by Bec Linder
They went down the hall to Andrew’s room. The hotel had already sent people up to begin cleaning, and they were at work in the bathroom, two small and quiet men who turned to look at O’Connor as he came in. Their expressions were blank, almost bored. They had seen this before, maybe, or worse.
It was pretty bad. The drapes had been torn from their tracks, and one of the beds had been attacked with something sharp—a knife, a pair of scissors—and feathers and mattress batting were strewn over the foot of the bed and onto the floor. The sheets of the other bed were caked with dried vomit. A bottle of vodka lay on its side on the floor, the carpet beneath it damp with liquor.
Andrew was sitting on a chair in the corner, his head cradled in his hands. James stood near him, lecturing him in a low, angry voice. Neither of them looked up as O’Connor and Rushani entered the room.
O’Connor wondered why he was even there. What was he going to contribute to the situation? More heaping scorn piled upon Andrew’s guilty head? Andrew knew what he had done; James wasn’t going to wring out the confession he wanted, or a promise that Andrew wouldn’t do it again. Of course he would do it again. They all knew that. It was a farce, a pointless repetition of their well-worn roles: Andrew the penitent, James the disappointed father.
He turned to Rushani. “Where’s Isaac?”
“I had security escort him out,” she said. “He’s not a problem anymore.”
Rushani, O’Connor thought, would have made an excellent mob boss. “Okay,” he said. “James!”
James turned to look at him, frowning. “What?”
“There’s no point,” O’Connor said. “Come on. Leave him. Let’s go have a drink.”
He watched James mull it over, his face working through a series of expressions. James suffered from the understandable but misguided idea that he could somehow talk Andrew out of being such an asshole, like sheer logical force would show Andrew the error of his ways and the path back to truth and light. But there was no point. James needed a beer, and a new hobby.
“Okay,” James said at last. “You’re right.”
“You’re going to leave him with me?” Rushani asked.
O’Connor looked at her and shrugged. “Come with us. You don’t need to babysit him, Rushani. He knows when bus call is.”
Andrew, who hadn’t spoken a word the whole time, finally roused himself from his catatonia and whimpered, “Don’t leave me.”
O’Connor rolled his eyes. Rushani instantly rushed to Andrew’s side and knelt on the floor beside him, one hand on his arm, her face turned up to him, pleading, eternally hopeful.
Andrew turned his head slightly so that Rushani couldn’t see his face, and shot a look at O’Connor so full of smug victory that O’Connor experienced a vivid, three-dimensional fantasy of crossing the room and breaking Andrew’s nose.
James, who had seen it too, shook his head in disgust and turned away. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’re right. He isn’t worth it.”
O’Connor was still watching Andrew, and he saw that comment hit home. Andrew flinched, the smug look wiped from his face. He drew in on himself, curling closer to Rushani and the comfort she offered.
O’Connor snorted. Andrew didn’t deserve her.
They ran into Leah on their way to the hotel bar. She was carrying a clear plastic bag full of laundry. “Hey!” she said, cheerful, oblivious.
It took a moment for O’Connor to reset his brain from “furious about Andrew” to “chatting with Leah,” and in that time James said, “We’re going for a drink at the bar.”
“Sure,” she said, glancing at O’Connor, a look that asked if she was invited.
O’Connor licked his dry lips. “Andrew trashed his hotel room,” he said, and then was surprised at himself; he hadn’t mean to say that.
“Oh,” Leah said, with that uncertain look again.
“What a mess,” James said, drawing one hand across his face. “Fuck.”
“Well, it sounds like he’s living up to his full rock star potential,” Leah said.
O’Connor was suddenly, fiercely annoyed by her relentless optimism about Andrew, the way she acted like Andrew was just a quirky guy who liked to party a little. “He’s self-destructing,” he said flatly. “You didn’t know him before.”
Leah drew back minutely, stung by his tone, and guilt pricked at him. “Well. That’s true.”
