STAR (A 44 Chapters Novel)

by BB Easton

  Hans sucked my tongue as he thrust into me harder.

  I whimpered, as loud as I wanted, and ground against him between every advance.

  “God, I fucking love you,” Hans groaned, sliding one hand down my stomach to cup my sex.

  “I love you too,” I cooed, sliding my left hand up to cup the back of his head. “So much.”

  With those words, I felt Hans swell and stiffen inside of me. My eyes slammed shut, and my heart soared as he tightened his grip around my waist, plunged himself into me from underneath, and pressed his firm fingertips against my clit. We came together and apart and together again in a hot-pink explosion so bright, it probably could have been seen from space. Our molecules mixed in the air, and when they fell back down to earth, Hans and I were forever changed.

  Changed but not for the better.

  When grown-ups told you to stay away from drugs, when they lectured you on all the ways that they’d ruin your life, they were right, of course. But what they didn’t tell you was how they’d ruin your life. You assumed they meant that you’d lose your job and borrow money from loan sharks and contract hepatitis and maybe do a little jail time for prostitution or possession. But the reality was that they’d ruin your life in much, much subtler ways. They’d steal your joy. Because, once you’d experienced reckless, vulnerable, soul-baring teenage love amplified to the nth degree by ecstasy, the rest of your life would pale in the shadow of that experience. Your happiest moments would never be as euphoric, and your darkest days would feel even darker when compared to that artificial high.

  The day after our night of bliss on Buford Dam, Hans was quiet. Lethargic. Preoccupied. I asked him what was wrong, but he just said he had “the blue Mondays.”

  When I asked what that meant, he explained in a clipped, annoyed tone, “It’s when you feel like shit the day after doing ecstasy because you blew out all your serotonin the night before, and there’s nothing left.”

  Okay. That made sense. Coming down from an experience like that had to take its toll. I felt pretty tired and blah myself.

  But Hans’s mood didn’t improve.

  He was still asleep when I left for school on Monday. Still quiet when I came home from work that night. And he barely touched the spaghetti I’d made for dinner on Tuesday. As I preserved his plate with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge next to the one from the night before, I began to worry that the drugs had done permanent damage. I felt better, so why didn’t he?

  I got my answer when I began sorting through the mail Hans had left on the counter. I pulled out all the utility bills and set them aside, making a mental note to pay them ASAP since it was almost the end of the month.

  Almost the end of the month.

  As Hans sat on the back deck, smoking and solemnly staring at the lake, I rushed over to the pantry and threw open the door. There, on the other side, written elegantly on Mrs. Oppenheimer’s cat calendar, were the words HOME FROM TRIP on Friday, October 1.

  We only had two days left.

  And Hans knew it.

  October 1, 1999

  When I awoke in Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer’s plush California-king for the last time, I smacked the alarm clock and rolled over to find Hans’s side of the bed already empty. I opened my eyes, expecting the space to be dark, like it usually was at six thirty in the morning, but noticed that a small reading lamp had been turned on in the corner of the room. It illuminated the overstuffed arm-chair next to it where a tall, troubled, tattooed man was chewing the fingernails on his left hand down to the quick while scribbling frantically in a small notebook with his right.

  “Baby?”

  Hans kept writing for a few more seconds, then lifted his head.

  His eyes were bloodshot. Puffy. Miserable.

  “Have you been up all night?”

  Hans nodded once, then looked away. He wore his pain like a beautiful brass birdcage—on the outside for all to see but for no one to enter.

  Not even me.

  He closed his notebook and set it on the small table next to him, beside the lamp. The sun hadn’t come up yet, but Hans stared out the window anyway.

  “Hey. Come here,” I pleaded, scooting over to his side of the bed and lifting the covers.

  For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to budge, but with a heavy sigh, Hans eventually got up and came back to bed.

  As he approached with the grace of an athlete, I notice that Hans was wearing nothing but a pair of plain black boxer shorts. Not leopard print. Not banana print. Not four-leaf clovers. Just black. Like his mood.

