Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry.

  You could keep this a fling, I tell myself. Liam could be someone you have amazing sex with sometimes and it doesn’t matter what he does with his life, because that’s all the two of you have to do with each other.

  Your pasts don’t have to matter.

  But I know what it feels like to tell myself bullshit. I did it more and more every day for three years.

  “Frankie?”

  I don’t have to tell him. I don’t.

  But I do.

  “It was you the night on the bridge,” I finally whisper.

  He sits up, slowly, leans against the couch. I follow suit, sitting cross-legged in the middle of my living room, watching his face as he runs both hands through his hair. He looks away, his face unreadable.

  “When did you remember?” he finally asks.

  “When did you?”

  Liam swallows, holds my gaze like he doesn’t quite want to tell me. I wait.

  “The moment you walked into the pub,” he finally says, softly.

  It’s not what I was expecting, for some reason. I blink, a little lost in his eyes, uncertain of what to say now.

  “I thought about your face for a year,” he says, voice still soft and intense. “Everything else about that night is a blurry mess, colors and shapes and the sound of a train, except your face. I never could shake the way you looked when I told you I wished you hadn’t saved me, either, and I remembered it when I went back to rehab, and I remembered it when I moved to Shelton as a last-ditch effort to stay clean. And then one day, you walked in.”

  I draw my knees together, bend them in front of me, lean my elbows against them.

  “You look completely different,” I say, my eyes moving over his face. I can see a shadow of the man on the bridge, but I have to look closely. “You let me think we were strangers this whole time.”

  I can’t look at him. I can’t. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling, but I think I’m supposed to be upset and indignant, a woman lied to.

  “We were strangers,” he says.

  I don’t answer.

  “It’s no excuse, you’re right. The truth is I couldn’t bear to tell you,” he says. “You saw me at my lowest, Frankie, or if not my very lowest then one of the deeper valleys I’ve been in. And then you walked into the pub and didn’t realize that I was the same pathetic drunk you’d had to talk out of jumping in front of a train, I just—”

  I’m motionless, waiting.

  “—I liked the way you looked at me then,” he says, his gaze still holding mine. “I wanted to be someone new. Shake all that off, be someone you might like, and every time I thought of telling you I thought of the way you’d look at me then and I couldn’t. I should have and I couldn’t.”

  He swallows hard.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  I feel some of the tension melt in my shoulders, and suddenly I realize I was bracing myself for a fight. I was preparing to be told about why I was wrong and why I was the one who ought to be sorry.

  But that didn’t happen. Liam just apologized. For real.

  So this is what that’s like, I think.

  “I found out when I googled you,” I say, still motionless. “There was a video, from a few years ago, and I hadn’t recognized you as the same person until I saw it—”

  Liam stands suddenly, holds out his hand to me. I take it and he pulls me up, his serious green eyes boring into mine.

  “There’s a diner in Hollywood that’s open until three in the morning and has fucking amazing ice cream sundaes,” he says, his voice still soft.

  I fold my arms over my chest, stomach squeezing. This talk was going so well, and I want to fucking keep talking instead of pretending like nothing’s wrong and eating ice cream.

  “No, Liam, we need to—”

  “I was a junkie,” he says, and then squeezes his eyes shut. “No. I am a junkie, I’m an addict, an alcoholic, a degenerate, a fucking liar and an impatient arsehole.”

  He opens his eyes, looks at me like he’s coring me to the soul.

  “I’ve ruined most everything I’ve touched in my life, but I’m taking you on a date so I can explain myself,” he says. “Just the one. You can turn me down afterward, you can say you never want to see me again but let me do this one thing properly. Please, let me try to fix something. For once.”

  I swallow, sigh, and then I feel myself nodding. It’s not the first time my stupid body has betrayed me to Liam like this, so I run one hand over my hair, try to contain the frizzy mess.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “There is one more thing,” he says.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Do you mind driving?”

  The coffeeshop-slash-diner is a few blocks off the freeway, and we park in the gravel parking lot, then have to walk through the lobby of a Best Western until we’re greeted by a diner with stone façades, all covered in family photos, seemingly of different families.

  “Sit anywhere,” says a waitress with dark hair, bright red lipstick, and swooping eyeliner.

  We slide into a booth, both looking up at the wall covered in photos. Between the fashions on display and the grainy, blurry quality they all share, I think they were taken decades ago.

  “I used to come here quite a lot,” Liam says, eyes running over the photographs. “I’ve got no idea who these people are, though.”

  “When you lived here before?”

  “If I was sober enough, which I was occasionally. Not that you need to be terribly sober to visit a diner at two in the morning,” he admits.

  “Think anyone recognizes you?”

  “I hope not.”

  I raise one eyebrow, waiting for the story.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re banned from a diner.”

  “I was very rock and roll, Frankie,” he says, grinning. “There’s a certain kind of person who shouldn’t go from constantly broke to rich as Hades, and it’s me. Would you like to know how quickly you can spend a million dollars?”

  “Oh, please,” I say. “You can do that by buying an apartment in Prospect Heights.”

