Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
GIA
Knives and bombs. Machine guns spitting bullets. Hell, give me that chick’s throat, and I’ll show you how much damage two skinny hands can inflict.
I’m alone in the shivery dark, lungs on fire from running.
Lake Zurich stretches in front of me like an endless black stain under a starless sky.
I feel echoey and empty inside, a toxic and creeping thing strangling my heart.
A ticker tape spools endlessly through my brain with the word lies repeated over and over.
JC lied to me.
To my face.
To hook up with that front-row stalker.
How could he do this to me the day after we share our innermost parts? My legs suddenly feel wobbly, and I collapse on a nearby bench, bawling. Broken, ugly crying I don’t want anyone to see or hear. Not a single cell in my body can pretend to have a Parisian level of nonchalance about JC and her.
My intuition screamed all afternoon.
JC acted jittery. Ditching me for Sawyer smelled worse than Mama’s attempt at rack of lamb. He left me no choice but to follow him after he left me at the bar.
I had to.
I’m suspicious by principle.
The mental image of JC with her in the bar leaves no space in my soul for anything but venom, and I cannot work out what their strange drama is.
Based on their initial body language, it was like two rival gang members stepping up to discuss turf wars and who could deal drugs where.
Then, it almost got cozy. She smiled and touched his arm.
I couldn’t see his expression, but the line of his shoulders remained tense.
Whatever he said near the end seemed to break her.
With my face pressed up against the cool glass of the window, I silently cheered, willing him to dump her blazered ass. Then I wanted to curl up and die.
The hug and then the kiss.
The goddamn KISS!
Some things you can never unsee.
I scream into the sky until my lungs burn and deflate. My survival instinct tells me to move, to put as much distance between him and me and all of Zurich, even if it means walking to our next gig in Milan. Ditch the bus and try to forget JC made my entire body ring like a bell.
How close is Italy? I tug my phone out to verify when a text lights up on the screen. The taste in my mouth turns rancid.
JC: I’m at the bar. Where are you?
I choke back a sob. Is he serious?
Hey, nothing mysterious is going on! Had to suck face with some rando.
I rip off a reply.
GB: Not there.
JC: So where?
GB: At the lake.
JC: By yourself?
I snort a laugh. That’s rich. My fingers fly across the screen.
GB: Now ur worried about me?
GB: Mr. Chaperone.
I imagine his expression, hoping my scorn hits like a kick in the nuts.
I jump out of my skin when the phone rings instead.
Sinister Gia thinks, piss off. But if I learned anything from last night, JC has a relentless streak in him that borders on OCD.
And these endless looping thoughts won’t leave me alone.
After the third ring, I answer.
“What do you want, liar?” I yell.
Silence. The kind that tells me he knows I know.
“Gia.” His voice is low and dark. “Where are you? We need to talk.”
I want to scream Who is she? It physically pains me to hold it all in. But no. I will confront him with the ugliness. Watch him squirm like the insects Brady used to burn with my magnifying glass.
I squint at the tram station behind me, the sign visible in a cone of streetlight. “I’m at Bürkliplatz. The end of the Bahnhofstrasse. If you’re not here in fifteen minutes, don’t bother.”
“I’m jumping in an Uber. Don’t leave. Please.”
Hunched on the bench, a thin cool breeze needles through my hoodie.
I shiver, halfway to frozen. Numb everywhere, except for the smallest sliver in my heart that betrays me.
It whispers all the good things, like JC’s expressive touching and near-perfect tempo, the musician’s instinct of what to combine for maximum impact.
He wasn’t one of Audrie’s romance meatheads who mutter filth while drilling the heroine into a headboard.
He is fucking perfect.
Or he was.
Tears stream down my face, and I plug my mouth with two knuckles, holding down a throb of pain. What does she have that I don’t? Other than she’s so much easier to love, all soft skin and smooth edges. The curves I’ll never have.
It sucks just thinking about it, so I think about getting plugged back into the music. The tour. What I can control.
In the time it takes for JC to arrive, I’ve run through every possibility. Firing him won’t work, but I can force him off the bus. He’s rich enough to limo between cities.
“Hey.” JC approaches me carefully from the shadows. The words I want to say dissolve on my tongue as he sits beside me. “You’re not cold?”
“I’m fine.”
“Take this.” He shrugs out of his leather jacket. The warmth of it on my shoulder, infused with its citrus scent, almost breaks me.
