Max
If this was what drugs were like, I understood how people got addicted. No matter how many times I did this, it never got any less exhilarating. The nerves and the fear and the hope and the hurt and the healing—my soul was a galaxy all its own when I was onstage.
I had tried a million things in an attempt to piece my life back together after Alexandria’s death, to make the world feel right-side-up again. Music was the only thing that worked.
When the last notes of “Better” were over, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would do whatever it took to keep this. Maybe it made me weak. It definitely made me selfish and a liar, but if there was any way I could convince Cade to continue the charade just long enough so that my parents didn’t cut me off completely, I would do it.
I found him in the crowd after our third or fourth song. I swear I’d scanned the entire bar for him twice already, and I was beginning to think he’d left. Then I saw him at a table in the middle of the room with the same blonde he’d talked to at Trestle. It was completely irrational, but I felt a spike of irritation that he’d brought her. It was soothed by the fact that every time I glanced at him, he never took his eyes off of me.
We started one of our Rilo Kiley covers, and I couldn’t keep myself from making eye contact with him.
“And it’s bad news, baby I’m bad news
I’m just bad news, bad news, bad news.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, and I nearly laughed into the microphone.
The song fit us, and I’d been thinking of him when I picked it for the set list. It was all about the ways a relationship could go wrong when one of the people in it was like me. Toxic.
A walking corpse . . . that’s how the song put it. That was me, but despite how often I told myself that seeing Cade was a bad idea, I was too selfish to stop myself.
I tried to communicate those thoughts as I sang, tried to warn him as best as I could.
I should not have noticed the way his eyes followed my movements or the way his posture straightened every time I looked at him. I should not have cared. I should not have looked into his dark eyes. I really should not have licked my lips between lines, because I could see from here his chest rise and fall. I wanted to feel bad about encouraging whatever this w fingernails scrapeDBowI wondered if as between us, but I didn’t.
“Bad news, bad news . . .”
The song ended, and I looked at Spence to make sure he was ready for our next song, one of ours. He gave me a look, and his eyes shot out toward the audience. I didn’t have to look to know he was glancing at Cade.
I didn’t have to guess what his mental lecture was either. I was completely qualified to give one to myself. Beyond all the normal levels of stupidity that this thing qualified as, it was the highest rung of stupid to allow it to distract me during a set, especially if I only had a few more months to do something significant with my career before my parents cut me off. I needed every song to be as awesome as it could possibly be. I couldn’t afford to mess up one verse, one line, even one note.
I kept my eyes off Cade through the rest of the set. I worked the stage, flirting with Mace and Spencer. I leaned down to touch a few guys in the audience, flirting with them, too. Funny how onstage, the more broken and messed up you are, the more entertaining people find you. The audience’s favorites were the songs I’d written in my darkest, angriest moments. Air that kind of aggression anywhere else but onstage, and people would stare or talk or lock you up.
When we sang our last song, one of Spencer’s originals, the applause was loud enough to drown out even my thoughts for a few moments.
I breathed in their excitement. This was living. I might be a walking corpse everywhere else, but not up here.
The spotlight operator swept his light across the stage while each of us waved. When the light came back to me, blinding, the beauty of the moment disappeared, and I lost my breath.
The flash of headlights.
Crunch of metal.
Screaming tires.
Then spinning, spinning, spinning.
Out of control and unending.
I stood there frozen until Mace hooked his arm around my neck. Sweat coated his skin and mine, too. He pulled me off the stage, and I waited until we were backstage and out of the view of the crowd before I shrugged him off.
I grumbled, “Bathroom,” hoping that this time he would take the hint. This time I made sure to go into a stall, so that he couldn’t follow me. I kicked the door closed behind me, and resisted the urge to light up. I wanted this place to invite us back, which meant I shouldn’t go smoking up their bathroom, even if it would make me feel better.
So, I pretended.
I imagined the flick of the flame, the smell of the smoke, and the filter against my lips. I inhaled slowly, remembered the relaxation it normally brought me, and then exhaled. I concentrated on pushing out the memories with it.
Spencer had told me once, on one of Alexandria’s birthdays actually when I was a complete wreck, that we should live like we smoke—inhale the present and exhale the past. Something about it had stuck with me. I only smoked on rare occasions these days, but I lit up an imaginary cigarette almost every day. I didn’t need the nicotine, just the motion, the breathing.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket.
Great [email protected] p6">Did I?
Maybe it made me a bad person, asking him to do me this favor despite all the confusing feelings between us, but it didn’t change anything. I still needed him, and if he was willing to let me use him, I would.
Yeah, Golden Boy. Whenever you’d like.
When I exited the bathroom, Mace was waiting. Spencer had disappeared somewhere, so it was just the two of us.
“Are you done being a diva?”
I rolled my eyes. “Needing a few seconds alone after a set does not make me a diva, Mace.”
“Then what about the fact that you spent all week blowing me off?”
I didn’t have an answer for my behavior, not a good one anyway. So I turned it back on him. “What about the fact that you spent all day today ignoring my calls and flaked out on setup?”
He tossed his head to get his black hair out of his eyes. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, completely closed off. Face blank. He said, “I told you, something came up.”
A drop of unease rippled through my chest. He was lying about something.
“Want to tell me what that something was?”
He punched a fist forward in his pocket and clenched his jaw. He shook his head and shrugged. “You have your secrets, and I’ll have mine.”
“The difference, Mace, is that my secrets don’t affect the band.”
“Jesus, I’ve got zero fucks to give about this band, Max. You know I’m only here for you.”
Unbelievable. In some demented part of his brain, he must have thought that sounded romantic because he stepped toward me and slipped his hands over my hips. I shoved him back hard.
“If you knew anything about me, you would know that this band is my life.”
“Oh, it’s clear you care about this band more than you care about me, about anybody.”
“Damn right, I do.”
He tugged on one of his gauges and ran his thumb under his nose. He got up in my face and said, “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
I’d known that for a long time.
“Says the guy with pinpoint pupils. What are you on? Couldn’t wait until after the set?”
He closed his eyes and groaned. “I get it. You’re mad about this morning. I’m sorry.” His hands came up to my jaw, and he continued, “Can’t we just—”
I shoved him back again and felt his fingernails scrape my jaw.
“No, Mace!” My voice was explosive, and I made myself calm down and lower the volume. The last thing we needed was for someone to hear us arguing back here. “Just . . . I can’t do this right now, Mace. Let’s take the night off, and we’ll address this all later.”
“Later, yeah, I’ve been hearing a lot of that recently. I’m sick of waiting for later.”
Damn it. I didn’t fingernails scrapeazowlmy have the energy to deal with this right now. I tried to reach for him, to appease him, but he backpedaled away from me. “I don’t know what the hell you want from me, Mace.”
His face screwed up in anger and he said, “I’m not sure I want anything from you anymore.”
He blew out the back exit into the alley, and it didn’t bode well for our relationship that the thing that irked me the most was that he left Spence and I alone to pack up once again.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
“Does that really work for you?” I turned to find Cade leaning against the door. He was wearing a black button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. You knew you were in bad shape when just the sight of a guy’s forearms distracted you. The week of not seeing him had done nothing to quell my attraction to him.
Bad news.
“Sometimes,” I said. “At the moment, it’s doing a fat lot of nothing.”
One side of his mouth lifted up in a half-smile, and he asked, “Do you want me to leave?”
I wasn’t sure whether he had heaherd enough of t