Page 12 of Over You
Smoke from the pyrotechnics swirled around my body in a vaporous cocoon while the green and blue lights beat down on me like an unforgiving sun. I should have been thinking about what a lucky son-of-a-bitch I was when I stared out at the sea of people clapping and holding up their phones, but I couldn’t appreciate the statistical improbability I was. Instead, I wondered what she was doing. I worried that, by now, there was another guy—why else would she want a divorce?
I missed my first cue. Wet my lips with my tongue. Then missed another. Three more bars passed before I belted out the first words to “The Beauty in Ashes.” By now, the lyrics were as second nature as breathing. Thank God because my mind was in no place for things that required thought.
Like I did during every show, I walked to the edge of the stage. The toe of my boots hung over the platform. People grabbed at my jeans, fingers brushed over my black and white checkered Vans. I locked eyes with a random girl in the crowd, and she went berserk, gripping her friend while shrieking.All these girls would throw punches for five minutes with me, and the one I care about just left me like I was nobody. . .
Last time I took a stage dive, I ended up mauled, my shirt torn off, and my lip busted from an accidental elbow I caught. Ricky chewed me out for that stunt. Told me the next time I took unauthorized leave from the stage, he’d fine me. But still, it was too tempting, because,what if they didn’t catch me?With a smile, I threw my head back, held out my arms like a thief on a cross, and then freefell forward. They could catch me or let me face plant into the concrete. I didn’t care.
But they caught me.
Fingers clawed at my legs, my arms. It reminded me of all the demons in Michelangelo’sLast Judgementtrying to drag the souls to hell. And I was fine with that.
Sometimes I thought I was already there.
Midnite Kills hadthree days in New York before we headed out to Iceland. And while this was my fifth trip to the Big Apple, I hadn’t seen Lady Liberty or Rockefeller Center. All I knew of the city was the nightlife and hotels.
What people assumed was a life of travel and leisure was really nothing more than one long, drawn-out, massive hangover. For the past seventy-two hours, as per usual, we’d gone from one club to the next, then slept in until the sun went down. And for the first ten minutes after I woke, when my muscles were sore and my memory foggy, I felt like a loser and wondered how disappointed she’d be with me now. The hole inside me grew larger, decaying and rotting with each sunrise and sunset. And while I debated on getting sober, I didn’t see the point any longer. Which was why I sat, blitzed out of my mind, in Nash’s luxurious hotel suite. The Manhattan bridge glimmered through the window, but I chose to focus on the eerie shadows of the boats tugging along the Hudson while the girls Nash and Leo brought back from the Playboy Lounge shimmied to the bass pumping through the Bluetooth.
Leo slapped my shoulder and handed me a beer. “Come on, man. Fuck one of them.”
My jaw tensed. I nodded even though my instinct was to punch Leo in the face for talking like that about her.
“It sucks.” A half-naked brunette strutted up behind him before suction-cupping her lips to his neck and cupping his junk through his pants. “But really. . . ” He shrugged and jutted his chin toward the girl wrapped around him like a vine. “Being married must’ve sucked when you had all this.”
His attention went to the pair of tits smashed against his arm, and mine went back to the window. I pulled my phone from my pocket and shot Georgia a text.Don’t do this. I love you.
I stared at the screen, waiting on the little bubbles to tell me she still cared, but the message went unread.
Fed up, I pushed up from the chair. I made it two steps before some dolled-up chick blocked my path. Dark hair. Dark eyes. The neckline to the little black number she wore dipped to her cleavage. She could have easily graced the runways of Milan or New York, but instead of threading my fingers through hers the way Nash would, instead of trying to get into her pants, I went to brush past her. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to disappear to my room and sleep for days.
An exaggerated sigh, the kind begging to be noticed, rushed through her lips. “I’m just. How do you say it?” There was a slight roll to her words, but I couldn’t place her accent. Bulgarian? Russian? “A yuge, yuge fan. Can I take picture with you?”
She didn’t wait on a response, just placed her palms on my chest and pushed me down on the couch.
“What the. . .”
Her long, bare legs draped over my lap, and she draped an arm around my neck. This wasn’t new. Morals did not exist in my orbit—in any rocker’s orbit for that matter. Slap some eyeliner and a tortured expression on a guy’s face, hand him a guitar, a mic, and print his name on a ticket stub, and the best of girls could have the worst intentions. Pure, virginal Sally would end up bent over the stadium seating with her skirt hiked around her waist if the bragging rights were impressive enough. Catch a nun on the right day, and you could have her bent over a pulpit, singing Hallelujah. Hell, Nash had.
But I never got that mentality. Guys wanted girls they couldn’t have, and girls always wanted the fucker who plowed his way through women like a John Deer tractor.
A smile crept over the girl’s face while she fiddled with my fly.
I took a long swig of my drink and, for a second, I rolled the taste of her around in my mind. After all, Georgia wanted a divorce, and I wondered if maybe this girl could fill that gaping hole for a short time. We could spend an hour together naked and tangled up in sheets. An encounter that would be meaningless to me while somehow meaning everything to her.
She’d feel validated, and I’d still feel empty as fuck. And guilty. . .
One, two, three flashes from her camera.
Her head tilted right to left, trying to capture the perfect Instagram-worthy post, while I looked straight at the camera and didn’t smile.
Click. Click. Click.Her warm lips pressed to my neck. Nash glanced around the shoulder of a curvy blonde in a pink corset and bunny ears, squeezing her ass while he gave me an approving nod. But I had no interest.
Swiping below my nose, I shoved Little Black Dress off my lap, and she toppled over on the couch, whispering, “Yerk.”
“Look, my dick’s just worn out. Better luck next time,” I said, then strutted off to the balcony, whipping said tired dick out and pissing through the rails.
When I slipped back through the patio door, a handful of girls had stripped down to bare skin in the middle of the living room. Nash, of course, was their sole focus. I fought through the alcohol-induced haze, not exactly watching when Nash peeled his pants off but not oblivious either.
Some random girl was snorting lines off the table, and I joined her, thinking: tomorrow I’d stay sober. But even as high as I was, I knew that wasn’t true.
