Chapter 14
(Steel)
My soul was slowly dying. The longer I kept my distance from Rebel, the more it hurt to watch him from afar, unable to ask how he was feeling or get to the bottom of what had happened the night he’d been taken to the hospital.
Because I’d been on duty guarding Jagger that night, I’d been standing behind his chair at the signing and only caught a few rumblings of what was going on with Rebel.
The second- and even third-hand information I’d received hadn’t been nearly good enough, but asking would have triggered questions I couldn’t answer when we were still on the outs.
And might always be.
His smirking profile picture remained beneath my unanswered text like a hot poker jabbed between my ribs, burning whenever I looked at it.
Once I’d seen those three beautiful dots appear to show he’d been typing and I’d waited with anxious energy, knee nervously bouncing up and down, until the dots vanished without leaving a message in their wake.
Now here I was, relieved of duty for the night, brooding at a picnic table near the campfire at a campground in Estes Park, Colorado, high up in the Rocky Mountains, where we had all the privacy we needed.
Last night they’d played in Denver, with Kayden playing lead guitar for Blissfully Immune in Rebel’s place.
It had made for a long night for him, which meant Robbie and Jagger had spent the day exploring the town and enjoying a rock and roll backroads Jeep adventure Lawson and I had thoroughly enjoyed escorting them on.
As far as perks of the job went, days like today were among my favorites.
The fact that we had two more days to enjoy the mountains before they were scheduled to play Fort Collins meant plenty more sites to see, including a ride on the aerial tramway and a tour of the Razorback Distillery and Tasting Room.
I just hoped no one needed to be carried back to the bus after that one.
Movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention to the figure striding towards a table several feet away.
With guards posted around the perimeter of our campsite, no one was forced to keep one by their side, a fact I was certain Rebel was thrilled with.
It wasn’t until firelight cast red hues on familiar golden curls that I realized that it was Rebel headed to a table, carrying something I couldn’t make out.
Oh.
A lantern.
He set it down and turned it on, illuminating the surface that he soon spread a notebook open on. I was shocked that he didn’t have his guitar with him, just a backpack, from which he started unloading containers and who knows what else; some were so small they were impossible to make out.
Before I could change my mind, I stood and walked over there, parking myself on the bench across from him, ignoring his look of confusion until I’d fully situated myself on the bench.
“Sully said that as long as I stayed within the perimeter, he didn’t have to be glued to me,” Rebel said. “So no lectures.”
“I didn’t come over here to lecture you,” I said. “I know what Sully’s orders were.”
“Okay.”
“Came over because you never replied to my text.”
“There was nothing to say.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Because I doubt you’d be over here if you did,” he said. “Weren’t you the one who told me not to seek you out, and you’d do the same?”
“You picked a hell of a time to listen to anything I had to say,” I told him.
"I always was a slow learner when it came to subjects I hated.”
“If you hate it so much, talk to me and tell me why you pulled the shit you did backstage?”
“Habit,” he replied. “Anytime I’ve got a good thing going, I have to wreck it.”
Now he was starting to piss me off again. “Tell me you have a better excuse than that.”
“Not one you’d want to hear.”
“Try me,” I insisted because damn, I deserved way better than that lame-ass, cliché excuse.
He huffed and rested his elbows on the table, propped his head on his hands, and glared across the table at me. “It doesn’t even matter now, so why don’t you drop it?”
“Because you fucking wormed your way into my heart, you little shit, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you out of my system and off my mind until you tell me why the fuck you didn’t just walk away when I asked you to.”
“Well, let’s see,” he began. “I’m kind of an asshole, a bit of a dick, and I didn’t want to go to the afterparty.
I wanted you, and when you said no, it felt like you were rejecting me, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it.
Everything was bright and loud, and I kind of needed you to pin me down until everything leveled out again.
I get why you couldn’t. It just sucked and pissed me off.
After I saw your text, I realized that you were right.
We aren’t the right fit for one another.
I’m needy and can be a bit of a brat. You’ve got a job to do and don’t have time for all that.
I just didn’t realize how little you really thought of me until the night you jumped my shit about Kit.
For the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with that. ”
Yeah, that hadn’t been one of my finer moments. “I know; I asked around.”
“Because you didn’t trust me to tell you the truth.”
“You have to admit that people trusting you doesn’t exactly work out well for them,” I reminded him.
“Cyril is stuck guarding the semis indefinitely because he trusted you to do as you were told and make sure he was with you before you went running off somewhere, and you couldn’t even be bothered to do that. ”
“Look, this whole thing hasn’t exactly been easy for me,” he said. “I was the grungy metal kid that just happened to be good at hockey, so I was tolerated, for the most part. Most likely to need a bodyguard was never on my bingo card, so it’s taking some adjustment.”
“I can appreciate that,” I replied. “What I can’t wrap my head around is why you feel the need to be so self-destructive in the process. Climbing down your balcony. Bribing strangers to let you pass through to the hallway? That’s not a normal level of avoidance, even if your plan was to get laid.”
He just cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at me. “Dude, not normal is par for the course with me. My mama didn’t name me Rebel. I earned that.”
“Does she still call you by your given name, or has even she given up and started calling you Rebel?"
“To be fair, it started out as Rebel Roy since I wasn’t the only Roy in my tiny circle of friends. By the time the other one moved to Fall River and wasn’t around as much anymore, it was just Rebel, and it’s been Rebel ever since.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to prove how much of one you can be.”
“Doesn’t it, though?”
“I’m still not buying it,” I replied. “I’m sure that’s part of the story, but you’re still not being completely straight with me.”
