CHAPTER 47

JARED

Life works in mysterious ways sometimes. I’d heard people use that saying, but it never made sense to me before now. Funny how that went.

Say, for example, that for the first time in years, you didn't have anyone breathing down your neck about anything, and yet suddenly, you couldn't sleep past sunrise. Or better yet, you broke up the band you used to be the songwriter for, and now you couldn't stop lyrics from flooding your brain.

Both of those scenarios would suck. And both of those things had been happening to me all week since my brother, Caleb and I, had walked out on Destitute, the band we'd started with some of our best friends and had seen us catapulted to stardom over the last few years.

I lifted my extra-strength Bloody Mary to my lips and took a long sip, watching Los Angeles wake up from the distance of my second-floor balcony. A light breeze ruffled the pages of the notebook I was scribbling my lyrics down in, the cloudless sky becoming a brighter, richer blue with every minute that passed.

What I was going to do with the song I was working on, I didn't know yet. The same could be said for the other two I'd already pulled together this week. At the moment, I kind of thought of it as my therapy. A normal, sane, and healthy person probably would have sought out some kind of professional advice about how to deal with what I was going through, but I wasn't any of those things.

Me? I had been holed up in my house pretty much all week, working on songs that weren't likely to ever see the light of day and calling my self-imposed exile from the world a vacation. To myself. Since I wasn’t really talking to so many other people nowadays.

Crunching the celery stick I pulled out of my drink between my teeth, I wondered again why my stupid brain wouldn't just let me sleep. I also wondered if adding extra black pepper and Tabasco to my Bloody Mary technically qualified it as being extra strength. It sure as hell wasn't the vodka in the drink that made me think of it that way since I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol in nearly two weeks.

The last time I'd had so much as a glass of wine had been with Alicia in New York on our date the night before the beginning of the end of Destitute, and the life-changing decisions that followed. Alicia, the public relations agent for the band that didn’t exist anymore, was the other reason I was having trouble sleeping.

She’d called me a dozen times, but I couldn’t take her calls. Which made me feel like shit but was a necessary evil.

It almost made me wish I wasn’t taking a break from drinking. One nice, strong drink and I was sure my brain would be able to shut down properly for one fucking night. But I was taking a break, and I wasn’t ready to end it yet.

I couldn’t. Caleb couldn't drink for a while because the same night in New York I'd been getting confused about feelings for a girl and begging her to sleep with me, actually sleep, though we'd done plenty of the other thing, too, my little brother was out getting wasted and subsequently was admitted to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.

In typical Larsen fashion, Caleb had gone all out that night. So much so that unlike ordinary guys who needed their stomachs pumped and a bit of rehydration for the same diagnosis, he'd been in the hospital for days and even did a stint in the ICU.

Before discharging him, the doctor had come to speak to him about his situation and care for the immediate future. It turned out that his body had taken some battering over the last few years, which meant he couldn't drink for a while and had to take things easy.

Taking things easy would have been a tall order since we were in the middle of recording a new album and were staring down the barrel of another world tour, our biggest so far. Taking things easy definitely hadn’t been on our agenda.

I'd stayed in the hospital with Caleb while he recovered, and every day there had opened my eyes more to the realities and consequences of our lifestyle. The doctor’s warnings were the last straw, making the last bit of wool or whatever you wanted to call it fall from my eyes. For the first time, I could see our lives with startling clarity, and I didn't like what I saw.

Caleb was only twenty-fucking-four, and he was already in danger of causing permanent damage to his body if he kept drinking. The rest of us hadn't been tested for anything, but I was sure our bodies were probably in the same state.

Add to our drinking habits the crazy hours, packed schedules, shitty sleep patterns, constant stress of having to produce something perfect, and the subconscious pressure of knowing that at every moment, fans around the world were watching us, our chosen career path wasn't conducive to living long, healthy lives.

If it was just me, I wouldn't have given a fuck. I would have kept living the life imagined larger and larger without regretting a single minute. But it wasn't just me. Caleb was my little brother, and though the other band members weren't my biological brothers, it sure felt like they were.

And so I’d pulled the plug.

It was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do, but I guess it was true that everything worth doing is hard.

"So this is what a moody, brooding rock star looks and lives like?" Caleb's voice interrupted my thoughts, pulling me back to the reality where he had appeared in my house out of nowhere. He leaned against the doorframe of the sliding glass doors leading from my bedroom to the balcony. I would never have guessed that my brother had been lying in the ICU two weeks ago. He pulled the sunglasses hanging in the V of his shirt out and slid them over his dark eyes before stepping out onto the balcony.

