by Frankie Rose
“It’s cool, Patterson. My daughter is a prodigy, wise before her time. I told her you had a few personal problems and she asked if it was about boys. I told her, no, not this time. I don’t think she believed me, though. Easier to let her think that than tell her someone tried to murder you last year and you had to make sure they didn’t get released from prison.”
“Yeah. Good idea. How does she know about boy problems anyway?”
“Because she knows I have girl problems, so…”
“Fuck.”
Noah laughs. “It’s all good. Not as bad as you think. Hey, guess what?”
I wince, bracing myself for whatever’s going to come out of his mouth next.
“I have a date tonight.”
“You do?” Surprise floods me. I didn’t see that one coming at all.
“I do. Her name is Tuesday. Literally.”
“Dude, I am so pleased that you have a date with a girl named Tuesday,” I tell him. And I am. I really am. I haven’t consciously realized until now that I’ve been avoiding Noah a little. Avoiding calling him at least. Now that I know he’s out there and taking a mystery girl on a date, I’m brimming over with relief.
“Yeah, well. It was time. And she’s really pretty. Like, a ten. Brunette. Big tits. I’m feeling very good about it,” he says, laughing. He sounds crass, but I can tell he’s just trying to ease the frisson of tension that lies between us.
“Nice. Big tits are a must.”
“It’s strangely hot to hear you say that, Patterson. You’d better watch yourself.”
“Noted.”
“Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were doing okay. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t too hard seeing, well, seeing Luke.”
Noah hates saying Luke’s name. He never really does it. He always manages to somehow find a way to avoid it. That he’s saying his name now is kind of interesting. “It was horrible,” I say, sighing. “And then it was just hard. And then it was good. And then it was sad. It was everything all at once.”
“Sounds intense.”
“He told me a few things that kind of put a few things in perspective. And he gave me these tickets to see him play at the Staples Center on the eighteenth. I have no clue if I should go or not.”
Noah is quiet for a while. Eventually, he says, “When you look at him, can you see anything else, Patterson? Does your heart still try and skip right out of your chest?”
I don’t need to think about the question to figure out my answer. It just feels cruel to tell Noah the truth. I do it anyway, because he already knows how I feel and I don’t want to lie to him. “I don’t see anything or anyone else,” I say. “And my heart feels like it’s on the brink of exploding when I look at him.”
“Then you should go to the concert. You should go, and you should forgive him. Life’s precious and often cut unexpectedly short. Don’t waste love. Especially not that kind of love. It’s very hard to come by.”
“I know. I know it is,” I say quietly. “But I just don’t know if I can do it.”
THIRTY
LUKE
I’ve never been afraid of death. When I joined the NYPD, they kept me out on street patrol for a year longer than they should have because I was always running when there was any danger. I wasn’t running away from it, of course. I was running toward it, to see if anyone was hurt. To see if anyone needed my help. I wasn’t afraid or fearful for my life. I just did what I had to do. Turns out that’s not a trait you’ll find in all police officers. They’re only human after all, and human beings have this overwhelming desire to preserve their own lives in the face of potential gunshot wounds, stabbings and a variety of other fucked up things that can easily occur during the course of your average working day on the streets of New York.
So, yeah. I’m not afraid of being attacked or going head-to-head with a gang of criminals. Not concerned in the slightest. I am, however, shitting my pants as we go through rehearsal for our Fallen Saints gig.
The space is massive. There are so many seats—literally thousands of them—and they are all going to be full in less than eight hours’ time, because every single ticket for the concert sold out in the space of twenty-three minutes. I’m totally awed by the whole thing. Mostly because I can see seats B23 and B24—they’re on the second row, for shit’s sake—and that’s where Avery is going to be sitting. If she turns up, that is. She shouldn’t. She should stay away. I’m doing so much better now, but I’m not miraculously fixed. I still have crappy days where I want to punch my fist through a wall. I just know exactly where that gets me now—a broken wrist and a new guitarist muscling in on the band—so I’m less likely to follow through. Still. It’s not as though I’m perfect. Avery deserves perfect. She needs stability in her life, and I’m hardly that. She shouldn’t come.
But I’m fucked if I don’t want her to. Badly.
“All right, boys. That’s it. You sound phenomenal. I’ll see you tonight. Go and get some rest. No drinking between now and call time. And no drugs, either. I’ll be able to tell. There’ll be plenty of pussy and coke to go around once the show’s over.” Butler’s happier than a pig in shit right now. He’s grinning from ear to ear like someone recently gave him a Chelsea smile. Cole gives him a disgusted look at the mention of drugs.
“You really are a prick, man,” he says. I’m glad the asshole finally appears to be wearing on my band mate as badly as he wears on me. Cole rips his t-shirt off over his head and mops the sweat off his face with it. He throws it at Butler, baring his teeth. “We don’t need you to hook us up with anything, okay? We’re having our own celebration back at my place once we’re finished here.”
