I haven’t slept in two days.
Forty-eight hours and counting.
Do you see that guy sitting on the couch? The one with the badass body ink and sighing every other breath? That’s me. The asshole who hasn’t slept in two days. My clothes are wrinkled, hair all over the place, but it’s obvious in my bloodshot eyes. You’re probably thinking, I need some sleep. I do. I just can’t allow myself that luxury.
Not sleeping. . . that’s not unheard of for me. Believe it or not, I once went eighty-two hours with no sleep and then crashed in my kitchen on the floor next to the fridge. Curled up next to a gallon of milk and a bowl of Captain Crunch I slept.
By the way, just so we’re clear here, I don’t recommend going eighty-two hours without sleep. It fucks with your head and weakens your ability to decipher right from wrong.
Unfortunately, now that I’m going on a couple days with no sleep, I know where this is taking me. I’m becoming irrational. Hasty. Out of control with anger at one girl who refuses to answer my calls. It fucking pisses me off when people ignore me, and I really hate being this guy. The worst part is she knows this about me, and she’s still pulling this shit.
Willa, my PR assistant, stands beside me, handing me my ringing phone. It’s always fucking ringing, and usually, I don’t answer. She does. But not this time. She knows who it is and she knows this is a call only I take.
Sighing, she shrugs when my eyes move to her, then to the screen flashing with Rhya’s number. “You have to be at the airport in two hours,” Willa reminds me. “You don’t have time for this today.”
Take a look at Willa’s face. Can you see the concern? The apprehension? The one that slightly resembles a mother warning her teenage son not to drive her car when she’s at work and knowing he totally will. This look, it’s Willa’s warning that maybe this time I shouldn’t take the call. In fact, I know I shouldn’t, but I’ve never not taken her call. The truth is I’m afraid if I don’t, Rhya will do something bad.
I don’t say anything after I slide my finger across the screen and then press the phone to my ear, silence stretching further apart than the distance between us.
Why don’t I say anything? Rhya knows it’s me. And we both know she’s not calling to see how I’m doing. No, it’s never about me. It’s always about her.
“Hey. . . ,” she finally says after a few seconds of unbearable silence. Her breathing’s low and drawn out, the word slurred through a sigh, and it confirms my theories as to why I couldn’t get a hold of her. “Why’d you call me so many times?”
Every time she calls—and I hear that familiar slur to her voice—I think to myself, not again You’d also think having known her my entire life, I’d be happy to hear from Rhya, like I am when any good friend calls.
But I’m not. I won’t ever be. The only relief I get from hearing Rhya’s voice is the confirmation she’s alive.
I have two friends I’ve known my entire life. Rhya and Auden. I’d do anything for either of them and that—and only that—is the reason I even bother, despite knowing where this is going. I’m loyal if nothing else.
I blow out a heavy breath. It’s my automatic response anytime I hear her voice.
The last time I heard from her was a month ago when I sent her to a very expensive rehab center in Malibu for the second time. She got out this morning, and word from Auden was Gage—her drug dealer—had already paid her a visit.
Knowing this, I tried calling her twenty-three times this morning with no answer. Until now when she finally returns the call.
It’s about fucking time.
“Shade?” she asks when I don’t reply.
Weakness claws at me. I hate the way she controls me. It goes against everything I am to not be the one in control. I fucking despise it.
You know that feeling when you take Vicodin, and you can barely function and it takes over all your senses, and you’re left in a relaxed jelly state despite wishing you could still control yourself? Maybe it’s just me, but Vicodin does that to me. I once pissed myself when I took them. Now I steer clear of the stuff. And given I’m constantly injured from my profession or in need of something stronger to take the edge off all these broken bones I’ve had to nurse over the last year, it’s hard to stay away from the little white piss-pants-inducing pills.
My point here? Rhya makes me feel like I’m on Vicodin. Except with Rhya, instead of a relaxed jelly state, I’m left in complete misery. Constantly. She has that ability to render me completely incapable, and I might not ever understand why.
“Yeah,” I finally say.
