Page 4 of Reckless
The sound of a bird chirping coming from my jacket pocket distracted the woman just enough for her to loosen her grip and for me to get out of grabbing range. Mom’s ringtone exploded in song again as I took the phone from my pocket and waved it in fake regret at her, tapping the green button as I strode down the hallway.
“Gage.” It was so good to hear her lilting voice. “How’s my rock star?”
“Mom, you have no idea how good it is to speak to you,” I said as I headed for the back exit, sneaking a look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed. “I’ve just finished playing a show, and…” There was a muffled cough on her end of the line. “Are you okay? You have a cold?”
Silence.
“Mom?” When the coughing returned, my heart beat faster, my muscles balling up as I clenched the phone to my ear. “Mom…what’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” she finally said in a strangled voice. “Don’t worry about me. You have your tour to—” There was a shimmer in her voice that told me she was lying. It was something. She might’ve been a loudmouth, but she was a crappy liar.
“Mom. You might be able to convince others, but I can tell when you’re lying.” That was one thing Mom and I had in common, we didn’t beat around the bush. “What’s wrong?”
“Gage.” She sighed, her voice suddenly shaky and weak. My stomach dropped. She didn’t sound like herself at all. She sounded…weak. A thing Babs Strickland had never been a day in her life. “I didn’t want to have to tell you like this.”
“Tell me what?” I ran a hand through my sweat-dampened hair, and it reminded me that she would hate how long it’d gotten, nearly touching my shoulders. “Just tell me, then we can discuss it. It couldn’t be that bad. Nothing the famous rock star son can’t fix.” I rolled my eyes at myself, but a sickening dread was forming in my stomach.
“I’m sick.”
“Sick.” The way she said “sick” didn’t sound like cold sick. It sounded…I froze, my hand curled around the handle of the exit door, my body feeling like someone had popped my head off and poured in ice water. “What do you meansick? Explain.”
“I mean, I’m not well. It’s been…bad.”
I checked my phone. Two a.m. No way in hell she’d call me at this time of night if things weren’t terrible.
“What’s been bad?” I wanted to reach through the phone and shake her, make the words fall out that I needed to know.
“I’m in the emergency room, sweetheart, and my doctor is insisting that you should come.”
“What hospital? What’s…” My breath evaporated as I tried to finish the sentence but couldn’t.
My mom was strong, an independent woman, and she never let on to so much as a cold, much less suffering from it. There was something she wasn’t saying. And I knew she wouldn’t tell me, not unless I dragged it from her. But I was in New York, and she was in Pennsylvania.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the stage door. We had a break after tonight, four blessed days we’d planned on laying on an anonymous beach somewhere. But fuck that. “I’m coming home.”
“Oh no, I wasn’t telling you for… for you to come back here. You have the tour. Dates to keep. Fans. I’ll be fine.” Her voice got stronger on that last bit, and that was what told me how bad it actually was. Mom only fought harder the worse things got, which was the reason for our survival when I was a kid. “I just wanted to keep you…up to date.”
My whirlwind life meant nothing compared to this woman. Compared to what she had done for me, Gaged, the rock star lifestyle, and even the boys were barely a blip. She’d always been the person there for me when no one else was, the one who helped me through not only rough patches but a broken heart. And now she needed me.
It was time to be the rock. Minus the star.
“Mom, I don’t want to hear it. I’m on the next flight.”
“Gage—”
“Mom. Please, just relax until I get there, okay?”
I hung up the phone and sought out Ron. He wasn’t going to like this, but tough. No matter where I was in the world, no matter what was going on, my mom came first.
