by Ali Parker
"Your brothers miss you," she said after hesitating for a minute. "They care about you. And about Caleb. They want you back, and I'm sure if you wanted this to be a dry tour, they'd all agree."
"And the next tour?" I wasn't afraid about Caleb or anyone else’s safety for just this one album. It had only taken us a couple to get here. How many would it take for us to forget and to go back to our old ways? "Besides," I added. "They can't miss me so much, I haven't spoken to anyone but Caleb."
Alicia's sighed. "That's because no one thinks you'll talk to them. Hell, I know how they feel. You didn't want to talk to me either."
"And yet, here we are," I told her and then winked playfully. "Turns out the stalker in you is strong."
Looking like she was torn between eating the bread roll she was tearing apart and chucking it at my head, Alicia eventually cracked a smile. "I prefer the phrase determined, thank you very much."
"Call it what you will, I just don't know that getting the band back together is a good idea."
"That's not a firm no anymore," she pointed out, popping a chunk of the soft bread roll into her mouth.
"It's not," I agreed. "But it's not a yes either."
Throughout the rest of our dinner, Alicia continued to make a lot of good points about why I should go back to the band. I could tell she'd put a lot of thought into this, and I appreciated that despite that, I didn't feel like I was being pitched. She was speaking passionately and from her heart.
By the time we were done eating, I knew I had to get out of here and fast. She'd found some of those buttons I'd been worried about and was pushing down on them shamelessly.
Abruptly, I stood up and to say goodbye. "Thanks for the food. And for the talk, but I have to go."
Alicia scrambled after me, catching up in the parking lot. "Please, don't go. Can't we just keep talking?"
"I'm sorry." I turned to face her and caught her chin between my thumb and index finger. "I really miss you, Alicia. I wish things were different. I'm really sorry you wasted so much of your time with us, but I don't want to get the band back together. It's just not where I feel like I need to be. I know it’s not enough, but again, I'm really sorry."
As I'd suspected, leaving her standing alone in front of that restaurant wasn't easy. In fact, insofar as difficulty went, it was a real bitch. But so was life. I was just going to have to learn to live with it.
4
Alicia
My heart, courage, and determination all sank as I watched Jared walk away from me. Again. I was getting so used to seeing his back that I was starting to forget what his front looked like.
Okay, that wasn't quite true. It was impossible to forget any part of him. He was impossible to forget. Every inch of his body, mind, and soul, at least the pieces of those he'd allowed me to see, were tattooed onto my brain, never to be forgotten.
There was no point in hoping he would change his mind and come back. I knew he wouldn't do that. Regardless of how much I begged him mentally to do it, he wouldn't turn around. I refused to stand there watching his taillights disappear and went inside to pay for our meal instead.
I was half in a daze as I paid and made my way to my car. I couldn't believe how quickly my dinner with Jared had gone south. I had thought things were going so well for us, and then the next thing I knew, he was practically jumping up from the table and running away.
Disappointment nearly crushed me while I watched him leave, but I'd shaken it off and followed him anyway. I think a part of me was hoping he would push me up against his car and kiss me, maybe throw me onto the back seat and have his way with me.
To be honest, I was still slightly disappointed he hadn't done either of those things. Didn't even look like he considered it.
The slight sting of disappointment, however, didn't begin to compete with the variety of other emotions I was feeling. The first ones that jumped into my head were rejection, dejection, failure, hopelessness, grief, anger, and even a bit of shock.
If I had any hope of getting a wink of sleep, I needed to work through at least some of these. I hadn't seen or spoken to Kelly, my sister, for a couple of weeks because we'd both been so busy with work, but I was hoping she'd be up for a glass of wine and maybe some ice cream.
Pressing my phone to my ear, I said a silent prayer that Kelly would answer and wasn't sleeping yet. It wasn't that late, but I knew she had early mornings.
Mercifully, the Diamond family all tended to be night owls. Kelly proved this when she picked up on the third ring. "The prodigal sister returns again. How are you doing?"
"How am I doing? Could we have a drink while I answer that question?"
"Sure," she agreed. "I'll unlock the door, pour the wine, and open the ice cream, but I’m already in pajamas so I’m not going out to meet you. See you soon."
Infinitely thankful I had a sister like her, I started my car and drove to Kelly's. As she promised, the door to her apartment was open after she buzzed me into her building, and there was an ice cold glass of wine and a bowl of ice cream waiting for me.
Kelly gave me a hug and a long once-over when I stepped into her living room. "You look like hell."
"Feels like I've been there too." Dramatic, yes, but that didn't make it any less true.
Kelly's brow scrunched, and her eyes narrowed. "Out with it. What's going on here?"
I wanted more than anything to tell her, but Kelly was a reporter. An entertainment reporter, no less. The Chinese Wall between us when it came to our professions was high and well established, but Destitute breaking up would be the scoop of a lifetime.
While I wanted to speak to her to work through some of the things I was feeling about Jared, I’d stupidly been hoping to leave Destitute out of it. Looking into her green eyes now, though, I realized that had never been an option. If I really wanted to talk about it, I would have to talk about it all. And I didn’t know if I could do that.
