We turn a corner.
“My place is over there.” She points at a vape shop.
We approach a door adjacent to the shop, she unlocks it, and we go up a stairway into a hall with four apartments. There are more stairs leading to higher floors. Maybe I watch too much TV, but this looks like a damn crack house—water stains on the wall, peeling plaster, and what on earth is that smell? She lives here?
Bria sees my expression. “Before you say anything, I know it looks bad, but my brother had the building checked out. He’s a firefighter in Brooklyn. It’s far from being condemned.”
I try not to cringe as we come to her door. “Well, I guess there’s that.”
Part of me wants to go inside, pack up her things, and take her back to Stamford. I may not live in the Taj Mahal, but my apartment is the goddamn Ritz compared to this shithole.
I come to the city often. So do the guys. We’ve been playing gigs here for years. Have I just ignored the fact that people live like this? Or maybe I’ve just never been to this part of the city.
“Your brother lets you live here?”
“I’m a big girl, Crew. He doesn’t let me live here. I choose to. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
She opens her door and we enter her small apartment. I glance around and am surprised yet again because this place is not anything like the outside of the building or the hall.
“Wow.” It takes only a few seconds to see the entire apartment. It’s all one room, except for the bathroom. But what she’s done with it—I could be at the Ritz or an ultra-urban version of it. I run my finger along the handcrafted shelves, which hold an impressive collection of vinyl. I spot one in particular and carefully extract the rare album cover. “Holy crap. How did you …?”
“I go to flea markets. Can you believe I got that one for a dollar? The lady selling it had no idea of its value.”
I put it back where I found it. “Was the place like this before you moved in?” I ask, taking in the wall that looks like exposed brick. When I move closer, I can see it’s been expertly painted. Her small open kitchen is sleek and modern, and there’s not a hint of rust on anything. The furniture is sparse but tasteful, and the lighting is fabulous.
“Nope. I did this with a little help from Brett and his friends.”
“Brett?” I ask, a gnawing in my gut.
“My brother. He and a few of his firefighter buddies helped me. And he has a rich friend who was redecorating, so I inherited some amazing furniture and light fixtures. Brett bought me the mini kitchen. You should have seen the place before.”
“I can only imagine but”—I peer at the many locks on the door— “is it safe?”
“It’s safe enough.”
My insides twist.
“Listen,” she says, seeing my concern, “I know all my neighbors. Well, except the guy who just moved in on the third floor. None of them are drug dealers. They’re regular people like me, waiting for their break.”
I go to one of the two large windows and then the other, testing the locks and making sure they’re secure. I examine the fire escape, wondering how easy it would be for anyone to climb up from the street.
I glance into the alley and swear I see someone who looks like him.
“What’s with you?” she asks, eyeing my balled-up fists. “You look like you want to kill someone.”
I retreat from the window. “You really have no idea how vulnerable you are, do you?”
“You need to relax, Crew.”
I open my mouth to speak, but she shuts me up by gripping my arm, twisting it behind my back, and pushing me up against her wall.
“What the hell, Bria?”
She releases me. “Just showing you I can take care of myself, that’s all. Brett made me take some classes.” She opens her small fridge and gets out two bottles of Bud Light. “Beer?”
I check the time on my phone. “It’s barely noon.”
“And you need to chill. How are we going to get any work done with you being all judgy?”
I take a beer and sit on the couch, then open my notebook to the last page. It’s a song we were working on three weeks ago. One of hers. It’s almost finished. It’ll be the easiest one to complete. I’m not sure I have enough creativity flowing through my veins to do anything else. Not after seeing that man in the alley.
She twists off the top of her beer and sinks into the couch next to me. She leans close to see my notebook. I can smell her. My first instinct is to scoot away—protect myself. I gaze at the window again, then at her, knowing I’m not the one who needs protecting.
Chapter Seventeen
Bria
We didn’t get much done yesterday, not with all of Crew’s questions about my apartment and the neighborhood.
Going out for a quick bite didn’t help either. He criticized something on every street corner. I get that he’s from Connecticut, but his high and mighty act is getting old. He needs to realize not everyone lives a charmed life.
I haven’t told him about my family, outside of Brett. I don’t need people feeling sorry for me. I want to tell him, though. I almost did yesterday to get him to quit with the third-degree about where I buy my groceries, what restaurants I go to, are the streets well-lit at night, and do I carry mace in my purse.
I’ve been on my own for a while now. I grew up in a house with a father, but he wasn’t really there. He may as well have died along with my mom. He wasn’t the one who raised me. Brett was. The minute I graduated from high school, Harry Cash hightailed it out of New York. The day of my graduation, he handed me a card with a few thousand bucks in it and told me he’d sold the apartment, and I had until the end of June to move in with Brett or find my own place.
If Crew had seen where I wanted to live that first summer, he’d have had a coronary. Even Brett put the kibosh on that one. I lived with Brett for a few months, but I couldn’t stand Amanda, his wife at the time, so I moved into the dorm. Until I quit school, that is.