First I’ve heard of it, but I’m pleased to find out about it now. I respect their work but Fallen Saints are notorious for their alcohol and drug abuse. That will never be my scene. I’ve found too many people down dark, disgusting back alleys, foaming at the mouth, mid-grand mal seizure as they overdose and die on a cocktail of chemicals that had no business being inside their body. Maybe in the music industry refusing to take drugs might make me uncool, but I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to make music. I can’t do that if I’m fucking dead.
Butler runs his tongue over his teeth, nodding slowly as he digests this information. “Okay. No problem. I may have already laid out for a few things but a change of venue isn’t the end of the world. I guess we’ll have more privacy at your place.”
“It’s just for the band, man,” Pete says. “We’re not partying with a bunch of strangers.”
Butler blinks a couple of times and then starts laughing in a very weird, very awkward way. “Of course, of course. That’s how is should be. Just you guys. Just the band.” He gives Marika a bizarre look, and I fight the urge to smile. He thinks he has a friend on the inside with us, but I know my boys. When they say just the band, they mean just the band. Butler couldn’t get any of us to sign the contract he had drawn up for us, which tied Marika to D.M.F. for a period no shorter than three years. Each and every one of us lawyered up and sent the contract over to our respective representatives, and boy if they haven’t been dragging their feet on getting back to us all.
Marika smiles back at Butler like she knows something we don’t. I can’t be fucked dealing with mind games or secrets right now, though, so I pick up my song list and my bottle of water and I get the fuck out of there. Feels weird not carrying a guitar off stage. It’s going to feel even weirder tonight, when there are twenty thousand people out there in the stands and I won’t have anything between them and me. My guitar’s been a shield for a long time, it seems. I never really knew until it was taken away from me that I treated it that way.
Cole catches up with me in the parking lot, throwing his arm over my shoulder. “This is it,” he says. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. After tonight, we’ll be unstoppable. Nothing will be able to hold us back. I have something for you, by the way. Something that’s going to make you very happy.”
I throw my l
eather jacket onto the backseat of my Fastback, pulling a stupid face at him. “Don’t you start again. I don’t want to fuck any girls you met on Tinder.”
“Psssh. Like I need Tinder. Besides, dickhead, it’s not that kind of present. It’s something far more practical. Something you’ve been craving for a long time.”
“I’m still worried.”
“Don’t be. You’re gonna propose to me when you see this shit, later, I swear to you. I’ll see you in a couple of hours, right?”
Cole leaves and I try not to think about whatever he has up his sleeve now. He may think his surprise is the best thing since sliced bread, but there’s every chance he’s wrong. He usually is wrong.
I head back to my apartment to relax a little before the show. The other boys are hitting the gym but I don’t need any more adrenalin charging around my body right now. I need quiet and calm. I’ve almost attained something that looks like calm by the time five o’clock rolls around and I have to make my way back to the venue. Butler gave us all passes for the underground VIP parking lot. I wasn’t going to use it but as soon as I arrive I find the normal parking lot packed full of girls, and there are people everywhere. A group of girls standing in a circle spot me doing a U-turn and I can hear them chattering through my wound down window.
“Oh my god, that’s him! That’s him, the lead singer!”
“Lucas Reid? Holy shit, where?”
“I can’t believe he’s driving his own car. What the hell? Shouldn’t he be arriving in a Lincoln town car or something?”
“Fuck, he is so hot. Do you think we should try and talk to him?”
I do not want to talk to these girls. Not one iota. I can’t turn around properly without driving right past them so I throw the car into reverse and back the hell out of there as quickly as I can. At the entrance to the VIP parking, the security guard doesn’t even ask to see my pass. He holds out his fist, waiting for me to bump it, and then he buzzes open the heavy gates. “Welcome, man. Love your work. I got tickets to the show tonight because of you guys.”
It’s one thing having a bunch of women throwing themselves at you left, right and center, but it’s kind of weird to have guys recognizing me now. Gives me a sense of credibility, I guess. Most of the time guys don’t want to come and see a band play because they have a crush on one of the musicians. They come because they’re into the music.
“Thanks, man, we appreciate it.”
I find the other guys sitting in the green room backstage, running over the set list and talking excitedly. We strum through most of our songs, making sure we know exactly where we need to be and when, and I’m feeling pretty confident by the time Butler shows up thirty minutes before we’re due to go on stage. He fetches us and leads us down a rabbit warren of corridors until we reach another green room, where the entire lineup of Fallen Saints are already in the process of getting fucked up. Brad Kershaw, the band’s bass player, has a girl perched on the edge of his lap. She looks highly coked up as Brad runs his hands up and down her long, bare, and very tanned legs.
Marika’s uncle, also the band’s drummer, Harvey Bruce Sung, is asleep on a chaise lounge, snoring loudly, and Reece Fitzpatrick, lead vocals, is chugging Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. Sam Perry, Fallen Saint’s legendary guitarist is nowhere to be seen, though.
Butler makes the introductions, and the aging rock stars grunt out the appropriate thanks for being here to support them. I get the feeling that they’re all very bored by meeting us, however, and when we leave I have a bad taste in my mouth.
“Well, that was fucked,” Paul says.
“Yeah. Not what I was expecting at all,” Cole agrees. “Never meet your idols. They’ll only end up disappointing you.
