by Lux, Vivian
"You can call me!" the blogger bleated as I stepped out of the elevator into the penthouse. The doors shut before I replied, which was fine.
"What?" I asked Annie, folding my arms.
She rolled her eyes at me. "You have a good night?"
"It was going to be," I retorted, "until my fucking mother crashed my room. What are you even doing here?"
"I paid for this. That means it's mine." Annie said it like it was obvious… and it fucking was. But not for much longer.
"What did you want to tell me?" For the first time, I took in the scene in front of me. The whole fucking entourage was here, all of the old farts that have been my mother's road team since before I even existed. Crusty Pete, Bash, Diggs, Gregory Fingers, the guys I used to call uncles and sometimes wanted to call Daddy.
Just then, Nails wandered up and slung his arm around Annie. "What the hell did you do to your hair, Jax?" he grunted by way of greeting.
I grinned back. "What the hell did you do to your face? That thing looks like you're hiding a bird's nest, or something."
Nails stroked his beard. "Nah, I cleaned it out this morning. Had the eggs for breakfast."
I laughed as he extended his hand. We clasped forearms for a moment before I realized something. "Hey, why are you being so nice? You're usually a complete asshole."
I expected Nails to grunt and swear at me, walking away in a surly mood like he always does. Annie's on-again, off-again boyfriend was a big, moody fucker who only seemed to like three things, none of which were me. Nails Nesbit like loud guitars, Kentucky bourbon, and my mother, possibly in that exact order.
"Let's have a drink," Annie interjected. "We've been waiting for you."
"Like hell you were," I muttered. By the way she was slurring, Annie was half in the bag already.
"It's a fucking celebration," Nails boomed, returning with three shot glasses. "Down the hatch." He slammed his own back before I even brought mine to my lips, then slung his arm around Annie, who giggled. She fucking giggled. My mother doesn't giggle. What the hell was going on?
"What are we celebrating?" I asked. My hackles were up. Annie invading my personal space like this, that was nothing new. But Annie bringing the whole crew over and then giggling? That was fucking weird.
The two old farts looked at each other with such goopy expressions on their faces that I nearly vomited the bourbon right back up again. "Your mother here has decided to stop stringing me along," Nails said gruffly, his tone a lot gentler than his words.
Annie playfully slapped him as the dread filled me. "Fuck off, Lyle," she cooed. Then she turned to me. "Nails asked me to marry him. I said yes."
Something exploded inside of my head, right above my left eyebrow. "You what?!"
"We're getting married, Jax."
"Why… the fuck… would you do that?" My mouth was hanging open like I was an idiot and I closed it tightly, right before I exploded again. "You're getting married?"
"It's about time, we figured," Nails said, like this wasn't the stupidest thing anyone had ever said. "I love your mama. You know, that Jax."
"Whatever." I was being an asshole, but I couldn't help it. "This is stupid. You're old. Who cares, at this point?"
"We do," Annie said, all casually. She planted a kiss on Nails that went on for so damn long I had to turn and walk away before I really did vomit on my shoes.
But another explosion in my brain stopped me in my tracks. "Wait," I said, turning on my heel. "Does Lily know?"
Nails pulled himself back from pawing my mother long enough to reply. "Yeah, we still gotta call her," he said, just as casually as Annie. Both of them were acting like this was just a totally normal thing, like it was no big fucking deal that they should get married after fighting, fucking, and fucking each other over for almost fifteen years.
And Lily.
Fuck.
Liliana. Nails' daughter. This whole sordid and sorry state of affairs would make my Lil Bit—my secret shame, my sorry obsession—my fucking sister.
Chapter Five
Liliana
One of the main reasons why I've never been able to hold down anything resembling a "real job," is my utter inability to arrive anywhere on time. Everyone knows you should be at least two hours early for any flight if you want to have a prayer of getting through security on time.
I arrived forty-five minutes early and was extremely impressed with myself. That is, until I saw the line snaking through security.
The crowd was packed tightly around me as we moved through the maze of crowd control barriers that I felt like a cow on the way to the slaughterhouse. "Moo," I muttered under my breath. The old lady in front of me with the tightly curled perm darted a startled look over her shoulder, and then shifted forward to give the crazy lady some space. I took a deep breath, feeling the claustrophobia dissipate a little with the extra space. Maybe I should always pretend to be a crazy person. Maybe it would keep people from crowding around me like this.
I don't like crowds, or audiences. Or really, people in general. My father, though—he lives for that sort of thing.
They say rock 'n roll dreams never die, and never was that more true than for my father. I knew he loved me, somehow, the way small children instinctually can tell these things, but he was never any good at showing it. I was an afterthought, not so much of a hindrance as something he never really considered in the first place. My only memories of him being at home with us were of him smoking out in the garage, a guitar on his lap, and a faraway expression on his face. "What are you doing out here? Go find your mama," he would always say, if he noticed me standing and staring at him at all.
After a sad and futile stint at being a normal, suburban father, Lyle Nesbit succumbed to his rock 'n roll dreams once more, leaving my mother to raise her three-year-old daughter by herself.