My phone rings. It’s Crew.
“I’m downstairs,” he says before I can say hello. “Can you buzz me up?”
“Be right there.”
I run down and let him in. He appraises the door and the walls surrounding it. “There’s no way for you to open this from your apartment?”
I snatch the Dunkin’ Donuts bag from him. “You must be confusing this with Park Avenue.”
He follows me up the stairs. “You shouldn’t leave your door open.”
“It was only for a minute so I could let you in.”
“A lot of things can happen in a minute.” He looks disgusted as he hands me my coffee. “You should keep your door locked at all times. Promise me you will.”
I stop blowing on the coffee. “What’s with the big brother act?”
He blindly reaches into the bag I’m holding, extracts a donut, and rips through it with his teeth. “I’m not your goddamn brother,” he says around a mouthful of food.
“I see your mood has improved since yesterday,” I jest.
I’m perusing the donuts when he recites some of my lyrics. “‘People tell me all about you. Your picture hangs up on my wall. I was forced to grow without you—’”
I race over and close the notebook I left open on the coffee table. I give him a hard stare, and he knows he crossed the line. We don’t look at each other’s notebooks without an invitation.
“You’re the one who left it open,” he says. “That makes it fair game.” He stands and thoughtfully checks out my apartment, his attention landing on a picture of my mother hanging on the wall next to my bed. “Is that your mom?”
It’s the picture I gaze at each day and wonder how things might have turned out if she’d lived. “She died on 9/11.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “I was three. I don’t really remember her. Sometimes I think I do, but they are probably just memories I’ve created based on what Brett’s told me. He was eleven.”
“Was she a fi
rst responder?”
“She was a nurse. Worked at a nearby hospital. They ran over to help.”
He leans down and runs a finger across the top of my notebook. “I’ll bet you have a lot of songs in here about her. Dozens maybe.”
He says that almost like he knows what it’s like to lose someone.
He shoves another donut in his mouth. “We’d better get started.”
We sit and stare at our notebooks for long drawn-out seconds. Then we laugh.
“Any ideas?” I ask.
“Remember the one we were tossing around last month about that car on fire at the side of the road?”
“I don’t know. I kind of thought it sounded too much like ‘Man on Fire’.”
He nods. “You’re right. We have to come up with something more original. Something we can shove up their asses.”
He’s still mad at the guys for kicking us out. I am too, but I understand why they did it. We were acting like adolescents.
His phone chirps with a text. “Liam just told me to open my email. Says it’s something for both of us.” He taps on the screen. “He sent me an MP3 file.”
He plays it. It’s a guitar riff. Not much, twenty seconds or so, but it’s good. Crew plays it two more times.
“He wants us to succeed, you know,” I tell him.
“I know.”
Liam writes the majority of the melodies for our songs. Sometimes he’ll come up with one and Crew will put words to it. Other times, Crew will give him lyrics, and Liam will write a melody to fit them. It’s a symbiotic relationship my presence has thrown a wrench into.
I’ve often wondered if either of them regrets bringing me on. If maybe they’re intimidated by me. I write lyrics and melodies. I never intended to threaten their jobs. Because of that, I hold back and let them take the lead. But I think I have to put both hats back on and see what happens.
“Can you play it again?” I ask.
I listen with my eyes closed, hearing the timing of where the lyrics should go. I then flip through my notebook to see if I have anything that will fit. Crew does the same.
After a while, he says, “I might have something. It’s not a lot, but with some work …”
“Can I see?”
He hesitantly hands me the notebook. These lyrics, located at the back, are relatively recent. He looks over my shoulder as I read them silently.
On that stage is where I find you
Each and every night
On that stage is where I find you
Dancing left and dancing right
“Play it again,” I ask.
I listen to the riff while singing in my head. I turn to Crew. “It’s missing something. The verses should be separate, and we need to add a third line.”
He ponders my suggestion. “That could work.”
I motion to his phone. “Play it on a loop.”
I close my eyes and listen. Then I scribble down some possibilities.
When I look at Crew, I see he’s doing the same.
Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, writing lyrics that are obviously about each other, but ask anyone in any band, and that’s the nature of the beast. We write about what’s important to us. What affects us. What has destroyed us.
“I think the first verse should be mine,” I say, leaning forward to stop the music. “How about this?”
I take a deep breath and sing, “On that stage is where I find you. Each and every night. Doesn’t matter if you’re here or far away from me.”
“Again,” Crew says. On his notepad, he does more scribbling as I sing.
“You got something?”
“How about this for my verse?”
I look at what he wrote:
On that stage is how I see you
Dancing left and dancing right
Looking just as though it’s where you’re always meant to be
“Perfect,” I say. “Now the chorus.”
I look at the words he’d written for the chorus.
