Chapter 15
(Johnny)
Darkness still clung to the room, broken by silver slashes of moonlight seeping in around the edges of the curtains and blinds. With all the money they made on room charges, hotels could more than afford to have full blackout ones installed, but no, they always opted for the cheapest shit imaginable. Maybe they were secretly in business with the sleep mask company, vowing to ruin people’s rest unless they invested in the damn things. They had to know that the bright lights in the parking lot would keep people awake, but like most corporations, they didn’t give a damn about the customer once they had their money.
The only nice thing about this time of morning was the stillness of the world outside. Most people were still in their beds and the night shift folks still had an hour or two of work before they trudged home, tired and frustrated, to sleep most of the day away.
“Why are you awake?”
Draven’s voice rumbled low in my ear as his fingers started carving through my hair.
“’Cause my brain won’t shut off and there’s light in the room.”
“I keep telling you to pick up a sleep mask.”
“And I keep telling you that the damn things make me feel like something is crawling on me. Why do you think I braid my hair back every night? I don’t want the strands on my face when I’m trying to sleep, either.”
“There’s a story there.”
“Maybe,” I murmured. “Isn’t there a story to everything?”
Draven’s chuckle sent a shiver down my spine as he swept my braid aside and kissed up the back of my neck while I sighed, my hate of the light temporarily forgotten. There was another reason I loved this soft time between night and dawn. Well rested, his voice wasn’t strained from all the time he tried to use it throughout the day when he should have been using his device. We’d all started pointing to his pocket whenever it seemed like he was straining, not to be cruel, but to save him from doing further harm to himself.
“Yeah, there is,” Draven replied as he drew his fingertips in lazy circles along my hip. “So when are you going to tell me the rest of yours?”
“What’s there to tell? You’ve known me for years. ”
“No, I’ve hung out in the same circles with you for years,” Draven murmured. “I’ve watched you kick ass onstage and party like every one will be the last one, but I don’t know you the way I want to. So tell me something, Johnny, anything.”
“L-like what?”
He was silent for a moment, while I snuggled deeper into the blanket’s folds, sighed and felt my body going lax beneath his touch.
“Why music? Why’d you choose this life?” he asked, each word pressed to my skin, the movement of his lips sending a lazy wave of pleasure through my brain.
He found the pressure point where my neck met my shoulder and nuzzled it before sinking his teeth in, not biting so much as exerting a steady, rolling pressure that morphed into an endorphin rush.
“I don’t think I ever had a choice,” I explained. “From the time I was a little kid, people told me that my voice was a gift. I didn’t get it then. I was just a little kid, ya know? I just knew that entertaining people made them happy. It felt good to see people smile. That’s all it was about for me. Their smiles. The way my songs would make hushed conversations stop. I could always tell when something bad was happening, because the adults in my family would huddle together in the corner of a room or someone’s backyard, keeping one eye on us and ordering us to go play if we wandered over. ”
“Good for them,” Draven murmured. “I wish the adults in my family had kept their bullshit to themselves instead of broadcasting it in the hopes of rallying more troops to their side.”
“I always loved that about my family,” I said. “The way they protected us kids and not just from whatever was going on with them but from the outside world, too. I know my uncle listened to the news on the way to work every morning, but if one of us kids was in the car, he always popped in a CD or kept turning the dial so the radio played only music. When my oldest cousin was a kid, there was a riot at the jail, with smoke pouring out the windows after some of the inmates set it on fire. He didn’t even know about it until some reporter did an exposé on the twentieth anniversary amid recent complaints that conditions at the jail were as bad as they were back then. He came home from working at the docks talking about it, confused about why the guys he worked with remembered it and he didn’t. Wanna know what our uncle said?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“He told my brother that he didn’t know about it because he didn’t need to.”
I felt as much as I heard Draven chuckle, his breath blowing out in hot puffs along my skin. Somehow, I’d gone from restless and glaring at the light, to boneless putty beneath his fingertips, as he kept drawing circles on my side.
“There are pictures of me at four years old, singing and dancing with a great big smile on my face,” I told him. “My grandfather says I was the hit of every family gathering and that everyone indulged and encouraged me.”
“That’s pretty cool. The only thing my grandfather encouraged was silence,” Draven grumbled. “His glare could silence a room in less time than it would have taken him to tell everyone to shut up.”
“The only time anyone encouraged silence in my house was in the last two minutes of a close Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup finals,” I said. “And even then, it was only if the Bruins or the Patriots were playing.”
Another chuckle and I rolled my shoulders and wiggled my ass back until it was firmly pressed to his groin. His cock gave a little twitch against my behind, right before he smacked me on the thigh, not hard enough to leave a mark, but not exactly light, either, like a warning for me to stop trying to turn this early morning conversation into sexy time.
“Behave, and tell me more,” Draven growled, nipping the pressure point in my shoulder again.
“Only if you tell me where you learned that,” I moaned, rocking my head against the pillow.
“Dated a massage therapist for a few months,” he replied before kissing his way to the other shoulder and gently biting that one.
