“One is the loneliest number.
So you said we should be two.
But in the end, baby, it was all about you.
The worst part is, I’d still take you back.
Though this time, I’d be sure to be the one to break your heart.”
—“Poison and Poetry,” Alex Winslow.
Everybody wants to be a rock star. It’s the closest thing to being a god, but what people often forget is that God has a hectic job.
God creates. Twenty-four-fucking-seven.
God is worshipped.
God is expected to answer, to deliver, to reassure.
And when God is sent to earth to deal with humans? Well, God is bound to disappoint.
See, when you’re a rock star, your fans feed you expectations.
And you almost always swallow them down greedily and ask for seconds.
Because you want to believe you’re a genius, whose lyrics are immortal, whose tunes run chills down people’s spines. You want to be unforgettable, irresistible, and unique. You don’t want to believe there’s nothing more after this—because there isn’t, you might be a hotshot millionaire motherfucker with a different model in your bed every night—but at the end of the day, you’re human.
So, terribly human. A human who is expected to be much more than a human. Which was how I’d gotten here. To where I was today. The very laughable cliché I’d taken the piss out of when I was younger. A washed-up, alcoholic, druggie rocker who is never alone but always feels so desperately lonely.
The first time I found true intimacy wasn’t when I shoved my cock into Laura, the lorry driver’s daughter, on a bench at age fourteen at Cassiobury Park. It was when I stood in front of thousands of strangers and sang to them. Asked them to love me. To believe in me. To support me. And. They. Did.
You feel stark naked on the stage.
Even with Waitrose behind me on the drum set and Alfie walking around with his bass guitar, it was mostly just me. And them. And the lights. And the fame.
The sweat dripping down on the guitar. Sex.
My muscles flexing, straining to produce that perfect harmony. Climax.
They see me, feel me. They hear me. Bliss.
But having sex with ten thousand people every night was not what you called a laid-back job. Which was why I’d needed a little pick-me-up to ensure my performance was up to par with my own unreachable standards. I used to get on stage with more coke in my bloodstream than platelets. I was high, and when you’re high, you can’t see how fucking low you’ve reached. Ninety days of rehab, and I’m clean now. Physically, mostly.
I gave my audience an encore. “Poison Poetry” was inspired by Fallon, who’d torn my heart out and fed it to the tabloid wolves. It was also one of the last decent songs I’d written before becoming too dependent and fogged by narcotics to produce anything real and substantial. Now that I was sober again, I wondered if my creative side hadn’t washed out along with the drugs.
I got off the stage, and the first face I saw was New Girl’s. She and her big eyes and narrow, Cupid’s bow lips and purple flared dress that made her look like she’d stepped out of a film noir straight into the imperfect arms of this industrial arena. Her clothes felt like a statement. One that made my cock stiffen in my jeggings, and I wondered if wanting to fuck my chaperone was my way of trying to get rid of her, or claiming her by making sure Lucas didn’t do it before me.
She wore her usual expression of annoyance, so I bypassed her, heading for my dressing room. Adrenaline simmered beneath my skin, making me roll my neck and cup the back of my head. The gig had been solid. No, fuck solid. It had been grand. I knew that, because I had been there—really there, not like when I was coked up, riding an invisible cloud of fake confidence.
I wanted to write.
I needed to write.
Alone.
Blake, New Girl, two groupies who’d sneaked in, and the local PR bloke all trailed behind me to the dressing room, but I slammed the door in their faces, not bothering to stop and explain. When the muse hits you in the nut sack, you crawl back and ask her to hit harder, faster, stronger.
Make me bleed. Make me gasp for it, live for it, then die for it. Make me lose my mind and find my soul. Do your magic, Muse. But don’t leave me hanging like you did before. Howling for you to come rescue me in an empty room. Waiting for you to show up unannounced like an indecisive lover.
“Winslow.” New Girl knocked on the door several times, and not gently. “Open the door or I’ll have to call Ms. Holden.” It didn’t escape me that she’d dropped the word ‘please.’ Shame she was starting to adapt to her new environment, because I wasn’t keeping her. I tipped my head back and squeezed my eyes shut. I needed solitude to write. My best words were usually found in silence.
“Go away,” I barked.
“Trust me, spending time with you is very low on my to-do list. Unfortunately, it’s part of my job description to be around you. You’re not allowed to be alone with the door locked.”
“Can you be any more annoying?”
“Can you be any more of a jerk?” She slapped her palm against the door. “Open. Up!”
“Oh, you’re using periods between words. Now I’m really in trouble,” I roared from the other side, kicking the coffee table to the other end of the room and watching it crash and lose a leg against the opposite wall.
Fuck, okay. I didn’t need any more shit with Jenna.