“Go see for yourself,” O’Connor said. “He’s in room 511.”
Leah stared at him, obviously not sure if he was serious.
James said, “O’Connor…”
O’Connor ignored the warning in his tone. “Go see. We’ll be at the bar.”
They were halfway through their first round when Leah came into the bar and hoisted herself onto the stool beside O’Connor. Her expression told him everything he needed to know, but he asked anyway: “So?”
“He was crying,” Leah said in a dull voice. “He was sitting there with Rushani and crying.”
“Christ,” James said, and that one word contained all of the uncertainty and anxiety and misery of the last three months, all of the pointless band meetings, all of the late-night worrying. There was no stopping it now; Andrew was in crisis, and none of them knew what to do, and it would keep getting worse and worse until it ended. However it ended. In fire or ice.
O’Connor drained his beer and leaned across the bar to order another.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rushani loaded Andrew onto the bus minutes before they were scheduled to leave, and hustled him directly to his bunk and drew the curtain. Leah caught only a glimpse of him as he stumbled through the front lounge, tripping over his own feet: his greasy hair, his pale face. He looked like death. He looked half alive.
Rushani returned to the front, where they were all pretending to be very fascinated by the home renovation show James was watching, and took a beer from the mini-fridge. There was no room left on the couches, so she leaned against the counter. She didn’t open her beer. Her shoulders slumped, and she closed her eyes.
James stood up, crossed the room, and wrapped his hands around Rushani’s upper arms and gently guided her to the couch. She sat there, mute and staring, while James opened her beer. Then she took a sip and seemed to come back to life, looking around at all of them and blinking.
“Is everything okay?” Marina asked, and then rolled her eyes at her own question, because it was pretty obvious that things weren’t okay.
“He’s sleeping now,” Rushani said. “We’ll see how things look in the morning.”
“Bleak,” O’Connor said, and Leah shot him a look. He wasn’t helping.
“No doubt,” Rushani said. “But what can we do? Short of canceling the tour—”
“That isn’t an option,” James said.
“No, I agree,” Rushani said. “So we’ll just have to keep him going somehow.”
That killed the mood. Nobody had anything to say after that. Rinna and Marina drifted off to their bunks, and Leah went to the back to call Luka. They didn’t talk long—he was at an after-party for one of his bands—but it was good to hear his voice, and to be reminded that there was more to life than the tour’s weird little bubble, by turns thrilling and dismal.
After they hung up, she turned on the television and stared blankly at the screen, not even bothering to change the channel from whatever the last person in the back lounge had been watching. A man with strange facial hair talked about how to read your cat’s energy fields. Good enough.
After a few minutes of that, someone tapped on the door, and then O’Connor came in, holding two beer bottles. He wordlessly offered one to Leah, and then sat beside her on the couch and joined her in staring at the television. He was close enough to touch, and Leah gave into temptation and rested her head against his shoulder.
He wrapped his arm around her and toyed with the loose ends of her hair. “Long day, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said. It was so good to be held. She felt safe and protected, which o
f course was an illusion—she was a grown woman, and it wasn’t O’Connor’s job to shield her from the hard parts of life. But they could hold each other up, and offer comfort, and that was even better. “I’m really worried about Andrew.”
He sighed. “Me too. But you shouldn’t worry. We aren’t paying you enough for that.”
“I can’t help it,” she said. “The whole situation is so—” She broke off, and swallowed. She didn’t want to talk about this, but she felt like she needed to. “It’s just that he really reminds me of Corey, before he, uh.”
“Corey was your lead singer,” O’Connor said, not quite a question. He must have done some reading.
“Yeah,” she said, and swallowed again. There was a lump in her throat that was making it difficult to speak. “He was—he killed himself.”
“Oh, Leah,” O’Connor breathed. He pulled her closer and pressed his lips to the top of her head.