I shuddered, eyes rolling back a little as he gripped and let go, gripped, held, dug his teeth in a little deeper, then released me again.
“Just, I had the best childhood once I went to live with my aunt and uncle,” I admitted. “It was amazing. Someone constantly gifted me with costumes they came across at a season ending sale or in a thrift store, and I’d get all dressed up in it to perform at clam broils and birthday parties. I took dance classes at the community center and created little skits with my cousins. All the ones in the house were way younger than me but I had older cousins that lived up the block and we were always in and out of one another’s houses. My older cousins constantly showed me the latest steps and dance routines, hell, my aunt used to dance in the kitchen while she cooked and she never minded if I joined in. I was just a silly little kid and no one cared if I was being goofy or flapping my arms around like an injured gull. They just cared that I was happy. Singing around the campfire was a family activity. My Uncle Nelson and my oldest cousin, Pam, played guitar, but I never got the hang of an instrument. I’ve tried several, too, even the harmonica, but my voice is the only talented thing about me.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Draven said “You’ve got a talented tongue and a sinfully wicked way of moving that draws everyone’s attention.”
“Don’t want everyone’s attention, unless I’m performing. The only attention I care about is yours.”
“Good, ‘cause I’ve been told I’ve got a jealous streak,” Draven murmured. “Been called possessive a few times, too, which I can admit was warranted.”
“I don’t mind possessive, but I draw the line at letting you brand me with anything. A tattoo, on the other hand, might be something you can tempt me with. Somewhere along the line, anyway.”
He punctuated the lazy kisses up the back of my neck by gently squeezing my thigh and nudging it up, until I got with the program and bent my knee, giving him access to stroke fingertips along the other one.
“The closest I ever came to figuring out an instrument was this old lyre my aunt had picked up at a thrift store,” I admitted. “And by figuring out, I mean that I could pluck the strings, but not in any sort of pattern that resembled a song.”
“And here I was worried that you’d say the xylophone.”
“I had one of those, when I was a kid. The one with all the colors that was supposed to make it easier to figure out. Hell, it even had the letters etched into the bottom of every plate, but my dyslexic ass would rearrange the order of the notes I was supposed to play, until even ‘Three Blind Mice’ was a challenge,” I admitted, too relaxed to keep the bitterness I usually felt from creeping through in my voice.
“I didn’t know you were dyslexic.”
“Most people don’t. ”
“Why?”
“Because it’s none of their business,” I said. “And I hide it well. Spell check and auto correct are not my friends, though. I can never tell if the word that’s been corrected is the one I meant, or one that looks close, but means something completely different.”
“Does your band know?”
“Dude, you’ve seen their handwriting,” I pointed out. “My spelling isn’t even the worst in the bunch. If we can’t figure out what someone wrote, we ask, usually while giving them shit for whatever atrociousness is on the page.”
“I saw, when I was helping Sully go through the forms everyone filled out,” Draven murmured, his voice finally beginning to grow difficult to hear.
I’d have to talk more just to keep him from trying to say too much. Bet he knew that, too. I couldn’t even blame him for using his condition to his advantage in this instance. Not when it felt so completely amazing to be wrapped up with him like this.
“I always envied the way Rebel could learn a song just by listening to it over and over, strumming and picking at the strings; fiddling with the chords until he got it right. I could never get it right when I tried learning that way. The only part that ever clicked was the singer’s voice. How it rose and fell, the notes they drew out, and how two people could harmonize so perfectly they didn’t even need accompaniment,” I said, pausing to nuzzle the hand he pressed to my cheek.
“Did Jagger tell you that we were in chorus together, back in high school?” I asked, though I was certain I already knew the answer.
“Jagger doesn’t like to talk about his past, either,” Draven said.
“Yeah. Well, we were,” I said. “We even did show choir and spent a semester doing a chorus elective specifically focused on barbershop quartets. Talk about setting ourselves up to be made fun of, especially during the spring performance. Well, that’s not exactly the truth, either. I set myself up to be made fun of, Jagger just came along for the ride and kicked their asses if they gave me too much shit.”
“Jagger?”
“Dude, be lucky no one has pissed him off yet,” I said, chuckling at the image that popped in my head. “I didn’t hit my final growth spurt until junior year and even then, I only gained a couple inches. I was this small, geeky little thing trying to act tough to keep the bullies from seeing how much they got to me. Jagger was a legitimate badass in pint-sized packaging. He was never afraid to go home with skinned and bloodied knuckles. The only thing I’ve ever known to terrify him was a fuckin’ dog and well, you saw how long it took him to get over it.”
“Yeah, and look at him with Beast and Beethoven now,” Draven pointed out. “He’s the first one to grab a leash when it’s time to walk them.”
“Because he’s fallen in love with them,” I said, reminded of the sight I’d stepped into when I’d gone to speak to Jagger about our sets that morning.
Robbie had been reading in the easy chair, while Keegan clung to the edge of the bed, one arm around Beast to keep from being shoved off, while the massive Saint Bernard and his equally massive brother had Jagger tucked between them on the bed. Their tongue-lolling doggy grins had given the impression that they were quite pleased with themselves. When Beast stretched and let out a woof of greeting while Keegan lost his precarious position and slid onto the floor with an oof and a thud, I swore their grins got bigger.