  “Sure, if you’d like to do it the boring way,” he says. “Or you can go on a cocaine binge, wake up in Vegas, take several handfuls of pills over the course of the next two days, at least some of which are bound to be the ecstasy you’re looking for, get drunk, get high, get drunk again, find yourself in the Ferrari dealership at three in the morning because Las Vegas doesn’t know the proper meaning of night...”

  I sit there, listening, kind of amazed at the amount of drugs that one person can apparently do. It’s not like I’m a stranger to pot or Adderall, but rock star binges are another category entirely.

  “I did crash that Ferrari while high on what I thought was just weed but turned out to have angel dust laced in it,” he says. “Someone handed it to me at a party.”

  God, I’m boring by comparison, I think. While he was doing that, I was mostly sleeping, sewing, drinking tea and watching movies in my apartment with friends...

  “Here’s some menus,” a guy with carefully coiffed black hair and thick-framed glasses says. “I’ll be right back to—”

  “Actually, we’d like a waffle brownie sundae and a chocolate milkshake,” Liam interrupts.

  The guy just blinks, like he’s baffled that someone in a diner just put in an order.

  “And two waters,” Liam finishes.

  “Sure,” the waiter finally says. “Be right back.”

  “Two spoons!” Liam calls after him.

  “You know I dumped the last guy who ordered for me at restaurants,” I say.

  “He never ordered you a waffle brownie sundae,” he says. “Don’t worry, Frankie, I ordered quite right. Trust a junkie to know his sweets, at least.”

  There it is, what we came for. My eyes drop to his arms in his t-shirt, a riot of tattoos: animals and instruments and musical notes and things I can’t even rec
ognize because they’re too old and faded.

  “Right there,” he says, his voice quieter, and he points to a spot on his forearm, just below the elbow.

  I lean in, and then I see it. A shiny spot, a quarter inch across, the tattoo faded and wavy where the circle overlays it. I reach out one finger and touch it, and then I see the rest.

  They’re nearly hidden by tattoos, but there’s a line from his elbow to his wrist. No, two lines. Three. My eyes widen, and I touch each circle one at a time, feeling suddenly out of my depth.

  “I’m not in the habit of showing these off,” he says, his voice low gravel. He flips his arm over, points to a few more on the other side, a constellation on the back of his hand.

  “I blew out the veins in both arms years ago,” he says. “When they took me to the hospital it took two nurses half an hour to get an IV in.”

  He says it so matter-of-factly, not embarrassed or bragging.

  “When you overdosed?” I ask, all four fingers on scars on the back of his hand.

  “Right,” he says, and then makes his hand into a fist, raps his knuckles against the table. “I’ve never really told anyone what I’m about to tell you,” he says suddenly. “I mean, after the first two tries at rehab I joined NA and AA and I tried then, but they’ve got a damn script, they want to talk about your downfall and your rock bottom as if there’s ever only one, they have the exact same one-size-fits-all solution for every problem—”

  He breaks off mid-sentence, looks at me.

  “Right, I’ll not slag off on addiction support groups at the moment,” he says. “I guess I ought to start at the beginning.”

  “It’s a good starting place,” I agree.

  I’m nervous. I don’t know why I’m nervous, except that I’m out of my depth right now. I don’t know the first thing about addictions or addicts or how to deal with those problems or what to do if you think you might be falling for one.

  Is there a roadmap for this? I wonder.

  “The beginning’s in Yorkshire,” he says. “Age seventeen, with Gavin, when someone offered us a line of heroin.”

  Most people who shoot up start out by snorting heroin. Google told me that.

  “I went first. I was seventeen, I was stupid, I was fully convinced I could never die, all that. So I did it, and Gavin did it, and all I thought about the next forty-eight hours was where I could possibly get more of that lovely, lovely stuff.”

  He spreads both hands palm-down on the table, and now that I know, I can see the pattern of small scars along the veins.

  “Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says.

  I shake my head.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Liam

  I’ve never told anyone this story before, not like this, and that means I don’t know how to tell it, so I do it badly. I start in Yorkshire, that very first time, but before I know it I’m telling Frankie about our London flat, the one that we both lived in along with our junkie ex-girlfriends, when Lucid Dream suddenly hit big.

  Once I opened the oven and found a rat staring back at me. It was a shithole, but I have oddly fond memories.

  But then somehow, I’m back to my childhood for a moment, a dirty house littered with bottles. No father to speak of and hardly any mother, Gavin the most family I’ve ever really had, but then I skip all the way ahead to the Lucid Dream tour, to wandering streets at night in Italy and Germany, finding heroin despite the language barrier.

  It’s a mess. I alternate between telling Frankie facts and trying to explain what it’s like, how the plunger going into your arm can feel like infatuation, how it makes a shit hovel feel like a palace when you close your eyes.

  What it’s like to try to get off the stuff, the feeling of needle-tipped spiders crawling over your skin.

  Finally, I get to the night in Seattle. She hasn’t said anything this whole time, just listened, and so I plunge on ahead because Christ knows I can’t stop now.