My brain is yelling for me to scream at her. It’s telling me to shout at her and demand she tell me why the fuck couldn’t she pick up the damn phone when I called earlier? Why the hell was Gage at her apartment within hours of her being released from rehab?
I don’t though. I never do.
It’s not weakness that keeps me from losing it on her, although that’s definitely a factor. No, it’s because I can already tell the frame of mind she’s in when she speaks, and it doesn’t take but a minute to decipher by her tone she’s high again.
I learned a long time ago that saying anything at this point is just a waste of time, and I’m tired of wasting my goddamn time with her.
I’m the best freestyle motocross racer in the world, so they tell me.
All right, I’ll admit it. I know I am.
I do what I want almost every day. I’m paid to have fun. I have women thrown my way every single day of the week, more pussy than any man can possibly imagine and more money than I know what to do with. I don’t say any of that to appear cocky or arrogant. I say it because regardless of all that, I’m weak when it comes to one girl. And Vicodin.
They say there’s one person you’ll do anything for. You’ll break yourself in any way possible to help them or make them happy. That’s this girl for me.
Rhya Morgan, she’s like being weak to the devil and knowing eventually, someday, she’ll burn it all to the ground because she can.
She didn’t always use to be like this. For so long she was this crazy energetic hell-raising strawberry blonde who brought out the life in me when everything else seemed to crash out of control. I don’t have a single childhood memory that doesn’t have her in it, causing mischief and daring me to live my life recklessly. Hell, people say I’m out of control now, but guess who I learned that from? Her and my brothers of course. Corruption at its finest.
Sadly, as life would have it, nothing good lasts. But guess what, nothing bad does either. Slowly they’ll both fade away with time. Like the passing of time and tragedy, one day that energetic troublemaker of a girl I knew slowly disappeared into the cocaine addicted shell of the someone she used to be. I can’t even tell you when it happened.
Actually, that’s not true. As fucked up as it is, I can. I can even tell you the day. I just don’t want to because the memory of her sobbing against my chest that night is one I’d like to forget. And unfortunately for me, the thought takes me back to the night, her body trembling, her eyes filled with tears.
The warm California summer night clawed at my face, heat ripping through me as I scrolled through the pits of Glen Helen. It was sometime after midnight and I’d been looking for Rhya everywhere that night only to find her in my uncle’s trailer, on the couch in the dark. The pits were alive outside, pulsing with the summer heat, music and laughter floating through the air. Everywhere I looked people were getting drunk and living the night up. Why wouldn’t they? Like most of my childhood, this was the scene at any outdoor motocross event when the sun went down.
Hesitantly, I opened the door to my uncle’s trailer, and there Rhya was, curled up in a ball crying into her hands.
I went inside and shut the door behind me. I sat next to her, my hand on her bare shoulder. “Are you okay? Why are you crying?”
She turned to me, but didn’t say anything. Her eyes told me what her words couldn’t. It was in the tremble of her lip, the red in her swollen eyes and the rips in her white tank top. She clung to me, crying uncontrollably and when the door opened over my shoulder, my Uncle Ricky looking for me, her eyes drifted past his face and caught the one who destroyed her innocence in the distance. It wasn’t Ricky. It was Jaime. Her older brother’s best friend.
I didn’t know it at the time everything that happened, but I should have known what the look meant. From both of them. But I didn’t. I was fourteen and didn’t know a fucking thing about how life really worked or what looks like this meant.
At some point it became obvious what had happened to Rhya that night. I wasn’t going to make her say it. Rhya had always found trouble. In some ways, she looked for it. A way to gain attention. But this, she didn’t deserve this.
She begged me that night. Begged me to replace the horrible memories with one she could remember as good and pure, but I couldn’t. Like I said, I was fourteen and didn’t know a goddamn thing about what she was truly asking me to do.
So instead I promised her, “I’ll always be here when you need me.”
It was the last and only promise I’ve ever made. To anyone.
As much as I’ve tried, I can never quite take that memory away from Rhya. All I can do is be there for her the only way I know how. The only way she allows me to. I’m there to catch her when she falls.