  And mine.

  Hans slipped under the covers and pulled me against his chest. My thigh slid between his legs, my arms wrapped around his torso, and my cheek rested on Freddy Krueger’s sneer. Hans stroked my upper arm with his left hand, giving me a glimpse of the new blue ink etched across the inside of his forearm.

  Gripping his thick wrist, I gently pulled his arm away so that I could read the words he’d spilled while I was sleeping.

  I was wrong. She cannot be contained.

  She tricked me with her laugh and her falling ways.

  I didn’t know until it was over.

  She’s not a falling star. She’s a supernova.

  The last line blurred as my eyes welled with the reality of our situation. I’d found my Prince Charming, and he was even better than anything I could have imagined. He loved me with every cell in his body, with every ounce of his soul, and he didn’t give a shit who knew it. But while we’d been busy dancing and admiring the stars, I’d lost track of time. The clock had struck midnight. My carriage had turned into a pumpkin, and my gown had reverted to rags.

  I wasn’t Hans’s princess. Not anymore. I was just a poor girl from the wrong side of town, and my night of pretend play was over.

  I pulled his forearm to my lips and kissed the words written there, careful not to blink an errant tear onto them while I tried to come up with something comforting to say.

  “It’s not over,” was the best I could do.

  Hans took a deep, shuddering breath and held me tighter.

  “Hey”—I craned my neck back, trying to get a glimpse of his face—“I’m not going anywhere.”

  I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

  “You’re going home.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all morning.

  “You’re my home.” The words came immediately, and I was shocked to discover that they were true. My parents’ house no longer felt like home. My old room was as foreign to me as a motel suite. The things I’d left behind, relics from another life. Right there, in Hans’s arms—that was where I belonged.

  “As soon as I turn eighteen, we can get an apartment together. That’s only…eight months from now. Then we can wake up next to each other every day for the rest of our lives. It’s not that long.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Hans grumbled into my hair. “I don’t wanna fucking miss you. I don’t wanna go back to living separate lives. This is the life I want. This one, right here, with you. Nothing has ever been more perfect, and I feel like I’m losing it. All of it. I feel like I’m losing you.”

  “Hans…”

  “I’m gonna see you, what, like, two hours a day? After work and on the weekends?”

  “Not if you come to school with me.” The solution fell out of my mouth before I’d even given it conscious thought.

  “What?” Hans pulled away so that he could make eye contact with me.

  “It’s perfect!” I beamed, gripping his shoulder. “Come to GSU with me. We could see each other before school and between classes, and we could even go to Underground Atlanta every day for lunch.”

  Hans blinked.

  “Please?” I begged. “I’ll fill out your admission paperwork and everything.”

  “I don’t know, baby.” Hans’s dark eyebrows bunched in the middle as he shook his head. “I hated school. And with my ADD—”

  “You don’t have attention problems when you play
music, right?”

  “Riiight…”

  “So, go to school for music. I can help you with the other classes.”

  Hans narrowed his tired eyes at me and chewed on the inside of his lip. “Do they have a music production program? I do kind of want to learn more about recording.”

  “I know they do,” I lied. I had no fucking idea.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  Hans smiled. It was a worried, unsure, tiny, little smile, but there was hope behind his sleepless eyes. Just a glimmer. “Okay.”

  I squealed and squeezed the shit out of his shoulder. “I love you!”

  Hans pulled me against his chest and rolled back and forth with his arms wrapped around me. “I must fucking love you to be considering going back to school.”

  “Hey, do you want to come with me today?” I asked, holding on for dear life. “You could probably sit in my classes with me, and nobody would care.”

  “No, you need to focus,” Hans said, ironically choosing that exact moment to get distracted by my lack of panties. He gripped my bare ass under the oversize Phantom Limb T-shirt I’d slept in and positioned me so that I was straddling the rapidly swelling bulge in his boxer shorts.