I slide away. “I said I’m fine.”
He sighs, giant and somehow tight. “Gia…”
“How was your visit with Sawyer?”
He eyes me for a moment, then drops his gaze. “I think we both know I didn’t see him.”
All the red seeps out of my clamped muscles. I was convinced he’d backpedal or deny it. But something still feels broken deep down under my ribs.
“Who is she? And don’t fucking lie to me, or I swear to god, I’ll never talk to you again.”
He blows out a long, dismal breath. “Her name is Amber Devlin. She was the drummer in my band.”
My mind folds in around this information, before it triangulates on the photo of Read My Rights pinned to my bedroom wall, half a world away.
JC with his sweet-ass Les Paul and beaming smile.
Heath and Ari, bassist and keyboardist. And Amber, who I thought was the coolest thing ever—an older female drummer with a banana-yellow faux-hawk and Cleopatra-level eyeliner.
I stare across the abyss of night and nature. The dots didn’t connect because Amber doesn’t resemble her old self in the slightest. And of all the JC rumors floated over the years, not even one involved her.
“No one knew about us,” JC says, reading my mind, “except the band and my father. He said it would kill our momentum if fans found out we were an item.”
Something cold rips through my chest. “And she wants to get back together?”
He waits one second too long before he stumbles over a “No.”
And I can’t take it. His eyebrows pulled together, waiting for me to make perfect sense of it all.
“If you don’t explain the kiss, I will stuff my pockets with rocks and walk into that lake.”
“Jesus, Gia. Don’t say shit like that.”
He reaches for me, but I yank away, shuffling to the end of the bench.
“I can say whatever I want. You knew who she was but pretended not to. And I can tell you’re not telling me the whole story.
What’s it going to take? Because I’m fully prepared to drown if all I am to you is a giant fucking notch on your belt. ”
In the faint glow of streetlight cutting through the trees, his bleak expression shatters me. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until his confession jars it loose.
“She got pregnant. We,” he quickly corrects. “Got pregnant. And it messed things up. She wanted to clear the air.”
My head almost explodes. If someone aimed their flamethrower at me, I’d douse myself in gasoline to speed up the carnage. There’s a secret baby. A mini-Trenton that binds them eternally. Just my luck, because how do I maim a mother in good faith?
“You’re a father?” I’m so thrown, I can barely spit out the words.
“No,” he says miserably. “I’m an idiot who handled it all wrong.”
My nervous system teeters on the verge of collapse. I have an idea what he means, but I struggle to voice it. JC forcing a woman’s choice?
“By wrong, you mean what?”
He looks past me. I brace for impact, a truck of information closing in fast to crash into me.
“I was young and wasn’t prepared. I didn’t know what to say.
And when you don’t say anything, it must mean something.
She took off and drank herself into oblivion.
” His voice catches before he continues.
“Miscarried. We finished the last two weeks of the tour barely speaking to each other. She fucked off, cut all communication, and that was that.”
I feel strangely bloodless. JC just righted the frame of his mysterious picture. This is the missing link, right here.
“Is that why you killed the band?”
His eyes flash around the park, looking for an escape route. Then they land back on mine with a flare of sorrow. He nods. A kinder, gentler soul might offer a consolation. Instead, I swing the conversation back to the black wool scraping over my heart.
“And there is nothing between you two?”
“God, no,” he sounds truly mortified at the thought, “I haven’t seen or spoken to her in thirteen years.
Why do you think I’ve been climbing the walls all day?
She reached out to my old bassist, sniffing around for my number.
I agreed to meet with her on one condition: that she doesn’t come to any more shows. ”
“She agreed?” Again, suspicious.
“Yes.”
“And if she reneges?”
JC drops his head into both hands. “I don’t know.
What I do know is I have zero feelings for her.
She caught me off guard with the kiss.” He drags his fingers down his face.
“And I don’t expect you to understand, but I…
I lost myself. For one fucked-up second, I thought it might heal us.
But all it did was make me feel worse.” He continues in a thin, stretched voice, “I’ve kept this locked up forever, Gia.
I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”
I stand there, fidgeting on the edge of this anything-can-happen evening. Sorry is one thing. What I need now is assurance. That Amber is a chapter in a book he’s closed for good.
That he wants me.
“If what you’re saying is the truth, then you need to take me down. Bend me over that bench, right here, right now.”