Marika meets us at the side of the stage, and I can tell from the look on her face that she knows exactly what’s going to go down once this show is over. She shoots me a wounded look and I almost feel sorry for her.
The sound of the crowd in the venue beyond is thunderous—thousands of people cheering, clapping, screaming and laughing in the darkness. Butler gives us a speech about what an amazing team we make and how this is merely the first of many amazing performances for us as a group, and I can see that he knows Marika is out after tonight, too. His graceless, last minute scrambling to try and make us see how awesome we are with Marika around is obvious and kind of pathetic.
I’m barely aware of all of this as it goes down, though. I’m nervous. Seriously freaking out. Not about the masses of people waiting for us on the other side of the stage door, or the fact that I’m going to be walking out in front of all of them without my guitar. No, I’m nervous about what I’m going to see when I look out into the madness and I find seats B23 and B24. Will she be there? Will she have come? Traveling from New York is a big deal, especially if the thought of seeing me makes her want to puke.
We all exchange freaked out expressions when the stage crew pull back the heavy black curtain for us to walk out onto the stage. Even Marika looks like she’s about to pass out. The roar of the crowd beyond is deafening. Of all the people to step out first from behind the curtain and into the light, Paul is the last I’d expect, and yet it is him, grinning as he goes, flipping us the bird over his shoulder. Cole next, then Pete, and then Marika. I’m the last. I’m holding onto the seconds as best I can, making them count, because one way or another I’ll know what Avery has decided when I make my way out onto that stage. I’ll know if she’s forgiven me and wants to give me another chance, or I’ll know if I’ve really and truly fucked things up and lost her forever.
“Am I going to have to wheel you out there myself?” Butler jibes.
I shake my head. “No. No, you’re not.” I go, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. The stage lights blind me momentarily, and it’s impossible to see anything at all for a second. Once my eyes grow accustomed to the glare, I see tier after tier of people in their seats, screaming and shouting. I find the seats I had allocated to Avery quickly; I spent the entire rehearsal earlier staring at them, wondering if I was going to be singing at them now, so my body is already attuned to where it needs to be facing.
Scanning down the row, down, down, down, my eyes settle on the spot where Avery should be and my heart stops in my chest.
There’s no one there. The seats are empty—the only empty seats in the entire venue.
She didn’t come.
THIRTY-ONE
LUKE
Rafferty would be so goddamn proud of me. I feel my anxious mood evaporating to be replaced by something far darker, and yet I don’t give in to it. I can’t this time. I have to finish this thing. I need to sing for D.M.F and I need to make sure I don’t fuck this up for the boys.
So I sing. I belt out the seven songs we’ve chosen to play, and after the second song, I stop staring at the seats I had set aside for Avery. It takes me that long to push the hurt out of my head and really focus on where I am and what I’m doing. Once I’ve done that, my body begins to buzz with excitement. This is real, for fuck’s sake. There are so many people in the crowd, grinning as they sing back the lyrics to our songs, and I have to pinch myself. Cole, Pete, Paul and Marika all play furiously, and together we sound amazing. It’s hard not to get caught up and swept away by the whole experience. When we finally hit the last chord of our last song, something has shifted inside me. I’ve held off for so long, reserving judgment on this whole musician-as-a-career thing, forcing myself not to grow attached to it. I’ve wanted to go home so badly, and Avery was a massive part of that. I wanted to go home for her, to see her, to be with her, and now she’s made her decision, it’s feels like a chord pulling me back toward New York has been severed.
I also wanted to go back to New York because I was driven by this intense need to help people. It was an urge that powered me every single day, and I never thought to question why. I never analyzed myself enough to know that I was still the one in need of help. Ever since I’ve been seeing Rafferty, I’ve realized
that it’s far more important to make sure I’m okay before I try and rescue anyone else. I still miss my job at the NYPD, but my obsession with going home and putting that uniform back on has been swayed a little.
Up on this stage is where I need to be—writing and performing music is in my blood. It keeps my heart pumping. It gives energy to my soul.
We finish our set and come off stage, all five of us laughing like morons. Not a single one of us expect the cheers and screams for an encore. Cole looks like his eyes are about to bulge out of his head. “What the fuck are we gonna do?” he hisses. “We only prepared those seven songs.”
“You don’t do anything,” Butler tells us. “You’re the support act. You don’t get a fucking encore.” He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet, though; he’s just as stoked as we are about how our performance went. He throws an arm around Marika, hugging her to his side.
“You’re the best, doll. We couldn’t have done this without you,” he tells her.
Cole clears his throat, his eyebrows lifting in the middle. “Actually we could have. We definitely could have done it without her. We could have done it without you too, Butler. It might have taken us a while, but we would have gotten here.”
Butler’s face transforms into a blank, flat expression, his eyes traveling over the group as he clearly tries to discern what Cole’s talking about. Next to him, Marika rolls her eyes, shrugging out of Butler’s embrace. “Whatever. I know what’s coming next. You guys never planned on keeping me in the band once Fallen Saints was finished with. I’m not completely stupid. It’s your loss, though. I don’t want to play with a group of guys who hate women.”