I sighed, pushing to my feet and swinging the door open. The groupies, Blake, and a few sound technicians were standing behind New Girl, curiously peeking over her shoulder. I stepped sideways, giving her a sliver of space to come into the room, but she had to fucking work for it.
“She’s addicted to the D. I need to accommodate that shit twenty-four-seven.” I smirked tauntingly as she rolled her eyes and squeezed past my body. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t look at anything. If possible, don’t even breathe. Actually, that’d be ideal.”
I signed albums, posters, and tits, then slammed the door in Blake’s face after the fans and technicians were gone. He’d mumbled something about not checking the Internet and dick pictures, but I tuned him out. I appreciated the concern, but who the hell cared? My knob was community property at this point. Every willing body that wasn’t a fan or underage got a free ride and a complimentary selfie.
I walked back to the sofa, picked up the notepad and pen, and frowned at the blank page. New Girl was standing by the window overlooking the harbor, her back to me. I tried to remember the last time I’d been in a room with a bird who wasn’t my mum or sister without having my cock shoved so deep down her throat she had to heave, and couldn’t. I scowled some more. Stared at the paper. Mentally paced the room and punched the walls.
The muse was gone.
New Girl had fucking killed it.
Bollocks.
I sat back, watching her blue-silver hair, no longer in a braid, cascading all the way down to her small, round bum. Way I saw it, if I wasn’t going to get any writing done, might as well burn the time reloading my spank bank. Though I knew I could go to one of the many after parties my bandmates were probably hitting, this was a big, fat no. A) New Girl was going to accompany me, and that’d be entirely too embarrassing to endure, and B) I recognized that in order to rein in my desire to get all coked up and drink myself into a stupor, I had to stay in. My agent was going to cut my balls off, drain them, and use them as mini purses if I got anywhere near alcohol or cocaine.
“Take a picture. It lasts longer.” New Girl threw my words back at me from her spot by the window. The sharp-edged crescent moon winked behind her shoulder. “I can see your reflection through the glass,” she explained as an afterthought, a sad lilt in her voice.
Our eyes met in said reflection. Time stood still.
I still hated her.
I still wanted her gone.
But for the first time since she tagged along, I was starting to suspect she might not be as useless as I’d originally viewed her. It was that curve between her neck and her shoulder that did it. I wanted to bite that spot, produce blood, and write the lyrics of my next song with it. And the fucked-up thing about it was that this was my train of thought when I wasn’t using.
“You chased my muse away.” My tone was low, lazy, and sort of psychotic. Even to my own ears.
“And?” She didn’t bother turning around.
“And now you owe me. So it’s a good thing you’re in my possession.”
“Your possession?” she echoed, incredulous. “I’m not your anything, Winslow.”
“You are. For three months. I have a signed contract to prove it, and now I’m going to take what’s inside you and put it in my notebook, because I’m empty and you’re full.”
It was weird. To say the truth out loud. The truth was meant to be whispered, not shouted, but I didn’t care what she thought of me, so I stood up and grabbed my leather jacket, not bothering to offer it to her.
“Meet me outside your hotel room at midnight,” I said.
She opened her mouth. I didn’t stay long enough to listen to what she had to say.
I was going to get my muse back and write that album.
Take over Billboard with every single I released and make it my bitch.
Reclaim my title as king of alternative music from that wanker, Will Bushell.
And claim what was mine. What had always been mine. Fallon.
Even if I had to cheat my way or bulldoze through everyone else to get it.
Legs stretched and crossed at the ankles, Tania in hand, my fingers flew over the fret board as I tried to come up with a melody. My back was pressed against my door, so I had a direct view to New Girl’s door. Our rooms were in front of one another. Jenna had asked Hudson, my PA, to make sure New Girl was always ten feet or closer in all the hotels we’d stayed in.
At five past midnight, her door opened and she stepped out.
She was wearing red plaid PJ shorts and a gray hoodie with the name of a college she couldn’t possibly afford plastered on it. I motioned to her with my chin to sit down, and she did. Her face, clean of makeup and pretense, was rapt. She slid down her door, tucking her knees under her chin, blinking at me. I couldn’t decide if she had no personality at all, or too much of it. I was about to find out.
I continued moving the pick over the strings of the acoustic guitar, ignoring the red, lush carpet and impersonal hallway, and imagined we were someplace real. A house or a beach or a cobblestoned London street with the bite of rain pinching at our nostrils.
“Why am I here?” she asked.
“I’m asking myself the same question.” I stared at my callused fingers strumming Tania before looking up. “You’re hanging onto this job for dear life. You in some sort of trouble?”
“No,” she said, not taken aback by my candor. “I have a nephew. His parents can’t find steady jobs, and he deserves more. More than we’re giving him. More than constant ear infections. More than drinking milk that expired two days ago because it’s cheaper. Just…more.”
