30. Love Bites
CHAPTER 30
Love Bites
KEY
Two Years Ago
I wonder what my parents would say if they could see me right now? Half drunk and wandering the Las Vegas Strip with my friends for a wedding that didn’t take place in a church. My mom would probably have a heart attack. My dad would remain stoic and disapproving, his palm itching to reach for his belt to lay more welts across my palms. But me? All I can do is think about how happy James and Becks are. While most people wouldn’t understand the desire to get married so young . . . I get it. Sometimes you just know and don’t want anything to get in the way of building your own family—especially when the one you were given is so shitty.
The smile falls from my face as I think of what feels like another life. My life before the band, before military school. Before San Francisco. Back in Iowa, when I sat at a bus station waiting to run away with the woman I loved. But she left. She left me, and every day since I’ve thought about why I wasn’t enough. Why didn’t she want me? And our baby . . . oh god, to this day I sit and wonder if there even is a baby. Do I have a child walking and talking out there somewhere? Or did she end it as quickly as that last night?
I finger the ring she so unceremoniously returned, trying to imagine her happy. That it was worth it. That she’s living the life she always dreamed for herself. That all that heartbreak and pain wasn’t for nothing.
An arm wraps around my shoulders, pulls me back, and I smile as Joel leans in close. “Hey, man, I have a feeling James and Becks are going to ditch us soon.”
I look over to find our friend wrapped around his new bride, who yawns widely. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I glance over at Dave, who’s watching Izzy with a kind of feral obsession. He looks like he’s about two seconds away from throwing her drunk ass over his shoulder and taking her somewhere she can lie down before puking.
“There’s a strip club across the street,” Joel suggests with a smirk.
“Perfect,” I reply. What an excellent way to get the thought of lost love off my mind.
“Hey, guys,” James calls. “Becks and I, we’re going to get a room at the Flamingo for the night. You know, wedding night and all.” He grins. “How about we meet up at that diner by the chapel in the morning for breakfast?”
“Told you,” Joel whispers.
I chuckle and wrap my arm around James and squeeze. “Aww, Jamesey’s got to go take care of his wifey,” I say, making an obscene kissing gesture as he pushes me away.
“That’s cool,” Joel says. “We were thinking about hitting up the strip club anyway.”
“Yeah, well, don’t blow all your money,” James warns.
What else am I supposed to spend my money on? The woman I want is gone. The family I would’ve worked hard to support doesn’t exist. And my best friend? He enjoys watching the girls, therefore I do too. Because what’s the alternative? Sitting in a quiet corner to brood?
“There’s no greater purpose for hard earned cash than spending it on tits and ass,” I say to deflect, then pull Joel along with me. I wave at Dave, but he’s following along after Isabella like a lost puppy, and I start to see it happen. Them—together. Will they start dating? What if they end up married? What if Joel is next? What if they all end up happy and I’m left alone?
“So what are we thinking,” Joel says, clapping his hands together eagerly. “You feeling a Vegas team-up if it’s an option? Or you want to go solo tonight?”
I remember the exact moment that Joel and I figured out we like to share girls. We’ve always had the same taste in women. Or rather I could always find something in the women he liked that reminded me of Dusty. The first night it happened we were playing at some shitty bar in downtown Iowa before James joined the band.
We were both hammered and Joel was flirting with a pretty brunette. When I saw her, I thought about how her freckles were just like Dusty’s and how I wanted her simply so I could imagine I was with the one I lost. When Joel brought her over to tell me he was taking her back to our one-bedroom apartment, I couldn’t help myself. I kissed her right in front of him at that bar. Shocked by my own jerk move, I apologized immediately, blaming it on the alcohol. To my shock she wasn’t upset, just grabbed my hand, then Joel’s, and before I knew it we were all in bed together.
Deep down I know the reason I insert myself into Joel’s relationships. I know it’s really because I’m worried he’ll fall in love. That he’ll find his soulmate and it won’t be me. And that’s terrifying. I don’t want to be alone, because that’s when I’m crushed by the memories of what could’ve been.
I shrug. “Vegas team-up sounds fun. You sure you want to waste the motel voucher though?”
He laughs. “Who says it’ll go to waste? After we’re done, I plan on going to my own room. You can snuggle with the girl while I get some uninterrupted shut-eye. You snore like a freight train when you’re drunk.”
