Excitement is like a contagious disease. It catches like fire, spreads, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t tame excitement, or piss on someone else’s parade when they’re truly enthusiastic about something. Which was why I was extra bitter when the cab picked us up from Heathrow Airport and drove us through London, up to Watford.
Everybody was just so jolly about seeing their families.
Blake was staying with his parents down the road from me. Alfie was crashing at a mate’s house in Kentish Town, and Lucas was going back to his perfect family in their perfect converted barn. Kent, not Watford. They’d moved somewhere with sheep and fresher air and inbred, posh neighbors when the eldest Rafferty graduated from university. All of Lucas’ siblings were already married to horsey-looking partners with great jobs. I’d once told him his family put the “promise” in “compromise.”
Maybe that’s why he dedicates his life to ruining yours, arsehole.
I had two rooms booked at a London hotel, close to my family, but not too close that I actually had to see them. The rooms were for Indie and me, though I’d asked Hudson to cancel the extra room so she and I would finally sleep in the same bed. I wasn’t even entirely sure what my feelings toward her were. I just knew she made some of the bullshit go away, and that was enough to pacify me.
I missed Tania.
I felt naked, moving around the world without her on my back. I’d purchased another acoustic guitar, but she didn’t feel the same. She was rough—not soft-wooded like Tania—the strings too tight. She felt weird on my lap, like an average-looking fangirl begging to be fucked. Every time I tried playing it on the plane, Stardust shot me a look of pity, which made everything so much worse somehow.
If there was, indeed, one good thing about the entire Fallon and Will engagement ordeal, it was that now I had fewer restrictions. I wasn’t talking to any of the lads—just to Indie, and not too much—but I could go on the Internet and watch whatever the hell I wanted. I knew Stardust had been privy to the engagement and the dick pics ordeal, but her betrayal wasn’t as soul-crushing. She wasn’t my childhood friend. She owed me nothing. In fact, she hadn’t even asked to be employed by me, which made everything about the revelation that she knew less stinging.
“Ready to go home?” Blake sniffed, staring out the window at the gray London landscape.
I didn’t answer. The constant drizzle reminded me why I loved my city. It was so unapologetically shitty. Rainy with a chance of a very public meltdown. People came here to survive, not to live. But surviving made you feel so much more alive.
“Would I be able to get a day off? I want to check the London Eye and the Dungeon. The House of Parliament, too,” Indie muttered, her eyes glued to the window. I didn’t know why it’d surprised me so much. Like I didn’t expect her to make any plans other than riding my cock and my face. She always seemed like an open book, eager to be stained by ink in different colors. Everywhere we went, she always wanted to bike around the main streets and eat the local food. Other men might find it cute, her lust for life, but I just found it depressing. She was so much happier than I was, and I had so much more than her.
“I’m sure we can sort something out. Right, mate?” Blake elbowed me, his whole body angled toward me. He’d been working hard on being less of a micromanaging cunt since the loss of Tania.
I chose not to answer Blake—again—and flung my arm over Stardust’s shoulder, eyeing Lucas, who was looking at me like I’d stabbed him in the soul.
“Sounds good. Let’s go there together and make some memories,” I gritted out.
Her head popped up, her skeptical gaze sliding along my face, my jaw, my eyes, my lips. An inventory she knew all too well, which was why pink spread over her cheeks and neck, cluing me in that she absolutely thought about all the things we could do while sightseeing. Grinding into her from behind in the London Eye in front of horrified Japanese tourists or cornering her in a dark spot at the London Dungeon sounded like paradise. Half the fun was watching her get flustered and annoyed with the way her body reacted to me in public.
“Whatever happened to you being sexually harassed by people? I thought you didn’t do public appearances,” she teased.
I shrugged. “I might have to punch a teenager or two. It’ll be on your conscience.”
Indie couldn’t help herself. She shook her head and laughed. “You’re so weird.”
“Normal is grossly overrated,” I muttered, hating that I cared if she thought it was good-weird or bad-weird.
And I didn’t want to break her. Not at that moment.
It should have been an alarm bell, but I chose to ignore it.
By the time I figured out how to call it, it was too late.
If you ever wondered how Indie would look if she found out I killed every puppy on her street, let me tell you: I now knew.
All it took for her to make this expression was telling her she was going to share a room with me. She didn’t like the idea. Not. One. Bit. Indie had only found out about our shared accommodation when we were actually in front of our presidential suite’s door. She turned around, asking for her digital key.
“What key?” I asked with a straight face, prolonging our inevitable showdown.
She rubbed her open palm over her nose, which I thought was adorable—another clear warning sign I chose to ignore—and cocked her head sideways.
“The door to my room. What’s up, Alex? You’re not even jet-lagged.”
I placed the card of our shared room in her hand and curled her fingers around it.
She said, “No.”
To which I replied, “Did you know the world is suffering from overpopulation and vast waste of natural resources? We’re going to save a lot of water and electricity sharing a room for a week.”