She wasn’t going to start crying, she wasn’t, but then of course she started crying anyway, and O’Connor held her in his arms and rocked her and made soothing noises until she calmed down. She was embarrassed; she drew away and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt.
“Hey,” O’Connor said. “Come back here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling. “I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Seems like you needed to,” he said, and drew her close again, his arm around her waist, her head resting against his shoulder. They were quiet for a few minutes. Leah drank her beer. Then O’Connor said, “Tell me about it.”
So she did: the whole story of that awful year, with the fighting and the drinking, the drugs, Corey’s increasing irritability, the way he would stay awake for days on end and then sleep so deeply they could barely wake him up for shows, the tense days and nights in the van, the lies, the misdirections, the bitter end. The way Bryce had finally dragged Corey to a doctor, who prescribed pills that Corey refused to take, until the last day, when he took them all, all of them at once. And Leah had been the one to find him, sleeping in the back seat of the van, except it turned out he wasn’t sleeping at all.
“He was bipolar,” she said. “We didn’t know. We should have—but we didn’t know anything. He was my best friend, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t help him.”
O’Connor kissed the top of her head again. “When did all of this happen?”
“About six months ago,” she said. She wiped her eyes on her T-shirt again. “A little more than six months.”
“That’s a hard thing,” he said. “A hard thing for anyone to go through.”
She let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Anyway, so you see why I’m concerned about Andrew. I thought he was just acting out, probably a little depressed, and the rest of you were overreacting, but when I saw him today…”
“Right,” O’Connor said. “I get it. I probably wouldn’t be too concerned, either, if I hadn’t watched his personality completely change over the last few months.”
“What was he like before?” Leah asked. She thought maybe she had seen a glimpse of it, that morning at breakfast when he let her read his notebook.
O’Connor shrugged. “Pretty much the opposite of how he is now, in every way. I mean, you’ve seen how he is with the fans—he used to be like that with everyone. Kind, empathetic, generous. A really great guy.”
“He needs help,” Leah said. It wasn’t her place—wasn’t her band, wasn’t any of her business—but she had to say it.
“I know,” O’Connor said. “But what can we do? He won’t see anyone willingly, and I don’t know how we could force him. As long as he’s going on stage every night, the label doesn’t care. The show must go on.”
* * *
O’Connor woke in the middle of the night and stumbled to the bathroom. He had been dreaming of his parents’ barn, of lying in the hayloft on a summer afternoon and watching dust motes glide silently through the air. A warm, peaceful dream.
On his way back to his bunk, he noticed a warm glow from Leah’s bunk across the aisle. She was awake in there.
He hovered at the head of her bunk, feeling torn. The correct, responsible thing to do would be to return to his own bunk and go back to sleep. But the thought of Leah curled up in a nest of blankets, warm and sleepy, had a powerful draw. He could just say hello, or see if she wanted to sit with him in the front lounge and watch a movie—
Leah’s curtain twitched back a few inches, and she peered at him through the narrow gap.
Busted. He smiled at her, trying to look suave, and not like he was creepily lurking by her bunk in the middle of the night.
“You’re a creep,” Leah whispered, and then she pulled the curtain back a little further and jerked her head at him, inviting him in.
He didn’t need to be asked twice. He clambered into her bunk and drew the curtain shut behind him.
It was a tight fit for two fully grown and tall people, but they made it work, with Leah wedged against the wall and their feet tangled together. The small space behind the curtain was warm from Leah’s body heat and smelled faintly of her shampoo. In the dim illumination from her phone, he could see that she had kicked her sheets to the foot of the mattress, and she wasn’t wearing anything but a tank top and a pair of panties.
God. This was a terrible idea.
O’Connor lay on his side, pressed close against her, and moved his head so that he could whisper into her ear. “I saw your light on.”
“Texting my brother,” she whispered back. “And listening to music.” She offered him an earbud.
He popped it in and closed his eyes to focus on what she was listening to. Weird noise rock, it sounded like, high and discordant. He made a face and yanked the earbud out again.