  “What are you gonna do today?” I asked in a breathy voice as he lifted his hips slightly and captured my earlobe between his teeth.

  Releasing it, he murmured, “I’m gonna call the guys and see if we can get together and work on this song.”

  “Your ballad?” I whimpered as his hips rolled against me again.

  Hans nodded, and I felt him smile against my cheek. “I think it’s done.”

  “I thought most places had, like, a green room or a dressing room or a fucking couch for the bands to hang out on.” I cracked open my bottle of Coke and poured half of it onto the gravel loading area behind the Masquerade.

  “Well, this isn’t most places, princess.” Trip winked and tipped his bottle of Korbel in my direction.

  Baker snorted in agreement and handed me the fifth of whiskey I’d asked him to buy. I smiled at the round face peeking out from behind that curtain of dirty-blond hair, but my smile fell as soon as I realized that he’d gotten me Southern Comfort.

  SoCo.

  Knight’s fucking brand.

  I could almost hear the sound of his latex gloves snapping into place as he readied his piercing needle. I could practically smell the antiseptic and taste the sweetly astringent shot of “SoCo” he’d given me to dull the pain. Over and over, I’d bared myself to him, and each and every time, I’d come away scarred.

  Some were just deeper than others.

  I quietly snapped the fingers on my free hand, shook the unwelcome memories from my consciousness, and filled my Coke bottle the rest of the way up with whiskey. So. Much. Whiskey. I squealed when it began to bubble over and immediately wrapped my mouth around the entire opening of the bottle to keep from losing any of the precious alcohol-caffeine mixture.

  “Yeah, girl. Take it all,” Trip teased, humping the air.

  Hans slid the bottle out of my hand and tipped it back, swallowing the caramel-colored liquid like it was sugar water as Trip congratulated him on his girlfriend’s deep-throating skills. Hans managed to both smirk and flip him off mid-chug.

  I pulled the Coke bottle out of my mouth with a slurp-cough combo that was anything but dignified, then laughed in embarrassment.

  “Dude. I heard a scout from Violent Violet Records might be coming out tonight,” Louis said, sitting on the hood of the van, twirling a drum stick in one hand and pinching a freshly lit joint in the other.

  “No fucking way.” Trip belched from the champagne. “That’s Love Like Winter’s label.”

  “He probably won’t come. They say that shit all the time.” Hans tucked a finger into the waistband of my pleather pants and pulled me into his side.

  It had only been a week since I moved back into my parents’ house, and the distance hadn’t been easy on either of us. I’d seen Hans every night that week, called him on my lunch break at school and again on my smoke break at work, but I still missed the shit out of him.

  I couldn’t wait for him to start coming to school with me. I did my best to make Hansel David Oppenheimer sound like a goddamn musical savant on his GSU application, but even if he got in, he wouldn’t start taking classes until January. Until then, all we could do was try to comfort each other and wait it out.

  And drink. We could fucking drink.

  By the time the guys got the green light to start setting up, our bottles were empty, our laughter was loud, and our auras were a fizzy caramel brown.

  “Break a leg.” I hiccupped into Hans’s ear with a kiss as I left him backstage and wandered out into the sea of rock fans beyond. I wriggled my way to the front of the stage, grateful for the crush of people who were helping me stay upright.

  Triple X sauntered out first, grabbed the microphone like a lover, and screamed, “What’s up, Atlantaaaaa?” into it.

  The crowd replied with a shit-ton of noise while the rest of the band quietly took their places.

  Trip was fired up, even more so than usual, but my eyes were glued to Hans. Other than a few stolen glances and tiny smirks cast my way, he hardly looked up at all. He really had no idea how beautiful he was. Hans didn’t see every girl in the audience—and probably some of the guys—staring at him the way I did. He was completely absorbed in the music. Just like he had been the first time I laid eyes on him—eyes closed, head down, playing in Steven’s living room for no one but himself.