“Why’d you call me, Shade?” Rhya’s slurred words and labored breathing brings me back to the desperation on the other line.
Why can’t you be normal?
I don’t ask that. I already know the answer.
Instead, I clear my throat and stare at the flat desert land behind my house where my track is. Sniffing, I lean against the railing, shaking my head. I should just hang up but I never do. “You didn’t call when you got out. Wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
There’s another deep breath. She blows it out into the receiver, heavy and harsh, as if the mere sound of my voice annoys her. It probably does.
“Sure,” she says, and it’s not followed with anything else. Just left there for me to take it as I will. “It’s fine.”
I know this answer. It’s one of her standards. It means she’s not willing to tell me the truth. I can count on one hand the responses I get from any question I ask Rhya, and I know the meaning behind them too.
If she wants money, it’s something along the lines of, “I’m in a bad place.”
If she’s in jail or needs me to use my connections to get her out of trouble, it’s, “I need you.”
Then there’s the simple question of, “Can you come over?” which I get a couple times a year. It seems. . . I don’t know, innocent, right? It never is. Not with her. That one right there comes when she wants me physically. And though I haven’t slept with Rhya in years, she still tries to use me to erase memories of the fucked up shit she’s done.
To my left, Willa stares at me, nudges my arm and I nod. I know I need to go but I can’t. There’s something off about Rhya’s tone and even though I don’t want to be right, I know it’s because she fucking wasted the thirty grand I spent sending her to rehab. I’m so tired of this shit. I tell myself I’m not going to be nice and understanding about it like I was the last time.
“What are you doing here? Shhh, no,” I hear Rhya tell someone.
And then I hear him mumble harshly, “Why the fuck not? I give you what you want, you give me what I want. It’s how it works, Ry.”
There’s only one person who calls her Ry. I know the name behind the voice, and I’ll fucking kill him for being at her apartment.
I look back over to Willa who is pointing to her watch, mouthing to me we have to leave. I know I don’t have time for Rhya’s bullshit. I don’t. But I also can’t let this go. Not this time.
My jaw snaps closed, a rush of adrenaline hitting my stomach with a jolt. “I’m coming over,” I tell her, then hang up before she can tell me no.
Fury settles into my bones, and I make my way through the house and stop at the door.
Do you see that guy at the door? The one shaking with anger, his body vibrating with years of uncontrolled misery that he can’t let her go? That’s what years of allowing someone else to control you does to a person. That’s the side-effects.
I stand there, shoving my hands in the pockets of my jeans and stare at the door, my heart pounding in my ears, searching for an answer.
Don’t go to her.
I can tell myself this a thousand times, but it doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. I know what I’m going to find when I do go over there, but then again, I need to. I have to show myself once again why she values our friendship so little. I need to know why she fucked me over without any concern for how it affects me.
“Shade, you really don’t have time,” Willa tells me, disappointment flooding her eyes. If there’s one person I disappoint more than the rest, it’s probably Willa. Or maybe Roan, my oldest brother. They both want the best for me, and they know Rhya isn’t it. Yet here I am, still doing exactly what I say I won’t. Chasing her.
“I’ll only be twenty minutes,” I tell her, reaching for my key to my bike and my helmet on the table next to the door. “I’ll meet you at the airport.”
Tucking her dark hair behind her ears, she holds her phone up and reaches for her bag on the white marble entry of my house. “If you’re late. . . .” She leaves the words there knowing what it means if I’m late for my flight to Seattle, what that will mean.
It means missing my meeting with Red Bull.
It means possibly losing my spot with the X-Fighters because of Rhya. I’m the defending World Tour Champion, but it doesn’t mean shit if you can’t show up and give respect to the people who helped you get there.
With one last look, I give Willa a weak smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll meet you there.”
Do you think she believes me? The trepidation in her eyes says otherwise, doesn’t it?
I’ll meet you there could be my famous last words because I have no idea what I’m going to face at Rhya’s apartment.