Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
JC
In many physical ways, my brothers and I take after our father: strong jaws just shy of arrogant, elegant noses that survived several punches to the face, and thick hair that defies neglect. But I cannot lie worth shit. Not like Dad used to, or Sawyer continues to.
It’s all in the delivery, and Gia isn’t buying my flimsy attempt at a cover-up.
“You wanna go hang with Sawyer and a bunch of bankers?” she asks, incredulous.
I tuck my phone away after pretending to text Sawyer. “Only for an hour. He has some people he wants me to meet.”
Her eyes flash, sharp and assessing. We landed in the bar thirty minutes ago and are two shots deep, with more on the way. This does not track.
She tugs on the zipper of my leather jacket. “Can I come? I’ll behave. I promise.” Her eyes soften, like her voice. “Please?”
Her pleading crushes me. The show tonight was utterly transcendent—both of us in the zone. We should be deep into making out and riding the lust wave into the night. Brushing her off for what’s coming makes me feel utterly miserable.
But I’m not dragging Gia into this, whatever old relic Amber plans to unearth from the grave of our past. During soundcheck, I felt Gia's eyes burn a hole into me while I cut a deal with Amber: if she no-showed at the concert tonight, I’d meet with her.
Naturally, she’d asked why.
I’ll explain tonight, was my reply.
Amber kept up her end of the bargain. Now I need to face the music, guilt humming through me like feedback.
I tip Gia’s chin higher, kissing her pouty mouth. “They will bore you to tears. Wait for me here?”
“K,” she says, trying hard, I can tell, not to sound crestfallen. “One hour.”
I weave through the crowd, all the dark shapes blurring into one. Flipping up my collar against the chill of the night, I tug my phone out and punch the Google Maps Link in Amber’s last text. The red pin drop indicates another bar in the same neighborhood.
Perhaps too close.
Because not even ten minutes pass, and I’m facing the ruins of my evening.
I take a deep breath and push open the door.
What looks like an old factory on the outside smells clean and expensive inside, like everything in Switzerland.
The light is warm and dim, votives flickering on pedestal tables topped with concrete.
I scan the posh, middle-aged crowd, all cut from the same fine cloth, and find Amber sitting alone at the bar, backlit and in soft focus.
For a second, my memory stumbles into the murky past.
I see her behind the Ludwig kit, lit up from the stage lights. Twirling her sticks and ready to bring it on. Another lifetime ago, she took a swig of gin, and I took a hit of tonic. Our wet kisses created the ultimate messy cocktail—fuck the glass or the class.
Now she sips champagne from a long-stemmed flute.
She sees me and smiles, a quiet shine in her eyes. Fifteen steps feel like fifty, each one dragging old ghosts behind me.
The whole world feels like it's shrinking to a pinpoint.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey.”
I swallow down the spreading lump in my throat. Neither of us seems to know what comes next.
She pulls the barstool out for me. “Thanks for coming.”
I take a seat, my stomach a tight ball of stress. I’ve forgotten what it was like, getting to feel edgy all over. And is that scent—patchouli? I disliked it then and hate it now.
“I can’t stay long.”
“Your crew keeping you on a short leash?”
“No. Someone’s waiting for me.”
Her smile slides away. The space between us suddenly feels heavy, like I should apologize, but what am I apologizing for? I signal the bartender, suddenly desperate for the numbing effect of alcohol. He replies with a universal wave of give me a minute.
“Anyway, I’m here.” I side-eye her. “What’s up?”
Amber is looking at me closely. Not for the first time, I wonder if coming here is a mistake. “It’s nice to see you in your element again,” she says. “I love watching you on stage.” She touches my hand, brow lifting on a smile. “I always did.”
My breathing shallows, like the air is thinner.
When we first met, Amber didn’t qualify as a groupie in the strictest sense of the word.
She was a musician looking for a band. But she set her sights hard on me.
Tracked me at countless gigs before she zeroed in like a missile backstage one night, dressed to kill in a PVC catsuit.
She’d heard my original drummer, Steve, was moving on.
At the time, I had a thing for fauxhawks, and Amber was like a magical mermaid in a shoal of identical blonde and brunette wannabes.
Older, sexier, and spoke my language.
We definitely aligned horizontally, as often as possible.
Back then, I thought someone could understand every heartbeat of mine. Now I’m wise (jaded?) enough to know no one can fully understand. But some come nearer to it than others—some very near.
“Yeah,” I draw out the word while shaking off her hand. “About that.”
She waits for me to expand and elbows me gently when I don’t. “Were you surprised to see me?”
I flick her a look. “Unicorns rarely make an appearance.”
“Is that a good thing? Me as a mythical creature in your mind?”
She perks up, and for some reason, that bothers the shit out of me. Walking out of my life without as much as a goodbye does not warrant perk. It warrants a hard smack for cruelty.
The bartender asks what I want and I keep it simple—order a tequila neat. Tonight is already whirling in my mind.
“How many shows did you buy tickets to?”
“Why?” She leans in, trying to catch my eyes. “Are you offering me comps?”
“Listen.” I square my shoulders and face her. “You in the front row, night after night, it’s gotta stop. Our singer feels uncomfortable.”
Amber stills. Her long stare knots my brain into a tangle, and I look at the floor for a painstaking minute while neither of us says a word.
“You and her,” she finally says, her tone brisk. “The rumors are true.”
“Nothing official.”
Amber puffs out a small sound of disgust. “Sounds like a familiar line. Does she know about us? Is that why you don’t want me in the audience? She can’t handle the spotlight shining on someone else?”