  They started off with a bang, playing their heaviest shit first, which got the mosh pit going, then they brought it down a notch to give people a rest before playing their more danceable, alternative stuff right before the kiss contest. It was their best show yet. Absolutely perfect. So perfect that my drunk ass bounced up and down until my stomach felt like an acidic, carbonated volcano of SoCo and bile.

  The lights were suddenly too bright. The air, too thick. The room, too spinny. My mouth pooled with saliva, and the edges of my vision got fuzzy. I didn’t want to miss the kiss contest—I’d worn my cut-off Phantom Limb T-shirt in preparation—but I’d felt that way enough times to know that I had about sixty seconds to sit the fuck down and get some fresh air before I either puked or passed out.

  I pushed my way out of the crowd and made a mad dash for the fire escape. As soon as the cool October air hit my face and the screaming fans were quieted behind the heavy steel door, the nausea and tunnel vision began to subside. Thankful that I hadn’t just barfed in front of my boyfriend and about five hundred other people, I sat on the steps high above the loading dock and dug a cigarette out of my purse.

  I noticed all of our empty bottles stacked in a cute little row on the half-wall below—champagne, Coca-Cola, Southern Comfort, Miller High Life, and Jägermeister. Poor Baker. We had all asked for something different. I smiled, picturing him pushing a little shopping cart through the aisles of the liquor store, cursing our names as he fulfilled our wishes.

  But he hadn’t fulfilled my wish. Not really. I’d asked for Jack and Coke. So, why was there a bottle of Southern Comfort staring at me?

  It wasn’t like Knight had personally switched the bottles in Baker’s cart, but the simple coincidence still gave me the creeps. I never saw him, never heard from him, but I felt him. I felt his zombie eyes watching when I walked to my car after work. I smelled his cinnamony cologne on the breeze during my smoke breaks. And whenever I saw a number on my caller ID that I didn’t recognize, I always let it go to voicemail on the off chance that it might be him.

  I didn’t feel like I was being stalked. I felt like I was being haunted.

  My deep, drunk thoughts evaporated the moment I registered the unmistakable beat of the cancan song vibrating through the wall.

  Fuck!

  I stood up and yanked on the door handle, but it didn’t budge. In a panic, I rattled the handle and banged on the metal surface, but nobody was going to hear m
e. Shifting to plan B, I scurried down the fire-escape stairs, ran around the side of the building, and flew through the main entrance, flashing my orange paper wristband at every security guy along the way. I ascended the industrial metal staircase in the center of the converted old factory as fast as my spindly legs would carry me and up through Purgatory to the top floor where I was prepared to leap onto that stage and secure my title as the ass-flashing, high-kick champion of the world.

  But, instead, I stood frozen in Heaven’s doorway as my whole world came crashing down around me.

  The cancan song was over.

  The contest had been decided.

  And all I could see was red, red, red.

  Hans’s red bass hanging upside down on his back.

  Glossy red fingernails gripping his shoulders.

  And glossy red lipstick smeared on the side of his mouth when Little Red Riding Ho finally pulled away.

  I stumbled backward, as if I’d just taken a sucker punch to the gut. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes stung. My knees buckled. And the vomit I’d just successfully tamed shot back up into my throat with a vengeance.

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to take one of my steel-toed combat boots off and bludgeon her pretty little face in with it, but my limbs were moving of their own accord. My right hand clamped over my mouth while my legs turned and sprinted back down the stairs.

  Back down into Hell.

  Where I fucking belonged.

  As soon as the soles of my boots hit the cement floor below, I bolted past all the day-glow-painted ravers and welcomed the slap of the cold night air across my face.

  But I didn’t stop there. My feet kept pounding the pavement, carrying me away from there, up the poorly lit sidewalk to the street where my car was parked. Evidently, my body had decided it was time to go. My brain, on the other hand, was spinning out of control.

  He kissed her! I can’t believe he fucking kissed her!

  Technically, she kissed him.

  He kissed her back!

  You don’t know that.