"Ex-rock star," I corrected him dryly, draining my drink and pushing to my feet. "You want some breakfast?"

Now that he'd broken me out of musings that were way too deep to be having at this time of the morning, I became aware of my growling stomach. Coming to think about it, I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten.

As if he could read my mind, Caleb gave me a long look and shook his head. "No, but you should eat something. You look like shit."

I hadn't looked in the mirror today, but I didn’t doubt he was right. The song I'd been working on had woken me up three hours ago, and I hadn't bothered with a break to shower.

Caleb, on the other hand, looked fresh as a fucking springtime flower in his crisp white T-shirt and black jeans. His leather jacket hung haphazardly over one of the stools in my kitchen like he'd flung it there on his way upstairs as he breezed into my house. The ends of his hair were still wet from a shower or maybe even an early morning swim.

Fuck him, sprightly clean motherfucker. He was probably sleeping too.

"Thanks. Clearly, unemployment doesn't suit me as well as it does you," I replied sarcastically, flipping him the middle finger as a rummaged around for a pan to make some eggs.

Raising his eyebrows, he tilted his head slightly to the side and dropped his chin, crossing his arms over his chest. "I prefer to think of it as funemployment."

"Funemployment?" I chuckled and shook my head, igniting my gas stove and breaking some eggs into the pan.

Caleb's lips kicked up into a wry grin as he sat down on one of the stools at my kitchen island. "You always were the one who said we had to have more fun. I'm just trying to follow your advice. You should try it sometime. It's working for me."

"I am having fun," I retorted, grabbing a plate for my eggs and pouring two glasses of orange juice. I slid one over the island at Caleb and set the other down for myself, scraping my breakfast onto the plate and sitting down across from him. "I get to do whatever the fuck I want all day without Gerry on my case, I write songs just because I want to, and no one has told me to post a single damn thing on social media or that I'm setting some kind of bad example for fans. See? Fun."

Caleb turned his juice glass between his thumb and forefinger on the counter, staring intently at it before lifting his eyes to mine. "Doesn’t look like you’re having fun. Are you sure breaking up the band was the best thing to do?"

"Letting you become another statistic of rock stars who died too soon didn't seem like a great idea at the time, so yeah. It was the best thing to do."

"You know that was no one's fault but my own," Caleb argued forcefully, glaring at me like he wanted nothing more than to punch me. "We can't leave the one thing we love doing just because I took too many shots one night."

"You didn't just take too many shots, Caleb." I wasn't in the mood to rehash this conversation. We'd had it, or a version of it, in the hospital, on the plane back home, on the way to Gerry's offices the day I dropped the bomb, and in the car afterward. "I'm over talking about this. This conversation is over. It's done. The band isn't getting back together. That's that. Game over. The end."

"But—"

I held up my hand to stop him, jabbing my fork in his direction. "You have to let this go. It's not easy, but it is for the best."

"You're not going to hear me out, are you?"

"I already have. The decision's been made, bro. The team has been broken up, and everyone is moving on. It's time for you to do the same."

Caleb's stool scraped against my tiles and nearly fell over from how fast he pushed it back and stood up. "You haven't heard me out, asshole. You heard what you wanted to hear to support conclusions you'd already drawn. Enjoy your new version of 'fun.' And take a shower, would you? You stink."

He stormed out of the kitchen without another word. I heard his car start and his tires squeal as he spun away a minute later. I sighed, shoving my now cold eggs away. I'd lost my appetite. Fixing myself a cup of coffee with the machine I’d had for months but only had time to figure out this week, I muttered, "How's that for fun?"

I carried the mug to my balcony and got back to writing my song. I couldn't let Caleb get to me.

Our new normal was going to take some time to get used to. I would have to let him pull punches where he needed to and stand there and take it when they were aimed at me. It was the only way to protect him.

Buzzing started from somewhere underneath the pile of crap that had accumulated on my table outside, followed shortly by the song I'd chosen as Alicia's ringtone on my phone. I felt around and finally found it lying underneath a sweater I'd been wearing earlier.

The picture I had of Alicia that came up when she called was a beautiful one, but that didn't matter. I wasn't answering any of her calls. Exhaling a deep breath, I denied her call. The last thing I needed this morning was someone else tearing into me over making the only decision I could make under the circumstances.

“One lecture per morning, people,” I mumbled, throwing my phone back down on the sweater and getting back to work.