by Ali Parker
“No, you should stay. Enjoy the night with the guys. You guys deserve it.” And having him around really wasn’t going to make me feel any better about the whole Gerry thing. Especially since I had to keep it from him.
I really, really hated this.
19
Jared
Whistling as I jogged up the stairs at Alicia’s office to pick her up for dinner, I couldn’t fight the grin on my lips. For the first time in a really, really long time, I was happy. Like actually, truly happy.
Things were going great with the band. None of us were fighting for a change, practices for the tour were going well, and I had a beautiful woman in my bed every night who wasn’t only chasing after fame or money. Life was good.
Until I rounded the corner to her office and heard her voice and Gerry’s filtering out into the hall. The building was mostly empty since the sun was already setting outside, and her office door was open, their voices crystal clear.
“I went to see the oncologist this morning,” Gerry was saying. Oncologist? I paused at the end of the hall. Wasn’t that a—? “The cancer hasn’t spread.”
“Thank god,” Alicia exclaimed. “What did he say about your treatment? Has he given you a firm start date yet?”
Wait a second. Gerry. Oncologist. Cancer. Treatment. What the fuck?
My feet were carrying me toward her office before I so much as came to the inevitable conclusion. Gerry has cancer.
Without knocking, I walked into her office. “What the fuck is going on?”
Both Gerry and Alicia looked startled to see me, seated at the small sitting area in the corner of her office against two floor-to-ceiling windows.
Alicia recovered first. “Jared. Hi.”
“How much did you hear?” Gerry asked, resigned. He told me to take a seat with them, but I was too riled up.
Pacing the length of her office, I shoved my hands in my pockets. “You went to see a doctor about getting treatment for your cancer.”
“I did.” Gerry nodded. He sighed and rose to his feet, placing both of his hands on my shoulders to stop me from pacing. “I’ve been diagnosed with cancer. I won’t be joining you on this tour.”
All my earlier elation evaporated as fast as air from a popped balloon. Emotion balled in my throat as I searched for the right words. None came to me.
Finally, I managed to choke out. “We need you.”
Gerry’s lips lifted into a wry grin. “I know, and I’ll be back. I just won’t be on tour.”
“Then we should postpone.” The idea jumped into my head, and I held onto it. “I’ll let the guys know and—”
“No,” Gerry said, both of his eyes boring into mine. “This is why I didn’t want you to know before the tour started. You have to go. You’re not postponing or canceling a single thing because of this. I won’t allow it.”
“You can’t make us play.” I crossed my arms. I knew I was being stubborn, but we couldn’t just leave Gerry behind and jet off on a world tour while he was fighting for his life. There were so many things wrong with that scenario.
The band would back me. I knew they would. We’d all lost so many people in our lives, they wouldn’t want to abandon one of the few left who really mattered to us all either.
Gerry took a deep breath, giving his head one firm shake. “I can’t make you, no, but if you do this Jared, if you cancel, you will be giving this disease power over my life, over your lives. I don’t want it to have that. I refuse to back down for a fucking disease, and you shouldn’t either.”
“I’m not trying to give it power,” I exploded, my arms shooting out to my sides. “I’m trying to tell you we’ll be here for you.”
“And you still will. We’ll talk often. I’ll keep you updated on my treatment just as you’ll keep me updated on the tour.”
I replayed past tours in my mind, lingering for the first time on all that Gerry did while we showed up at concert venues and played. “We couldn’t go without you anyway. No way we’d get anything done without you.”
“I’ve taught Alicia all the things she needs to know to fill in for me on tour. She’s not taking over my job, but she’ll just be keeping my seat warm until you get back. Listen to her, and you’ll all be just fine. We’ve been working together, and she knows what to do.”
Alicia was quiet, letting us talk. But she nodded in agreement with what Gerry was saying when my eyes sought hers out. In the back of my mind, it occurred to me that if she’d been working with Gerry, that meant she had known and didn’t tell me, but looking into his eyes, I could read his expression clearly.
Gerry had a game plan, and he didn’t want us to fuck it up. I took a deep breath and thought over all I’d learned in the last few minutes. Gerry hadn’t mentioned a single thing we could do to make this easier for him other than not to give power to his disease.
He asked us to go on tour and to trust Alicia with his job while we did. I understood where he was coming from, but it wasn’t my decision alone. Before he told one of us, his plan of us only finding out on tour might’ve worked, but now that I knew, I had to let the other guys know. It was their decision too.
“I’m calling in the band. We need to decide on this together.”
Gerry huffed out a frustrated sigh. “For fuck’s sake, Jared! I’m not dying. I just need to get through chemo. Unfortunately, that means I need to miss the tour, but I’ll be back. Sure, when I found out, I tried to retire because I didn’t know what else to do. Destitute had broken up anyway, and it didn’t seem like it would hurt anyone. Things are different now. You have to go, and you have to kick this tour’s fucking ass.”
“The guys need to know about this. I’m not trying to be an asshole here, and I’m not trying to be difficult, but they’ll never forgive me if I don’t tell them, and if we don’t all sit down with this together.”
