6. Noah
6
NOAH
B y the time I got back to my room, I’d worked myself into an actual rage. How the hell could she just up and leave like that, without telling me where she was going or when she’d be back? She hadn’t even left a fucking forwarding address. Not that I knew what I’d do with it if she had. I couldn’t exactly call up the tour managers and let them know I was taking a leave of absence. This could be the most important tour of our lives and I had record labels and execs to meet with. New music to write. A band to hold together.
Honestly, I didn’t even have time to think about what Molly was doing–or care. So she’d picked up and left for LA with barely any notice. Who the fuck cared? I didn’t actually need her, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss her. I had plenty of things to take care of that had nothing to do with her or her career.
A tiny voice in my head said I was being unreasonable and unfair. Molly was the smartest of the five of us and deserved the best life she could get. She’d always been too good to stick around with us, playing roadie when she should have been out in the world doing bigger things. She deserved every opportunity, and Tempest was the luckiest magazine in the world to have landed her. I believed that with every piece of my heart.
The problem was, my temper was bigger than my heart, most days, and right now it was screaming.
I slammed the door shut behind me and leaned against it, my chest heaving. I needed to calm down. Look at why I was so upset. Find a way to be happy for her rather than so angry. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out why I was so angry. I’d known she was applying to that magazine. Hell, I’d practically forced her to do it, because I’d been tired of watching her waste her talent taking pictures that no one ever saw. I’d felt guilty that she was stuck on the road with us rather than out there living her best life. And part of me had really thought that getting a job with a big magazine was the best thing for her.
Of course now that it was actually happening, I felt differently.
I felt like she was running out on me. Like the girl who’d felt like home my entire life was abandoning me here while she went off to make new friends. Find a new guy to idolize.
“She’s too good for this life,” I told myself firmly. “Too smart to be stuck here towing equipment around and keeping your schedule in order.”
Speaking out loud seemed to help calm me down, and I pushed off the door and started walking for the mini fridge, dredging up more ways to be happy for Molly. The girl colored every single memory I had, and that was saying something. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d found her in some scrape or another, talking shit to someone twice as big as her because they’d been unkind to an animal or something. I must have saved her at least a thousand times.
Until we grew up and something changed. Rivers, Matt, Hudson, and I formed the band and brought Molly along for the ride, and out on the road during our first tour, something had shifted between us.
She’d started taking care of me .
And now she was abandoning me. Just like my mother had done a thousand times before I moved to the orphanage.
There it was, I realized. I wasn’t angry because Molly had landed a job with a big magazine. I really was ecstatic for her. This was huge news, and she was going to be brilliant. But leaving me in the lurch like this... That, I was angry about. It put me right back into that tiny trailer, watching my mother close the door behind her as she left to go find her next hit. Knowing I would have to find my own food for the night and sleep alone, the trailer dark and terrifying around me. It made me feel empty and somehow terrified.
Like a five-year-old who didn’t know when he was going to see another adult.
I was being unreasonable and unfair, and I knew it. My mother’s actions weren’t Molly’s fault. She had spent most of her life proving to me that I could count on her when I needed to. Mending the broken pieces my mother had left behind. She didn’t deserve my anger.
But I didn’t know if I could stop the tide, now that it had started flowing.
I grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the mini fridge, called room service to have them send up something bigger, and headed for the shower. Maybe it was better that Molly was leaving now. I was starting to get too dependent on her and let her in too deep, and I didn’t need that. I couldn’t trust it. I would be better off on my own.
That tiny voice tried to pipe up again, telling me that I didn’t mean any of that and that my heart was breaking in real time at the thought of her getting into a cab and heading for the airport without me. The idea that she was starting a new life that didn’t include me...
It would break me.
But only if I let it. And I was well versed at ignoring things I didn’t like.
After all, I’d spent my entire childhood learning how to do it.