13. Wilder
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
wilder
You gave me what I asked for
Then took it with you out the front door
Now I’m broken open
Everything unspoken
pouring out of me
So I spin… spin
On this carousel of sin… sin
A game I’ll never win… win
Without you
S ix long weeks have passed since Evangeline’s gasps and moans became my favorite soundtrack. I’ve replayed our night together so many times the vinyl is worn out. Muffled and muddy, the melody distorted.
Sometimes I’m not sure it really happened.
The only time it feels real is when I’m asleep. In my dreams, I experience it all again. The silky slopes of her hips under my hands. Her arching neck. Sweat-slick spine against my chest, her hair in my mouth, in my fist. The graceful, serpentine waves of her moving body as she matched me note for note. Bright, lust-drunk eyes and her voice sobbing my name.
Evangeline is a perfect song, but she’s stuck in my head like a bad one.
Kendra is not happy.
I’ve successfully avoided having sex with her, but I’m running out of excuses. Thus far, she hasn’t confronted me. As much as I need her, she needs me, too. The threat goes both ways. She’s not willing to risk losing all the perks of being my girlfriend, so she’s pretending everything’s fine while I pretend I’m not revolted by the idea of touching anyone but Evangeline. And that, of course, is off the table.
Evangeline did what I told her to and blocked my number. I may not be a good person, but I’m not enough of an asshole to push her or show up at her house uninvited again. Even if I fantasize about knocking down her door a hundred times a day.
I’m in a constant state of hunger, but the only sustenance that will sate me is one I can’t have.
The band is my saving grace. Our second single released and the response was even more insane than the first. Whatever anonymity we enjoyed before is gone, at least with the under-forty crowd in the city we call home. I wasn’t a fan of social outings before, but now I can’t even hit up my favorite record store or local coffee shop without being forced into conversation with strangers.
Not that I have much free time.
Between multiple daily rehearsals, the guys and I have been running ourselves ragged. Every day there’s somewhere we have to be or something we have to do. Interviews. Photoshoots. Music videos. Our social media accounts have ballooned so much we’ve hired an agency to handle them. A team of people now generates our content, one of whom is currently recording us while we watch a basketball game in our basement.
Our keyboardist, Zander, shoves his glasses up his nose, his eyes darting from the TV to Eddie. “Are we supposed to be talking?” he hisses.
“Just act natural,” chirps the woman behind a tripod holding her phone.
The first two replacements for Evangeline only lasted months before being fired. Zander has been with us for over a year. He’s normal. Kind of quiet. So far, he seems to be handling all the attention pretty well, but he’s definitely more freaked out than the rest of us. We, at least, remember our first tour. Although that brief flare of fame was nothing compared to what’s happening now.
“This is so weird,” Zander mutters.
Next to me, Jax chuckles. “If you think this is weird, wait until we hit the road.”
Eddie throws a piece of popcorn at him from the other end of the L-shaped couch. “Stop scaring the newbie.”
Ignoring his brother, Jax leans toward me and lowers his voice. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.”
His eyes fall to my hands. I curl my fingers, subduing their spastic drumming.
I’m on day ten free of pills. Normally by now, I’d have taken a quarter of a pill, my usual starter dose for reentry into my life. But after I cut the tablet, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow it.
This detox was more brutal than any I’ve gone through before. The withdrawals more painful, the cravings so intense I almost broke a dozen times. It scared the shit out of me. My skin still feels raw, like I’m recovering from a sunburn. My head is a mess, my thoughts a fireworks show—blinding, loud, chaotic. At least my stomach settled today and I can swallow without gagging.
“Dude,” Jax whispers. “You’ve gotta stop.”
Five days ago—my worst day—Jax heard a crash in my room. When I didn’t answer the door, he busted in and found me on the floor, moaning, sweating, and shaking. My mumblings about having the flu went down like a lead balloon.
I ended up telling him the truth minus where I get my pills. He yelled a lot. I puked on his shoes. It was a fucking mess.
“I told you,” I whisper back, “it’s under control.”
Jax frowns. “When the tour starts?—”
“Did you guys see this?” Eddie interrupts as he jumps to his feet. He veers around the coffee table and shoves his phone in our faces. “Glow is headlining tonight at the Cathedral!”
Jax whistles. “Damn, go Eva. Main stage?”