Gerry closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, I saw the resolution in them. “Call them. You’re right. I should tell them about this myself.”
I pulled my phone out of pocket and opened a group chat we had but rarely used. Typing fast, I told them all to get their asses to the office. Right now. An hour later, it was dark outside, and we were all seated in Gerry’s office. Initially, they all had the exact same reaction I had: Hell, no, we weren’t going anywhere.
As the shock started to subside some, Gerry calmly explained the situation and told us postponing the tour was silly. “You guys have overcome a lot to finish this album. And even if you stay, I’m not letting any of you come to the hospital to hold my hand while I get the treatment, so staying behind in LA serves no purpose.”
“Fair point,” Nick said, sitting on the armrest of one of the couches in Gerry’s office.
Caleb glowered at him. “It’s called moral support.”
“There are thousands upon thousands of people in this city right now battling this disease. Being in the same city as them isn’t bringing them any moral support. It won’t be different with me. You can give me moral support from anywhere in the world. Over the phone. Which is the closest I’d allow you to me anyway.”
“Another good point,” Matt said.
This time, no one glowered. We were giving Gerry a chance, and slowly but surely, what he was saying was starting to make sense.
“What kind of cancer is it?” Dom asked finally. We were all waiting for Gerry to get there, but since he hadn’t said anything, it was time to ask.
“Prostate.” His face was expressionless.
“What’d the doc say about your prognosis?” Nick asked.
“He’s fairly positive. They caught it early during a routine checkup.”
Caleb put his elbows on his knees, resting his chin on his steepled fingers. “What can we do?”
Gerry looked around the room and made eye contact with each of us in turn. “You can go on your tour, listen to what Alicia tells you, and come back safe. That’s what I really need from you guys.”
One by one, we nodded. If that
was what he needed, that was what we were doing.
“Okay,” Dom said, voicing what we were all thinking. “If that’s what we need, we’ll do it. Good luck, Gerry.”
Our meeting ended shortly after that. The guys and Gerry left, walking out together. I waited for Alicia to grab her stuff. When she was done, she slung her purse across her shoulder and took my hand. “How are you doing with the news?”
I contemplated her question before answering. Threading our fingers together, I gave her hand a squeeze and pulled her to my side. “I’ll be fine.”
As long as I had her hand in mine, I really felt like I would be.
20
Alicia
I was going to kill whoever it was on the other end of that line. My phone was ringing incessantly, and I tried to ignore it, but this was the third time without any break in-between that it was ringing, and ignoring it was becoming impossible.
Groaning, I rolled over, and without opening my eyes, reached for the phone. After fumbling around for a second, my fingers closed around the offending object, and I blindly slid my thumb across the screen and held it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Alicia,” Gerry’s voice barked, and I flinched at the loud noise. “Thank god. I’ve been trying to reach you for ten minutes. Where are you?”
My eyes burned as I cracked them open. “Where do you think I am? It’s four-thirty in the morning. I’m in bed.”
Gerry’s impatient voice came barking through the speaker. “When was the last time you checked Insider Scoop?”
His reference to the popular celebrity gossip site confused me. Then, I was scrambling out of bed, wide awake as I realized the implications of why he would be calling to ask me that at this hour. Someone in the band must have gotten up to something last night.
“What is it? I checked it before I fell asleep, and Destitute was clean.” Part of my nightly ritual before bed was checking notifications and alerts of where and if the band’s name had popped up.
“Well, they’re not clean anymore. Just check the site, and get to my office in an hour.”
With that ominous summoning, the call dropped, and I flicked on lights as I hurried to my living room where my laptop was charging. I hit the button to fire it up, and while I waited, I made a very quick cup of coffee and then carried it with me to my couch.
As I might have expected from something big enough for Gerry to pull me out of bed at this time of the morning, the dull, electronic beeps of incoming notifications and emails rang out as soon as I logged on.
Hastily opening a few tabs on my browser, I thought at first, I was still dreaming, but as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I knew I wasn’t. My initial thought that one of the band members had gotten up to something last night was dead wrong.
It wasn’t one of the others, but it was my very own Jared Larsen who was blowing up the internet this morning. A quick scan of the headline and article that had been posted on the most widely-read gossip blog in town gave me the basic details.
A woman, a Madison Green to be precise, was claiming she was pregnant with Jared’s child. The article had been posted just under four hours ago, and it quoted Miss Green as saying, “I’ve tried to contact him to tell him I’m having his baby, but he’s refusing to have anything to do with me. Or with his child.”
Tears stung the backs of my eyes, and a wave of nausea rolled through me. I couldn’t believe this. Making quick mental calculations, I tried to determine whether he could have knocked her up while we were already together. Since the article didn’t say how far along she was, it was entirely possible that he had and also absolutely impossible for me to actually calculate.
As I fought to remain calm, I remembered the promise I’d once made to myself to stop assuming the worst about him was always true. I allowed myself to focus on that and felt the anger and disappointment leaving my body as I gulped in a few deep breaths.
