Page 6 of Over You
The tingle crackling through my veins caused me to move over him with more intent, and he stumbled a step, his back crashing against the pantry. And then the weightless feeling rolled through me like a rogue wave, sucking me beneath its currents until I gasped for air until the only things holding me up were Spencer’s arms.
His chest rose in ragged swells before his lips pressed to my neck. “Nothing is better than this,” he said on a groan.
And I believed him. After all, he didn’t know that was a lie, which made it easier for us both to believe.
Spencer’s candied-applered Maserati pulled down the drive, and the wrought iron gate swung open. The car’s engine revved, and he peeled out, smoke spinning up from the tires. The second the gate closed, I moved away from the window and headed straight to the studio at the back of the house and grabbed the bag of coke hidden behind the amp. Next, I snatched the Ziploc bag from the box of snack cakes in the pantry.
Within thirty minutes, every hiding place I knew of had been ransacked and all the drugs dumped into the toilet. Clumps of powder and a plethora of pills swirled around the drain, and I shook my head.
On my way through the bathroom, I picked up a damp towel and hung it over the shower door, then made my way into our closet to change. A pair of jeans. A faded T-shirt and my Converse. I went to grab an LA Lakers ball cap—the bane of my existence but a necessary evil to keep my face out of the media. When I reached for it, my fingers brushed the crumpled sides of an Adidas box. I needed a reminder of who he could be, so I grabbed the box, sat on the floor, and dumped it out. Pictures and about a hundred gum wrapper love notes tumbled onto the carpet. A bent strip of black and white images from the mall photo booth landed face-up on the top of the mound. We looked like kids. Well, we were kids. Seventeen and eighteen. Young and oh-so- in love. The first picture resembled a mugshot, but I had insisted we be serious. The next was a snapshot of Spencer’s tattooed arms wrapped around me for the obligatory photo-booth-kiss pose. The third frame was a blur of me shoving Spencer away after he’d pressed his thick tongue to my cheek. When these had been taken, I would have believed it if someone had told me Spencer’s band would make it. What I wouldn’t have believed was that I’d be married to an addict.
Life was evidently full of surprises and shit.
Midnite Kills tour started in a week. Seven days. Even if Spencer stayed clean until then, he’d fall right back into it on the road. The industry made it hard for anyone to stay sober. Leo, the bassist of Midnite Kills, was just as bad as Spencer, if not worse. Nash, the drummer, could go on a binge for a month straight, then walk away from it all like he’d never touched it. Some people were lucky like that. I rolled my eyes just thinking about the money-hungry assholes at Devil’s Side Records. If anything, they encouraged the use of uppers and downers to enhance performance. Courtney Love had been onto something when she said: dead rock stars made the most money for the industry.
Those guys were nothing but dollar signs to most people. Rockstars: Wanted dead or alive.
Exhaling, I raked the memories back into the box and placed it on the shelf. I had a lot of thinking to do. While he had promised me he would stay sober, only a fool believes an addict. And I hated that I couldn’t believe my husband.
Santa Monica Beachhad been my haven of thought since I was six years old. The days my mom would get drunk and hit me, the day one of her on-again-off-again boyfriends got too handsy with me, I’d ride my bike down to the beach and trudge through the gritty sand to the shore. And just stare. I’d imagine my thoughts were on the waves, drifting and crashing. It was the only place—until I met Spencer—that I found peace. And I needed that solace right now. God, I needed it.
The sun sat behind thick, gray clouds, and the air was charged with the electricity of an impending storm while a low groan of thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky could have split open at any moment, but I remained with my Chucks in the sand and my knees bent to my chest. Surfers dotted the murky ocean, paddling and catching waves before the water rushed to the shore in a roar.
The wind kicked up. Fragments of sunlight crept out from behind the clouds. I wrote my name in the sand, and the ridiculous diamond on my ring finger glinted, mocking me. Spencer had bought that ring four months ago. He said the one-hundred-dollar pawn shop find he had given me all those years ago wasn’t good enough. But I liked it more than the monstrosity that now sat on my finger simply for show.
Everything was different, but maybe that was how life went. After all, change is a part of life. But this change. . . I hated fighting with him. I hated that most days I felt more like a mother to him than a wife. I despised that everything orbited around him and his career and his image, and how our marriage currently unraveled inch by inch.
But no one knew.
Our relationship was private, and for that I was thankful, but in some ways, it made me feel even more alone. To Spencer’s millions of followers on social media, he was all smiles and leather pants. They were handfed sneak peeks of backstage. Pictures of him and the guys in the studio. But what they didn’t see was the way that reckless, bad-boy persona spilled into his personal life.
When Spencer had overdosed the first time, the media gave just enough information to garner sympathy. And with every post, with every piece of fan mail sent from a Jenny or a Meghan, Kristy, or Dave, all claiming his overdose had scared them because they didn’t want to lose him. . . I grew angry and jealous. While these people had been spared the gruesome details of how I had found him unconscious in our marble tub overflowing with bloodied water, that image had been forever etched into my memory.
It affected us. It affectedme. Not them.
This was our life—I wanted it to beourlife, but with fame, there is no such thing as yours. Spencer was a commodity intended to be distributed, consumed, gobbled down.
The fame and drugs had changed him, and like an infectious disease, the effects were spreading and beginning to eat away at me like battery acid. But I still loved him.
A spider web of lightning streaked across the sky followed by a boom that shook the ground. Raindrops splattered the sand, and I pushed to my feet, no closer to peace than I was when I arrived. I spent the thirty-minute drive home listening to the radio, watching people at red lights sing along to their favorite song and wondering what their lives were like.
When I pulled through our gate, a cloud of dread fell over me. The garage door slowly lifted. Spencer’s car was still gone. If he came back from that shoot high, what was I going to do? Threaten to leave again? Plead and beg, then fuck him mercilessly when he told me he was sorry. We were a broken record on repeat, and the song was driving me insane.
I sat in our garage with the car engine still running. Midnite Kills’s hit song played on the radio. When the guitars faded, the deep vibrato of the DJ’s voice replaced the music, rumbling through the speakers. “That song’s blowing up the charts right now. And, hey, all you Hailstorm fans out there, good news. Midnite Kills’s highly anticipated, international tour that was postponed due to lead man, Spencer Hailstorm’s stint in rehab, kicks off next week! I’ll tell you, Ryan, I can’t wait to see these guys in concert. They’re—”
I cut the engine.
The inflection in the announcer’s voice when he mentioned rehab made it sound like a holiday in the Galapagos when it was nothing short of a wooden rollercoaster ride through hell.
I gripped the steering wheel. Jag had once told Spencer rehab was a rocker’s badge of honor. That asshole had enough badges to fill a boy scout’s sash. Spencer, so far, had one. And now, he’d have at least two.At least.. .like my subconscious knew addiction was a song that played on a loop and never ended.
Numb from thought, I sucked it up, and I climbed out of the car. “Losing My Religion” blared from my phone. “Hey, babe. I’m walking through the garage, did you—”
“It’s Nash.” In the half-second pause, I froze. Fear shredded me like rusted barbed wire. “He’s okay. He’s just. . .” Nash exhaled, and a dizzying wave of adrenaline fired through me.
“Did he come to the shoot?”
“No. But that’s not the problem. Spencer called me acting all crazy and shouting about you and me. Like we’d been messing around. He was slurring, so I figured he’d— Anyway, he’s coming down, but I just wanted you to know before you got home and. . .”