“Side stage,” I murmur, having already seen the post on the band’s Instagram. Cathedral’s main stage has a capacity of six hundred, but the attached hall for lesser known acts is nothing to sneeze at with a cap of three hundred.
Eddie bounces on the balls of his feet. “We have to go!”
“Sounds good to me,” says Jax with a shrug.
Zander stands fast, his relief obvious. “I’m down.”
Eddie and Zander head for the stairs, Eddie rambling about how awesome Evangeline is and how he’s going to text everyone he knows to come to the show in case ticket sales are lackluster. They’re not. I checked fifteen minutes ago and the show is nearly sold out.
I wonder if Eddie would be as supportive of Evangeline if he knew I fucked her into a coma last month.
Sighing heavily, I press the heels of my hands to my aching eyes.
“Can we have the room?” Jax asks the woman whose name I can’t remember.
She smiles brightly and removes her phone from the tripod. “Sure thing. Are you going to the show, Wilder?”
I start to shake my head but pause. If everyone leaves, I’ll be here alone with nothing to distract me from the craving beating in my blood. I have no idea where Kendra is—she stays away during my detox—but she’s the last person I can talk to about this, anyway. The last person who would tell me not to take a pill… or three. Much more likely, she’d crush them up and snort a line, then offer me the straw.
“Yes,” Jax answers with a quick glance at me. “He’s coming.”
I cock an eyebrow in his direction but don’t object. Do I want to see Evangeline? More than I want my next breath. But that doesn’t mean seeing her is a good idea, especially not in my current state. My impulse control is hanging by a thread. If I see her fingers on a guitar, hear her sing, I’m probably going to do something stupid like weasel my way backstage and use my effect on her to get under her clothes.
Blood flows south at the thought, and I suddenly can’t remember why that’s a bad idea.
The social media woman claps her hands in excitement, shattering my daydream about Evangeline’s tits in my mouth.
“Awesome! I’ve been wanting to see Glow, so this is perfect!” Leaving the tripod, she runs up the basement stairs.
Jax sighs. “Mae is a lot.”
“That’s her name?”
He snorts, then grabs the remote to turn off the TV. Sensing that I’m about to get lectured, I sigh and face him.
“Look, Jax, I’m sorry I worried you?—”
“Let’s do a dry-thirty. You and me. No booze, no drugs for a month. Gym, vitamins, the whole nine.”
I stare at him, floored, as the words cycle through me and incite an uncomfortable blend of fear and yearning.
The last time I was sober for that long was after Evangeline left the band. I don’t even remember why I did it, though it probably had something to do with the shame of all the fucked-up shit I did on tour and what happened after. I’m sure some part of me also thought if I could show her I was changing, she’d come back.
She blocked my number instead, and I got blackout drunk the night I realized it.
“It’ll be good,” Jax continues. “We’ll reset our systems before the tour.”
Without thinking, I say, “I don’t know if I can go that long,” then immediately wish I could take the words back. They make it sound like I’m admitting…
I can’t even finish the thought.
Jax grabs my shoulder, his expression determined. “It’s going to suck for me, too. I don’t think I’ve gone more than a few days without weed for—shit, probably two years. Point is, we’ll be miserable together. But then we’ll be jacked from all the gym time and so healthy our piss smells like lettuce.”
A reluctant smile pulls at my lips.
“Is that a yes?” he asks, grinning.
Yearning briefly eclipses fear, and my chin jerks down.
He squeezes my shoulder, then stands. “Come on. We have time to clear out our stashes and tell Eddie and Zander to lock their shit up.”
Just as fast, fear rises again, this time a monster with fangs dripping venom. Panic curls through me, accelerating my pulse. I stand, locking my knees when they wobble. The urge to take a pill hits me so hard my vision tunnels.
“Jax.” My voice is strangled.
He turns at the base of the stairs, his expression swiftly shifting from questioning to concerned.
I open my mouth, close it, and finally force out the words that don’t want to come. “I need your help getting rid of the pills. Like you’re going to have to do it because I don’t… I don’t think I can.”
His expression softens in understanding. “You got it.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, pushing back against the pressure inside me. “One more thing. The Oxy… Kendra gets it for me.”
He stares at me for several seconds, processing, then blows out a heavy breath. “A lot of shit about your relationship suddenly makes sense.” He pauses. “Do you love her?”