It’s going to be okay. I had to believe that. Jared had changed in the last few months. His own brother had said so, and I’d seen it with my own eyes.
Even if the woman was pregnant and on the off chance the baby was, in fact, Jared’s, I had to believe in him and that it hadn’t been conceived after we’d started seeing each other. More than that, though, I knew all the way to my bones that he wasn’t the kind of man who would simply blow off a woman he’d impregnated.
Sure, there was no way he was going to make an honest woman out of her by marrying her or anything, but he wouldn’t refuse all contact, and he definitely wouldn’t refuse to provide for his child.
My shoulders squared as I absorbed all these things I knew to be true. I had to be there for him. Everything else I could figure out later.
Red hot annoyance spread through me at the lies the woman was spreading, one way or the other. I wasn’t going to allow her to paint him as the next poster child for the “worthless fathers who didn’t support their kids” list. Not on my watch. Slamming down the lid on my laptop and leaving my cooling coffee behind, I headed to my bedroom to throw on some clothes.
It was time to get to work.
An hour after my rude awakening, the early light of dawn was playing softly on the ocean beyond the windows of Gerry’s office where Jared sat next to me listening to Gerry rant and rave.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, Jared was freshly showered, and the clean, masculine smell coming off him where he sat so close to me was distracting me from Gerry’s lecture about how many times he’d warned them about the pitfalls of their lifestyle.
Looking as unshakable and impenetrable as ever, Jared was almost bored as he listened. Clad in another of his old, iconic rock shirts, sunglasses hanging from his neckline, and a worn pair of jeans, I knew Gerry was seeing the old Jared. The arrogant, entitled rock star.
“Be honest with me, Jared. Do you know this woman?”
“Now you ask me that? After making me sit through all of that?” Jared folded his arms and cocked a dark eyebrow. “Yeah, I know her. Before you ask, yes. I did sleep with her. Once.”
My stomach sank. However, his genuine exasperation and annoyance when he continued were like a soothing balm to the stinging brought on by his admission.
His eyes touched mine as he said. “She told me she was on birth control, but I used a condom anyway. I swear.”
Gerry ran his hands through his hair, as he suggested. “Maybe this one time, you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget,” Jared scoffed, dismissing the possibility outright. Having personal knowledge of how dedicated Jared was to wearing condoms, regardless of the heat of the moment or the place, I tended to agree with him.
“How do you know? Maybe you were drunk or—”
Jared held up a hand to stop him and shook his head. “No. I wasn’t. I remember this chick. We were at my place after a party at Nick’s. I wasn’t that drunk, and I specifically remember her begging me to leave the condom off. It was a bit of a fucking turn-off, and it was definitely her.”
“If that’s true, then why is she coming after you?”
“I don’t know.” Jared shrugged. “She showed up at my house a couple of days later and tried to seduce me and then got all pissed when I refused her. I think this whole thing might be a shakedown by a slightly obsessed fan who may or may not still be holding a grudge. It all happened months ago.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked him, but there was no distrust or judgment in my voice.
His eyes cut to mine. It didn’t look like he was hiding anything when he answered me. “It all happened before I even met you. I think it was maybe a week or so before you came onboard. By the time I met you, I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. There was never any reason to bring her up.”
“Okay,” I said.
His brow furrowed a little, but he nodded. “I’m telling you, if this woman is pregnant, the kid’s not mine,” Jared concluded, dropping his chin as if waiting for Gerry to contradict him.
I didn’t know which one of the two of u
s was more surprised when the contradiction didn’t come, nor did any more questions. Gerry shifted in his seat and focused his attention on me. “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to spin it as a full-frontal assault by an obsessed stalker, and I’m going to round up Ted and his team. We’ll demand blood tests and take it from there.”
I nodded and started to rise from my seat. This was a nightmare. Just when I thought we were in the clear for the tour, the guys finally at peace with Gerry’s decision to stay behind, this had to happen. The entire tour could be derailed by this.
My mind raced a thousand miles an hour.
I could carry out Gerry’s plan with the press. Stalkers and obsessed fans were known to pull this kind of stuff. It wouldn’t be hard for people to believe Destitute, and Jared as their frontman, were being targeted.
The band was at an all-time high, and it was no secret. The tour was selling out faster than we could release tickets. The guys were everywhere, in the news, in magazines, on billboards. If you switched on the radio, chances were Jared’s voice would be serenading you on your way to work. Their old stuff was being revived, and the new stuff was a sensation.
If they were ever in the prime spot to gather this kind of attention, it was now. Spinning it and doing my job wasn’t what was bothering me. I could do that in my sleep with my hands tied behind my back. The question gnawing at the back of my mind, the one I couldn’t shake and didn’t have an answer to was way more troubling.
What if it turned out she was pregnant, and it was Jared’s baby she was carrying?
“One last thing. Here’s a picture of her. I’m circulating it with security here at the office, but you’ll need to make sure security at all your promotional events knows she’s not to come within spitting distance of him.”