I grin, and the two of us walk up to the velvet rope walkway in front of the club. Thankfully, there isn’t much of a line, and within ten minutes, we’re being ushered inside. The speakers are blaring Whitesnake, and before we get far, there’s half a dozen nearly naked girls within a twelve-foot radius.
“I’m going to go get us some drinks,” Joel says in my ear, and I nod before watching him walk away toward the back of the club where a neon bar stretches the length of the place.
I love these places because the haze in the air and the music help to keep the memories away. It works like a charm. Naked women and loud music plus alcohol equals burying my feelings. Not exactly healthy, but it’s not like I care. I find a pair of chairs and a table off to the side of the stage and sit down as I wait for Joel. There’s a dancer on the pole before me. A blond with thick thighs, and I groan as I think about what it would be like to have my face between those legs while Joel fucks her ass. But she’s not looking at me. She’s trying to get the guy in the fancy suit to choose her and . . . yup, she’s got him. Lucky bastard.
Sometimes, it takes a few tries to get the girls to look our way. Strippers tend to pick the guys who dress expensive, likely assuming they have the most money, and ninety-five percent of the time they’d be right. But not with us. No, we have money to burn. Just waiting for the?—
“Hiya, handsome. What brings you in here tonight?”
I turn toward the voice and there she is. I jolt forward, my hand coming to my chest. Did I die? Am I in heaven? Or is this hell? What other reason would there be for gazing upon that gorgeous freckled face? Those eyes as blue as the sky? It seems to hit her too and she freezes in place.
I don’t know what to do or say or think. How is she here? How is she in Vegas at a strip club of all places?
“Dusty?”
Her unblinking eyes dart over my face so fast they nearly blur. “Key.”
She straightens, her mouth gaping like she can’t string together any words. I don’t blame her. Neither can I. She blinks, then spins and walks away.
My legs move on instinct, following as she weaves through a crowd of people, and I have to dodge them to keep up. I can see where she’s headed, and my heart, which is already sprinting, starts to constrict.
“Dusty, wait! Please,” I call over the noise.
A waitress with a tray full of drinks slows her down and I reach forward to grasp her wrist. Finally she stops, but pulls out of my grasp, her eyes panicked and scanning our surroundings.
“Don’t grab me,” she says frantically, “or they’ll throw you out.”
I hold my hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just . . . I needed you to stop.”
She bites her lip, and I’m flooded by memories of us as teens when she would get anxious and do this exact same thing. It feels like I’m back there, in that humid, dank cabin in the woods.
“You’re . . .” I start, but I hardly know where to begin. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She drops her head and crosses her arms. “Yeah, well?—”
“What are you?—”
I take in her clothes. How she’s wearing quite possibly the smallest black bikini I’ve ever seen with a neon green fishnet dress overtop, leaving nothing to the imagination.
“Wait, you’re working here?”
Her jaw tenses. “No, I just came for the free buffet. Of course I work here.”
“But,” I start, licking my lips that have turned to sandpaper. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” she grits out. “It pays money. I have bills that require money. Therefore this place pays the bills.”
“Oh, well, sure. Yeah.”
Her nails tap rhythmically on her arm as the silence stretches on between us, punctuated by some awful disco song in the background.
“Look, are we done here?”
My mouth drops open at the hostility. Why is she acting like this? She left me . “Did I say something wrong?”
She closes her eyes and sighs. “No, just—I’m working and I can’t be doing this right now.”
It hits me like a truck. She works here. She works here.
“Dusty, tell me you’re not—” She avoids my eye so I push on. “You’re a stripper?”
None of this makes sense. She left me to make something better of herself. She wanted to be an actress. Or work with movies. And while I would never shame the girls who do choose this life, did she seriously leave me at that bus station to spend her nights working as a stripper?
She doesn’t say anything, and the anger that builds in my chest is suddenly bubbling over.
“You—this is what you left for? Working as a stripper in some sleazy, bullshit club in Vegas?”
Her eyes narrow and it’s as if the electricity in the room flickers. “Yes, Key! I’m a stripper at a sleazy, bullshit club in Vegas. Why the fuck do you care anyway?”
“Why do I—why do I fucking care?”
But she just stares at me hard. Waiting for my answer.
“Because we were supposed to be together. We were going to be a family and make something of ourselves and instead you left me to do this shit? And the b-baby?” My voice cracks and her face crumbles. “For fuck’s sake, was there ever even a baby to begin with?”
She stumbles back half a step. “How dare you!”