  I’m the one who scored it that night. We traded off, but that night it was my turn, and I remember wanting to celebrate being back in the U.S., somewhere that I at least spoke the language. We were closing in on the end of the tour, and no matter how much I love playing and touring, it’s exhausting.

  I was looking forward to coming home, to the penthouse flat I’d bought in Los Angeles. To taking a few days to do absolutely nothing but get high without needing to go on stage afterward.

  The stuff was stronger than I thought it would be. I knew it the second it hit my veins, but even then, I didn’t realize how much stronger. I remember saying something to Allen and Gavin, Gavin saying something back.

  I woke up two days later. Gavin was alive, but Allen wasn’t. He hadn’t even removed the needle from his arm. Trent had had to break in the door when we hadn’t shown up for the show, Darcy with him. She’s the one who realized Allen wasn’t breathing.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember most of it,” I admit. “Being in a coma will do that. But Gavin and I went to rehab for a month after that, and...”

  “And he made it and you didn’t?”

  I don’t answer because the waiter comes back, finally, sets the sundae and milkshake in front of us.

  “Anything else?” he asks, already walking away.

  We don’t answer, just watch him leave. I pick up a spoon.

  “I admit that the terrible service reminds me of home,” I say.

  “You mean reminds you of the level of service you provided?”

  I chew a bite of waffle brownie sundae — they cook brownie batter in a waffle iron and it’s divine — mulling over my response.

  “You didn’t complain.”

  “Only because I thought you were cute.”

  I raise one eyebrow at her, take another bite.

  “So does that mean you’d like to hear the rest of my heroin tale?”

  Frankie scoops sundae into her mouth, looks at me.

  “That was the first try at rehab,” I say. “Afterward I got kicked from the band, crashed two separate cars, tried to assault Gavin, and set fire to a law school textbook of Marisol’s, and then Gavin let me stay with him anyway and I wrecked his house, lied about him to his girlfriend, and made him relapse.”

  She just watches me steadily, spooning ice cream into her mouth.

  “Oh, and nearly burned down an entire apartment building,” I say, because I honestly forgot I’d done that, too. “Anyway, I moved back to my hometown and tried rehab again. I didn’t light anything on fire after that time, but it was a week before I was using again and two months before a pretty girl stopped me from jumping in front of a train.”

  I snag some whipped cream from the top, put it into my mouth.

  “Third time’s the charm, though, and after that stint I sold everything I could to move clear across England to a shit village where I didn’t know anyone apart from my NA sponsor, to whom I lied incessantly about my drinking and my general attitude on everything.”

  “And that was Shelton.”

  “Right. And not knowing anyone or anything for a hundred miles around finally worked, because there was no one to ask if I wanted to get high and even when I wanted to, I didn’t know where to get anything,” I say.

  “Until I came along and got you drunk.”

  I snort.

  “I’m an addict who thought it was a brilliant idea to take a job in a pub,” I tell her. “I’m perfectly capable of turning down drinks and perfectly capable of not drinking bottles of vodka to solve my problems. It’s not your fault I did neither of those things.”

  Silence. The sounds of eating.

  “Have I frightened you off yet?” I ask.

  I should have. I know I should have, because anyone even slightly sane who hears the list of shit I’ve done and problems I’ve caused ought to be halfway across the city by now, running as fast as possible.

  And yet she’s not. She’s still here in this booth, scraping melted ice cream from the plate. It’s enough to give me a glimmer o
f hope that I know might be stupid, because Frankie is smarter than this. She could do a thousand times better than me, and both of us know it.

  “You want to know something weird?” she finally asks.

  “Obviously.”

  “I spent a month telling myself that it was no big deal that you’d never called me,” she said. “People have flings and one-night stands all the time, you know? And just because I never really had before didn’t mean I couldn’t now, so I talked myself out of trying to find you. Until finally I couldn’t anymore, and I looked you up.”

  My heart skips a beat. I’ve not been brave enough to look myself up on the internet in a long time, but I’ve a good idea of what she found.

  “And the weird thing is, even after I saw a video of you and Gavin throwing shit into a pool, pictures of you naked and strung out taken by some woman you’d just fucked, after I realized when we’d really met...”

  She trails off, her big hazel eyes looking at me. There’s something naked and open in them, something that makes me feel like right now I could drown in gold-brown moss. I’ve got a vise around my heart as she pauses, ice cream from my spoon dripping onto the Formica table.

  “I was still disappointed you never called me,” she says, and looks away. “I should have felt like I dodged a bullet.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  “But I saw all that shit and still wished you’d called me.”

  I exhale, swallow. The vise tightens around my heart, because I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this.

  Wait, I do know: nothing. I’ve done fucking nothing.

  “You’ve got shit taste in men,” I tell her.

  “I know.”

  “You should go on some dating site and find someone who runs a nonprofit rescuing llamas from llama factories and the two of you could have a lovely life together,” I go on, somehow unable to shut up.

  “Probably,” she says.

  “Buy a house with a picket fence, have some kids, go on vacation to Paris...”

  “Are you done suggesting things I’m not going to do?”

  My heart thuds off-beat.

  “Give me a week,” I say.

  “A week to what?” she asks, but her eyes soften.