Sensing my hesitation, Kelly crossed her heart over her flannel, kitten pajamas and pretended to stick something in her eye. "You can talk to me about anything, and it won't leave these four walls. Promise, hope to die, the whole nine yards."
"This is big. I don't want to put you in a difficult position."
She rolled her eyes and sank down onto one of her ratty old couches. "If it's that big, the more difficult position for you to put me in is to know something like that is going on with you and not letting me help you."
"Okay,” I said finally, sinking into the couch across from hers. “But I'm talking to you as a sister, not as a reporter. You can't repeat anything I tell you tonight."
"I've already crossed my heart. I won't tell a soul." Kelly picked up her bowl of ice cream and tucked into it, waiting for me to gather my thoughts before I got started. I was still a whirlwind of emotions, but I managed to get a hold of myself and, little by little, told her the whole story.
Ending with my dinner with Jared earlier tonight, I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried not to be overwhelmed by the helplessness I felt saying it all out loud. Kelly had finished her ice cream while I talked, though her spoon had fallen a few times while she listened, and she was gaping at me.
"So that's it? Destitute is done?"
"I think so," I admitted. I hadn't even wanted to admit it to myself before, but lying to Kelly was harder than lying to myself. Tonight's dinner had been my Hail Mary pass at Jared, and I'd failed.
I was fresh out of ideas, and as a result, probably fresh out of clients. Tears stung the backs of my eyes, and I blinked, trying my best to hide them or just to get rid of them altogether.
"No. This can't be it. There has to be something else."
Shaking my head, I finished the last few spoons of my own ice cream. "If there is, I can't think of it. I just don't know what to do anymore. Everyone’s telling me that once Jared's mind is made up, it's made up. The guys thought if there was any chance, it would be me talking to him, but I tried, and he wouldn't listen."
I hated the way my shoulders w
ere sagging and how acute the sense of failure I was feeling was becoming. It was like I had dipped my toe into it, only for the failure to swallow me up like a pool of quicksand. Kelly watched me quietly, looking as depressed as I was feeling. But then suddenly, she perked up and dropped her empty bowl onto the couch.
I couldn't help it. A spark of hope shot through my heart. "What is it, do you have a plan?"
"I might." She chewed on her bottom lip, telling me that she was uncertain, but her eyes were wide and excited. "I don't know the band, so I don't know that this will work, but it's worth a shot."
"Anything is." I was that desperate. Short of selling both my kidneys or clubbing a baby seal, I would try pretty much everything. A week wasn’t a long time to change Jared’s mind, especially not about something this big.
Gerry wouldn’t give me more time since he was ready to move on. He thought it was a lost cause, and I didn’t blame him for it. But if Kelly had any kind of idea that might help, then she was right. It was worth a shot.
She stared down at the floor as she turned her idea over in her mind and then lifted her eyes to mine again. "How about if you can show him the band isn’t the same without him? That they miss him, and they want to carry on, but they can't do it without him?"
Contemplating her plan, I squinted in thought. Jared felt a tremendous sense of responsibility toward all the guys. I'd told him how much they missed him, but was that enough?
Actions spoke louder than words. If I could show him how much they missed and needed him, show him Destitute without him, just them, stripped down to only the boys and their music, then I might still have a chance.
Mentally crossing my fingers, I allowed my first real smile in hours to come to my lips. "That might just be a great idea."
5
Jared
Something somewhere was banging. Loudly. I sat up groggily in bed and rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
"What the fuck?" I muttered when I heard what sounded like voices filtering up to my bedroom from downstairs.
Jumping out of bed, I was this close to running downstairs naked before I realized confronting an intruder with my dick hanging out sounded like a terrible idea. Too many things provided too many obvious targets.
My heart was pounding, and adrenaline rushed through me. I shot over to my walk-in closet and grabbed a pair of drawstring pants, pulling them on as my eyes darted to my alarm control panel on the wall.
All my alarm zones lights blinked red, meaning the alarm was still activated in those zones. All except one. A single green light shone on the control panel to show the alarm had been deactivated there.
I distinctly remember arming the alarm after I got home from dinner the night before, and I hadn't accidentally left one zone out. That, combined with the muted banging noises and voices I was now sure weren't only in my head, meant there was someone in my house.
More specifically, there was someone in my garage.
I wasn't necessarily sentimental about my cars or anything, but it still pissed me off that there was someone in my house. When I’d bought the place, Gerry and everyone else had warned about its lack of security. I was starting to regret not listening to him far more regularly than I was used to.
Maybe it really was time to look into calling my real estate broker and buying a new place. I didn't know what the fuck was going on, but this wasn’t going to end well for whoever it was in my home.
Calling the police crossed my mind, but I didn't want to do that yet. I would see if I could deal with this myself first. A call to the police would only draw attention when people drove by and saw the cruisers. Before I knew it, my entire street would be packed with paparazzi speculating and reporting on what was happening at my house.