I shake my head.
He nods decisively. “Kick her to the curb tonight, then crash at your parents’ for a few days. Eddie and I will move her shit out and get the locks changed. Okay?”
A frenetic energy sizzles through me. Not fear or panic. Something far more dangerous.
Hope .
I nod. “Okay.”
* * *
As desperate as I am to see Evangeline, I know she isn’t the answer to my problems. She can’t change the way my brain works, can’t protect me from the feeling I’ve had since I was a kid that I was different from my peers.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of it as the Shadow.
There are three manifestations. Sometimes it’s subdued or muted, usually when I’m hyper-focused on music. For minutes or hours, I’m able to forget about it.
Other times, the Shadow overtakes me like a fog, becoming a veil between me and the world. It’s a haze that numbs me. Separates me. Those are the times I withdraw because I’m afraid that when people look at me, they’ll see it. My wrongness . They’ll recognize I’m not like them and everything I’ve worked for will vanish.
The third manifestation is the worst. When the Shadow isn’t distracted or numbing me, it hovers around me as a constant threat. When triggered, it snaps closed like a medieval Iron Maiden, piercing me with dozens of sharp spikes. I’m hypersensitive. Raw, exposed nerves and emotions. The world and all its madness and loudness invade me, overwhelm me. I lose perception of time. Lose control of my breath and senses.
I panic.
When I was six, I drew a picture of the Shadow. A crayon kid surrounded by a cloud of swirling black and purple with needles sinking into the small body and making it bleed. My mom found the drawing and showed my dad. They put me in therapy. I don’t remember the therapist’s name, but her voice was soft and I liked her smile. We played with sand trays and drew pictures more than we talked.
I stopped going after a year. My parents and the therapist seemed excited about me not coming back. It was a celebration to them, but I was sad. I’d liked the one hour a week I spent in her office full of toys and no expectations.
More than that, though, I liked that my parents were happy. So when the Shadow next appeared, I didn’t say anything. Didn’t draw any pictures. I kept my weird thoughts to myself and started watching how other kids acted. Classmates at school, Rye and Evangeline on the weekends. I learned to mimic them, how they interacted with each other and adults. I was still a quiet kid, but I learned to smile more. Say the right things.
Pretend there was no Shadow.
When the topic came up again, I was eleven. My parents were worried because one of my teachers expressed concern that I didn’t have friends at school. But by then I’d become adept at faking normalcy. I convinced them I was fine by making friends I didn’t really want. A lot of friends. I joined after-school activities: drama, musical theater, and even soccer for a couple of years. I went to birthday parties and hangouts. Spent my free time at home entertaining my younger siblings, playing guitar with my dad, and learning piano from my mom.
I distracted myself, which distracted the Shadow. During the day, at least. Almost every night, I’d wake up gasping and shaking beneath an enormous pressure on my chest. When the numbness invariably came, it was a relief because for however long it lasted, I could sleep.
Then Evangeline and I wrote a song.
It was the first time in my life the Shadow actually disappeared. Almost like it had been waiting for that moment. Waiting for her and our music.
For years afterward, I went through each week knowing that relief was coming in the form of Evangeline every weekend. Being around her, making music with her… she made me feel both normal and extraordinary.
I overheard my mom once referring to Evangeline as an old soul. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. She was a calm kid. Slow to anger. Perceptive and compassionate beyond her years. She always smiled with her eyes. She always knew what she wanted. Said what she thought. She was brave. Real. Those traits only grew as we did.
Unlike me, her insides have always matched her outsides. She’s never been a fraud pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
With her influence, I stayed in control of the Shadow until I was almost twenty. And when I lost it, it was also because of her. Because my mom showed me a picture of her at her senior prom. A grinning boy had his arm around her waist. She was smiling up at him. I asked who he was, and my mom told me he was Evangeline’s new boyfriend.
That night, the jaws of the Shadow snapped closed with more force than ever before. It wasn’t my first panic attack, but it was by far the worst. There were moments when I thought I’d die from it, alone and unable to call out.
The next day, shaky and weak from the worst night of my life, I texted a friend who I knew stole Xanax from his mom. I’d tried them before. They didn’t make the Shadow disappear, but they dimmed its effects.
He offered me Vicodin instead.
Relief.
I know Evangeline can’t fix me.
But she’s still my favorite high.