3. Wilder
CHAPTER THREE
wilder
F rom behind dark sunglasses, I watch Evangeline and Rye chatting on the other side of my parents’ backyard. They’re standing not ten feet from the sycamore tree.
Our tree.
My fingers squeeze the neck of the bottle in my hand, my knuckles cracking from the force. If it weren’t for the bruises beneath Evangeline’s eyes and the furtive glances she’s been sending me since she got here, I’d think she was unaffected by blowing up our lives last night.
“Whatever we were is done. We broke it. It’s time to move on.”
She didn’t break it, though. I did. And like an absolute asshole, last night I took what was broken, lit it on fire, and kicked the ashes into our eyes.
But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been a saint. From the second Rye told me she was leaving the band, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her. Once Evangeline makes up her mind about something—from a lyric to what she wants for dinner—there’s no arguing with her. No changing her mind.
And she’s done with me.
Distracted by the heaviness in my chest and the way the sunlight glints off her pale hair, I startle when someone sits in the Adirondack chair beside mine. My dad stretches his tattooed legs over the grass, crossing his ankles. I don’t look at him, instead letting my gaze wander over the backyard and the dozen or so people I’ve known most or all my life.
My dad’s bandmates—Nick Henderson, Matt Sullivan, and Jackson Everett—are playing some weirdly complicated frisbee game. For dudes in their fifties, they’re pretty fit. I hope I’m half as active as they are when I’m their age. Their wives, including my mom, are sprawled on lounge chairs near the giant pool where six kids between the ages of eleven and seventeen are currently competing for the biggest cannonball.
The younger kids periodically call for Eva and Rye to join them in the water. They won’t ask me, though. Even if I wasn’t basically hiding on the far side of the yard, everyone knows I’m not much for group activities. Sometimes—today, as a prime example—I wonder why I still come to these things.
“You’ve been avoiding me all day.”
My dad’s voice is mellow, but I feel the pressure of his stare on the side of my face. I take a sip of lukewarm root beer, wishing it were alcohol, then look at him—at the famous, handsome face that still gets photographed and drooled over, the dark hair without a single gray, and the bronze eyes that are currently filled with concern.
“Don’t take it personally. I avoid most people.” I tip the bottle his way. “I am, after all, the son of Julian Ashburn.”
I hate the worry creasing his brow. Right now, I hate pretty much everything, including the fact I look so much like him. My hair is curlier and my eyes are my mom’s, but the tabloids aren’t wrong—I’m basically my father’s clone.
He opens his mouth, but I speak first.
“Please don’t spout some AA slogan about how we’re only as sick as our secrets. I told Mom what happened when she cornered me right as I walked in the door, and I know she told you.”
“Fair enough.” His gaze veers away as he settles deeper in the chair. Thinking he’s done grilling me, I relax a little. Then he says, “There are times I wish you weren’t, you know.”
I frown. “Weren’t what?”
“So much like me.”
Yeah, same.
Only my reasons are different than his. I detest the constant comparisons between my music and his, but he’s talking about the similarities in our temperaments. My moodiness and isolation, especially when I’m working on songs. My tendency to horde my private thoughts and mask myself with a false persona in public. All of which makes him and my mom worry that in addition to following in his musical footsteps, I’ll walk his darker roads, too.
I’m not stupid; the concern is valid. Addiction and music are intertwined in our family tree. Mom was spared the genetic bullet that took her own mother when she was a kid, but Dad was a crazy alcoholic during his teens. Thankfully, he straightened his life out when he was twenty and has been sober longer than I’ve been alive. He’s told me enough stories over the years to make me both appreciate the fact I’ve never seen him drink and have a healthy wariness of my own habits.
But he’s wrong—they’re wrong. I’m not him. I can handle my shit.
Memories of that night in Vegas arise, but I shove them down. I know I made mistakes on tour. I overindulged. We all did, even Evangeline. I’d never seen her as drunk as she was the night I found her and Eddie in a hotel hallway dry humping each other.
The thought of them sneaking away on a different night, of him taking her virginity, makes me want to kill someone.
Preferably Eddie.
My eyes find Evangeline again, but I look away before she can feel me watching her.
