make sure no decent record company would ever touch you again. You’ll ruin not only your career but Niko, Linx and Kris’ careers too.”

  Kaz lit a Marlboro and dragged hungrily before he exhaled in Seth’s face. “I’m a fair man and I would make it clear Dominic knew the rest of the band was clean. He would probably take the Winter’s Regret trademark from you and Talia would be th
e first person he would ask if she wanted to take up the mantle as the new lead singer and I would back her all the way because she is way too good to be playing second fiddle to your dumb ass.”

  Seth’s face went from a healthy peaches and cream to sickly alabaster within the space of a few moments. “Listen, I can kick it but I have to slowly wean myself off the Oxy…it’s just as bad as heroin—”

  “I don’t give a shit what you do but if you have a performance like tonight then I will personally make sure you are fired from Winter’s Regret. They shouldn’t be dragged down for having a lousy lead singer who is weak and needs drugs to get through the day.”

  “What would you know, rich boy?” Seth wondered with cold gray-green eyes. “You don’t know a fucking thing about me. Perhaps you were roughed up a bit in your posh all-boys boarding school but your life was pure luxury compared to mine. You think you have the right to fucking judge me? I dealt with beatings at the hands of my old man and watched him do the same to my brother and my mother. Have you ever had to give your old man a blow job? Or have him violate you because if he doesn’t do it to you then your brother is next and you would rather he hurt you than anyone else in your family?”

  Kaz looked away and continued to smoke his cigarette in silence.

  It wasn’t his father who violated him and he wasn’t violated at school but by his older brother and that was just as traumatic. The cycle of sexual abuse in their family was generations long, starting with a pedophile uncle who had abused his older brother, Randall, when he was only eight years old. He and Randall attended the same boarding school and by the time he was twelve, he was his brother’s little bitch boy.

  He didn’t want to think about what his highly respectable brother had done to him. The man was now a U.S. Senator for the state of Connecticut where he and his uptight wife lived. They had three sons. He doubted he used them for his sexual proclivities and probably had a stable of rent boys who wouldn’t dare tell, not if they wanted to live.

  “Listen, just because I come from a wealthy background doesn’t mean I don’t know suffering so don’t start with me. Get yourself cleaned up and make sure this doesn’t happen again. Are we clear?”

  “Yeah, yeah—”

  “Don’t fuckin’ ‘yeah, yeah’ me—I know a blow off when I hear one. Just. Do. It. Period. You feelin’ me?”

  Seth glared at Kaz with arctic gray-green eyes. “Yes, I’m fuckin’ feelin’ you.”

  “Good, now get back to your skanky, washed-up groupie whores.”

  Kaz watched as Seth walked back inside though he didn’t follow him inside right away. He smoked his cigarette in silence and tried to block out the images of his years of sexual abuse. He wasn’t special and it didn’t make him a victim. It happened every day to kids and at least he could afford treatment to work his shit out in therapy. However, what about the people like Seth who’d rather self-medicate than do anything legitimate about the broken pieces of their lives? Or worse, what about traumatized victims who couldn’t afford treatment at all?

  He’d spent years in therapy and he knew the sexual abuse wasn’t his fault nor did it make him any less of man. However, he’d told Damira it had been his aunt who had forced him to have sex with her and she bought the story without nary a thought.

  Damira had suffered from both psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of her father so why hadn’t he told her the truth? He realized he hadn’t wanted her pity and somehow a woman sexually abusing an under-aged boy was always more acceptable to society than the other way around.

  Something innately told him Syd wouldn’t be nearly that easy to convince. He knew her and she would ask all the right questions and he’d back himself into a corner. If he ever told her about his adolescent years, he would have to be completely honest with her and that was harder than telling her he was falling in love with her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Goodbye New York, Hello Boston

  The second night at Madison Square Garden turned out much better than the first night and the photos I managed to capture were amazing. We had one more North American stop before we left for Europe and I couldn’t help the excitement I felt, knowing that soon, we would be leaving the country.