Anger, sharp and hot, stabs through me. She has no business throwing that in my face. She fucked out of my life without a second thought. To materialize thirteen years later and have the nerve to belittle Gia’s feelings?
“Do me a favor and forget about the rest of the gigs, okay? Let’s not turn this into a sideshow circus.” My voice rises, anger bubbling with it. “You left the stage. You left me. Don’t make this weirder than it has to be.”
Her mildly offended look warps into something far uglier. “I left for a reason. You remember? Our pregnancy—that involved you.”
I imagine filling in the giant pause that presses against all four walls and the ceiling, resting our secrets inside one by one.
And just like that, I’m backsliding toward the darkness I struggled to escape from a hundred times before.
I think of our argument, the permanent negative space it created.
My heart in tatters, lying to the world about why I killed the band, because my own child didn’t make it into this world, and I was partly to blame.
Amber blinks. Not a single movement in a body that once moved so in sync with mine.
“Or,” she says, now fully on the attack, “maybe you wanted it all to go away. Funny how you said fucking nothing.” She downs her champagne and slams the glass hard onto the counter.
“And saying nothing is saying exactly what you were thinking.”
It’s a slightly unnerving experience to relive deep pain all over again. Can’t recommend it. And it’s true I didn’t say the words she wanted to hear.
“I would've committed,” I say, the words tight in my throat. “I just ... I needed time to process. I was nineteen. I didn’t know how to handle any of it.” I look at her, heart pounding. “But I didn’t ask you to do what you did.”
It comes out softer than I meant it. Regret laced in every word. Because the truth is, I didn’t ask anything. I just froze.
And she stormed out and went on a bender. Miscarried two days later.
I remember the blood-red sunrise and her soft cries. And that my world became swirls and fragments, nothing making sense.
“Committed?” Amber snorts a laugh, ignoring the elephant in the room I just dropped like a bomb. “The only thing you wanted in your life was music. That’s what I realized. Why have a baby with a man unable to love me the way I wanted him to love me?”
“Is that your excuse?” I scoff. “Because if it is, it sucks. I loved you with all my heart.”
Her cutting gaze lands on mine. She looks like she’d prefer to be in another bar right now.
Maybe a bar in another country. I’m wishing I’d never left Gia.
She makes me feel space. Makes me feel everything.
It isn’t getting any easier to want her, but I miss her, and it's dark outside, and the air in here feels like toxic soup.
And Amber keeps tossing poison darts. “How does the role reversal feel? Or do you feel it at all? Older man, younger woman?” She laughs bitterly. “No one bats an eye, I bet.”
At this point, I feel shamed and judged. And why should I feel this way? She soldiered on without me, as if, in losing me, she’d lost nothing. Too many nights, I dream about the child I’d wanted to hold, and wake up sweating with my sanity collapsing all over again.
I’m suddenly so tired, like I’ve aged two decades in a single night. I down half my drink in one burning swallow. “No one cared about that except you.”
Time passes. Not sure how much. An entire sunset and sunrise's worth of slow, ticking minutes. My heart rises and falls and keeps falling.
Two lost souls staring into the bleakness they created.
I signal the waiter for the bill.
“What are you doing after the tour?” Amber finally asks.
“I don’t know.” I run an agitated hand through my hair. “And why do you care?”
She clears her throat, making me acutely aware mine is bone-dry. I feel this rolling seasick sensation that only ends when you step off the ship. I want to get outside of it all, feel like kicking holes in the world of my life.
And that’s the moment Amber rests her hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you stay in Europe?”
There’s a creaking sound above our heads, or maybe I imagine it—the universe slowly imploding. She searches my eyes, and I’m thinking the most incomprehensible thing.
Is she serious? After all this time?
“We were so good together,” she adds, giving my shoulder a good, firm squeeze.
I open my mouth and close it again. I should do the JC thing and say something nice, not pierce her misguided ambitions with a dull blade of rejection.
But I’m done pretending it didn’t hurt.
And maybe I’ve been secretly crafting the words in the blackest part of my soul for years because they spill out fast and clean and are nothing short of lethal.
“Whatever space I had in my heart for you … it’s gone. You disappeared as revenge. I can’t forgive you for that.”
Time takes another drag. If Amber had any illusions left about us and what could have been, I snuffed them, figuratively, under the grind of a boot heel.
Her smile is the saddest thing I’ve seen in years.
“Typical JC,” she says softly. “A poet to the fucking end.”
A single tear slips down her face, leaving a wet trail behind.
Then she slides off the stool, folding me into a hug.
Maybe I’ve tricked myself into believing I can handle anything, but no man can prepare for a woman breaking down in his arms. And I don’t want to be a spiteful, angry monster.
Rubbing slow, consoling circles between her shoulder blades, I fight the drowning pull of her familiarity—her contours and scent, the little sounds.
Force myself to remember that after Amber, I felt dark and never quite clean.
Gia and her chaotic brightness have illuminated the dusty attic of my heart.
Two complicated natures coming together in a beautiful, simple one.
She is who I need, and my caving-in heart knows it.
But when Amber ever so slightly maneuvers to kiss me, it’s a place I’ve been before, comfortable and secure.
I kiss her back. It feels like I’m suddenly free-falling, the ground rushing up hard toward me, and no parachute cord to pull.
Then a tray of glasses shatters onto the floor behind us, the bartender yelling, “Sheisse!”
And it feels so very wrong.