"I don't hate him, honey," she used to sigh when I'd ask her, but she never could quite muster up the conviction to make me believe her. My mother married Graham, my stepfather, when I was five, and she and I moved into his big corner house. On that day, I got a new dad and two new stepbrothers in one fell swoop. But if I thought that would mean someone would notice me, I was sorely mistaken. Graham's boys were utterly wild, perpetually in trouble, perpetually fighting whether in fun or in earnest, with Graham shouting from the sidelines ‘til his voice grew hoarse. I stayed in the background, honing my talent at being completely ignored by father figures.
Graham was useless, all prim and proper, so unlike my father that it was almost comical. He fancied himself a scholar and took great pride in the shelves of leather bound volumes I never once saw him open. He was more of background noise in my life than a father figure, but one thing I did have to give him credit for: my motto. He grimaced it at me once after I verbally dressed him down, halfway out the door on the way to a friend's party.
"Though she be but little, she is fierce."
Shakespeare. Midsummer's Night's Dream. Of course I recognized it. I devoured any book that I could get my hands on, transcribing the bits that spoke to me into reams of journals that I scribbled in night and day. It made me stop and consider Graham in a different light for one moment.
Then he went right back to being an ass hat and the moment was lost.
Still, little and fierce. That's what I was. How I defined myself even when fierceness seemed far out of reach. When the tears pricked shamefully at my eyes and I lashed out rather than see them fall, I was always reminding myself: fierce. It was the mantra I believed in even when I didn't believe in myself.
I had daydreamed my way right to the front of the line. "Shoes off," the bored TSA agent intoned mechanically. "Put your belongings in a bin and step over here."
Everyone hurried to obey, grabbing the gray bins and slinging them about like toddlers with stacking toys. I had to duck out of the way before I got taken out. "Hey, watch where you swing that thing!" I barked at the harried-looking businessman.
He looked out, and then down. "Oh
, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you down there."
Then the bastard grinned at his own joke.
"I'm the perfect height for punching you in the nuts," I retorted loudly.
He opened his stupid mouth a few times, gawping like a fish. I seemed to have that effect on guys like him. The self-important ones who couldn't imagine that someone who looked like me, all small and elfin, could actually have a temper. Guys like him tended to be speechless when faced with ferocity. That was part of the reason why I was, as yet, still single.
Jaxson never condescended to me.
What the hell? Shut up.
Apparently my traitor brain, eager at the prospect of a reunion, was deciding to replay only the highlight reel of my former life. With a mental yank, I forced myself to relive the bad shit too.
Because there was a lot of bad shit. And as I settled into my seat on the plane, I knew that there was going to be no way I could stem the tide of memories.
Life in the corner house moved on with its predictable boringness. The only time I experienced anything approaching excitement was what my father decided to drop by. It was irregular and infrequent—two, maybe three times a year—but it gave me something to look forward to besides counting down the time until I could move out.
Seeing my dad was something that I always looked forward to… no matter how many times he disappointed me.
He'd eventually given up on being a rock star in his own right, and had started working as a roadie. He was perpetually broke, and perpetually on the verge of homelessness, but I had never seen him happier. He'd bring me souvenirs of life on the road and I'd sit on his lap, hoping like hell that this time he'd take me with him.
But just because he was happy didn't make him any less of a shitty father. As quickly as he dropped into my life again, my father would always vanish, called back to the road like a man possessed. Sometimes I would wish that he would fail completely, and give up to come back home to me.
But instead he met Crusty Pete Dillingham.
The story of that night is now part of my own personal legend. My dad went to see a show at a local dive bar. When they started the show, nothing came out of the speakers except ear-splitting feedback. The tech ran backstage in a panic. While everyone else was covering their ears, my two-hundred and sixty-pound, bearded father vaulted the stage like an Olympic high jumper and ran back to switch out the mis-plugged cables.
"The first thing I noticed was that his stack was a mess. The second thing I noticed was the stench." My dad would always grin at this point, slapping Crusty Pete on his back.
"I thanked him and told him we just lost a guy," Crusty Pete would add, gamely playing his part in the story. "And if he could get his fat ass up early enough in the morning, we'd have more work for him."
Pete introduced my dad to Bash Gills, the drum tech extraordinaire. He was slumming it in between tours, picking up club gigs here and there. But once his real gig started up again, he'd be able to use a guitar tech that was as fast on his feet as my father.
Right here in the story, Bash always made a point to look up and down my father's considerable bulk. "How the man eat so much and still move so fast, I'll never even begin to understand. It defies both logic and physics." Then my dad would guffaw like it was the first time he'd ever heard that joke, and me and Jaxson would roll our eyes so hard they may as well have fallen out. Then we'd start laughing at each other’s, reactions, goaded on by our shared experience of being teenagers in the weirdest fucking place to be a teenager… ever.
I smiled at the memory before my heart could catch up with my head. And when it did, I felt the sick, hollow feeling that always hit me when I thought about Jaxson Blue. And since I was always thinking of him, I was sick and hollow pretty much always.
The feeling remained as we taxied out into the runway. I scrunched low in my seat, grateful for my tiny frame as I nestled close to the window. The guy sitting next to me ignored me completely, putting in his headphones and promptly falling into a drooling, open-mouthed sleep. Something about the way he completely overlooked me, like I was part of the plane itself, made me think of my stepfather again.