I poked my lip out, considering her answer. I didn’t care too much for my family. In fact, the part I dreaded the most about the tour—along with trying to come up with new songs—was seeing my mum, dad, and older sister, Carly. If I was going to see them at all.
“What’s his name?” I asked, not entirely sure why. I never felt compelled to be polite, least of all to people who were on my payroll.
“Ziggy.” She smiled. Her smile wasn’t as annoying. Dimpled and genuine and Botox-less. Big lips. Small teeth. I liked it. Flaws were intimate. Telling. Pure. Indigo was pretty. Like a wasted sunset, beautiful in a taken-for-granted sort of way.
“Like the David Bowie album?” My eyebrows fell into a frown. I banged up a few notes on Tania, and they actually made sense. Maybe I was remembering “Starman” or “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” Though it sounded different, fresh.
“My brother is a fan.” She stared up and started absentmindedly chewing on her bottom lip. “Ziggy is two years old. Smart, funny, and kind. I always tell him he is Ziggy, and I am…”
“Stardust,” I finished, bunching up a few notes into a melody in my head. Of course I was still dressed in the same clothes I’d worn to the gig. And of course I smelled like stale piss in a dark London alleyway. “Silence, now.”
She didn’t scold me. Instead, she started braiding small pieces of that blue hair as I came up with something…new. I closed my eyes, my fingers trembling a little. Finding a good tune felt very close to finding a flower in the sand. Improbable, rare, thrilling. I played for a few minutes before pulling Tania’s strap off of my shoulder and propping it against my door. I took out the little notepad and Sharpie from my back pocket and started writing the notes. When I looked up, New Girl was still braiding. The troubled look on her face told me she felt sorry for me. The thought was unsettling.
“Tell me about yourself.” I ignored her quizzing eyes.
“You’ll need to be more specific than that.”
“What makes you, you? Your personality. Your secrets. Your quirks.”
Another girl would giggle, avert the topic, or play dumb. She didn’t.
“I’m left-handed. Hate clowns. Love making dresses. It makes me feel…” She looked up, searching for the word. “Focused.”
I strapped Tania back on, my pick moving over the strings without direction.
“What else?”
“I don’t have any social media accounts. If I could study anything, it’d be fashion. I used to work at a thrift shop called Thrifty in Beverly Hills run by a seventy-year-old woman named Clara before she closed it down to spend more time with her family. Working there was—still is—my dream job.”
She looked at me like I would deem her dreams too small or too insignificant. I bet anything she didn’t know I hadn’t planned on becoming a hotshot TMZ regular. The initial goal was far more romantic. I got sucked into this world by my childhood mate, Will. We used to have a band together—The Kryptonites—before we’d decided to go solo and live together in London, all five of us—me, Will, Alfie, Blake, and Lucas. I’d wanted to stay indie when Will got that fat, mass-production deal. He was the one who’d hooked me up with Grapevine Records. Who’d made me me, in more than one sense.
My fingers were moving faster, chasing a rhythm, a forgotten song that was always there in my head. This was why I wanted her in the hallway. Somewhere neutral. Not in one of our rooms, where all I’d think about was how to shag her, because she was there, with a pulse, and in all probability willing. I needed her words and her thoughts and her disposition. I wanted to suck her soul dry and pour it onto the pages, my pages, getting my money’s worth out of my babysitter. Because she was innocent. And strong. And so infuriating, picking at her brain felt like a necessity.
“Go on, Stardust,” I taunted her. She knew it. It wasn’t a moniker. It was a dig.
“I have one brother.” She omitted her parents’ death this time when speaking to me. She’d offered the information to my bandmate freely enough. Maybe she saw me as the enemy and Lucas as an ally—stupid, stupid girl. “I ride my bike everywhere.” She paused, her front teeth sinking into her lip again. “And I have something to tell you, but I’m not sure it’s my place to say it.”
My head snapped up at her last confession.
“What could you possibly know that I don’t?”
“Oh, wow.” She blew air, shaking her head. “Look, I just want to help you.”
“And you are. You’re helping me by doing everything short of changing a fucking diaper to make sure I don’t dip my nose in the white stuff. That’s your job done. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
She stared at me, insolent, her gaze telling me she knew what I was doing. I was pushing her away in a last bid to make her leave, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. Not all the way, anyway. She was going to stay, whether I liked it or not, and the least I could do for myself was use her until there was nothing left to take. The way Fallon had used me.
“You annoy me so much, sometimes I want to cry,” she gritted through clenched teeth.
I smiled, knowing for a fact I had another set of notes to write down. It was time to finish our session. She’d turned out to be more productive than anticipated. This was all I needed. I’d spend my night writing.
I climbed to my feet, my fingers wrapped around Tania’s neck, and knelt forward, getting into Indie’s face.
“When I finally lay my hands on you—and make no mistakes, Stardust, I will—you will be crying, all right. My name. Over. And. Over. Again.”