His snickering didn’t help my already frayed emotions, nor did the way he scoffed and raised an eyebrow at me. “I haven’t been completely straight since I went skinny dipping with the Louden twins and realized I was way more interested in watching Joey than Lillian.”
“Now you’re just giving me shit.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t see the point in any of this when you made your position very clear,” he replied.
“In other words, you don’t want to be vulnerable and admit the truth because you don’t feel like there’s anything to gain in doing so,” I surmised.
“Which truth is that?” he asked. “The one where I tell you that you hurt my feelings, or the one where I admit that it was my fault for having them?"
“Look, I made it clear right from the beginning that my job came first and that there were lines you weren’t to cross.”
“And I get that. I just didn’t like it. Johnny said he has the same problem sometimes when it comes to Draven, because he’s still in manager mode when Johnny wants his Daddy to help him feel grounded again.
Sometimes the rush of playing is so intense it clouds judgment.
Any other time and I’d have been happy to get drunk and let the fans hang all over me while they took a bunch of selfies and tried to get in my pants.
That night, the only hands I wanted on me were yours, and when I couldn’t have that, I went into brat mode, knowing you weren’t going to bend and give it to me. ”
“You just couldn’t stop yourself.”
“Oh, I probably could have if I’d tried hard enough,” he admitted.
“I just didn’t want to. I was disappointed.
I had planned out the whole night in my head, from ordering room service to falling asleep curled up in your arms. When it turned out you were working, I don’t know, I couldn’t pivot away from what I’d worked out in my head.
I get fixated on things all the time. Certain foods, types of movies, I'll play my way through two thousand levels of a game and still keep going back to it, but I’ve never been fixated on a person before I started to get to know you. ”
“Do I even want to know what game has more than two thousand levels?”
“Lots of them. Domino Dreams just happens to be my favorite.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Meh, it’s something I play on my phone.”
“Got it,” I said, finally beginning to feel like he was opening up to me without throwing up walls of deflection and snark.
Hearing that he’d been fixated on me, that was a bit harder to process.
He was the rockstar. People hung his poster on their walls and asked him to sign his name on their skin in Sharpie, just so they could get it tattooed beneath the band logo.
He’d been pelted with underwear and propositioned in some seriously lewd and unexpected ways, at least according to the men who’d guarded him and some of the articles I’d read online.
Like the other band members, he was the source of endless speculation, rumors, and seriously outlandish lies that Draven was constantly having to debunk on social media.
I was a shadow in comparison. A man few people would ever know.
And yet I’d been the one he’d been backstage looking for.
Damn.
Talk about a mindfuck.
Should I tell him I was flattered and more than just a bit stunned at his admission, or was now the time to mention that his hyperfocus on me could have gotten me fired and removed from his presence permanently?
He sat watching me across the table as I debated it and finally decided to go for a bit of vulnerability of my own.
“I’ve thought about little else but that night since it happened,” I said.
“Even when I was pissed at you, I couldn’t get you off my mind.
Not getting a response to my text has been eating at me almost to the point of distraction.
I’ve never checked my phone as much as I have since I sent it to you.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how I feel about your reason for not answering.
When I think about it now, I made it clear that my decision wasn’t up for debate.
I guess I didn’t leave you any room to turn it into a conversation.
I was pissed that you tried to tempt me into putting my job on the line and even more furious about the trouble you got Cyril into. ”
“I feel like shit for that,” he admitted. “I tried to tell Sully that what happened wasn’t Cyril’s fault, but he wasn’t having it. Said that you guys had the kind of training that should have made it next to impossible for someone like me to constantly lose you guys.”
I was shocked by the surge of indignation that shot through me on his behalf. Despite how much of a pain in the ass he’d been, it didn’t sit right with me that Sully had said that to him.
“Someone like you?” I asked, waiting for him to tell me something that was truly going to set me off.
“That’s what I asked,” Rebel replied. “He said he meant a civilian. I guess that’s fair.
I told him that I’d honed my skills while attempting to avoid getting ratted out by my tagalong pest of a kid sister.
She was always whining about it not being fair that I got to go fun places while she had to stay home with the sitter, which, okay, I could see her point there, but the least she could have done was not snitch on me just to earn brownie points with our folks. ”
“How much younger?”
“Seven years, though you wouldn’t have known it with the sass and attitude.
I heard, Ohhh, I’m gonna tell Mama so many times growing up that as soon as the Ohhh came out of her mouth, I’d shove a piece of candy in it and promise her a half dozen more if she’d just keep her fucking mouth shut.
I probably shouldn’t have sworn so much around her, ‘cause she’s got a worse potty mouth than I have now, but I was sick of getting into trouble. ”
“What’s she like as an adult?”
“Still a pain in my ass, not that we see each other often. She’s part of a longline fishing crew,” he explained. “Loves being on the water.”
“It’s a dangerous job though, isn’t it?”
“She handles herself just fine.”
“Sounds like it. Are you two close?”
“Naa. She was still a kid when I took off with the band, and I wasn’t the best about keeping in touch. To me she was just a pest. I never expected her to miss me. Turns out I was wrong. There’s still a lot of resentment there that we’ve never taken the time to work through. Doubt we ever will.”
“Seems like that’s a common theme with you,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Cutting ties, walking away, leaving things be instead of settling them,” I replied. “It’ll catch up to you someday.”
“I’m pretty sure it already has.”
I might have said more if Kit hadn’t shown up at the table with his electric drum kit, his inquisitive gaze sweeping over us, which was my cue to leave. Still, the conversation stayed with me even after I’d walked away, my feelings still a jangled mess of regret and longing.