“Why didn’t you two ever form a band together?” Draven asked.
“Because we figured no one would want to be part of a band with two singers, neither of whom could play an instrument,” I admitted. “So we went our own way when it came to the people we played with. When we started talking about putting bands of our own together, so we could sing the songs we’d written, we agreed that we wouldn’t poach from one another, or let it turn into a competition between us, especially when we shared the same friend group. The problem was that we only knew one guitarist. I asked Rebel first, and that was that. Jagger was asked to join a cover band a few weeks later, and he accepted, since he couldn’t find anyone who was as serious about making music for a living as we were. Rebel knew Ozzy, and Ozzy brought in Dash, after we tried a handful of other bassists that didn’t pan out. Between me and Jagger, he was the first to play a paying gig, but I was the one who was lucky enough to make a real band stick. Sometimes I feel shitty about that, and how long it took before things worked out for him. If I hadn’t asked Rebel, maybe he and Jagger would have built something back then.”
“Why feel bad, when you’d struck a deal with one another?”
Sighing, I let him stroke my thigh several times before I answered.
“Because Jagger had a thing for Rebel and that’s why he didn’t ask him,” Johnny admitted. “He wanted to go out with him but he didn’t want to fuck up a potential band in the process. I had a thing for Rebel, too, and figured making music with him would be the perfect in to something more.”
“Wait, you and Rebel were a thing?”
“For half a minute, more than a decade ago,” I admitted. “Turns out that the music trumped things for me after all.”
“And Jagger?”
“Never told him. Never said a word. Just did his damnedest to make things work with the cover band and when that fell apart, he found another one to join and another when that one imploded,” I said, feeling lower than low when I really thought about it all.
Despite having paved the way for Jagger to join Damaged Saints, there was no denying that I’d done it as much because I owed him as wanting to help my friends out of the shitty spot their former roadie had left them in.
“What we’ve done, the success we’ve had, the tours, the albums, the festivals, the fame, that was always the dream,” I admitted. “Now that I have it, I’m terrified that it’s all going to be taken away when this case goes to trial. That’s not how I saw the whole thing turning out for me.”
“So, how did you see it playing out?”
“As just one long, never ending party, I guess.”
“Aren’t you tired of parties yet?”
I chuckled at that and slid my hand down to squeeze the one he had resting on my knee.
“Yeah, I ran out of love for them years ago,” I said, making a shushing sound. “But don’t tell the others that. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
“Why not just forge a new one?”
“Working on it,” I admitted. “That’s the real reason I was late to the party the night of the accident. I kept stalling and dragging my feet about getting there. I just wasn’t in the mood for more screaming and flirting and all the effort it would take to look happy to be there. On the way over, I kept thinking of things I’d been meaning to pick up. Made three stops before hitting the Dairy Queen drive threw and grabbing a cone. I stood outside the venue finishing it and debated saying fuck it and going home without making an appearance.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I kick myself for it and other times I’m glad I went inside, because Rebel was shitfaced by then and ranting about something that didn’t even make any sense, not even to him when I asked him about it later. I still have no clue what triggered him that night but no one was keeping track of how much he was drinking. People just kept handing him another whenever he demanded one. I told him that I had a bottle of tequila back at my place that I hadn’t even cracked open yet. That’s what got him to hand over his keys and get in the car.”
“Sounds like it’s a good thing you went in, then, no matter what happened afterwards.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, rolling to face him. At least those slashes of light were good for something. I could see his eyes, sparkling like there were tiny fireflies flittering through all that green. “I just don’t get how a lifelong dream can be on the verge of coming to an end because I made the right choice? How is that fair when I’ve never once broken any of the rules my uncles laid out when they’d been teaching me to drive!”
He hugged me to him, in part to stifle the raising pitch of my voice, but the rest was pure comfort.
“What were they?” he asked, his words taking a moment to sink in.
I’d been so ready for him to say what others had said countless times since my accident. That life wasn’t fair, that sometimes shit happened. I’d been poised to jerk away, twist out of his hold and scramble out from beneath the blankets. Now it took a moment for my brain to reset.
“Don’t get behind the wheel if you’ve been drinking or smoking up,” I recited, the echo of my uncles’ voices in my head helping to keep me focused. “Don’t let your friends get behind the wheel, either. They always said that the worst time to play who’s the soberest fucker in the room was when no one was sober.”
“No shit.”
“Right,” I replied, draping an arm over him and resting my head right over his heart. “So they told us to pick up the damn phone and call home or fork over the damned money for a cab if we were gonna get shitfaced, and if all else failed, and no one answered and we were short on cash, to walk our asses home. At least then we’d have a better chance of getting there safely.”
He crushed me to him then and pressed a kiss to the top of my head.
“No matter what, no one can take the music from you,” he murmured against my hair.
“I know,” I replied, snuggling against him. “But they can keep me from sharing it, and that’s as much a part of the joy as being able to sing.”