  Kaz had been acting rather strange since that first night and his talk with Seth. I could only imagine how heated it had gotten but it hadn’t come to blows.

  After the second concert, we had a very brief after party before the band loaded up on our various buses around one in the morning and started off on our trip to Boston.

  It was bittersweet for Kaz because his parents lived in Beacon Hill and were neighbors with my real father and his wife. I knew he wouldn’t visit them because he couldn’t stand his father or his step-mother. It was just another destination.

  The trip to Boston from New York City was less than a four hour drive. The moment we boarded the tour bus, I put all my equipment away and took off my clothes, replacing a pair of black skinny jeans and a periwinkle blue vicuña sweater with a pink Juicy Couture sweat suit and a white tee shirt underneath.

  I didn’t take offense when Kaz shut himself in the bathroom and didn’t come out for a long time. Instead I watched an episode of Sons of Anarchy while I enjoyed a glass of Macallan 30, my favorite alcohol beverage of choice. Unlike everyone else at the after parties, both Damira and I had to stick to mineral water or juice because we were still considered to be on the clock.

  Damira didn’t really drink; her poison had always had been chronic and the perfect evening for her was a glass of Pinot Noir and joint. I laughed because I would have never guessed she was the type but I considered it a lesson in judgment and why it was a bad thing to do especially when you didn’t know a person very well.

  Now that we spent so much time together, despite Kaz’s warnings, we’d become friends and talked to each other often. Sometimes she allowed Xander to skip tutoring lessons and we would take off, just the three of us and check out the concert arena ahead of time.

  It was a good feeling because despite having my two best friends on tour, we only saw one another after shows and texted each other a lot. I missed spending more time with them but at the same time, while Laurel and Faith were there purely for pleasure, Sasha, Damira and I were on the bands’—and by proxy, Introspect Records—dime and had to do the jobs we were paid to do.

  I stretched out and sipped from my scotch as Kaz walked out of the bathroom, looking comfortable in a pair of faded black sweat pants and a matching wife-beater. He made a beeline for the liquor cabinet and poured himself a Macallan 30 before he joined me on the sofa.

  “Oh, you started without me?” he questioned, his voice almost sounded disappointed and hurt.

  “No, I didn’t. You saw this entire episode and I fell asleep in your arms half-way through it. I wanted to catch up so when watched the next episode, I’d know what was going on,” I responded.

  Kaz nuzzled my neck. “Yes, I know. I was only joking around with you. How are you feeling tonight?”

  “Tired but I know I won’t be able to go to sleep so it’s nice we have something to watch. The weather is really changing. It’s supposed to be freezing in Boston.”

  “I heard…at least it hasn’t started to snow. That’s a small favor, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely.” I drank from my scotch and hated the stiltedness of our conversation. My nails bit into the palm of my left hand as I inquired, “What did you and Seth talk about last night? You’re different and not in a good way. Did something happen to trigger a memory you would rather forget?”

  He laughed out loud. “That is such bullshit therapist talk. Speaking of ‘triggers’, what was yours?”

  I swigged from my Macallan 30 and realized it was all gone. “The Cheesecake Factory. My mom would take me there and I would pig out just so she would assume I was okay but I always vomited the food back up and now I can’t even visit that restaurant without wanting to hurl.”

  “Thanks for telling me. I am more o
f a Gordon Biersch fan myself if we were going to do low key.”

  “Oh my God…I love Gordon Biersch. I always end up drinking too many pilsners and eating too many garlic fries.”

  There was a comfortable silence as he grabbed my empty glass and set it on the counter before he linked his hand with mine. “Listen, I need to get some shit off my chest and the television isn’t helping.”

  My heart thundered in my chest because I knew that look in his eyes and he was dead fucking serious. His blue-green irises were bright with unexpressed emotions and what ever he needed to tell me, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to express.

  I grabbed the remote control and turned off the television before I set it on the mini, art deco glass coffee table.