She laughed softly and mouthed, “No taste.”
They could debate the relative merits of noise rock some other time. He didn’t want to talk. She was warm and close, and half-dressed, and he’d been thinking about her every second of every day since their all-too-brief encounter at the bar. He didn’t know how to leave her alone.
He took her phone from her hands and reached over her head to tuck it between the wall and the corner of the mattress, safely out of the way.
He felt her inhalation more than he heard it, her ribcage expanding where it was pressed against his chest.
“How quiet can you be?” he whispered.
She breathed his name.
Their bandmates were sleeping inches away. Rinna had the bunk directly above Leah, and she was a light sleeper; she would wake if they made any noise, or even shifted around too much. This was the worst idea he had ever had. But he was tired of waiting. And the way Leah was watching him, mouth soft and open, eyes wide, made his blood run hot as fire through his veins.
The light from her phone shut off, and in the dark they lay together, breathing against each other’s mouths. O’Connor deliberately shifted his weight to press his hard-on against Leah’s hip. He wanted her to know exactly what she was in for.
“We can’t,” she whispered.
“Tell me to leave,” he whispered back, knowing that she wouldn’t, that she wanted this just as badly as he did.
She whispered his name again.
He took it as the invitation it was, and pushed up onto his elbow so that he could bend down and kiss her. This was nothing like the gentle kisses they had traded before; O’Connor was done with being gentle, with trying to rein himself in. He took a firm handful of her hair, tipped her head backward, and claimed her.
She made a soft noise and went limp beneath him, her face tilted up, and the fire in his veins went radioactive, hotter than any man could survive. He broke away from her mouth and kissed her ear, her neck, feeling her shiver against him, but she kept quiet. When he kissed her mouth again, he felt the indentation her teeth had left in her lower lip, from biting down to silence herself.
The darkness in the bus was a solid thing, a thick fabric pressing against his eyes. He wanted to see her, but th
ere was no hope of that, not now. But he could feel. He slid his right hand beneath the hem of her tank top and splayed his fingers across the soft skin of her belly. She twitched beneath him, her muscles jumping at the contact. He slid his hand upward, over the shallow dip just beneath her ribs, and the flaring cage of her ribs themselves, and then up to the soft curve of the underside of her breast. He stopped there and moved sideways, tracing the outer curve of her breast all the way to the sensitive hollow beneath her arm.
She was shivering steadily now, her body taut with the effort to stay silent. He brushed his lips against her ear and whispered, “You’re being a very good girl.”
She whimpered.
He grinned fiercely, hidden by the darkness. He loved the power that came with sex: making a woman lose control of her senses, making her world narrow down to the points of contact where his fingers touched her body. And Leah was the perfect partner in this ancient dance, responsive and practiced, comfortable enough with herself to accept what he gave her and ask for more.
And she did ask, with every arch of her back, every quiver of her limbs. It was more than he could have hoped for. “You’re perfect,” he whispered, and she writhed again, tight as a guitar string.
He moved his hand, then, to slide over the peak of her breast, her pointed nipple grazing his palm. Her breasts were soft and warm and just the right size, a perfect handful for squeezing. She drew in a noiseless gasp of air; he felt her chest move as her lungs expanded. He could tell how difficult it was for her to keep quiet, could feel the strain in every muscle and tendon, and he couldn’t wait to get her in a hotel room where she could be as loud as she liked.
He lingered there for a while, stroking her nipples and listening to her shallow, ragged breathing. His aching cock demanded immediate action, but he knew he wouldn’t be getting off tonight, unless he went and jerked off in the bathroom. The bunk was too small, with too much potential for a mess, and not enough room for maneuvering. So he contented himself with focusing on driving Leah wild.
He bent down and kissed her neck and her collarbones, the warm flat skin of her upper chest, and then he worked her tank top upward to expose her breasts, and finally got his mouth on her hard little nipples. She arched against him and grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and tugged.