“What am I supposed to fucking think? It seems like I never really knew you at all.”
“Don’t!” she yells over the music. “Don’t you dare come in here and judge what I do with my life.” Her entire body is vibrating with fury and her lips tremble with every syllable. “Of course there was a baby. But it’s gone now. I never had it. Happy?”
Some of the rage subsides, replaced by the unsatisfied feeling of a long-awaited question not being answered the way you wish. I never realized until this moment how much I wished our baby was born. How the finality of its existence hurts me deeper than I ever thought it could.
I’m going about this all wrong. Why am I so angry with her? I reach out for her again and gently touch her arm, the familiar feel of her skin like a drug relapse after being sober for years. I shouldn’t be angry. It’s not her fault—it’s mine. “Dusty, please—I couldn’t take care of you properly then, but I can now.”
“Key, don’t?—”
“I’m sorry I yelled. Just—” I shake my head. “Come home with me. You don’t have to stay here,” I say, moving toward her, my hands tracing up her shoulders until I’m cupping her face. “You don’t have to do this anymore. I can take care of you. Let me save you.”
The moment the words leave my lips I wish I could take them back. Tell her I didn’t mean it the way it came out, but there’s fire in her gaze and she pushes me hard in the chest.
“Save me?”
She laughs. An unrestrained, maniacal sound that sends a chill down my spine.
“That’s all this ever was, wasn’t it?” she says, wiping the mirth from her eyes. “It was always about saving me. Saving me from my trashy parents, from my abusive dad, from myself, from our mistake .”
My heart splits in half. “Our mistake?”
“I suppose I can’t be mad about it. It’s how you were brought up. Jesus saves Mary Magdalene too, right? The good boy who saves the whore.”
I can barely breathe. “No! No, that’s not—it was never like that for me,” I say desperately. Pleadingly.
She shakes her head and backs away, and I see the tears trickle down her freckled cheeks. “Don’t feel bad for me, Keith. I never wanted your pity.”
“But how could you choose this?” I ask, throwing my arms out wide. “How could you end up here instead of . . .”
With me. Just say it. Say it.
“I won’t apologize for the choices I made, because they were mine. And whether they were good or bad, I won’t stand here while you make me feel guilty about them.”
“Dusty . . .” I reach out for her and touch her arm, and for a moment I can see the way it calms her. The tension easing in her muscles.
“Hey, man, hands off!”
A thick, muscled bouncer grasps my arm and twists it behind my back. I grunt in pain, and my knees buckle as I’m hauled away from her. I fight against the man, but another one joins in and soon I’m being dragged away. Surely she won’t let them take me. Surely she won’t . . . but she’s backing away, shaking her head.
“No! Stop, I need to tell her,” I beg.
The bouncer turns to her. “This guy bothering you?”
And with a coldness I never believed she was capable of, she nods. “Yes.”
The breath is knocked out of me with that one word.
“All right, pal. You’re done here,” he says, pulling me away.
There’s still so much I have to say. “No,” I whisper. It can’t be over like this.
I reach out for her again but she’s gone, disappearing through a black door where I can’t follow. My chest feels like it’s caving in, the pain so excruciating that for a moment I worry I might be having a heart attack. It feels like that awful night all over again. Her choosing to leave me behind. Then the panic sets in as I’m carried out into the gutter behind the club, and as I’m tossed into the street, I search around for men in white uniforms who might pop up out of nowhere to take me back to Samson Academy.
They don’t come. I’m safe from that at least. The tears start next and everything hits me at once. She never really loved me. It’s the only explanation. How else can someone be so unfeeling and cold? I brace my hands on my knees and throw up into a sewer grate.
Forever passes before I pull myself up. Part of me hoped Joel would come find me, but he must have met a distraction, and I can’t fault him for that. All I want to do is curl up in my bed at the motel and cry, so I stumble back down the Strip toward the chapel where our night started so happily. I suppose part of me always thought that maybe if I ever saw Dusty again it would be like it is in my dreams. That she would realize we were meant to be together. That she hadn’t really meant it when she left me. That there’s a better explanation.
Our history says differently though. She was always leaving me and I was always too stupid to think she might finally stay. That she only ever left because she had to. And is she right? Was I only ever in love with her because she was someone for me to fix? So I could play the hero because I couldn’t even save myself from my own life?
I’ve swallowed a hard truth tonight: She’s no damsel. And I’m no hero.