“I know you’re angry at her, Wild,” murmurs my dad, “but I’m sure she has good reasons for stepping away. Give it a little time. Don’t let this end your friendship.”
I bite my tongue.
Evangeline and I aren’t friends . We never have been. Most of our childhood, she was my unwanted shadow, following me around and poking her nose into my business. I could never escape her and by extension Rye, who trailed in her wake.
It all changed when I was thirteen and she was eleven and she handed me a sheet of lined paper covered in short verses. As I read them, I heard a melody. Halting and imperfect but still shockingly clear. I grabbed my guitar and a pencil. We spent three hours perfecting our first song, and it didn’t matter that the song itself was crap.
Those hours changed us. We traded parts of our souls, and since that day, when she writes, I hear, and when I write, she hears.
We’re not friends. We’re entangled . She’s inside me just like I’m inside her.
And now she wants the pieces of her soul back? My pieces?
Never fucking happening.
“Anyway, I’m here if you want to talk.”
I nod. “Thanks, Dad.”
He squeezes my shoulder and walks toward the pool where the kids are now waging war on each other with foam noodles. My eleven-year-old twin sisters, Olive and Ivy, are currently trying to drown Eva’s fifteen-year-old brother, Hunter. Normally their antics would make me smile, or at least take the edge off my bad mood.
Not today.
My mood sours even further as Eva and Rye approach the pool. They’re still talking. Always fucking talking. Rye’s mouth moves nonstop as he peels off his T-shirt, leaving him in black swim trunks. He winds up the fabric and whips it at Eva, who dodges and laughs. A forced laugh, but still a laugh. I’m sure she’s pissed at Rye for spilling her secret to me last night. But him, she’ll forgive. Even though I didn’t say a damn thing to prompt Rye’s confession, I have no doubt I’ve been cast in the role of the villain.
Eva pulls her tank top over her head and steps out of her shorts, revealing a blue bikini. My stomach tightens at the sight of her full breasts in the tiny top. Her long, lean legs. Small waist. Subtly flaring hips.
The house could explode right now and I wouldn’t even notice.
My parents’ biggest worry is that I’ll become an addict. They don’t know I already am one, that I’ve been heroically abstaining from my drug of choice for years, fighting its hold over me with everything I am.
Like an alcoholic with booze, one sip of Evangeline will be too many and a million not enough. It’s why I don’t touch her. Ever. Last night was the closest I’ve been to succumbing. Even contact between my fingers and the silky strands of her hair was a risk, one I’m paying for now as I watch her wind the heavy, white-gold mass into a bun on the top of her head and remember the way her pupils dilated as I yanked that hair last night.
Given the pointedness of my stare, I’m unsurprised when her head turns in my direction. I’ve long chalked up our weird awareness of each other’s regard as a symptom of our souls’ entanglement. I know she can’t see my eyes through my sunglasses, and she’s too far away for me to see her mismatched irises—one hazel, one pale blue-gray—but it doesn’t matter. For five long seconds, we’re alone in the universe.
Then Rye picks her up and throws her into the pool. I hate that he can touch her without consequence. I hate that she lets him.
Dropping my head back, I close my eyes and take long, slow breaths until my balls stop aching and my dick deflates. The discomfort eventually fades—at least the physical one. Mentally I’m still a fucking wreck.
An indeterminable length of time later, a shadow falls over me. I blink up at my mom. Her dark curls are haloed by sunlight, her expressive face wearing a soft smile.
She holds out a small black notebook and a pencil.
“No,” I rasp.
“Yes.”
If anyone on Earth can come close to understanding me, it’s my mom. Maybe because she understands my dad so well. Or maybe because everyone’s wrong and I’m actually more like her than him. At least on the inside.
“I can’t,” I whisper, but I still take her offering.
She clasps my face in her graceful hands and stares at me with eyes I see in the mirror every day.
“We don’t back away from pain,” she says gently but firmly. “We seek out the cracks in our hearts and dive inside. It’s okay to be afraid of the unknown, but we have to take the dive. It’s the only way to keep the darkness at bay. Scoop it out with words, Wild. With music. Don’t let it rise over your head.”
My voice cracks as I confess, “I don’t know if I can do it without her.”
Her eyes burn with understanding and compassion. “You can, and you will.”