I didn't want to risk it. It would be like sending up the bat signal to every reporter in town.
I grabbed my phone anyway and punched in 911 just in case, my thumb hovering over the call button as I jogged down the stairs and burst into my garage. I froze in the doorway at the scene playing out in front of me.
Of everything I thought I might have found, what I saw hadn't even been on my radar of things to expect. There were no strangers, no fans, and no threat.
It was my band. All of them, plus Alicia, in the middle of setting up their instruments.
They stopped what they were doing as soon as they saw me, all eyes snapping to mine. I blinked, halfway convinced I was still dreaming. "What the fuck are you doing?"
Caleb stepped forward, opening his arms. "We're going back to the beginning. This look familiar to you?"
It did, actually.
I looked on as my friends, brothers, set up their equipment in the same way I'd seen them do a million times. To be fair, I hadn't seen a scene like this in years, not since we made it big and people started doing all the shit for us.
But before then? In the early days? We did this every other day. Only two things were majorly different. The first was that my garage was a hell of a lot bigger, cleaner, and fancier than the dingy one we used to practice in, and the second was the blond helping Dom set up his drums. There never used to be any girls like Alicia helping us set up back then.
"Why are you doing this?" They had to be working an angle, but I didn't know what it was. I was still too groggy and confused from having just been jerked from my restless sleep.
Everyone but Caleb ignored me, carrying on with their setup as if I wasn't even there. "Alicia called us this morning. She came up with the idea of us starting over. Going back to our roots, as it were."
I narrowed my eyes when I began to put her plan together and scoffed. "Yeah, we're not doing this."
I was about to launch into a speech about how jamming in my garage wasn't going to make me change my mind about getting the band back together when I saw Dom move in behind his kit. Without so much as looking at me, he started playing.
The song was familiar, as was Dom not giving a fuck about what was going on around him and simply wanting to play. He'd done that often during the early days. We'd be arguing about something, and he would just start playing over our voices, almost like his way of saying he didn't care about politics or whatever we were arguing about and wanted to get on with the business of making music.
I nearly snorted out loud. I'd forgotten how he used to do that. Oh, how the times had changed. These days, he was usually the one arguing about politics while I was the one telling everyone to chill.
Nick joined in next, falling in with Dom in a song I loved but hadn't heard or sung in way, way too long. It was one of the first ones I'd written for Destitute and, while it had never been a single or even a massively popular song with the fans, it meant a lot to us because it was one of the ones that had gotten us noticed.
Matt's eyes were closed in concentration as he waited for his cue and fell in seamlessly right along with Caleb as if they’d last played the song together yesterday. I could only stand and stare, watching each of them play with more passion and raw commitment than I could remember seeing from any of them in a long time.
Dom was always on our asses about how things had to be perfect, and though we often thought we had it that way, listening to them now, I knew we'd been wrong. This was perfect. What they were doing right now. This was our sound, us.
Someone had set up my microphone right in the center of the garage. They must have moved my cars out earlier because except for the band, the garage was empty. We used to love it this way.
There wasn't really a light shining on my microphone. For the first time in years, there were no lights in here that could be aimed at anyone, but the way my vision narrowed and the way the microphone was all I could see, I could have sworn the brightest stage light was beckoning me to my spot.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was standing right behind the microphone, my fingers wrapped around its grip. Having it right there in my hand felt so comforting and familiar, it felt like coming home or getting a hug from someone you didn't even realize you were missing
so much, your soul was split apart from having been away from them.
Just like my feet had carried me to the stand of their own accord, and my hands had wrapped around the microphone without my brain giving the conscious command to do so, my voice joined the traitorous body brigade next. When the guys reached the chorus, I suddenly heard my voice join in. I didn't fight it, didn't want to.
Being here, doing this, felt right. It felt natural in a way I'd been missing for longer than just the last two weeks since I'd last been on stage with them.
One song flowed into the next and then the next.
Some of them were our songs. Some of them weren't, but they all came as naturally as the first one. The music lulled me into a trancelike state, and when it finally faded away, I blinked a few times, trying to make sense of what the hell just happened.
Around me, all the guys looked as reverent and at peace as I was feeling. Alicia was beaming at us from where she was standing off to one side, her eyes misty with tears. She clapped and cried out, "That was incredible!"
Then, as if she realized we were all in some kind of stunned haze, she quieted down and turned away, trying to give us some privacy. Nick shook the trance off first and looked at me, a huge smile spreading on his lips. "How’d that feel?"
"I don't know about you," Matt said, his smile rivaling Nick's in size. "But that fucking rocked."
"Yeah, it did." That from Caleb, who raised his fist for Nick to bump.
Dom didn't rave like the others. Instead, he was as quiet as I was, his gaze drilling into mine. I could see the question in his eyes, along with the promises he was making. His gray eyes didn't release mine while he waited for my answer. The thing was, there really was only one answer I could give them.
"I'd forgotten how much fun it was just being in the garage making music." It was crazy how there were so many bands out there dying to get out of their garages, and here I was, after busting my ass to get out of ours, dying to get back into it.