After living out my childhood in the background at Graham's house, playing second fiddle to Graham's kids and losing my mother to being Graham's wife, I then lost my mother for real. The ovarian cancer that took her was swift and merciless, transforming her from tired, but still vital, woman to gasping shell in a matter of eight months, start to finish. She succumbed when I was fifteen, and suddenly Graham looked up and noticed I was there.
"Liliana, I know things haven't always been great between us," he started to say at the kitchen table the night after her funeral.
But I’d had enough. I held up my hands to ward off his apologies. "You don't have to say anything Graham, I've already called my dad."
"Your… dad?" Graham spat the word.
"Yes… my father."
"Liliana, I raised you. I'm your father."
My grief was still way too fresh for me to stay cordial. "You didn't raise anything, Graham. I raised myself while you weren't looking."
His face got really tight around the eyes right then. He sagged his head into his hands and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "Lily, I know it hasn't always been easy…"
"No shit," I said, loving the way his eyes darted back up to stare at me, shocked that I had the gall to swear at him. "It hasn't been, but it's about to get a hell of a lot easier for you Graham. I'm out of your hair. It's all been arranged."
My suitcase was already packed. When my buttoned-up stepfather stood at the door and watched my grizzled, tattooed father bundle me into his beat-up van, I thought I caught the glimmer of tears in his eyes. For one moment I almost went back to him. My father, the man whose genes I shared, was a complete stranger to me. At least the tight-ass man who was waving goodbye was a known quantity.
But by then, it was too late to look back. I blinked back the tears and repeated "fierce" to myself until I felt slightly better. We started rolling backwards, but there were no engine sounds…
"Stupid piece of shit, start!"
I knew he was swearing at the van, but it was too late. I had already jumped in terror at my father smacking the wheel. I jumped so hard at the anger in his voice that for once in his life, Nails Nesbit noticed me. His huge, ham hock of a hand came out of nowhere to cover mine. "Hey Lily," he said, raspy, but gentle. "I know I ain't always been around like I should've, but you need to know that I will never hurt you, you got that? None of this scaredy-cat shit with me, okay?"
"Okay," I said tightly.
"Good. Now, check your mirror for me?"
"All clear… Dad."
Nails shot me a look of surprise. His eyes were nearly hidden under an explosion of untrimmed eyebrow hair, but I was startled to see that they were the exact same shade of brown as my own.
I had never noticed that.
"Okay Lil, let's hit the road."
The fact that a world tour is no place for a fifteen-year-old never crossed either one of our minds. Doing things properly really wasn't my father's strong point.
Except, for some reason, now it was. For some reason, after all these years, he was going to be a proper married man, and wanted me there with him. It was almost sweet… as sweet as Nails could ever be.
"Fierce," I muttered to myself, and then fell asleep.
Chapter Six
Jax
The sound guy looked like he had never actually gone to sleep last night. Not that I could really judge him. Ever since my mother dropped the bombshell of her impending marriage in my lap, my nights had been filled with tossing, turning, and really frustrating hard-ons about seeing Lily again. Sleep seemed like something I'd have to wait for until after the wedding.
I did have to give Annie credit. Once she makes decisions, there was no dithering around. The happy day was scheduled at their home in two weeks.
And somehow, Nails had convinced Lily to come early to help prep. E
very time I tried to clear my head, that thought came by to hit me over the head with an anvil. Lily was coming back.
Lily was landing today.
I had studio time that I couldn't get out of. My labeled booked this time weeks ago, before any of this bullshit happened. So now I had to be a goddamn professional, even though I felt like I was ready to crawl out of my skin.
The bleary-eyed tech—I think his name was “Raven” or “Crow,” or something like that—whatever his name was, he flicked on his mic, and his gruff, whiskey-soaked voice came through my monitor. "Okay Jax, were ready for you."
I nodded. The guitar track that I had laid down last week came blaring in through my mic and I began counting the beats. As I counted, the words that I had written last night played over and over in my head. One good thing about insomnia: it gives you time to write.
Annie was watching me from the booth, leaning against Nails. Two blonde chicks that followed me here giggled as I made eye contact with them. But my eye went right to the bottle of Jack. I held up my hand. "Can you start again please?" I asked the monitor.
Blackbird sighed and grumbled a bit, but dutifully rewound the track. I took a quick nip from the open bottle. These words… the feelings I put down… writing it down was supposed to get rid of the pain, not make it worse. But singing it forced me to feel it all over again, and that was a bad thing. It took another long pull as the guitar track wailed in my ears. Then I opened my mouth to sing.
I was a disaster.
"Can we start again please?" I grunted into the mic, feeling the beads of sweat starting to form along my forehead. Annie leaned forward, her lips twisted into that snarl I knew so well. I was disappointing her, wasting her time, and money. I could already see the tabloid headline now: "Jaxson Blue, Flash in the Pan, Wasted Son of Rock Royalty in Studio Disaster." It would be yet another scandal, just like the one I started back when I was eighteen and broken hearted over losing Liliana.