On that stage, on that stage, I see you on that stage
I’ll always see you like you were that daaaaaaay
That day I saw you up on that staaaaaage
I walk over to my keyboard and mess around until I find a melody that goes with the riff. I tweak it, changing the key until I find the best one.
“That’s it,” Crew says, jumping off the couch. “Let’s try it.”
We sing the chorus together, doing it a few different ways, both of us making notes.
I don’t fail to notice that he keeps his back to me as we sing.
He turns and smiles. “It’s good.”
I go to the couch and play Liam’s riff again. “We need a third verse.”
We both listen and think.
The riff loops again and he sings, “On that stage is where you slay me. Even when I pick a fight.”
Without missing a beat, I add, “Never saying what it really is you want from me.”
“Yes,” he says, writing down my lyric. “From the top, the whole thing. Acapella.”
We sit on the couch, each of us staring at the wall as we sing our new song.
“Again,” he says.
This time, as the song unfolds, we look at each other as we sing. And somehow, the song gets better. It gets better even though there’s no music. It gets better because we bring more emotion to it. More passion.
At the end, we naturally sing the chorus twice. Then we stop, the apartment dead silent except for the sound of our excited breaths.
His eyes flare with heat and the edges of his mouth turn up in a sexy, roguish grin. We reach for each other simultaneously and our mouths collide. His full, firm lips brush back and forth against mine. Without hesitation, our tongues mingle. He lays me back on the couch, kissing me even harder. He tastes like chocolate and me—cherry. The flavors mix together almost as well as our bodies do.
I can already feel his erection as he presses into me. Every hormone in my body zings to life. I pull him more tightly against me.
He moans into my mouth when I suck on his tongue. His hand works up and under my shirt, and my breasts grow heavy, weighted with need. He grips one, then the other. My bra gets pushed up. He cups my bare skin, then his thumbs lightly graze my rigid nipples.
“Oh, God,” I mumble incoherently.
He sits up, straddling me, and removes his shirt. I see his tattoo up close for the first time, but before I can explore, he’s ripping off my shirt and bra. Then his lips are on me again. They’re all over me: my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. He spends a lot of time on my breasts. I weave my fingers through his hair, begging him silently to go lower. I want to feel his mouth on every part of me.
He slips a finger under the waistband of my jeans, teasing my skin before he unzips my pants. His lips blaze a trail down my abdomen, finally joining his hands as they work to shimmy my pants over my hips.
He abruptly stops kissing me and jerks away.
I look down, thinking maybe he’s removing his pants. But he’s staring at my stomach. At the scar from having my appendix out. He doesn’t look like he wants to sleep with me anymore.
He looks like he’s going to be sick.
He hops off the couch, picks up his shirt off the floor, and throws it on inside out. “I have to go.” He retrieves his phone and notebook and bolts to the door, glancing back at me like he wants to say something more, but he doesn’t.
I stare at the door after he leaves. What just happened?
I get dressed and read the last lyric I wrote, thinking how nothing has ever been truer.
Never saying what it really is you want from me.
Chapter Eighteen
Crew
Hours later, after doing a lot of soul-searching, I end up at Mom’s. I knock, the door opens, and she’s there. “Oh, sweetie, what’s wrong?”
I step inside. “Is Gary here?”
“He’s at a meeting. He’ll be home soon.” She runs a soothing hand down my arm. “You okay?”
I nod. It’s not very convincing.
“I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”
While she’s in the kitchen, I browse the pictures on the wall. Pictures of me, of the two of us together, of her and Gary’s wedding. Even one of Abby and me.
“A man who stares at a wall must have a lot on his mind,” she says, coming up behind me. She hands me a cup. “Or maybe nothing.”
We go to the kitchen table and sit. I sip coffee, stalling.
She cocks her head thoughtfully. “Does this have something to do with Bria?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because a month ago, when you’d sleep here a few times a week, I noticed some changes.”
“Changes?”
“You were … happy.” She smiles. “After all this time, it’s not something I expected. I’d hoped, prayed even, then it started to happen. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it. But a few weeks ago, around the time you told me about your record contract, you stopped coming to the city, and when we spoke on the phone, you seemed sad.”
“I’m not sad, Mom.”
“Okay. Confused then.”
I run a hand through my hair.
“We’ve always been able to talk, Chris. You know you can tell me anything.”
“I ran out on her.” I sink into my chair like the weasel I am. “I saw the scar, and it just reminded me of … Well, I saw it and freaked.”
“Scar?”
“Bria had her appendix out.”
She tries not to smile, but I see it anyway. She knows full well what we must have been doing for me to see a scar like that. “Is that so?” She sips her coffee, eyebrows raised.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Can I ask you a question? Have you been with anyone else since Abby?”
I eye her like she’s crazy. I am in my mid-twenties. “Mom, it’s been seven years.”
“So the answer is yes. Surely other girls you’ve been with have had scars, Chris.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I didn’t notice.”
Reckless Obsession (The Reckless Rockstar Series) Page 10