“We’ll be saving a lot of oxygen, too, because one of us ought to strangle the other.” She walked over to the opposite door. She thought I was joking. Clearly, we needed to be doing more talking and a lot less fingering, because this woman didn’t understand me. At all. I watched as Indie’s smile evaporated gradually from her face each time she slid her key card into the slot and the red dot blinked back at her, spitting out the card. By the fourth attempt, she turned around, stomped her foot, and released a feral growl. “Alex.”
For the record, I spared her my shit-eating grin when I leaned against our already-open door, arms crossed over my chest.
“Alex,” she said again, her tone warning this time, indigo eyes begging me to put her out of her misery.
I didn’t get it. The only difference between the entire tour and London was that she’d be spending the night next to me. Even that wasn’t much of a big deal. I wasn’t a spooner.
I crooked my finger and motioned for her to come in. She stayed rooted to the floor.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we’re going to write music together. And get drunk on words. And bone against the glass door. Because we make sense. Because I’m tired of your fears. This is our tour. Our album. Our soul.”
The thing about being a compulsive liar is at some point, you don’t stop and think whether what you said is true or not. But at this point, I knew, we shared a soul. It was inside her, and I borrowed it. And I needed it. Losing Tania was a game-changer. I needed Stardust much more—maybe even after Paris—and I was beginning to accept that the way one accepted a deadly disease. With a healthy dose of disinclination.
She peeked behind my shoulder to the empty room, then back at me, her fingers clutching her duffel bag, knuckles bone-white.
“On one condition.”
God, if you exist, please make her not ask for Louboutins or a Porsche.
“I’m listening.”
“If we do this, I want you to see your family.”
Now, here’s the thing. Stardust and I had talked. A lot. About The Little Prince and about music and, yes, about our families. We talked like our life depended on it when we were writing every midnight. So she knew everything about my gambling mother and drunk father and slag of a sister. She knew I’d never been hugged as a wee boy and that I wrote about love in the same way people write about sci-fi: solely from my overworked imagination. Which prompted me to believe she thought my relationship with my family was salvageable. Look, I got it. She didn’t have any parents. But living vicariously through me was not the way around it.
“No.” I glued my forehead to the still-open door, acutely aware of the fact she was still in the hallway. What was it about us and hallways? Why were we always so reluctant to let the other person in? Note to self: write a song about it. Foyers. Relationships. Metaphors. Blue-haired girls.
“Well, then, you better get me a room.” She spun on her heels, advancing toward the lifts.
I needed to let her go, and deep down, I knew it. But my soul couldn’t, so I ended up grabbing her wrist and jerking her back to me.
“First of all, you don’t know my family.”
A hint of a triumphant smile decorated her lips when she looked up at me. “I know enough. I know you have one. You, Alex, have a family. Everyone needs a family.”
“That’s bullshit. Do you honestly need Craig? Need this wanker’s drinking problem, hot and cold behavior, and stupid violent spurts?” I couldn’t believe we were spending our time fighting instead of fucking. I also couldn’t believe how similar Craig and I were. How could she be attracted to a guy who represented every vice that had made her life a quiet hell for the last few years?
She thought about it—actually thought about my question, not just spat out an answer—before answering.
“Yes, I need Craig. A big part of loving people and feeling loved is taking care of them, even when they infuriate you. You build confidence and security not only in being taken care of, but also by taking care of your loved ones. I want to help Craig. Hell, I want to change Craig. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need him. He’s my brother.”
It was my turn to think. Did I need Carly? No. Or, at least, I didn’t think I needed her. She was never much good at anything, other than popping babies, and I wouldn’t touch that department with a twenty-foot pole. I didn’t need my parents, either. They clung onto my fortune like a skunk’s scent, and I only ever spoke to them when I needed to, or the customary Christmas and birthday phone call. But I needed Indie, at least for this tour. I didn’t have any illusions about her. She was a girl with small dreams and big problems and we had nothing in common. Nevertheless, she did make “Letters from the Dead” bearable, and I needed to keep her close until we finished the tour and I could give her what she wanted, even if what she wanted was to stab my soul until it bled the rest of its vitality. Because that’s what me sitting in the same room with my parents and my sister, watching them drink canned lager and eating unrecognizable fried food from a newspaper funnel would do to me.
“Jesus Christ.” I waved a dismissive hand her way. “I’ll meet them, okay? Just get the fuck in here and stop loitering in the foyer. For all I know, they’re going to sell the security footage to TMZ, and then I’ll be the cock-exposing, washed-up druggie rock star who also has to beg his babysitter not to leave him home alone.”
She took a step in my direction, her grin infuriating and cock-hardening in equal measures. “You’re cute when you beg.”
I hooked my finger into her barely existent cleavage and pulled her into me, planting a wet kiss on her smart mouth. “We’ll see who’s going to be doing all the begging tonight.”